Chuckle, that'd be right, take the 'wee' out of somebody, and people take you literately.
Raven:
Quote: " just because they were created prior to OpenGL & DirectX doesn't mean they're not 3D.
back in '94-95 Software Rendered 3D was revolutionary simply because there was no 3D Hardware... sure both TR & Quake for OpenGL Rendering engines later, but the actual engines didn't change at all - just the rendering method.
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erm, try the 1980's.. Battle Zone/Elite/Back Lash/Star glider etc .
Quote: "
just because a game does not use a 3D Accelerator Card to produce its 3D doesn't mean that it isn't 3D
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Agreed with it or not, today 3D is assimilated with 3D hardware.
Moreover, the statement you made earlier was something like 2D and 3D are the same in terms complexity. This generalization while obviously based upon the 'huge' assumption that your writing a 2D or 3D application sitting high above a rendering abstraction layer, it isn 't demonstrated very well by your examples .. As titles like TR / Quake were not written under these conditions..
Quote: "
the 2D Equivilant of Quake would be Doom (of course)
the 2D Equivilant of Tomb Raider would probably be, Prince of Persia
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Interestingly now your confusing 2D Game Play with 3D representations. Your argument previously was that old 2D games could be easily transported to 3D to dress them up. So by the standards you set above 'bamber man' for one... This transportation would thus make them fit under this elusive '3D' banner.. So, by your own definition Doom can not be 2D.
Doom/Wolf etc renders have all 3 axis represented (X,Y & Z) as any other 3D representation.. However the game play is certainly 2D, as is Bamber Man.
Quote: "for car games... although Lotus was a Super7 style game, think about it the detection of what was going on around the car were the same.
although the actual rendering of what was going on, onscreen is different - you were still driving on a 2D course. Just because you car couldn't turn around doesn't mean that your not still calculating speed the same way - that your not trying to calculate the turning of the car within an arc based on speed."
No, Lotus is bill boarded and not scaled. Bill boarded racing games have no real direction. Their not vector based. Rot zoomers do have direction on the other hand ..
Quote: "
(the only reason you couldn't turn was because the car could only reach a max of 35ยบ turning based on the tracks current axis angle being used as 0)
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No, the limitation of raster interrupt driven effects is that they only work in straight lines.. When the track flexes vertically or bends, the bitmap is being re-sampled / offset under the video interrupt, it can not rotate using this method. As the track is drawn from in fixed /\ shaped bitmap and flexed per scan line. In much older games like pit stop they just had preset directional pictures.
Quote: "
i don't see any reason for anyone not to use 3D to thier advantage and thing that somehow the game should be developed any differently.
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As much fun as playing the semantics game can be.
Now were back somewhere to one of the initial points. Developing shareware 3D games, whatever flavour, comes with a set of requirements / foreseeable limitations (Skills, Tools & Hardware) that traditional 2D does not share. People tend choose one in terms of their goals, accessibility to those skills/Tools/hardware and ultimately, whom they are targeting the release for.
l8r,
Kevin Picone
[url]www.underwaredesign.com[/url]
