It seems to be fully polygonal. Panning the camera is somewhat smooth but you are never shown moving around in first person, just teleporting to fixed spots on a grid, which is either a deliberate design decision or a way to work around a limitation of the tech.
The remake, Sentinel Returns is, of course fully realtime 3D
2D images with alpha channels constrained to face the camera may be used in 3D graphics. They are common for rendering vegetation, to approximate distant objects, or for particle effects. These are sometimes called âbillboardsâ or âZ-sprites.â The technique was most heavily used in Sega game machines in the late 1990s, prior to the era of polygon rendering. If rendered on the fly to cache an approximate view of an underlying 3D model, such sprites are called impostors. Modern hardware may have a specific mode for rendering such point sprites without needing each corner to be defined, or these may be generated by vertex shaders.
e: iâm leaving this here but it was actually intended for the sprite-based thread - iâm copying it to that thread
Metaltech: Earthsiege
Metaltech: Battledrome
Earthsiege 2 might be too fancy for what youâre thinking but maybe not.
And if ES 2 is borderline I figure Starsiege and consequently Tribes are totally out.
G-Nome maybe?
And getting away from giant robots, you make this thread when Iâm playing with Chasm: The Rift again.
Itâs post Quake but still interesting technically since itâs basically 2.5D but with models instead of sprites. In the modern context it almost feels like a GZDoom mod or something, though with far more constrained areas both horizontally and vertically than Doom tends to.
Quake made sparse use of dynamic lighting, using it mainly for gunfire, some projectiles and explosions, along with occasional flickering and strobing lights on maps. Quakeâs lighting was primarily pregenerated lightmaps, and I think thatâs where the big deal was, all the pre calculation involved, especially for architecture where it was predetermined what the player could see and where and improving performance by not drawing shit the player couldnât see from their position. Hence why back in the day people had to leave their computers running all night just running Vis on a map.
But notice that the objects donât change. If they were rendered in real-time they would move a little when you move the camera past. It looks more like youâre panning across a bitmap.
The Sentinel does indeed use a special perspective projection quite unlike the one that is usually used in real-time 3d games.
Basically itâs like one of those 360° panorama pictures, but you never see enough of it to really notice (and itâs only the vertices that are affected, the lines are still straight so youâll have to look at several faces at once to notice the curve. Pause there for example). The purpose is to avoid redrawing the whole screen on each movement (which youâd have to do with a standard perspective projection); to rotate the camera you just have to scroll the current screen and just draw the newly revealed lines or columns. So you only get a full redraw on teleports. It didnât keep the full rendered panorama in memory (there wasnât enough memory for that) but that trick allowed to rotate the camera in real time on polygonal grid landscapes much more detailed than what the platforms of its time could handle.
Itâs nothing like impostors though, just an unusual projection and a great trick.
Thanks Chevluh!
this is seriously great info; whereâd you source this information
if the answer is âfrom my own expertise and knowledge completely unrelated to this gameâ thatâs acceptable
Solvalou
thank you!!!