If one had a game made up in 2D by dozen of characters and bits and pieces, all art related, backgrounds, players etc. And this took up 20MB in memory. How much, could it be suggested that these same characters, which are in fact, from a 3D model in Maya, … How much more would memory consumption be?
I rough guess, as I want to estimate a potential conversion from 2D to 3D in art, that is already made.
The size of a 3D scene can vary greatly. If the textures are all large ie. 1k, 2k or 4k and there are a lot of them you could very easily exceed the size of pure 2D. If you are very careful and creative you can get very small files sizes. Think Minecraft or this scene by BitGem where the entire scene uses a single 128x128 texture.
Or if you really want to crunch your file size you could make an entire FPS in only 98KB like Kkreiger.
On the flip side you could end up with a game that takes GB’s of storage like Skyrim or most of the Final Fantasy games since X. The real limit to game size whether its 2D or 3D is the style you are aiming for, how many tricks you know for minimizes resource size and how much time and effort you are willing to put into it.
Hm.
Great point Chronos.
In my game, it would be complex meshes. It would not be just cubes or spheres. So, in terms of shapes, closer to Skyrim.
Wow that 98kb FPS is very impressive. It’s hard to believe such a game can be only 98kb. Thanks for sharing Chronos. 
edit. sorry I mis read the statement. In terms of memory, we would not be aiming for Skyrim. This is a mobile build. Just 3D models. I am wondering, if done well in terms of memory, how low could you get the memory vs a 1MB sprite? * Your average model might look like Peter Griffin in terms of vertices on the mesh.
Rough guess if you estimate 80bytes per vertex for a model with normals, tangents, 2 uv ssets, and vertex color a 10K vertex model would be about 780KB without compression. That doesn’t count storage for animation or textures. But your models wont be 10K for a mobile device your entire scene would probably only be 10K vertices maybe 20K if you are going for only the newer devices. So your models aren’t going to blow your memory budget it will be your textures that you will need to worry about.
Use texture atlases and keep you textures for objects small sub 256x256 smaller the better here. Reserve 512x512 and up only for hero objects and gui elements and you should be fine. I’ve done an entire endless runner prototype that used only a single 256x256 atlas for the entire level, not counting the Gui.
So, as a general rule of thumb, I was that term very loosely. To achieve what I want would be 100 times more memory?
Let’s say for the sake of argument you used the same number of textures that are of the same size and compression for your 3D version as your 2D and the only thing that changed was the addition of 3D models and animations. Then your project might only grow 5 or 10MB’s, everything else being the same and assuming you are using reasonable sized models for a mobile platform.
Cool man,
Thank you for the guidance.
