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Lou's Pseudo 3D Page (2013)

by whereistimbo on 12/18/24, 4:45 AM with 23 comments

• by komadori on 12/18/24, 9:23 AM

  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.

• by blackfur on 12/18/24, 9:12 AM

  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.

• by zackmorris on 12/18/24, 7:14 PM

  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.

• by gnabgib on 12/18/24, 4:47 AM

  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

• by TacticalCoder on 12/19/24, 8:31 PM

  You cango pretty far with fake 3D.For example you can take the same type of technique but then additionally move vertical "bars" of eight pixel (going along the entire screen) and it feels like the car/bike is turning more.

  Here's an example from the early 90s in a PC DOS game (Word Rally Fever, heavily inspired by Power Drift):

  https://youtu.be/tn4lK2-pUxw

  FWIW it was made by friends of mine, got published by Team 17, and I was a beta-tester of that one :)

• by Netcob on 12/18/24, 9:54 AM

  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.

• by elevationapi on 12/18/24, 10:57 AM

  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

• by a1o on 12/18/24, 8:17 AM

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

• by toolslive on 12/18/24, 8:11 PM

  The screenshots are a blast from the past. Outrun, Space Harrier... Those were really good games back in the day (1980s)

• by MaximilianEmel on 12/18/24, 6:21 PM

  When does Pseudo 3D cross the threshold into Real 3D?

• by erickhill on 12/18/24, 4:16 PM

  Prepare to qualify...