Hello all,
Unity looked awesome for a tool to build a game that requires a 3D scene.
However, I am just wondering if Unity is too much for something like a 3D Chess Game or other board game?
What are your thoughts? Appreciated.
Unity is perfect for that kind of thing. There is even an example project for a memory / card matching game (iPhone-match):
Unity will work for this type of game rather easily.
Wouldn’t the number of drawcalls be a concern with chess if all of the pieces are 3D objects?
yes and no.
Chess is not exactly a realtime action game so lower FPS have no directly disturbing effect on the majority of situations
Additionally you can optimize the stuff quite a lot as only very few things are dynamic at a time.
Additionally you do not have animated things so you theoretically could use something like a realtime “combine children” that combines all the figurines of one player at the end of his turn → means 18 drawcalls in total for board, 16 stones with your counter player + 1 for all yours.
Or you could build all the white as one mesh with a bone for each piece, instantiate a second version with a different shader for black, and just move the bones. Two draw calls for the whole game. Three if you count the board.
How do you have non-contiguous meshes? I’ve read about this technique in other threads but I can’t really figure out the steps to make it work with, say, Cheetah.
I’m not familiar with Cheetah, unfortunately. In 3ds Max, you can select an editable poly and hit the ‘Attach’ button. In Maya, select multiple meshes and navigate to Mesh->Combine. In any program, once the meshes are combined it’s a simple mater of weighting the verts to 100% on that object’s bone.
Some visuals
Single mesh, one draw call.
two bones inside the object.
Animating one bone moves only one section of the combined mesh.