Atari vs Amiga article

[Thorham]

Wolfenstein 3D

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

[Thorham]

DM is 3D.

No, it's not.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Thorham]

how well does it run on a stock A1200?

Probably like crap.

[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.