Starting in 3D or 2D? New dev in town!

Hello everyone,

I think I'm going to start making my first game in 3D, and learn on my way. I've just started with Unity a few days ago, and installed the essential and watching what it can be achieved in some games, and watched (and read) some starting points, noth in 2D and in 3D.

Assume and don't know nothing, it is not exactly the case. But, here comes my question: Can you make a 3D 60fps with ease? If I choose the 2D path I want extremely accurate movements (some made by hand and others using some physics).

I'm currently diving into 3D, anyway, this post was mostly for presentation but this is a question that I always have in the back of my head when reading and coding.

Let's build something!

 

Welcome to Unity.

Take some time to settle in and get started with some good tutorials here on the site: https://unity3d.com/learn/beginner-tutorials

You'll get a feel for Unity and what you can do, and practice and expand from there.

Have fun!

 

Welcome!

When you start off with an empty project and run it, chances are it'll run at >60FPS. It's not until you start adding things that your FPS will decrease. So the less you add (or the more optimized things are), the better your FPS will be!

With that said, framerate should be one of the last things you should be thinking about right now. Focus on just learning and making things happen, and worry about performance stuff later.

 

2D is a flat visual surface. 3D is a virtual space environment. They are completely different. You have to choose one or the other.

The issue of FPS during development is based on the power of your computer. For the final product, it is about optimizing "draw calls" and "batching". There are other issues, but those two are huge, and if you can understand those two then you will be a lot farther ahead than most devs.

A lot of devs pass around an old saying "Don't optimize unless you need to," but I find this to be wrong. That old saying was created by professional coders who had decades of experience. They did things correctly, so optimization was not necessary in some cases.

The problem now is that most Unity devs have terrible "practices". I mean that "best practices" are a lost black art and Unity projects are built to fail.

Therefore, to answer your question, FPS is based on you knowing the best practices.

• To master "draw calls", "GPU Instancing", "Multithreading" and "batching", these assets will take care of a lot:
  • One Batch
  • Microsplat
  • GPU Instancer
  • EZ Thread multithreading by Jeff Johnson
  • Massive Vegetation (billboarding system for trees and plants)
• Also, be careful with adding a lot of trees or grass to Unity terrain.

Some other suggestions to speed up your editor:

• Only download into your project the assets you want to experiment with (don't go crazy; more assets in your project will just slow the editor down).
• Drag all your assets into a single folder like "3rdParty" and then drag that into "Plugins". Do your development in "Plugins/project". The reason is that Unity chokes on trying to constantly compile every script whenever you make a change to anything. When you are ready to publish, delete all assets you did not use, and drag your "project" folder back to the Assets root (drag it out of "Plugins").

--David

 

If you think you are going to develop 3D games, just start using Unity in 3D. 2D isn't 1/3 easier or anything.

 

The fallacy is that they are extremely dissimilar, they are not. Learn the skills akin to the games you would like to make.

 

What others said - 2D and 3D is equally challenging, just for different reasons.

2D animation gives you a very different workflow, depending on what sort of 2D characters you're going for (if at all any characters are present). You can get ready-made characters, but you're stuck with the animations included. Or you could use skeletal animation (as acquired by UT and in testing now), but still have to make body parts and actually animate it. No third-party animation set exists that fits all.

3D lets you drop in any rigged character and use any standard animation set, then off you go. Just tweak offsets, blending and speeds. A lot of different approaches exist to getting unique characters, other than making your own, and the most popular free solution is UMA. The challenge is making enough things for them to wear.

2D should theoretically be easiest on the CPU/GPU/RAM, especially using tile-based worlds. You can keep memory far below 100MB on a mobile device and still have everything you need for a game loaded. 3D has different optimisations required to run well on any platform, so you add another skillset for that.

Start with what you like. Learn the other eventually, as it's all good knowledge to have. Most of what you do is shared between 2D and 3D anyway - programming, sound, interfaces, asset management, input, output, distribution.

 

Welcome to Unity! Just get started with the Learn section (link above) or tackle something you feel like doing. It doesn't matter what kind of game it is, only that you enjoy it, and feel interested in taking the learning forward. It's not hard either. When you get going, feel free to make a new post about each issue you might have - more posts the better See you around.