[HN Gopher] Lou's Pseudo 3D Page (2013)
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Lou's Pseudo 3D Page (2013)
Author : whereistimbo
Score : 146 points
Date : 2024-12-18 04:45 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.extentofthejam.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.extentofthejam.com)
| gnabgib wrote:
| Popular in
|
| 2016 (115 points, 12 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14017574
|
| 2015 (148 points, 26 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8847063
| a1o wrote:
| I implemented this in Adventure Game Studio following that page
| seven years ago.
| blackfur wrote:
| 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.
| komadori wrote:
| 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.
| Netcob wrote:
| 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.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| IMO it greatly depends on the game. Very advanced games that
| used this technique, like OutRun in the arcade, really almost
| feel like you're driving on a road with real turns. Lotus Turbo
| Challenge on the Amiga also does a pretty good job giving you
| the illusion that you're actually approaching turns, i.e. that
| there is a turn ahead of you and it is coming towards you.
|
| But most games that implemented this technique were much more
| primitive, and just amounted to "bending" the road to indicate
| turns, which never feels like there's actually a turn coming
| towards you. It just feels like the road is suddenly changing
| its shape. But that's not an inherent fault of the technique,
| it's just a poor implementation.
|
| I do agree that Mode7 games, which effectively display an
| almost correctly rendered 3D plane, are generally a much better
| experience.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Pit Stop II on the C64 felt like you had force feedback on a
| digital joystick, no less!
| frou_dh wrote:
| I agree. Even at the time, many of the games that look like
| this felt like you were being dragged around the track, and
| just finessing it a bit with the controller input.
|
| It's not a good feeling as a player when a game mostly plays
| itself and gives you some token involvement.
| anthk wrote:
| Lotus III on the Amiga did the mountain tracks almost af if
| they had some height and so due to the bending effect from
| the guard rails and being able to see the actual cliffs at
| the sides. OTOH, curves were better than the average 16 bit
| racer, as you could step a bit offroad from the curve, but
| not so much. But it gave the game some believability.
|
| Also, the patched Road Rash 1-2-3 ROMs for the Mega Drive run
| much better with far more frames, and neither any
| overclocking is required at all, nor any extra hardware. That
| make them very good on simulating pseudo-3D races.
| elevationapi wrote:
| I remember Vroom killing the game on Atari ST :
| https://youtu.be/Z-RELFjDu_8?si=giyiDpRqUPNSNEK9 Insane depth of
| view with fluidity for the time
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Excellent.
| mysterydip wrote:
| There's a new racing game that just came out for the ST that
| achieved 50FPS: https://retroracing.itch.io/faster-atari-ste
| TapamN wrote:
| Also on the Sega Genesis/MegaDrive as F1 World Championship,
| and a sequel, Kawasaki Superbike Challenge.
| erickhill wrote:
| Prepare to qualify...
| MaximilianEmel wrote:
| When does Pseudo 3D cross the threshold into Real 3D?
| duskwuff wrote:
| What makes these techniques "pseudo" 3D is that they can only
| render one very specific type of scene (a road), and even then
| only under various constraints (road must be in front of the
| camera, road must continue to the horizon, etc). "Real 3D"
| typically implies a more general scene renderer.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Kinda cool, I've never seen these techniques all in one place
| before. Growing up, I thought that SNES mode 7 scaling was so
| cool:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_7
|
| The article mentions about halfway down the page that what made
| the 80s road rendering technique possible was racing the beam.
| Where say an Atari 2600 would toggle the color at certain pixel
| counts as the TV's electron beam swept the screen, producing
| graphics that seemed otherwise impossible from such underpowered
| hardware:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJFnWZH5FXc
|
| Some engines allowed for say 8 hardcoded sprites this way by
| toggling colors at each sprite's position, with various rules
| about overlapping, so sprites would flicker sometimes when they
| were next to each other.
| toolslive wrote:
| The screenshots are a blast from the past. Outrun, Space
| Harrier... Those were really good games back in the day (1980s)
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(page generated 2024-12-18 23:01 UTC)