
The Polygons of Another World: Amiga 500 - atomlib
https://www.fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_amiga500/index.html
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paublyrne
Previous discussion here on yesterday's non Amiga specific post.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21937607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21937607)

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sixothree
Further, when this was previously submitted, the Amiga 500 page (linked here)
existed but the Atari ST page did not. It appears to have been released by the
author. Submitter would have done more service by submitting that page.

[https://www.fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_atariS...](https://www.fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_atariST/index.html)

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zozbot234
It's an ongoing series, of course they're going to cover plenty of other
platforms.

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sixothree
Not sure about the downvotes. I thought the point was obvious. A day had
passed and the newest page had been released. Instead of re-posting the
previous page, he could have posted the latest one.

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JohnBooty
Here's Eric Chahi explaining his decision to use polygons - he mistakenly
thought that the Amiga version of Dragon's Lair used them!

[https://youtu.be/JFaOYYSxSEA?t=245](https://youtu.be/JFaOYYSxSEA?t=245)

Very cool video, wherein Chahi demonstrates his rotoscoping system, where he
could use the Amiga's genlock to trace live video in his (extremely
impressive) homemade animation/code tool.

The polygons in Another World are a bit different from today's games.

In a modern game, game models would contain fully 3D representations of each
model. Each polygon vertice would have X, Y, and Z coords. The CPU/GPU then
render these out.

In Another World, the polygons are 2D representations only, like paper
cutouts. The animations are precalculated, and then at runtime they basically
just need to be blitted out using some of the clever techniques mentioned in
the linked article. You wouldn't really be able to alter the animations at
runtime or change the perspective, but that was OK - it was a smart compromise
to hit Chahi's stated target of about 20fps.

This "2D polygon" approach was a brilliant way to overcome the limitations of
CPUs at this time. There _were_ fully 3D polygon games at the time, but they
run at a fraction of the frame rate as Another World and contain only a
fraction of the detail. The 2D polygon world of Another World felt fluid and
real (well, relative to the competition at the time) and some convincing
pseudo 3D effects could even be faked.

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fuball63
I just acquired a IBM PS/1, and it's been really fun tinkering with it and
learning about it. The next article is about PC-DOS, so I'm looking forward to
it.

