Just read your Game Dev FAQ,
as i see that most of Dexterity's games are 2D,
and only 2 are on 3D...

Understanding that DX8 is a big (11mb) download,
the alternative is building a 3D game in DX5 , means
Re-Learning an entire framework (DX has evoulved
much in 4 versions) and losing tons of effects, speed,
and more work (both Learning & coding things that
arent on this version).

also, every computer with XP has 8.0 (8.1 ?) version.
I do understand that this reduce the potent. market
(thu i must argue that you can usually find DX latest
version on shareware disks)

Just wanted to hear your opinion and others about it.
I believe that people can create an Indi product that can
justify downloading ver. 8, not to mention the tech
advancement.

In regards to which version of DirectX to use, the best advice I can give is to only require a newer version if you really need the features of that version. For a 2D game, DirectX 5 should be just fine. That's what I used for Dweep.

Requiring DirectX 7 or 8 will definitely reduce your audience, and I'm certain that it will reduce sales vs. if you were able to create the same game with DirectX 5. So the question is whether the added features you gain by using DirectX 8 will make up for a more limited market.

Even though Windows 95/98 supports DirectX 8, the problem is that people with older computers invariably have older video and sound cards, cards that are often no longer supported by the manufacturer. So some of them can't even get DirectX 7/8 games to run properly because the driver support just isn't there.

My philosophy in writing 2D games like Dweep is to rely on DirectX as little as possible. This minimizes reliance on driver functions, which are often buggy. Dweep doesn't use any DirectX blitting functions. It initializes DirectDraw, grabs a pointer to the frame buffer, and then it uses my own custom drawing routines to do all the blitting, including shadows and alpha-blending. Even though all the rendering is done in software, it's still playable on a Pentium 90 with Win 95. It uses 640x480x16 mode.

Dweep is also a very small game at just 1.3MB (for the full version and the demo). All the backgrounds are tiled, and the art is a combination of 8-bit and 16-bit, compressed using RLE. I wrote custom blitting routines so that most sprites in the game were stored as 8-bit art, each with their own palette. Storing 8-bit art plus a palette for each sprite is much smaller than storing 16-bit art. The rendering routines can blit an 8-bit image to the 16-bit back buffer by converting the 8-bit pixels to 16-bit ones on the fly. This is surprisingly fast because the character palette fits nicely in the CPU cache. And it's all C++ (no Assembly). I learned this trick from a GDC lecture several years ago. You can also change the palette for each character individually. For instance, in Dweep I made the laser's palette gradually more red as the laser heats up and then explodes.

Actually I don't think Windows 95 supports DirectX 8. MS have stopped supporting Win95 recently. You should consider using OpenGL. It works even on Windows NT 4.0, and since it's updated very rarely even older computers and operating systems support it, without any extra downloads.

Also, while it does require 3D hardware acceleration, you have to keep in mind that newer video cards (which will always support OpenGL and Direct3D) are likely to eventually stop supporting DirectDraw acceleration. Microsoft stopped development of DDraw with DirectX 7. And from what I know even cheap integrated video cards often have some basic OpenGL support.

I don't want to start any arguments on what's better DirectX or OpenGL, just want to point out that there are alternatives to using DirectX that some people may not be aware of.

You might also want to consider SDL (www.libsdl.org) which can be used with OpenGL. By default it uses DirectDraw in Windows. The nice thing about it is it will work with whatever version of DirectX is currently installed, so you don't have to worry about that.

Fenix: i think that DirectX 8 does support win95, ill check it soon.

Steve: I get your drift about not using big plugins, thats totaly
understandable. I'm just Ranting ;)

Win95 supports up to DirectX8. It's version 8.1 that isn't supported. I also don't think it's likely that cards will stop supporting DirectDraw for a long time.

As for going for OpenGL instead, that's a touchy subject. I have posted my opinions on that several times in other forums. I am a huge fan of OpenGL, and right now its the renderer I use in Miko & Molly. It is lovely using GL on the coding side of the equation, but when it comes to supporting users it's a bit more of a pain for both you and the user. First of all, you won't get GL acceleration in Windows right out of the box...not even with WindowsXP and a GeForce. Of course, all the Direct3D8 drivers are there for you, so the user probably won't even have a clue. Almost every game out there is Direct3D, so all of the user's other games work fine. When your OpenGL game doesn't work for them, their natural conclusion is "everything else works, so this must be a bad game".

