Why the game was chosed to be 2d?

[Maniac Trudovik]

Even main screen is 3d.... why the game is chosed to be 2d? Its cool, but we cant have all we want de that...

[Name Lips]

Base-building games are frequently 2d because 1) they already tax computers to their limits and people complain about optimization. When the base gets too big, framerates suffer. This is happening while displaying cartoons! It would only get worse if you're trying to do the same thing in a 3d world.

2) It's actually a royal pain for the user to make complex bases in 3d. Compare setting up Minecraft circuits to ONI circuits -- you can accomplish the same thing in ONI in a fraction of the time by drawing a few quick lines with your mouse. Compare setting up an automated assembly line in Fortresscraft Evolved versus Factorio -- you can set up something ten times as complicated in Factorio in a tenth of the time as you can in FCE. And troubleshooting, tearing down, and rebuilding is a lot easier in 2d where you can more easily find bottlenecks and problems.

3) 2d also makes games more accessable to people who don't have fancy 3d gaming computers. The game needs a good CPU, but it does not ALSO need a good GPU. This can increase sales by having a wider user base.

4) after a certain amount of time playing games, especially base-building or management games, the graphics become invisible. You stop noticing them, and instead focus on the facts and numbers. Heck Dwarf Fotress has a large cult following and it actually uses a 3d engine (openGL) to display a 3d world using 2d ASCII characters -- deliberately imitating a game from the early days of computer gaming, before graphics were a widespread thing.

Because there is a fundamental truth for game quality -- and that is that graphics don't matter. Not even a little bit. If the mechanics are sound, and the game is fun to play, people will play it no matter what it looks like. In the reverse circumstance, a game with awesome beautiful graphics and no depth of gameplay, the graphics might draw in some players, but they'll quickly stop playing and spread the word that the game isn't worth the money.

5) 3d graphics development is a time and money sink. It costs tremendously more to develop a game in 3d, and all of that time and money could be spent making a deeper, more involved, more complex, 2d game. And ultimately that's what people who purchase a base-building resource-management game really want -- a base to build and resources to manage. Fancier graphics only distract from what the game is supposed to be accomplishing.

[Lailah]

4 is patently untrue in the general. Graphics fidelity (That is, the technical quality - pixel counts and the like) does not generally matter outside of nerd slapfights, but its quality (the stylization and the art direction) generally does matter. The single most obvious way to discuss it is horror games - while you can make a graphics-less horror game, it'd be extremely different from the horror games that gained some purchase in the relatively recent past (such as Amnesia, RE7, or FNAF). The more atmospheric a game is, and the more story focused it is, the more it matters - but again, this is a matter of its quality, not its fidelity. In manager games, it _does_ matter significantly less, because they are indeed rarely, if ever, focused on an atmosphere or story, but that's not to say graphics don't matter for gaming at large.

Tarn Adams is also not exactly proof against - it's a two person team, and IIRC neither has the skills tod o decent sprite work, nor the inclination tof ocus on it, nor do they really have the budget - and even if they did have the budget to hire an outsider, getting sprite workd one represents time on the back end that neither actually wants to do (Sprite work does not spring into being by outlaying money - someone has to find and hire an artist who's look they like, and spend time actually directing them as to what they want things to look like in the final product; all of this is time not spent coding the specifics of dwarven behavior, of the world's physics and hte like, and thus represents work that neither really wants to do). They're graphicless not because of 'the era before graphics' but for many of the same reasons that early, small productions lacked complicated graphics. In an ideal world according to Adams, as I recall, the graphics would be 3-D and good, but in an ideal world dwarf fortress would be a perfect simulation of a fantasy world's history, and this isn't an ideal world; it has to run on existing computers, and actually making it 3-D would represent a significant amount of effort on his part (Even if he did exactly none of the final work himself), on top of the costs. By contrast, Klei seems to have an actual team and indeed, does actually push aesthetics in many ways (though oddly, all materials look identical to the finished final product. Unclear if Early Access-ism or intentional choice to not punish a player for the player's own aesthetics.. though the latter is certainly a waste given decor)

5 is also not entirely true. It's certainly true that 3-D building is an enormous outlay of resources, but depending on what you're actually doing graphically, 3-D modelling can be cheaper than 2-D art (though it wouldn't change that the game is still 2-D at large; and making it be 3-D at large is /always/ a significant outlay.) It varies with specifics I don't entirely recall, but to put it simply: To make a model lift their arm, you just lift the model's arm. To make a sprite lift their arm, you have to animate each individual frame seperately. That's part of why I mention graphics mattering - Klei really did put a lot of effort into this game's! And it's really cute for it!

But strictly in regards to this game, you are probably basically correct and I agree with you on the likely reasons it is not 3-D. And it really can't be stressed enough just how expensive, both in computational power and modelling time, real 3-D would be. Gaseous flows and temperature in 3 dimensions must be an utter nightmare.

[Meat Man (Alfons)]

So the game wouldn't literally melt with its gas physics, thermal logic and all that, also makes things simpler to work with, like Dupe AI and graphics.

[!?!]

Because 3 isn't better than 2 and aethetics and style can't be quantified with polygonal count.

[Maniac Trudovik]

Originally posted by Meat Man (Alfons):

So the game wouldn't literally melt with its gas physics, thermal logic and all that, also makes things simpler to work with, like Dupe AI and graphics.

Yea... 3d simulation of gases/heat/etc is really heavy for pc.

[Eagle_of_Fire]

Originally posted by Name Lips:

4) after a certain amount of time playing games, especially base-building or management games, the graphics become invisible. You stop noticing them, and instead focus on the facts and numbers. Heck Dwarf Fotress has a large cult following and it actually uses a 3d engine (openGL) to display a 3d world using 2d ASCII characters -- deliberately imitating a game from the early days of computer gaming, before graphics were a widespread thing.

