It's great to see something similar on the effects used in driving games, which I always imagined to be akin to raycasting's vertical slices drawn horizontally.
This page is such a gem. I stumbled upon it many years ago, when making a classic pseudo-3D racing game for a hacked (and very underpowered) graphing calculator. Never ended up finishing it though. Turns out without debugging, floating point calculations or any real knowledge of C you struggle.
The article mentions about halfway down the page that what made the 80s road rendering technique possible was racing the beam. Where say an Atari 2600 would toggle the color at certain pixel counts as the TV's electron beam swept the screen, producing graphics that seemed otherwise impossible from such underpowered hardware:
Some engines allowed for say 8 hardcoded sprites this way by toggling colors at each sprite's position, with various rules about overlapping, so sprites would flicker sometimes when they were next to each other.
You cango pretty far with fake 3D.For example you can take the same type of technique but then additionally move vertical "bars" of eight pixel (going along the entire screen) and it feels like the car/bike is turning more.
Here's an example from the early 90s in a PC DOS game (Word Rally Fever, heavily inspired by Power Drift):
I love the ingenuity, I also love youtube documentaries on this topic, but... as a child (in the 90s), I did not like these pseudo 3D racing games at all!
Mode 7 on the SNES was usually fine. I don't know how accurately it rendered a single flat surface in 3D, but it felt real enough and responsive enough. Except for the very rare cases where they simulated non-flat surfaces (Speed Racer, Super Off-Road), even though that was technically much more impressive.
The effect just didn't work for me - it didn't feel like turning, it just felt like what it was: The game displaying a "left turn" animation and telling you that your car will now start drifting to the right if you don't press left. And that felt more like playing a Game&Watch toy.
IMO it greatly depends on the game. Very advanced games that used this technique, like OutRun in the arcade, really almost feel like you're driving on a road with real turns. Lotus Turbo Challenge on the Amiga also does a pretty good job giving you the illusion that you're actually approaching turns, i.e. that there is a turn ahead of you and it is coming towards you.
But most games that implemented this technique were much more primitive, and just amounted to "bending" the road to indicate turns, which never feels like there's actually a turn coming towards you. It just feels like the road is suddenly changing its shape. But that's not an inherent fault of the technique, it's just a poor implementation.
I do agree that Mode7 games, which effectively display an almost correctly rendered 3D plane, are generally a much better experience.
> But most games that implemented this technique were much more primitive, and just amounted to "bending" the road to indicate turns, which never feels like there's actually a turn coming towards you. It just feels like the road is suddenly changing its shape.
After looking at a couple videos, I think the "secret sauce" was having objects along the sides of the road to reinforce the illusion of movement. Even in OutRun, sequences where the player drives past objects like trees or road signs feel more convincing than ones in open areas.
A few days ago I made a 50x timelapse of a drive using my dashcam and... oddly enough, that looked exactly like that pseudo 3D effect. It looks like the road is just bending left and right, whipping around out of the blue, while everything else is stationary.
I agree. Even at the time, many of the games that look like this felt like you were being dragged around the track, and just finessing it a bit with the controller input.
It's not a good feeling as a player when a game mostly plays itself and gives you some token involvement.
Lotus III on the Amiga did the mountain tracks almost af if they had some height and so due to the bending effect from the guard rails and being able to see the actual cliffs at the sides. OTOH, curves were better than the average 16 bit racer, as you could step a bit offroad from the curve, but not so much. But it gave the game some believability.
Also, the patched Road Rash 1-2-3 ROMs for the Mega Drive run much better with far more frames, and neither any overclocking is required at all, nor any extra hardware. That make them very good on simulating pseudo-3D races.
Back in the day it was probably easy to move goalposts as techniques advanced. Do remember that Duke 3D's Build engine did not draw a true 3D environment by today's standards, and Novalogic's Voxel Space did not use voxels but a heightmap with painter's algorithm.
My personal opinion is that to qualify as 2.5D the game engine must internally use a 3D coordinate system even if the render process is 2D, and 3D requires a true 3D to 3D conversion.
What makes these techniques "pseudo" 3D is that they can only render one very specific type of scene (a road), and even then only under various constraints (road must be in front of the camera, road must continue to the horizon, etc). "Real 3D" typically implies a more general scene renderer.
As far as old-school 3D effects go, I like this tutorial on ray casting: https://permadi.com/1996/05/ray-casting-tutorial-1/
It's great to see something similar on the effects used in driving games, which I always imagined to be akin to raycasting's vertical slices drawn horizontally.
This page is such a gem. I stumbled upon it many years ago, when making a classic pseudo-3D racing game for a hacked (and very underpowered) graphing calculator. Never ended up finishing it though. Turns out without debugging, floating point calculations or any real knowledge of C you struggle.