The other problem with supporting OpenGL is that not all cards support it under all OS's. Intel i740 cards are one example...their drivers don't support GL under Win2000. I think the Mystique only supports Direct3D on any OS. On the other hand, I have yet to see a card/OS combination that supports OpenGL but not some version of Direct3D. Using Direct3D8 will limit you some, since that requires at least a DirectX6 class driver, which a lot of older cards don't have. However, I'm pretty sure if you stick to DirectX7 you can support pretty much every card out. Of course, the last remaining issue is that WindowsNT only supports up to DirectX3.

So there are the pitfalls...I'll leave it to you to decided if you wan't to deal with OpenGL. It helped me finish my game quicker, but I will be adding Direct3D support soon.

LordKronos is correct. Win 95 supports up to DirectX 8, but not 8.1.

Thanks for clearing that up. I knew there was something it didn't support, just wasn't sure what.

As for OpenGL I'm surprised to hear what you're saying LordKronos. I was under the impression that most cheap cards have support for OpenGL. I have an old SiS6326 card lying around, that came with my Pentium II 350. I'm going to try and see how OpenGL works with it. If Windows doesn't come with OpenGL drivers for those cards that's certainly bad...

I also use OpenGL is because it's portable. I intend to release MAC (maybe Linux too) versions of my games to broaden my audience. However it may be a good idea to code Direct3D graphics support for the Windows users, so I might do that sometime.

And by the way, Windows NT 4 supports up to DirectX 5 or 6 with service pack 5. I'm not sure exactly what version it is but it does go beyond 3 now.

I decided to browse opengl.org a bit and found this bit of info, which is I guess what you were trying to say.


Q. Is OpenGL compatible with Windows Me, Windows 2000 and Windows XP?

A. Yes, it is completely compatible. Windows (all recent versions) ships with the OpenGL 1.1 runtime library. However, it does not include any hardware drivers for individual video boards. You can download the drivers directly from the Web site of the company that manufactured your hardware. Most hardware manufacturers have updated their hardware drivers to run under Windows ME, 2000 and XP.

Yes, its a bit sad that OpenGL support is more difficult to get. As far as Linux/MAC support, of course that is something I don't currently deal with. If you do, then of course Direct3D isn't an option for you there. It's just most developers (including myself) only develop for Windows, so I always seem to forget other options exist. :)

As far as NT is concerned, last I heard Service Pack 6a added support for DirectX 3.0a, and SP7 didn't change anything. If they did add DirectX5 support, I would be pleasantly surprised. Now, on the other hand, I just did some searching and found ways that people have found to hack DirectX5 and partial DirectX6 support into NT4. Here is one site:
http://www.newdoom.com/hosted/stimpee/directx.shtml

However, it is not official, is unsupported, and you can't get the necessary files from Microsoft. I would not dare suggest to a user to try this. For all practical purposes you should probably just draw the line at DirectX3 for NT4.

If we're already on the subject,
how much are the installations of dx versions?
can you split them up to the components you use
in order to reduce size?

DirectX8 is 8MB for Win2000/XP, 12MB otherwise. They have always distributed the whole things as a single package and have required you to do the same (which is probably a good thing).

LordKronos : thats for 8.1, XP already has 8.0 built in

Until last week Katsu's Journey was built around DirectX 8.1 Mostly because when I started the project I wasn't well acquainted with the system requirements of a game and it's effect on sales. I also wanted to play around learning all the cool features of 3D in DirectX8. Katsu's Journey is a 2D scrolling game and I thought doing 2D in 3D would be good because I could take advantage of hardware acceleration and the nice alpha transparencies that are easily done in 3D.

Then I began reading up on the pitfalls of my decision. In order to support older machines you must use vertex buffers and you must sort all of your drawing by texture. This was definitely achievable but it would require a re-write of a lot of the support classes/wrapper's I had written. Being a developer I don’t mind re-writing my code to get it perfect, but it got me thinking. In the end the people who had the older systems probably wouldn’t even play the game if it required DX8.1

I realized that the few things DX8.1 gave me did not outweigh the cost of using it and potentially chopping my market in half. I decided instead to port my game to Allegro, which is based on DirectDraw 5.0 and has been road tested by a large community. It took me 2 evenings to learn allegro and get it set up and 3 to port my engine code. The engine has all the features it did before (including alpha transparencies) and it runs on old systems. One of they guys at Rainfall Studios has access to a Pentium 160mhz and it was able to run the program acceptably without any additional downloads.

