

Lou's Pseudo 3d Page - skorks
http://www.gorenfeld.net/lou/pseudo/

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Luc
I made a few games and demos on the C64 using this technique (switching
colours every few raster lines). That part was easy to figure out. The hard
bit to my 15-year old self was finding the foreshortening relationship.
Through trial and error I finally settled on a lookup table calculated using
1/tan(z)... which as it happens is a good approximation of the true 1/z
relation for small angles. Crazy...

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simonw
Has anyone seen an HTML5 canvas demo that uses these techniques?

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callmeed
Really interesting. I'm curious if there are any iPhone car/racing games that
use some of the road techniques described.

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Luc
There's no need for that. The iPhone's PowerVR chip can push tens of millions
of triangles per second (depending on the artificial benchmark used...). It's
roughly comparable in capabilities to a Dreamcast (also PowerVR), and ten
times better than a Nintendo DS.

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chadaustin
From the article:

Why Pseudo 3d?

Now that every system can produce graphics consisting of a zillion polygons on
the fly, why would you want to do a road the old way? Aren't polygons the
exact same thing, only better? Well, no. It's true that polygons lead to less
distortion, but it is the warping in these old engines that give the surreal,
exhillerating sense of speed found in many pre-polygon games. Think of the
view as being controlled by a camera. As you take a curve in a game which uses
one of these engines, it seems to look around the curve. Then, as the road
straightens, the view straightens. As you go over a blind curve, the camera
would seem to peer down over the ridge. And, since these games do not use a
traditional track format with perfect spatial relationships, it is possible to
effortlessly create tracks large enough that the player can go at ridiculous
speeds-- without worrying about an object appearing on the track faster than
the player can possibly react since the physical reality of the game can
easily be tailored to the gameplay style.

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Luc
Pffft... sorry, that's very nostalgic and all, but if you really wanted non-
realistic road effects, you'd still use polygons in any modern implementation.
And I know what I'm talking about, I have used both systems.

