Anyone do any 3D for mobile?
polycounter lvl 18
Has anyone done anywork for a mobile 3D realtime game--n-Gage or any other phone w/ 3D support? I'm wondering what polycount and texture sizes you had to work with--characters/props, anything. Thanks!
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I was contacted a week or 2 ago for free-lance gig to make characters for a cell phone FPS game. The limits were 350 polys, about 250 verts and a 128x128 texture for the highest LOD model.
I think that the current cell phones that can handle games for serie 60 or Symbian (like the NGage)the 3d specs are roughly the same as a DS. Check out the DOOM DS project site for examples of their work.
http://dual-soft.com/doomds/
Its been a while since I worked on Payload for the Ngage, a futuristic free roaming car game, but if I remember correctly, we were looking at around 50 polygons for the vehicle models (cut down in favour of more funky special effects), up to about 120 for buildings and perhaps a couple of hundred for the height mapped terrain. 64*64 should be the maximum size for textures given that NGage doesn't do blending and will just turn anything higher res into a pixelated mess.
Its also worth noting that the NGage has a similar problem to the Playstaion/PS2/PSP in that its not very good at understanding large flat planes (I forget exactly what the technical reason is), resulting in some nasty texture warping unless theres a few tesselations to give it a some verts to work from.
For comparison sake, our current DS title, the indoor rooms weigh in at around 1200 polygons with up to four 3-400 polygon characters on screen at a time, which doesn't cause any noticable frame drop. The Ngage would probably melt if tried that on it.
The NGage seems to take PS1 games, should have roughly similar constraints, same for the DS and PSP.
[/ QUOTE ]
NGage
>DS
>PS1 -- >PSP -- >PS2
Performance charts are more along those lines.
>DS- >PS1 >n64 >PSP
>DC -- >PS2 >GC >XBOX
>yo momma
The PSP is an insanely powerful little beast - you might as well consider it to be a PS2 because although it isn't as powerful, the smaller screen size means less to render, making it comparable. Its a PS 1.9.
I just saw some stuff running on it that will blow your wee socks off.
Not really sure how that compares to the likes of PS1/N64/Dreamcaste
DS must use a much better palette that the GBA
my custom 060/50MHz A1200 AGA 2MB is capable of playing Quake and Quake 2 at 320x200, it's a very capable machine.
Playstation 2 really shouldn't be in this topic, it also quite frankly has such a different pipeline to everything else you can't say it's better or worse.
As far as the hand-helds go. Well the N-Gage is quite powerful, 100MHz StrongARM 9 CPU iirc; which handled Tomb Raider direct translation quite beautifully at [email="180x240@12fps."]180x240@12fps.[/email] At times it could have as many as 2,500poly on-screen with alpha and particle effects. It is very restrictive count to think about in today terms but the unoptimised Playstation 1 engine could only push that at 15fps, later engines were capable of doubling this.
NDS can seriously push the polygons though, in terms of power it's about on-par with the N64 4MB. Though as far as the Playstation Portable goes, it's about double the power of the PS1. Though with it's dual graphics pipeline (inherited from the PS2) it's capable of doing some cool effects. It can enhance the graphics, but doesn't stop the fact that your polycounts still have to be quite low.
Most of the counts will depend on the engine though.
I mean think about it, without or sparely using textures you can use almost double the polycount at the same speed. Several more polygons in the memory so much larger worlds too.
I'd suggest doing some research on the given system you want to develop for, see what engines and devkits are like. Work up from there.
With the Imageon and GoForce now in cellphones, graphics are seriously jumping for mobiles. I'm actually surprised neither the PSP or DS are using either.
GoForce3D 4x00 Series is SERIOUSLY impressive. Almost as powerful as a GF3 for the cellphone. Crazy really.
Anyone worked on a 3D capable phone, like the LG VX8000, and know how it would compare to something line nGage? Oh, and if there's a mobile-centric-polycount-ish site? Thanks again!
I'm not. Their battery lives are bad enough as-is.