Because our game has a scrolling screen it isn’t quite as easy to update as a game like Dweep where you can do all your drawing with dirty rectangles and run well on all systems, I decided to go with 8bit color. It reduces back buffer sizes, and speeds up blitting of alpha blended elements. I was worried at first because all of our art assets thus far have assumed 16bit color, but Photoshop did an excellent job of reducing all the art to one palette and I wasn’t able to notice any degradation in the art.

Was it worth the 5 days it took to do the port? Absolutely.

Very good idea. It's best not to require later versions of DirectX and 3D hardware unless you're really going to take advantage of it. If your game will look about the same with a 2D DirectX 5 engine, you'll be able to access a much bigger market. And your tech support will probably be much lower as well.

personally i think that those people who are still using DirectX 5.0 should be upgrading to DirectX 7.0+ ......why should you use old stuff anyway when there are free updates..:)

And why should someone with a 28.8 modem spend an entire hour tying up their phone by downloading a newest DirectX when every game they already have works fine on DirectX5. For them, the fact that a game which COULD have been done in directX5 wasn't (without good reason) and they have to needlessly upgrage is just a slap in the face.

there are manny alternative ways to obtain the newest DirectX drivers...(e.g.: Shareware cd's...Freeware cd's...etc) :p ;)

I dont think that they sell 28.8 modems anymore.
and still, most users own at least one commercial game
that has a decent version of DX, not to mention the
shareware disks which usually ship with those (i recall
pcgamer doing that)

ofcourse puzzle gamers wont bother having DX or
even bother on selecting a 3d card.

BUT, gamers who like arcade/action games DO have
DX&reasonable Gfx accel.

dont think that when you build an arcade game, you
appeal to a different audience. The same audience
that clicks on "ACTION" on download sites, not puzzle.

people who seek action/arcade game actually EXPECT
reasonable GFX, not low end graphics. therefore i wouldnt
be surprised to see if 80% of the end users in the action/arcade
game have at least DX7&GFX accel.

now thats what im talking about !!! :D :cool:

Something else to remember is what Steve has said repeatedly about selling games. If your game has a "shelf life" of the next 4-5 years, if you design it with Direct X 8 now, although you will be limiting the audience initially, this won't always be the case. 18 months from now We will be on Direct X 10.5, Windows 95 will have been a discontinued product for over 2 years, and Direct X 8 won't seem like such a high requirement anymore.

Thats not to say that you should just use Direct X 8 because you can. I still agree that you should only use the highest version you have to use. :)

(Damn, talk about sitting on the fence :D )

Originally posted by gilzu
I dont think that they sell 28.8 modems anymore.
...
BUT, gamers who like arcade/action games DO have
DX&reasonable Gfx accel.



First off, if a user can't even be bothered to download a newer version of DirectX for free, what makes you think they actually went to the effort and cost of upgrading their modem either?

Second, I was refering to SopiSoft's comment that everyone should just upgrade. If the portion of the market you are targeting has already upgraded, why would you care about the people who haven't upgraded? They aren't your target audience.

Originally posted by Dax
18 months from now We will be on Direct X 10.5, Windows 95 will have been a discontinued product for over 2 years, and Direct X 8 won't seem like such a high requirement anymore.

But of course, we STILL can't even get Microsoft to ship a version of Windows with hardware OpenGL drivers :(

Originally posted by gilzu
I dont think that they sell 28.8 modems anymore.
and still, most users own at least one commercial game
that has a decent version of DX, not to mention the
shareware disks which usually ship with those (i recall
pcgamer doing that)

ofcourse puzzle gamers wont bother having DX or
even bother on selecting a 3d card.


Not to pick on you Gilzu, but I think that first paragraph is indicative of the blinders worn by many people in the game industry. Most people with a computer may not even own a commercial game, or have any idea what DX is. If you're selling to the people who have bought one or more commercial games in the past year, you're actually selling to a niche market. OTOH, if you're selling to the people who may not have bought a game in the past year but who still want to play a bit on their computer, this is much larger market. And the sensibilities of this market are far from what's considered cool or even necessary in the core gamer market.

Originally posted by LordKronos
If the portion of the market you are targeting has already upgraded, why would you care about the people who haven't upgraded? They aren't your target audience.

