 | Re: Implimenting 3D contrails and Projectiles in A |
| Posted By: McNutcase | Date: 1/17/07 3:28 a.m. |
| In Response To: Re: Implimenting 3D contrails and Projectiles in A (treellama)
: All 3D game engines fake 3D. Unless you have a 3D monitor...
Some get closer than others, in terms of level geometry. The Marathon engine is fundamentally planar in its treatment of the map data, (this is shown by the fact that all walls are vertical, and all floors and ceilings are parallel) whereas most newer engines define their level verices in 3-space. The 5-D space trick is an artifact of a lack of sanity checking in the code designed for room-on-room, probably left out because the original coder liked the subtly brain-melting effects.
: There are, by now, other engines that do this better than we can ever hope to
: :)
Actually, no. There are plenty of engines that define their level geometry in true 3-space, and some of them even allow portals, but there aren't any easily available pure portal engines, which is about the only way to get effects similar to Marathon's. What I was referring to was the constraint the Marathon engine imposes that the floors and ceilings of your polys are always horizontal, and the walls are always vertical. A reimplementation would remove those constraints, allowing arbitrary geometry; ideally, it would also remove the constraint that lines must be congruent in the mapspace to be shared, thus allowing a sufficiently creative (read: deranged) mapper to do truly horrible things to spacetime. That second is what would require a pure portal engine, which so far doesn't exist in usable form... although I do know a guy who's hacking on pure portals. It's very tough...
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