Because there is a fundamental truth for game quality -- and that is that graphics don't matter. Not even a little bit. If the mechanics are sound, and the game is fun to play, people will play it no matter what it looks like. In the reverse circumstance, a game with awesome beautiful graphics and no depth of gameplay, the graphics might draw in some players, but they'll quickly stop playing and spread the word that the game isn't worth the money.

Quoted for truth. I can't recall a real strategy game using 3D and worth discussing.

[Maniac Trudovik]

Originally posted by Eagle_of_Fire:

Originally posted by Name Lips:

4) after a certain amount of time playing games, especially base-building or management games, the graphics become invisible. You stop noticing them, and instead focus on the facts and numbers. Heck Dwarf Fotress has a large cult following and it actually uses a 3d engine (openGL) to display a 3d world using 2d ASCII characters -- deliberately imitating a game from the early days of computer gaming, before graphics were a widespread thing.

Because there is a fundamental truth for game quality -- and that is that graphics don't matter. Not even a little bit. If the mechanics are sound, and the game is fun to play, people will play it no matter what it looks like. In the reverse circumstance, a game with awesome beautiful graphics and no depth of gameplay, the graphics might draw in some players, but they'll quickly stop playing and spread the word that the game isn't worth the money.

Quoted for truth. I can't recall a real strategy game using 3D and worth discussing.

Its just not the time, maby in next 40y our pcs will get EXTRLYMLY BETTER and this HARD games will be like easy calculators.

[Eagle_of_Fire]

..? I'm sorry... Which hard game are you refering to?

[Maniac Trudovik]

Originally posted by Eagle_of_Fire:

..? I'm sorry... Which hard game are you refering to?

Games with full simulation of phisics, they are atm extrmly hard for pc's and not used for games

[Eagle_of_Fire]

Ah, got it. I'm sorry, I understood something completely different. :P

[Maniac Trudovik]

Originally posted by Eagle_of_Fire:

Ah, got it. I'm sorry, I understood something completely different. :P

:D

[Red_warning]

It's charmy and makes things easier for the artists and designers.

[Maniac Trudovik]

Originally posted by Red_warning:

It's charmy and makes things easier for the artists and designers.

Yea

[Varenvel The Festive Dinosaur]

Originally posted by Name Lips:

Base-building games are frequently 2d because 1) they already tax computers to their limits and people complain about optimization. When the base gets too big, framerates suffer. This is happening while displaying cartoons! It would only get worse if you're trying to do the same thing in a 3d world.

2) It's actually a royal pain for the user to make complex bases in 3d. Compare setting up Minecraft circuits to ONI circuits -- you can accomplish the same thing in ONI in a fraction of the time by drawing a few quick lines with your mouse. Compare setting up an automated assembly line in Fortresscraft Evolved versus Factorio -- you can set up something ten times as complicated in Factorio in a tenth of the time as you can in FCE. And troubleshooting, tearing down, and rebuilding is a lot easier in 2d where you can more easily find bottlenecks and problems.

3) 2d also makes games more accessable to people who don't have fancy 3d gaming computers. The game needs a good CPU, but it does not ALSO need a good GPU. This can increase sales by having a wider user base.

4) after a certain amount of time playing games, especially base-building or management games, the graphics become invisible. You stop noticing them, and instead focus on the facts and numbers. Heck Dwarf Fotress has a large cult following and it actually uses a 3d engine (openGL) to display a 3d world using 2d ASCII characters -- deliberately imitating a game from the early days of computer gaming, before graphics were a widespread thing.

Because there is a fundamental truth for game quality -- and that is that graphics don't matter. Not even a little bit. If the mechanics are sound, and the game is fun to play, people will play it no matter what it looks like. In the reverse circumstance, a game with awesome beautiful graphics and no depth of gameplay, the graphics might draw in some players, but they'll quickly stop playing and spread the word that the game isn't worth the money.

5) 3d graphics development is a time and money sink. It costs tremendously more to develop a game in 3d, and all of that time and money could be spent making a deeper, more involved, more complex, 2d game. And ultimately that's what people who purchase a base-building resource-management game really want -- a base to build and resources to manage. Fancier graphics only distract from what the game is supposed to be accomplishing.

1:there are few 3d survival managment games but building stuff in 3d with destroyable terrain in all of them is very very ackward , taxation on pc is rather badly designing game itself then optimalisation problem
2: problem with AI is not as big some may make it , more of the time its whole game is heavily unoptimalized needing to update so many things all time (water , gas , everything flows , objects melting , temprature on all map , gasses flowing and moving around) it all needs quite a lot frequent updates from cpu , in factorio whos also 2d game you can have thousants moving enemies and fluids flowing from pipes and conveyor belts and game runs allright even on 6 year old laptops
3complete lies , this game actualy has very high pc req, can compare it to rimworld , factorio , this game also runs worse then most fps games especialy if you reach mid/end game with 40+ dupes
4:grafics are nice but indeed if game had simpler tone noone would mind
5:that depends really when you use 3d game you use 3d models who are rigger so animating them is not that hard(i done fair emount of these things in second life) , i would say making sprites is harder as each textures have to be painted and all animations have to be painted(atleast i asume so) its basicly making image , then making image when it moved a bit , till you reach full animation cycle this is how it works in most 2d games or atleast part of them

[luciasar]

I don't play rimworld because it's hideous, art wise. ONI, on the other hand, looks fantastic and is a joy to explore for me. For some people that's less important and that's fine. But having a good art style opens up your playerbase to those who feel more strongly about aesthetics.