A agree with what your saying, but I thought it worth mentioning that you can always increase your potential audience and hence bring in a few more sales if you use older technology.

Take Blizzard for example, in a day and age where most of the new retail games require a G-Force level card to play enjoyably, they release WarCraft3 which runs nicely on a TNT level card. It just makes good sense to have the largest potential market you can if it is at all possible.

Admittedly Blizzard's backwards support doesn't go as far back as Dweep's but it's equivalent given their target audience are your typical PC gamers.

Does anyone remember the game Out of This World? I found out recently that it only used a 16color palette. That's just amazing; I played through the whole game and never noticed. I guess that explains why it was ported to just about every console/gaming system out there.

Just something to chew on :)

I just want to say, yes there is still some of us out here who can only connect at 28.8. :D I have a 56k modem, but due to my bad phone lines, I can only connect that fast. And if I find something that I’d like to download, but the files is over a certain size, then I just download it over night. I know people in the same area with only one phone line, and they do the same thing. But, sometimes we forget, and there goes your possible sale.

Anyway, by having a lower filesize doesn’t mean that everyone with a bad connection will download your game. Only the ones who were on the border-line of not downloading your game anyway, and by adding an extra 11 Mbs to download pushes them over the edge. But, by having a smaller filesize does mean that less people will download your game “later”, and then forget about it (plus those previous border-line people ;) ). And, like everyone has said, unless you’re making a cutting-edge 3d game, DirectX 5.0 should be all that you need.


Oh, and I remember Out of this World. That was a really neat game, though I thought it was kind of short.

Originally posted by Dan MacDonald
Does anyone remember the game Out of This World? I found out recently that it only used a 16color palette. That's just amazing; I played through the whole game and never noticed. I guess that explains why it was ported to just about every console/gaming system out there.

humph...
one of my fav...

Out of This World was one of my favorite games too. When did that come out... early 90s perhaps? I enjoyed the originality, although I agree it was a bit short.

There is a middle ground between DX5 and the latest 8.1 (or whatever it is). I used to upgrade my code, but stopped at DX7. I use D3D to do 2D, and although I don't use hardly any DirectDraw anymore, I didn't want to swap to the new API of Directx8.
I think DX7 is a nice middle ground for those of us that need fast good graphics, but don't want to rely on people having the latest cards and version of DirectX.
I aim for my games to run on a 400MHZ with a 16MB or hopefully 8MB card.
This is a higher spec than dweep I'm sure but THIS STUFF (http://www.positech.co.uk/planetarydefence) can't be done in software...

Originally posted by LordKronos
But of course, we STILL can't even get Microsoft to ship a version of Windows with hardware OpenGL drivers :(

Yeah. Since I don't see any technical reasons for this, this is probably yet another one of their anti-competitive practices. What we plan to do for our GL based game is keep track of all the major video card manufacturers (there are about 9) by keeping an online database with links to their latest drivers.

When you install the game and it finds that you don't have the drivers, it will run the program. The program will then check with our online database, download the driver for your video card (GL can tell you the manufacturer and model), and run the installation. This idea is actually based on a program called glsetup (http://www.glsetup.com/) which was originally intended to do exactly this, but it only supports win9x and seems to be a dead project at this point.

Originally posted by cliffski
There is a middle ground between DX5 and the latest 8.1 (or whatever it is). I used to upgrade my code, but stopped at DX7.

Yes, I do agree that if you need 3D, I think DX7 is a good point. As far as I know, Direct3D7 works on any card that has any level of DirectX driver available. Direct3D8, on the other hand, requires that cards have at least a DirectX6 class driver. This rules out a bunch of the lower end 3D cards.

Originally posted by Fenix Down
The program will then check with our online database, download the driver for your video card (GL can tell you the manufacturer and model), and run the installation.

Except that OpenGL will only tell you what the card is when you have the appropriate drivers installed for it. I think if you want to detect the card name, you would have to use DirectX to get it.

I have thought about trying this very same thing, but I just don't seem to have the time to get around to it. And yes, I am :( that GLSetup never progressed further than it did. The web setup is quite nice.

Hmph, you're probably right. Well as long as there's some way to get the name it's possible to do this. I think SDL might be able to tell you but maybe not.

Yeah actually this is what you seem to get when there's no OpenGL driver installed:

Renderer: GDI Generic
Vendor: Microsoft Corporation

This at least tells you the driver is not installed. Then your driver download program could use DirectX to find what the name of the card is.

