The GBAnext or Sonyboy, what does it need?

[McFly]

On the other hand, I don't quite see what the point would be to make more powerful 2d. You can't get good lighting effects in a 2d game, no matter how many sprite layers you make. Most of the big improvements in the visual quality of 2d games came from resolution and color depth, which are completely impractical for a handheld device.

If you have great 2D hardware support, then graphics artist need much less to think about how they need to design the tiles and sprites. Right now on the GBA you need to know alot about the hardware specs and memory allocation to start designing something that looks incredible. You need to save memory all the time on every single tilemap. If a handheld could work with a 2048x2048 map in full color without the need of tiles and with multi layer support, then designing a map would be much easier and much less time consuming. All the work with tile transitions would be gone forever and the artists would have pure freedom of expression. And more sprites could make nice 2D particle effects possible, especially if you have alpha channel support for sprites.

Basicaly I think that 2D games could still be much better on future hardware.

Just my opinion of course.

Fredi

 

[Tagrineth]

panajev, it isn't the first time I've been wrong. 8)

Oh well... I was always under the impression that the sorting was a part of the underlying architecture.

 

[London Geezer]

On the other hand, I don't quite see what the point would be to make more powerful 2d. You can't get good lighting effects in a 2d game, no matter how many sprite layers you make. Most of the big improvements in the visual quality of 2d games came from resolution and color depth, which are completely impractical for a handheld device.

If you have great 2D hardware support, then graphics artist need much less to think about how they need to design the tiles and sprites. Right now on the GBA you need to know alot about the hardware specs and memory allocation to start designing something that looks incredible. You need to save memory all the time on every single tilemap. If a handheld could work with a 2048x2048 map in full color without the need of tiles and with multi layer support, then designing a map would be much easier and much less time consuming. All the work with tile transitions would be gone forever and the artists would have pure freedom of expression. And more sprites could make nice 2D particle effects possible, especially if you have alpha channel support for sprites.

Basicaly I think that 2D games could still be much better on future hardware.

Just my opinion of course.

Fredi

2D graphics is great, just look at Guilty Gear X2.......
i think everyone's been spoiled by 3D graphics now, which is fair enough, but 2D graphics could still be improved just like 3D is doing now....
and it must be much easier to make a 2D game look fantastic then a 3D one... i mean in terms of assets, performance etc...