Atari vs Amiga article

[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.

[zylesea]

Maximum non-interlaced resoulution for the A1200 is 1280 x 256 or 1472 x 290 (with overscan) not 640 x 480. Oh, and wasn't the apple a bag of %&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!e.

No, ECS and AGA provided more modes. i used the 640x480 60Hz mode for workbench intensively before I got a gfx card.
The only bad thing about these productivity/Euro72 and multiscan mode was that they were not 15.x Khz and hence not 1084 comaptible. But with a multiscan mode these modes were quite useful.

http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/resolute.html

[Thorham]

it's just that as far as I know, this is the concensus.

Yes, I don't doubt it is. Doesn't make it true, of course.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Then we have Wolfenstein (arguably the first "First Person Shooter"),

It's not the first first person shooter (Catacomb Abyss, I think, is), nor is it the first texture-mapped 3d game (Again, Catacomb Abyss preceded, as well as Ultima Underworld).

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Yes, I don't doubt it is. Doesn't make it true, of course.

No but it communicates a bit easier

[slaapliedje]

I guess to make it a little less boring;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw1PyUkVuZk

I'd say that doom runs pretty well on a stock falcon!  how well does it run on a stock A1200?

slaapliedje

[Thorham]

how well does it run on a stock A1200?

Probably like crap.

[Linde]

Just checked on this thread again...

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

You can't really talk about spatial dimensionality of a game in any other sense than representationally, can you? To say that the visualization is irrelevant is kind of an arbitrary idea that I don't think anyone will agree with you on, but let's pretend that we do for a moment and consider this situation:

Two regular brown uniform guards are standing in a straight line in front of the player character, one hidden behind the other. Only when the closest enemy starts aiming at you (thus spreading his feet apart) can you see the enemy behind him by looking between his legs. This is a situation where x, y and z are all important to the outcome of it, not only in a visual sense. If you were to disregard the Z dimension of the game and only look at the upper half of the screen only, you wouldn't have seen the furthermost guard.

[psxphill]

Two regular brown uniform guards are standing in a straight line in front of the player character, one hidden behind the other. Only when the closest enemy starts aiming at you (thus spreading his feet apart) can you see the enemy behind him by looking between his legs. This is a situation where x, y and z are all important to the outcome of it, not only in a visual sense. If you were to disregard the Z dimension of the game and only look at the upper half of the screen only, you wouldn't have seen the furthermost guard.

What you're describing could be implemented on the c64 with sprite priority, it doesn't make it 3d.
 
Isometric games also have x, y & z and aren't really 3d.

[Linde]

What you're describing could be implemented on the c64 with sprite priority, it doesn't make it 3d.

On what basis? Since the C64 is perfectly capable of 3D games and game engines, I'm assuming that that alone isn't what your argument is based on. If you literally have consider situations that arise in the game spatially in three dimensions, how can you argue that it isn't 3D?
 

Isometric games also have x, y & z and aren't really 3d.

In thorham's opinion, if x, y and z all actually matter to the game and not only visually, as far as I understand him, it' 3D.

[slaapliedje]

It's pretty much my thought that if you as a player can move in more than just two dimensions, then it's 3D.  Doesn't really matter visually speaking.  For example, the newer Rayman games have this giant mushroom that bounces you from one playing level to another, and it's moving you in a third dimension.  So it technically is a 3D game, even though most people wouldn't consider it as such.

This is in the same way that Dungeon Master lets you move up and down floors.  The only reason you can't do that in real-time so to speak, was due to memory constrictions at the time.  So the argument that it's only a 2D game is rather off, in my opinion.

slaapliedje

[psxphill]

It's pretty much my thought that if you as a player can move in more than just two dimensions, then it's 3D.

What the world understands as a "3D" game is different to implementing something in three dimensions. And language is supposed to be used to convey meaning to others.
 
What the majority would regard as "3D" it something that is 3D rendered as well as being able to move freely on the three different planes. Something that dungeon master fails at on all counts. You could use your same argument that pong was 3d, but the technology just wasn't there to display it.
 