Originally posted by Fenix Down
... The program will then check with our online database, download the driver for your video card (GL can tell you the manufacturer and model), and run the installation.
If you do decide to go that route, I would strongly suggest you prompt the user for confirmation every step of the way. Having lived through the 3dfx openGL issues, I know how much work it sometimes takes to find just the right driver version to stabilize my system (in my case, there was only 1 out of about 20 driver versions that worked with my setup).

With old hardware, it's not always a simple matter of downloading the latest video/audio/whatever drivers to upgrade your system. Depending on your machine (especially the "cheap" kind you bought 5-15 years ago), changing drivers can likely be the difference between a reasonably stable machine and the blue screen of death, no matter how stable these drivers are claimed to be. It was very difficult finding a stable combination back then and once you managed to resolve a problem, there was no way you'd risk touching any drivers unless you were willing to risk having to upgrade your hardware or pay a professional to undo the damage.

I say this because a good portion of shareware players still use such systems. I'm quite certain that many of them stick to shareware because of its low system requirements, but that's a different topic :)

Originally posted by LordKronos

Second, I was refering to SopiSoft's comment that everyone should just upgrade. If the portion of the market you are targeting has already upgraded, why would you care about the people who haven't upgraded? They aren't your target audience.

well....you need to upgrade anyway sometime....and DX5 is very old.....even DX7 is kinda old now but in my opinion at least a must have.....:)

Originally posted by Scorpion
If you do decide to go that route, I would strongly suggest you prompt the user for confirmation every step of the way. Having lived through the 3dfx openGL issues, I know how much work it sometimes takes to find just the right driver version to stabilize my system (in my case, there was only 1 out of about 20 driver versions that worked with my setup).

Well on the bright side, 3Dfx is dead so I don't have to worry about new 3Dfx card issues. :)

Originally posted by SopiSoft
well....you need to upgrade anyway sometime....and DX5 is very old.....even DX7 is kinda old now but in my opinion at least a must have.....:)

The question is is your game compelling enough to be the one that causes your customer to upgrade? Now we'd all like to think yes, but I rather not force any of my potential customers to make that choice. Downloading my demo should be a no brainer.

Originally posted by Dan MacDonald
The question is is your game compelling enough to be the one that causes your customer to upgrade? Now we'd all like to think yes, but I rather not force any of my potential customers to make that choice. Downloading my demo should be a no brainer.

I totally agree with you on that......but i kinda expect that they have at least DX7 when they wanna buy my game..;)

you see......im working on a puzzle/arcade game which uses a lot of 3D.....and therefore requieres a video-card with 3D support.....i can also do this game in 2D so you dont need a good videocard...but still need DX7 at least....and it would take away the nice 3D-effects if its done in 2D...:(

I’m not trying to advocate that everyone should up and use the oldest version of directX or maybe even WinG to make their games. If you feel that you will be able to delight your target audience more by having the added benefits of 3d and thus sell more copies then by all means use newer versions of directX. It's still possible to make games that run on older systems with a 3d api, you just have to use a little restraint.

It's just a question of how much of the bottom end of the market you want to cut off. If you have an action oriented puzzle game, chances are the people it appeals to most will have a voodoo or TNT card. Then using 3d is pretty reasonable. Katsu's Journey can be done in pure 2D and run on really old systems like p160's, because I have the option of including the really low end by using older API's it makes a lot of sense. Especially since the customer with the 5-6 year old machine is largely ignored by retail games today which makes them a good candidate to buy my game because there are a lot less games in that segment for me to compete with.

I'm a big fan of 3D and I'm working on a shareware game in DX8.1. While I definitely agree that the primary audience for a lot of shareware games have older systems, I don't completely agree that everyone with good hardware and DX8.1 are catered to by the big retail companies. In fact, a lot of retail games, in order to sell more copies, do reduce their hardware requirements to a certain level. I believe there is also a somewhat uncatered-to niche market of people with really nice hardware who would like to see games that take full advantage of what their cards can do.
For example, I'm one of those people. I download tech demos for my Radeon 8500 that show all these neat things you can do with pixel shaders and vertex shaders, and have done some of that myself, but all the retail games so far only use pixel shaders as an option for pretty water reflective techniques, because they don't want to make shaders a requirement for their game for a year or two. I think, if you can manage to reach them, there is quite a big market of people with the latest hardware who would love to download a game that has awesome effects that won't be out in mainstream commercial games for a year or two. You're cutting out a lot of people in the mid-to-high range, but those people are the ones being targeted most by the big retail companies.
I think going with the "limit your audience to expensive hardware" or even "take advantage of a particular card's features" would also be a nice way to maybe get a deal with ATI or Nvidia to get your demo packaged in with their new video cards, which would be great.
It's not the most solid business plan, but if you really want to make a game with great 3D effects, I think you can still make some profit off of it.

