31–40 of 63 posts
Was this a normal option that could be enabled? I played countless hours and I don't remember it at all. The article mentions Perspective Mode like it was something that could trivially be turned on.
IIRC it was added pretty late in development, I remember it because my only involvement was adding the UI menu option to allow users to turn it on/off.
Was this a normal option that could be enabled? I played countless hours and I don't remember it at all. The article mentions Perspective Mode like it was something that could trivially be turned on.
This 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?
Also a key different is pre-rendered sprites. In games like Roller Coaster Tycoon or Diablo, models were made on expensive dedicated computers and then rendered into sprite sheets. Objects may look 3d but were usually shipped as flat assets. Some modern pixel art games will do stuff like ship a normal map with the sprite so you can do dynamic lightning on a 2d sprite.
Modern games that use parallax could easily be just rendering flat objects in 3d scenes, but 20 years ago graphics pipelines were way different so you had to be clever if you wanted 3d effects.
So I did enjoy TFA a lot.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moon_patrol_original...
Not only did I play Diablo 2 (TFA is about Diablo 2, not about Diablo) a huge lot but... One of my most prized possession is an original arcade PCB of Moon Patrol from 1982. It's crazy: it's got 3 layers (2 full size PCBs and then one half size) and it's definitely my bulkiest PCB [1]! Still works, too! So I did enjoy TFA a lot . [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moon_patrol_original...
> 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.
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: If you change the zoom and translation of mode 7 on every line (but keep the rotation the same), you can get the typical tilted 3D look by having the upper lines zoomed out (smaller) and the lower lines zoomed in more (bigger).
This "change the zoom on each scanline" trick is very different from what modern GPUs do and not an arbitrary transform, e.g. with the scanline trick you can only rotate the plane around the horizontal axis, but not around the vertical one.
It sounds like the dev was very satisfied with parallax, but I don't recall ever using it. I think it just felt weird after already getting used to the default.
It did give a sense of 3D back then when the character is moving fast with a lot of obstruction objects (walls and trees) passing by. Some rendering also gave better lightning effects AFAIR.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It isn't just a skybox?
The original sky is mostly procedural, I forgot to mention. The newer skies are more traditional skyboxes.
