Question by Der_Kevin · Feb 11, 2014 at 06:41 PM · 2d 3d performance

2.5D or 3D. A Matter of Performance?

Hey guys!

I am currently starting to work on a city builder/dungeon crawler mix and i am stocking at the moment at the part, where i have to decide which graphical style i should use or continue with. here are the facts: - should run on a mobile phone and tablet (iphone 4+ and ipad3+) - the city sector would contain something like lets say 30-50 buildings where each building should have something around 2000 verts and i think after some tests each building have to use his own 512x512 texture. so with the character and other stuff we have something like 70 textures in the end for the city. too much maybe? - then we have the dungeon part which currently using the dungeon builder starter set from the asset store.

so, after i played the new ultima forever game from EA i saw that they using 3d characters on a 2d background which is a pretty cool idea i think because that would boost the performance a lot or what do you think? then i checked out the new dungeon craper game and this is using pure 3d and running also smooth. also tested "oceanhorn" which has nearly the same atmosphere which i want to reach and also a gorgeous city part. then i saw "kings age" which is doing the same as ultima and now i am totally lost and can not decide where i should continue.

what would you do when you have to make this decision? a sprite based isometric game with 3d characters and villagers or pure low poly 3d? I dont mind when you can not rotate the whole world anymore, actually i have a fixed isometric camera anyways but the only thing that makes me stick on the 3D city is, that i am already finished with that and have to start again for the 2.5d version and i think for example in "oceanhorn" it looks a lot more natural when you are moving around because you have this perspective view everywhere. i don't know how to describe it but it feels just better then the painted background from kings road or ultima forever.

so, i would love to here what you think about that.

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robertbu · Feb 11, 2014 at 06:51 PM 2

Questions like your come across this list frequently. I shake my head when they do because the OP is asking a bunch of folks of unknown experience to help make a major game design decision. If it were me, I'd just send a day or two testing the various scenarios. You don't need much for an initial testing. One texture and one building of the right number of vertices. You need to duplicate these in Unity to create unique assets (50 buildings and 70 textures), but they can all be the same original asset for testing purposes. Then write some code to generate a random scene from the assets (and maybe some movement code) and run the app on the target platform to gather some performance data.

In the end neither scenario may work, or both but you will have some hard data to begin with. And that is not the end of the line because there are many approaches that can make dramatic improvements in performance. But you don't know if you need to research and implement these approaches until you've run some tests.

Der_Kevin · Feb 11, 2014 at 08:47 PM 0

yea, of course you have to test it on your own if you want to be really really sure but where is the problem to ask if someone has done this before and maybe want to share their experience and gather some results this way?

Owen-Reynolds · Feb 12, 2014 at 12:16 AM 0

To expand on Robertu's comment, this is a Design decision. The major consideration whether to use 3D models vs. 2D backgrounds is the look and feel of the game. Unity takes pride in not forcing a particular look -- letting you pick based on art, and not technical issues.

The only technical issue, you seem to have in hand -- using highish-poly 3D buildings may cut into, say, your massive particle effects budget or heavy-duty AI pathing.

robertbu · Feb 12, 2014 at 12:49 AM 0

@Der_Kevin - given the very limited amount of information about the game given by the OP, the best we could do is have a discussion about trade-offs and issues. UA is not designed to be a discussion site. That is why you will frequently see discussion questions closed with a recommendation to post them on Unity Forums instead.

But beyond that, I would put little stock in almost anyone's opinion on this list...partly because performance issues vary so widely even among similar games that with so few specifics any opinion is at best an educated guess, and partly because almost everyone on this list is anonymous and we don't have any true idea of their abilities or accomplishments. So no matter what anyone says, my best course of action is to ignore opinions of unknown value and test the different scenarios myself.

unimechanic ♦♦ · Feb 22, 2014 at 01:43 AM 0

This question could have different solutions that derive into long discussions, and it might stay unanswered for an undetermined amount of time. Please help us improve Unity Answers with concrete questions and answers, and consider using Unity Forums which is a great place to discuss ideas. Thanks for your comprehension, Unity Support.