Lou's Pseudo 3D Page (2013)

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2016 (115 points, 12 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14017574

2015 (148 points, 26 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8847063

I implemented this in Adventure Game Studio following that page seven years ago.

This page is such a gem. I stumbled upon it many years ago, when making a classic pseudo-3D racing game for a hacked (and very underpowered) graphing calculator. Never ended up finishing it though. Turns out without debugging, floating point calculations or any real knowledge of C you struggle.

As far as old-school 3D effects go, I like this tutorial on ray casting: https://permadi.com/1996/05/ray-casting-tutorial-1/

It's great to see something similar on the effects used in driving games, which I always imagined to be akin to raycasting's vertical slices drawn horizontally.

I love the ingenuity, I also love youtube documentaries on this topic, but... as a child (in the 90s), I did not like these pseudo 3D racing games at all!

Mode 7 on the SNES was usually fine. I don't know how accurately it rendered a single flat surface in 3D, but it felt real enough and responsive enough. Except for the very rare cases where they simulated non-flat surfaces (Speed Racer, Super Off-Road), even though that was technically much more impressive.

The effect just didn't work for me - it didn't feel like turning, it just felt like what it was: The game displaying a "left turn" animation and telling you that your car will now start drifting to the right if you don't press left. And that felt more like playing a Game&Watch toy.