Atari vs Amiga article

[mrknight]

How is that 3D? It's a flat world. If this is 3D then so is Dungeon Master.

DM is 3D. It is 3D because you can only see what the camera is pointing at. Enemies etc. can hide behind object you are seeing, thus being ínvisible' from you. This is not the case with 2D games where you can see anything on the screen.
Think of a football game. The field is flat but it doesn't make it less 3D. If you are a player, you might still not be able to see an opposing player because they are behind you or behind another player.

[Thorham]

DM is 3D.

No, it's not.

[psxphill]

I'm just questioning if that saving would be worth it due to the decrease in performance.

That is very difficult to quantify. You'd have to know whether that was the reason that the Falcon only lasted a year, if it wasn't then spending any additional money on it would have been worse.
 
You would also have to know whether they could have hit the same release date by switching to 32bit. If it would have taken additional time and money then would it recover it. It's the same argument for any compromise in any computer. i.e. how many C64's would have been sold if they'd have fixed the slow floppy drives before shipping and how much would it have cost to fix? Yeah it's annoying that it was slow & some people were probably put off by it, but without the figures you can't calculate it.
 
I'd say that by the time the Falcon shipped there weren't enough people with ST's that were looking to buy another 680x0 based computer. The majority of Amiga owners wouldn't jump ship, it had a few interesting pieces of hardware but nothing that couldn't be added to an Amiga. Plus MultiTOS was awful when the Falcon was released.
 
 

How is that 3D? It's a flat world. If this is 3D then so is Dungeon Master.

Wolfenstein isn't flat, the walls have a height even though it's fixed. The graphics are effectively rendered in 3d, even though the player is limited to 2 dimensions.
 
There are plenty of 2d games where the player is limited to 1 dimension, we don't call those 1d games.

[Thorham]

Wolfenstein isn't flat, the walls have a height even though it's fixed.  The graphics are effectively rendered in 3d, even though the player is  limited to 2 dimensions.
 

The maps are flat, therefore the game world is 2D. How that 2D space is visualized is completely irrelevant.

[slaapliedje]

Personally, I'd say that if there are calculations within the program of X Y and Z, then the game is 3D.  I believe in Dungeon Master, when you'd throw something, it had a specific distance that it would travel before it fell to the ground, and I think if it hit a creature at a particular distance, it'd do more or less damage.

So I'd say it qualifies as a 3D game, in both play and visualization.  You could even go up and down levels.

I do always find it funny that Wolfenstein 3D is always brought up as being the first 3D game.  Alternate Reality had fully textured walls many years before Wolf3D did, and apparently in the original design, he was planning on doing full 360 degree movement.  He just thought that the players at the time would be really confused, and the maps would be more difficult to make.  Amazing that the creators had managed to do the things they did on the 8-bit machines.  It's a sad thing that AR: The Dungeon was never released for the Amiga or any 16/32bit machine for that matter.

slaapliedje

[Thorham]

I believe in Dungeon Master, when you'd throw something, it had a specific distance that it would travel before it fell to the ground, and I think if it hit a creature at a particular distance, it'd do more or less damage.

Can you throw things up and down? No.

You could even go up and down levels.

Stairs and pits in Dungeon Master are simply connections between two dimensional maps.

In Dungeon Master and Wolfenstein all of the action takes place on a two dimensional plane, therefore the games are two dimensional.

[psxphill]

therefore the games are two dimensional.

So http://www.easports.com/uk/fifa/fifa14/xbox360 is a 2d game?
 
wolfenstein has 3d graphics by any definition I can find.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_computer_graphics
 

DM is 3D. It is 3D because you can only see what the camera is pointing at.

I think it's a stretch to say it's 3D, the way the graphics are drawn is not in any way like a traditional 3D render.
 
There is no http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_projection, afaik all graphics are just blitted.

[Thorham]

So http://www.easports.com/uk/fifa/fifa14/xbox360 is a 2d game?

Is a third dimension relevant to soccer? If so, then soccer is 3D.

wolfenstein has 3d graphics by any definition I can find.

I don't care about the graphics, the game world is 2D. The way it's visualized isn't relevant. Not to mention the fact that Wolfenstein's 3D view is completely fake, just like Doom (only simpler).
 

I think it's a stretch to say it's 3D, the way the graphics are drawn is not in any way like a traditional 3D render.

By that logic a game with blitted graphics that takes place in a 3D world wouldn't be 3D. Dungeon Master isn't 3D because the levels aren't 3D.

There are two things to consider here. The game world and the graphics engine. One of these can be 3D while the other doesn't have to be.

An example of a 2D world with a 3D graphics engine would be a shoot'm up like Ikaruga or Radiant Silvergun. The graphics are 3D, but the game world isn't.

An example of a 3D world with a 2D graphics engine would be Hired Guns if I'm not mistaken. Or the turn based stratagy parts of Ufo.

I personally interpret a game as 3D if the game world is 3D.

[ElPolloDiabl]

Define 3D. Moving x, y, and also z. I'm pretty sure you could go up and down stairs in wolfenstein.
Dungeon Master was a 3D pre rendered dungeon.

It can't be classed as the first, because there were other kinds of 3D games before it. Was it one of the first SVGA games on PC?

[slaapliedje]

I swear I've seen this very conversation before...  Some people define '3D' differently than others.  I figure if it looks 3D, has 3D movement, even though it's still technically on a 2D display, than it's 3D.

slaapliedje

[Jiffy]

So we're discussing semantics? Wowza... :-/

[slaapliedje]

So we're discussing semantics? Wowza... :-/

Yup, pretty much...  That's why I had said that if the calculations are in there somewhere for x y and z coordinates, then it's by definition a 3D game, since it has to do 3D calculations.

slaapliedje

[bloodline]

ST vs Amiga discussions were never this boring in the past! ;-)


-Edit- I'll throw my $0.02 in... A game is 3D if it presents the user with a 3D environment. So side scrollers and isometric games don't count, thus dungeon master does count IMHO. I know was was basically a slideshow, but that doesn't really matter to the user, what Dungeon Master wasn't was a First Person shooter... And this is where things get confused.

Then we have Wolfenstein (arguably the first "First Person Shooter"), which doesn't add much to the "3D genre", as we had flight/racing sims in true 3D and even carrier command which although a real time strategy game at heart had plenty of 3D shooter gameplay.

What Wolfenstein did, was take the sidescroller and put it into a 3D context. The sidescroller/platformer was the most common/popular type of game so... All games which would have been side scrollers and platformers (and thus all the games machines like the Amiga/Megadrive/SNES/etc which had dedicated hardware for 2D games) suddenly needed to be better at 3D.

[Thorham]

ST vs Amiga discussions were never this boring in the past! ;-)

This ones not very exciting, no. Go to Atari forums to see some real action.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Considering the sound capabilities of the A1200 (and the A500 for that matter), in-game sound was still unbeaten in 1992, I mean, back then I had a sound blaster pro clone, and maybe it could do some neat 16 bit sound playback, if I compare it to the Amiga sound playback in most games, the Amiga totally blows it away. Only when the wavetables became common the Amiga sound became obsolete. (apart from, like the SID, irreplaceable unique sound)

[Speelgoedmannetje]

I personally interpret a game as 3D if the game world is 3D.

Generally people refer Wolfenstein 3D as defacto 3d as the graphics are calculated with 3d algorithms. Dungeon Master therefore has not been considered 3d. Not that I do not agree with you, as your argument is logically sound, it's just that as far as I know, this is the concensus. A nice 3d game as well is Pandemonium, it has 2d platform gameplay, yet it's fully 3d rendered.