does anybody know of a nice webpage where pixel sizes of a character and how that works in relation to a computer system shared
does anybody know of a nice webpage where pixel sizes of a character and how that works in relation to a computer system shared
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 - 18:04
Hi all,
I have seen lots of times modellers telling of some file/art as its 16x16, 32x32, 64x64 ot whatever. While I do understand that bigger is better I don't really know which size means what.
If one were to take as the best for low-end machines then I had played Morrowind in the past which seemed to be good enough. Does anybody what pixel size they were at ?
something which explains more than simutrains paksets page does or attempts . http://simutrans.com/paksets.htm
Okay, first of all, I think you are mixing up sprites (2D), tiles (2D) and models (3D).
A character sprite is a single frame of a character's animation (in a 2D game). All the sprites together form a spritesheet.
A tile is a fixed-size static element from which the gameworld (in a 2D game) is built. You can think of tiles like many LEGOs which all have the same size but different surfaces. A bunch of tiles which work well together is called a tileset.
Sprites and tiles are usually (but not always!) delivered as raster images, e.g .gif or .png. Raster images are made of a certain amount of pixels (little colored dots). 16x16 means that the image has a width of 16 pixels and a height of 16 pixels. If such a size is given for a whole game, it usually refers to the tile size and not the size of character sprites. For example, the OGA 16x16 JRPG Sprites & Tiles collection has tiles of size 16x16, but sprites of size 16x18.
3D models, on the other hand, are (unless they are voxel based) made of a bunch of points (called vertices) which are connected via lines (called edges) and together form surfaces (called faces or polygons). Therefore they don't have a fixed pixel size but have to be rendered specific size. What we call a '3D game' is in fact a game where models are rendered to 2D at the very last moment (during runtime) and very often (once at each frame).
The important thing to know is that you can render a model to any pixel size you want!
What determines the performance of a 3D game are rather the poly count (how many polygons there are) and the applied shaders. The only part of a model which is measured in pixels are the textures. Of course, the size of the textures also matters for performance, but that's rather a memory problem than a CPU power problem.
So why am I writing all this? Because you refered to these three different things in your posts. In the heading (btw, please use shorter headings!) you seem to be asking a question about character sprites. In your first post, you refer to Morrowind, which is a 3D game and therefore doesn't have fixed-size characters. And in your second post, you included a link to a site which contains information to a bunch of tilesets.
So your question probably is what's the poly count of character models in Morrowind:
Click here to find the answer.