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Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7

simonschreibt.de

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Re: Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7

#41

Post by daxelrod »

RedNifre wrote: post #38
TillE wrote: post #27

> This looks 3D but it’s not! It is SNES tech and is called “Mode 7“. To render it, Nintendo manipulated textures (trading height for depth) with some coder magic. Mode 7 essentially is a primitive 3D accelerator, it renders a single textured plane with various transforms. I think in principle it's just as "real 3D" as a modern GPU, it's just very very limited and less accurate.

No, it's not: Mode 7 can only zoom, translate and rotate the layer in 2D. For example, the Bowser fight in Super Mario World is a typical use of mode 7: Bowser moves around, sometimes rotates and between rounds flies around in "3D" by zooming in and out. The cool 3D hack comes from co-processors in the cartridge: Games like Super Mario Kart use extra chips than can quickly compute new mode 7 parameters per scanline:…

Great explanation.

F-Zero managed to do the “change zoom on each scanline” trick without a coprocessor in the cartridge, didn’t it?

Re: Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7

#42

Post by waste_monk »

quadcore wrote: post #2

Ah, it was on my list, now I can cross it, thanks. If someone knows how the sky of world of warcraft is made (and to a lesser extent the ground of warcraft3 which I think is a clever use of marching squares), please let us know, Ive been wondering for 10+ years. It has an incredible amount of features (day, night, clouds, moon, stars, etc), it's gorgeous, light, updates beautifully every other frame or so and no, it'…

Unrelated but on the topic of skyboxes, I always thought the backgrounds of Homeworld were really nice... turns out it's just vertex color gradients.

https://simonschreibt.de/gat/homeworld-2-backgrounds/

http://simonschreibt.de/gat/homeworld-2-backgrounds-tech/

Re: Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7

#43

Post by dexwiz »

This article focuses on parallax in games, but parallax has a long history in animation.

Multiplane cameras from Disney and their predecessors are almost 100 years old. You can do a lot of trickery with 2d images to construct scenes with depth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplane_camera

Re: Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7

#44

Post by mattcheston »

OG computer graphics are always amazing to me. I'm convinced software and hardware both would be entire generations behind where it is without the contributions made for early animation and computer graphics.

Look at NVIDIA. They pretty much just lucked out that the same architectures would be useful for machine learning and "artificial intelligence" in it's initial iteration, but the entire company was founded on computer graphics.

Re: Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7

#45

Post by twelvechairs »

Weird focus on Diablo 2. The mode focussed on was use by hardly anyone as it looked awkward and broke certain features. Diablo 2 was also released in an era where full 3d was very standard practice (well after half life let alone quake and doom and others). The great graphical coding era of video games was at least 5 years before for me. Things like Commanche Maximum Overkill, Magic Carpet and Descent.

Re: Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7

#48

Post by cmplxconjugate »

I still play D2 thanks to the hard work at the folks running Project Diablo 2[1]. Perspective mode looks absolutely beautiful at 144fps; it's somewhat hard to go back to the 30fps of the original LoD client.

Even now, I still have the memory and nostalgia of walking down the twisting steps from the Pandemonium Fortress and being blown away by the beautiful (macabre is maybe more fitting) graphics.

[1] https://www.projectdiablo2.com/

Re: Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7

#49

Post by k__ »

"I don’t know why the lower edge of the sprite is bent that way"

Maybe a designer said, it looks better.

Joke aside, I throw in one-off/random code into my games here and there. Feels bad from an engineering point of view, but sometimes the games just need this to feel better, Idk.

Re: Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7

#50

Post by porbelm »

mattcheston wrote: post #44

OG computer graphics are always amazing to me. I'm convinced software and hardware both would be entire generations behind where it is without the contributions made for early animation and computer graphics. Look at NVIDIA. They pretty much just lucked out that the same architectures would be useful for machine learning and "artificial intelligence" in it's initial iteration, but the entire company was founded on co…

And before that, vector processing, SIMD etc. was the domain of supercomputers like the Crays of yore :)
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