Dungeon Master allows you to move one screen at a time, you don't have a character that walks around the screen. Therefore it's not a 3d game. Stuff like Mario 64 is a 3D game, you walk, you turn and you see yourself moving through a 3d rendered landscape. Dungeon Master is not that at all.

[slaapliedje]

That's arguing semantics about a third person game vs first person.  Realistically a '3D' game is anything that represents 3 dimensional movement.  In Dungeon Master you can move forward, and you can move left and right.  Which would still basically only be 2 dimensional in a 3D landscape.  But since you can travel up and down stairs (even though it's not represented in real time) it still is a 3D game.  If you draw a map of Dungeon master out, you would need some sort of 3D rendering software to do the full thing, would you not?  It has a height, length and depth to it.

Pong has none of those things.  It plays completely on a 2D plane.  Now they do have a 3D version of Pong...

slaapliedje

[stefcep2]

i don't think you can move up and down in Doom, but no-one would seriosly say its not 3D.

3D is not about how you can move.

Its about whether depth is show on screen, and how this depth varies to mimic the real world as the viewing perspective changes.  Look at a  cube for example, as you move around or "above" it you see all of its sides,and the top and bottom and the view changes to match your viewing angle as it does in the real world.  Limiting your view to only horizontal and vertical viewing positions doesn't stop it from being 3D.

[Thorham]

You can't really talk about spatial dimensionality of a game in any other sense than representationally, can you?

The internal representation of a world and the way it's visualized are two different things. You could make a three dimensional world and represent it in the form of purely text based descriptions.

This is in the same way that Dungeon Master lets you move up and down floors.  The only reason you can't do that in real-time so to speak, was due to memory constrictions at the time.  So the argument that it's only a 2D game is rather off, in my opinion.

Dungeon Master is a two dimensional game, because the dungeons are flat maps that are connected via pits and stairs. Hired Guns has a three dimensional world.

i don't think you can move up and down in Doom

Sure you can, have you even played it?

but no-one would seriosly say its not 3D.

I would, because it's not three dimensional in any way at all. The maps are flat in the sense that you can't have things like rooms above each other, that's why you can actually see everything on the auto map, which would be impossible if the maps were three dimensional.

Then there's the graphics engine which is completely fake 3D. So no, Doom isn't three dimensional.

3D is not about how you can move.

It is to me. It's the world that makes it three dimensional, after all, if I close my eyes the world doesn't stop being three dimensional. What it looks like is completely irrelevant.

Its about whether depth is show on screen, and how this depth varies to mimic the real world as the viewing perspective changes.

Even that isn't actually three dimensional, because it's just a flat surface. And besides, humans can't see in three dimensions or we would be able to see an object from all sides at the same time. We see two completely flat images, and two flat images don't make a three dimensional image. The brain creates a three dimensional approximation of what you see (whether you have one or two eyes), but the brain's visual input is as two dimensional as it gets.

3D is all about the internal representation, and three dimensional visualization would be where you can actually stick your head inside the viewing system so that you can look behind things, etc.

Basically it all comes down to the difference between the way humans normally talk, and how things really are. You say it's three dimensional, even when it's not, because it looks like it's three dimensional.

[psxphill]

It is to me. It's the world that makes it three dimensional, after all, if I close my eyes the world doesn't stop being three dimensional. What it looks like is completely irrelevant.

What it looks like is completely relevant. 3D is basically a marketing term. It doesn't just mean three dimensional.
 
3D TV's are actually stereoscopic, but 3D is catchier. It has other uses than fooling our brains into perceiving depth in the image.
 
For a game to be 3D you need to be able to freely move along three planes and freely rotate around two planes. It needs to give an impression of depth and not just look like a 2D photograph, which is what Dungeon Master looks like.
 
Doom is an interesting case, you can move in three dimensions but you can only rotate around one of them. The map has 3 dimensions, but it's like a voxel where the height is stored within a 2d matrix so you can't have one floor above the other. Only the rooms were rendered at run time, the barrels and enemies etc were just scaled sprites. At the time we called it 2.5D http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5D
 
In a world where Doom is considered 2.5D, Dungeon Master cannot be 3D.