I am trying to collect information before starting to build a 3D game with an early 2000s look, designed for low-end PCs.
I want to understand the best approach to develop a 3D game with low-poly models and environments, similar to early 2000s games like Max Payne or Serious Sam. The game should also run on low-end PCs and laptops with around 8GB of memory and onboard graphics, which would have been considered quite high for the early 2000s.
Are there any good tutorials that show how to optimize a game for low-end PCs? Should I use Godot 3.6? Any hints or advice would be greatly appreciated.
planning to program the game in c++ .
The most important thing for a low end pc game is you need to bake/use Lightmap, for increasing the performance. Otherwise you can do everything normaly, you can use shaders for making it like a 2000s game if you want. Also you need to use low quality and low resolution textures for it. Here is a tutorial video on it.
You should use the latest stable version of Godot (4.3 at the time of writing) unless you have a specific reason to do otherwise. This gives you access to the many improvements that come with that later version WHILE still allowing you to create the early 2000’s art and graphic direction. (You can have 2000’s graphics with 2020’s performance)
The video provided by KingGD is a very good watch by the way.
Another thing you could do is use technology in “old-school” way. For example you could use vertex painting (at least in 4.4 and onward) to make it look like 4th/5th gen console. There are also videos dissecting those old games and allowing you to see how exactly were they made (how are assets packed, things loaded etc), so those would great starting points to look into for something to mimic.
One trick we use for targeting lower end is to dramatically reduce the texture usage.
Do as much vertex coloring as possible vs heavy texture maps (as I just realized the comment right before me said as I was trying to fight with my keyboard ).
If you’re aiming for VERY low end, don’t use lighting, go with unlit materials and adjust the coloration directly.
Shadow blobs (actually a simple decal) can also be used if you need to, but they can be a bit pricey.
The one we’re currently working on is Smugglers of Cygnus (which is in no way aimed at very low end machines), and it’s in Godot 4.x.
We’ve also done a few others in Unreal 4 - one of which was aimed at low end machines (Intel HD graphics).
I was speaking more from experience, as I’ve been developing games for various shops since the 90s.
As for C++, unless you’re quite literally aiming for early gen pentiums, your bottlenecks are all going to be 3D pipeline. I wouldn’t worry about trying to get performance gains from the compiler unless you’re creating an engine from scratch. In which case, check out the old SIGGRAPH presentations, lots of good info there.
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