I’m in the early stages of making a billiard/pool game. So far it looks like I cannot get the graphics quality I want with Unity, if using 3D spheres for balls, and being able to support a wide range of hardware (i.e.-graphics cards pre shader 3, so no image effects, tablets with poor/no hardware AA, probably others).
So I started thinking outside the box, but wondering if I’m headed down a dead-end. My game will have a fixed camera angle, 90 degrees, straight top-down view. So really it doesn’t need to be 3D… the balls could be 2D sprites, in which case I can get really good quality edges/AA.
Has anyone done anything like this, and can give me some pointers or even to just say “it will not work”. Mostly I’m trying to figure out, without actually spending a ton of time making graphics/code/etc, if I’ll need too many variations of my sprites to support all of the different positions every possible ball could be in. When rolling really slowly, I want it to be smooth.
At first I thought “no way”… but now I’m thinking maybe with the right tricks it might work. For example, using a tinted shader I could probably avoid having every possible ball color… since other than stripes vs solids, and the numbers on the balls, the only other difference is the color. I could probably also get a lot of variations by rotating the balls (typically z-axis for a standard 2D setup). Also, over half the variations are all the same, at least for the solid balls, since they look the same when the number area is on the bottom side of the ball. I could do any light/reflections I want on top of the balls as a separate sprite that just never moves (alpha overlay).
I was never planning on using Unity physics to move the balls around, so that part isn’t a big deal… except it probably will be a lot more work having to calculate the correct sprite to display vs just “rotating the sphere” like I could do if using 3D.
Lastly, I see other top-down pool games like the famous “8 Ball Pool” that look great (although super laggy) even on my cheap $50 Android phone. Do you think they are doing “fake 3D” (2D/sprites) or are they just taking advantage of some other game engine or native code/techniques that are just better suited to this type of thing? I doubt “8 Ball Pool” (and most others) are using Unity, because most are iPhone only, and others are iPhone + Android only… if they were using Unity, you’d think they would also have Windows versions, maybe even Facebook/Web.
Sorry for the long post… and really appreciate any feedback.