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Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7
51–60 of 63 posts
Re: Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7
#52> 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:…
You don't need a co-processor for that. Final Fantasies IV-VI all used the 3D mode 7 effect for the overworld, making the effect more exaggerated when the player enters an airship. It's fairly trivial and inexpensive to use HDMA to adjust the (pre-calculated) parameters for each scanline.
Super Mario Kart needed the co-processor for determining things like how to draw the karts depending on their position and distance from the player. Pilotwings used the same co-processor for similar things (essentially, tracking objects and perspective in 3D space).
Re: Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7
#53I can't help but wonder if a feature like the Diablo 2 perspective mode would have a chance of being implemented today in a AAA game? A lot of effort for a feature that didn't actually add anything to the gameplay and only worked for users that (a) had a supported 3D card and (b) found the option in the menu and enabled it? Not very likely...
Re: Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7
#54Ah, 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/
Well done, this is something like it. That tesselation is awesome. The result is gorgeous and fast. Really beautiful.
Cant upvote enough.
Re: Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7
#55"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.
Also possible it's a honest to god bug.
Re: Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7
#56Thanks for sharing my little article :) <3
Really good and interesting article! Keep going and sharing!
Re: Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7
#57This talks about these old games having "not real" 3d, but modern 3d games are on a flat screen too. So aren't they fundamentally "not real" 3d in the same qualitative way?
Indeed. The article claims that flat 3D planes implemented using mode 7 are merely "fake 3D". But the result looks exactly like a single texture mapped polygon, except that the "camera" only allows changes in yaw and pitch, not in roll. But that's just a limitation of the 3D situations the mode 7 system can render, it doesn't say that what it _can_ render is more fake somehow. In the end, every 3D rendering approach manipulates just a 2D pixel grid on a screen to create the illusion of looking at virtual objects.
Re: Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7
#58OG 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…
This is not quite right. They did not see AI coming, but Nvidia invested in „compute“ very early on. The current market value is a result of two decades of continually pursuing that vision and executing competently.
Re: Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
F-Zero was a launch title that didn’t use anything specifically for graphics. It used the same cartridge board as Super Mario World.
Mode-7 scaling can be modified per scanline to get the textured-plane effect seen in many games (e.g. F-Zero), without any additional hardware.
Re: Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7
#60The article is glaringly wrong on one point: Diablo 2 is not 2D; it's natively 3D! The entire (visible) playfield is a triangle mesh. Interestingly as you walk in the game you don't move in relation to the mesh. The textures and vertex heights are modified according to what part of the ground is under the fixed mesh, like dragging a large sheet of clear plastic over a landscape.