Comment by deltaburnt
11 hours ago
I often think about how crazy it must have been to be a game developer around this period. Almost every bit of design, math, coding knowledge was flipped on its head. Overnight developers who were managing relatively simple XY coordinates suddenly had to discover the complexities of 3D rotations, perspective math, and probably more linear algebra than they ever really expected to know.
It’s even crazier we got masterpieces like Mario 64 so early into the first 3D console generation.
I remember Mario 64 felt so mindblowing when it came out, like walking into a whole new world.
Yes, and I think the haptics of walking into that castle hall to explore the different tasks drove it home so well that it was a new experience!
I was confused why you mentioned haptics, as the Rumble Pak did not exist when the N64 launched. But Wikipedia cites EGM as saying later versions of the game had Rumble Pak support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumble_Pak
3D had been in arcades earlier (e.g. Virtua Racing in 1992, four years before) but having to figure out how platforming works in 3D was the true genius. They really knocked it out of the park.
Doom had been a few years before but what Mario 64 really bought to the table was a super intuitive analogue control stick rather than tank controls and tons and tons of polish
Doom isn’t 3d, it’s raycasted 2.5d. It’s a completely separate type of rendering that has nothing in common with real 3d.
Quake released the day before Super Mario 64.
Those 48 hours were likely the peak of video gaming. Certainly they have yet to be equaled.
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First of all, DOOM isn’t raycasted. Second of all it’s 3D in the sense that all objects have xyz coordinates and can move in that space. You can miss the monsters by having a rocket go over their heads. The main limitation is that the levels couldn’t have more than one ‘room’ per vertical space.
The rendering can still be implemented as polygons (making it true 3D rendering) whilst still maintaining the same level-based limitations, as we can see with DOOM 64.
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Most people would call DOOM a 3D game. Its popularity spelt the end of 2D games which is why people bring it up.
It doesn't matter that it's raycast with billboard sprites, it was first-person-perspective with pixel-perfect lit texture-mapped wall and floor rendering with lifts and stairs. 3D enough.
As a Marathon fanatic, it killed me that the game didn’t get more love. I recall watching a Doom game and someone shot a rocket at a player above them. The path of the rocket was bizarre and being baffled that this was ‘good’.
It was a fun era to live through as the progress was so quick.
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doom's rendering is 2.5d (but is still fully accurate to 3d rendering, if the pitch of the camera is fixed to 0), but doom's _logic_ is fully 3d (the only reason enemies were infinitely tall was to save on cpu speed (and different to enemies, projectiles always had full 3d collision), it was just a few lines of code change to make them have real height for player-enemy collisions, which was done in heretic, another game using the same engine as doom)
Hey, Mario 64 isn't "real 3d". It is just a projection of 3d coordinates to 2d triangles on a 2d screen.
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If we're going that hard, I would argue anything that's not viewed stereoscopically by definition cannot be 3D.
Yeah I meant less that 3D games were invented out of nowhere when the PS1 or N64 released. It's more that a large majority of developers, especially ones on console, were thrust from 2D to 3D development.
The original demo they did for folks was apparently crazy clunky too and they adjusted a ton after
Imagine their dismay when they realized they actually need 4x4 matrices and weird math invented in the 19th century.
Just getting 3d triangles working is a mess (winding order, normal direction, etc). Clipping them correctly as they intersect the view frustum is a next level nightmare if you don't have a known-good implementation or reference text available.
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