Kinda cool, I've never seen these techniques all in one place before. Growing up, I thought that SNES mode 7 scaling was so cool:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_7
The article mentions about halfway down the page that what made the 80s road rendering technique possible was racing the beam. Where say an Atari 2600 would toggle the color at certain pixel counts as the TV's electron beam swept the screen, producing graphics that seemed otherwise impossible from such underpowered hardware:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJFnWZH5FXc
Some engines allowed for say 8 hardcoded sprites this way by toggling colors at each sprite's position, with various rules about overlapping, so sprites would flicker sometimes when they were next to each other.
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You cango pretty far with fake 3D.For example you can take the same type of technique but then additionally move vertical "bars" of eight pixel (going along the entire screen) and it feels like the car/bike is turning more.
Here's an example from the early 90s in a PC DOS game (Word Rally Fever, heavily inspired by Power Drift):
https://youtu.be/tn4lK2-pUxw
FWIW it was made by friends of mine, got published by Team 17, and I was a beta-tester of that one :)
Very cool, thanks for sharing! I’m a huge fan of this Super-Scaler inspired style, and had never heard about this!
I love the ingenuity, I also love youtube documentaries on this topic, but... as a child (in the 90s), I did not like these pseudo 3D racing games at all!
Mode 7 on the SNES was usually fine. I don't know how accurately it rendered a single flat surface in 3D, but it felt real enough and responsive enough. Except for the very rare cases where they simulated non-flat surfaces (Speed Racer, Super Off-Road), even though that was technically much more impressive.
The effect just didn't work for me - it didn't feel like turning, it just felt like what it was: The game displaying a "left turn" animation and telling you that your car will now start drifting to the right if you don't press left. And that felt more like playing a Game&Watch toy.
IMO it greatly depends on the game. Very advanced games that used this technique, like OutRun in the arcade, really almost feel like you're driving on a road with real turns. Lotus Turbo Challenge on the Amiga also does a pretty good job giving you the illusion that you're actually approaching turns, i.e. that there is a turn ahead of you and it is coming towards you.
But most games that implemented this technique were much more primitive, and just amounted to "bending" the road to indicate turns, which never feels like there's actually a turn coming towards you. It just feels like the road is suddenly changing its shape. But that's not an inherent fault of the technique, it's just a poor implementation.
I do agree that Mode7 games, which effectively display an almost correctly rendered 3D plane, are generally a much better experience.
> But most games that implemented this technique were much more primitive, and just amounted to "bending" the road to indicate turns, which never feels like there's actually a turn coming towards you. It just feels like the road is suddenly changing its shape.
After looking at a couple videos, I think the "secret sauce" was having objects along the sides of the road to reinforce the illusion of movement. Even in OutRun, sequences where the player drives past objects like trees or road signs feel more convincing than ones in open areas.
A few days ago I made a 50x timelapse of a drive using my dashcam and... oddly enough, that looked exactly like that pseudo 3D effect. It looks like the road is just bending left and right, whipping around out of the blue, while everything else is stationary.
Pit Stop II on the C64 felt like you had force feedback on a digital joystick, no less!
I agree. Even at the time, many of the games that look like this felt like you were being dragged around the track, and just finessing it a bit with the controller input.
It's not a good feeling as a player when a game mostly plays itself and gives you some token involvement.
Lotus III on the Amiga did the mountain tracks almost af if they had some height and so due to the bending effect from the guard rails and being able to see the actual cliffs at the sides. OTOH, curves were better than the average 16 bit racer, as you could step a bit offroad from the curve, but not so much. But it gave the game some believability.
Also, the patched Road Rash 1-2-3 ROMs for the Mega Drive run much better with far more frames, and neither any overclocking is required at all, nor any extra hardware. That make them very good on simulating pseudo-3D races.
I remember Vroom killing the game on Atari ST : https://youtu.be/Z-RELFjDu_8?si=giyiDpRqUPNSNEK9 Insane depth of view with fluidity for the time
There's a new racing game that just came out for the ST that achieved 50FPS: https://retroracing.itch.io/faster-atari-ste
Also on the Sega Genesis/MegaDrive as F1 World Championship, and a sequel, Kawasaki Superbike Challenge.
Excellent.
I implemented this in Adventure Game Studio following that page seven years ago.
The screenshots are a blast from the past. Outrun, Space Harrier... Those were really good games back in the day (1980s)
When does Pseudo 3D cross the threshold into Real 3D?
Back in the day it was probably easy to move goalposts as techniques advanced. Do remember that Duke 3D's Build engine did not draw a true 3D environment by today's standards, and Novalogic's Voxel Space did not use voxels but a heightmap with painter's algorithm.
My personal opinion is that to qualify as 2.5D the game engine must internally use a 3D coordinate system even if the render process is 2D, and 3D requires a true 3D to 3D conversion.
What makes these techniques "pseudo" 3D is that they can only render one very specific type of scene (a road), and even then only under various constraints (road must be in front of the camera, road must continue to the horizon, etc). "Real 3D" typically implies a more general scene renderer.
Prepare to qualify...
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