-makeshiftwings

To be honest, I'm not really sure that is a very viable plan. First of all, targeting something that high end means you are cutting your potential audience down to (probably) less than 10% of the market right of the bat. Myself personally, I'm pretty ecstatic about cutting edge graphics technology, and even I only have a GeForce 2.

Furthermore, of the people who own these high end cards, most of them probably bought them for UT 2003 and other recent AAA games of that type. While they are not mutually exclusive, the type of people that play those games tend not to be too into most indie games. Even if you can draw their attention with the flashy graphics, I suspect you will get a lot of "that game looks good, but its lame/easy/simple/boring/nowhere near as good as UT2003". To make a game that would sell well to them, you would typically need a pretty big team, a lot of time, and probably quite a bit of funding to make something of the calibre they are accustomed to.

Not impossible, but I think it's a longshot. To do something like that, you would probably have to step into the big boy's territory. After all, its not likely they will go nuts over a pixel-shaded pac-man/arkaniod/solitaire/sokoban/etc. Those aren't their types of games. More than likely you would need to make a (MMO)RPG/FPS/RTS to really get their attention. Then, pixel-shaded or not, you are up against multi-million dollar budgets.

I don't mean to rain on your plans here. If by all means you feel very strongly about it, then go for it. I just feel its probably more wishful thinking than anything.

As far as getting some sort of deal with NVidia/ATI, that is a possibility. I'm not sure what they would pay for it, but remember that you are probably up against a ton of other groups trying the same strategy. Typically, even these groups are large, funded, and put in a ton of man-hours before having something interesting enough. If you want to go big time and possibly get a deal with a major publisher, then that would be a good stepping stone. However, if you really want to go indie, I'm not so sure how helpful that would be.

I am going down the DX7 middle-path too, since the game I am currently working on really uses all dimensions in a 3D world for the 'puzzles'.

I hope the requirement of DX7 and a TNT or higher card doesn't cut down the target audience too much, I am definitely aiming at these lower end 3D cards and 700-800 MHz systems instead of the current top-notch hardware configs.

About the OpenGL Windows XP driver issue: Don't most OEMs install the card manufacturer's drivers onto the systems they sell? I know my Dell/Windows XP system came with Intel drivers for OpenGL 1.1.2. Also, don't most new video cards come with driver disks?

People who upgrade old systems to Windows XP would need to download the latest drivers, but how many people actually upgrade their systems to Windows XP?

Yes, usually Dell installs the drivers. But sometimes people upgrade themselves, or have a system crash and reinstall windows from scratch, or something else like that. Sometimes even experienced programmers make the mistake of assuming that XP installs updated OpenGL drivers. Their Direct3D stuff works fine for them, then they get an OpenGL game that runs really poorly. The logical assumption would be "must be a POS game".

AFAIK if someone buys a card, there are OpenGL drivers included. If someone buys a complete computer and reinstall the drivers, there are drivers again in those small plastic bags (or folders) that the OEM seller gives. So the user has just to reinstall the drivers.

Personally for 2D i'm using DX3, since all that i want is a framebuffer. I'm getting that and i'm doing my own stuff.

For 3D i prefer OpenGL. However in order to be sure that the 3D game that i'm creating right now will be able to be played by people with older h/w, i made a software 3D engine for it instead of using OGL (however i may add OGL support later).

About what can be done in nonaccelerated 2D... i've seen some demos (*not* game demos, just demos...) that does texture mapped 3D with reflections, shadows, 3D grid triangularization (to make 3D water effects - aka metaballs) and more. And all this in my old computer, a S3 Virge-based PMXX200 with 128MB RAM and Windows 2k.
My point in the abone is that what can be done in 2D is limited only by the imagination and the knowledge of the coder (for example i can't make all these, since i don't have knowledge to make my 3D engine faster than slow :-P...)