Comment by grumbel
13 hours ago
Many years ago there was a game called Casebook[1], a small little detective game where you investigated rooms for clues. But unlike similar FMV games where you jumped from point to point, it had photorealistic environments that could be smoothly walk around in, much like later lightfield or gaussian splatting experiments.
Any idea on how they achieved this?
I can't say I know how they actually did it, but taking a look at the trailer I can point out that it looks like the spaces are confined and your character is on rails. I'm mainly going off of the instant direction changes that don't appear to be 45 degrees off from the camera direction. Once it's constrained down to a single line/path you could do some wild things like cube mapping a video, where the position in the video is tied to the characters position. I can't say I know how they would take that video though, my best guess there is the scenes are constructed in 3d software, just it was to expensive for real time rendering.
Cube mapping a video sounds plausible, this is commonly known as 360° video. Putting the camera on rails (though I don't really notice rails in this case) and tying the video playback speed to the speed of the rail movement has also been done in the past in some pre-rendered PlayStation games, though without cube mapping. But I think it's not pre-rendered in this case. It looks far too realistic for a game that is at least 17 years old. My best guess: they captured the 360 degree videos with a real camera (stabilized in some way) and edited the equipment out frame by frame.
The image capture was done with a robotic camera rig from what I understand, they photographed 360° images of the room from all possible position. They restricted the camera movement to a plane, which is why the player height is fixed. I don't know what they did on the software side with all the image.
Oh cool, so the camera wasn't just on 1D "rails", it was on a 2D plane. I never before heard of a game (pre-rendered or photographed) which did that. Impressive.