3 ms·

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 qual

• dexwiz 3y ago
  Not really. Modern 3D games have an arbitrarily placed camera and use linear algebra to flatten everything from 3d into 2d clip space and then rasterize. Games like D2 use sprites and offsets to give the illusion of 3d, they don’t have a 3d coordinate system to begin with. In games like this movement is usually constrained to 2 axes. 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.
  • lukas099 3y ago
    I think I understand what you mean. Thanks!
• cubefox 3y ago
  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.