glassner@cwruecmp.UUCP (Andrew Glassner) (09/19/83)
I've just returned to the net recently, so if this topic has been covered already please don't flame too hard! Someone suggested that the graphics in the StarWars game that's out from Atari is really only slightly 3D. "Slightly" means that the ships in the first sequence, the red firing bases in the second, and the catwalks in the third are the only things that are really 3D. All the other effects (stars, laser towers, etc) are really just two-d line drawings which are moved by moving their endpoints through what amounts to a vector field of accelerations. Since at each moment in time the perspective is fixed, they keep a grid of the acceleration of each small area on the screen. If a point of an object falls into that area then it is accelerated using data values from the table. The idea sounded good; last night I animated a flight down a 3D starfield on a TRS-80 Color Computer in BASIC, and with 10 stars or so I still got a good 3D effect (without matrix multiplies!). It sounds good and cheap - 3D animation for the cost of addition. Has anyone seen this technique used on any other games? Andrew Andrew Glassner decvax/cwruecmp/glassner