It is true that isometric 3D RPGs like Divinity: Original Sin series and probably most others save on time and resources by not rendering things like ceilings that will always be out of view but hey, this is still infinitely better for both looks, functionality and practicality than isometric 2.5D. But really most of these games, which are NOT hugely ambitious (the exact opposite for most) and not rushed by big publishers, can afford to implement skies and ceilings like the Neverwinter Nights games do, which allow for both isometric and third person gameplay and a lot in between. And being able to rotate and zoom the camera so dynamically is just so damn useful and hard to live without, especially in combat.
Rpg 2.5D Game Engine
Never forget: almost every game considered an all time great, including the cRPGs, were technological pioneers and very forward thinking. No, they are not all time greats entirely because of that, but it helped tremendously as they used it to not only bolster presentation but gameplay as well. Until we do that again, games will only stagnate and regress.
2.5D (two-and-a-half dimensional) perspective refers to gameplay or movement in a video game or virtual reality environment that is restricted to a two-dimensional (2D) plane with little to no access to a third dimension in a space that otherwise appears to be three-dimensional and is often simulated and rendered in a 3D digital environment.
By contrast, games, spaces or perspectives that are simulated and rendered in 3D and used in 3D level design are said to be true 3D, and 2D rendered games made to appear as 2D without approximating a 3D image are said to be true 2D.
They are popular camera perspectives among 2D video games, most commonly those released for 16-bit or earlier and handheld consoles, as well as in later strategy and role-playing video games. The advantage of these perspectives is that they combine the visibility and mobility of a top-down game with the character recognizability of a side-scrolling game. Thus the player can be presented an overview of the game world in the ability to see it from above, more or less, and with additional details in artwork made possible by using an angle: Instead of showing a humanoid in top-down perspective, as a head and shoulders seen from above, the entire body can be drawn when using a slanted angle; Turning a character around would reveal how it looks from the sides, the front and the back, while the top-down perspective will display the same head and shoulders regardless.
There are three main divisions of axonometric projection: isometric (equal measure), dimetric (symmetrical and unsymmetrical), and trimetric (single-view or only two sides). The most common of these drawing types in engineering drawing is isometric projection. This projection is tilted so that all three axes create equal angles at intervals of 120 degrees. The result is that all three axes are equally foreshortened. In video games, a form of dimetric projection with a 2:1 pixel ratio is more common due to the problems of anti-aliasing and square pixels found on most computer monitors.
Two examples of oblique projection are Ultima VII: The Black Gate and Paperboy. Examples of axonometric projection include SimCity 2000, and the role-playing games Diablo and Baldur's Gate.
In three-dimensional scenes, the term billboarding is applied to a technique in which objects are sometimes represented by two-dimensional images applied to a single polygon which is typically kept perpendicular to the line of sight. The name refers to the fact that objects are seen as if drawn on a billboard. This technique was commonly used in early 1990s video games when consoles did not have the hardware power to render fully 3D objects. This is also known as a backdrop. This can be used to good effect for a significant performance boost when the geometry is sufficiently distant that it can be seamlessly replaced with a 2D sprite. In games, this technique is most frequently applied to objects such as particles (smoke, sparks, rain) and low-detail vegetation. It has since become mainstream, and is found in many games such as Rome: Total War, where it is exploited to simultaneously display thousands of individual soldiers on a battlefield. Early examples include early first-person shooters like Marathon Trilogy, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Hexen and Duke Nukem 3D as well as racing games like Carmageddon and Super Mario Kart and platformers like Super Mario 64.
Skyboxes and skydomes are methods used to easily create a background to make a game level look bigger than it really is. If the level is enclosed in a cube, the sky, distant mountains, distant buildings, and other unreachable objects are rendered onto the cube's faces using a technique called cube mapping, thus creating the illusion of distant three-dimensional surroundings. A skydome employs the same concept but uses a sphere or hemisphere instead of a cube.
In some games, sprites are scaled larger or smaller depending on its distance to the player, producing the illusion of motion along the Z (forward) axis. Sega's 1986 video game Out Run, which runs on the Sega OutRun arcade system board, is a good example of this technique.
In Out Run, the player drives a Ferrari into depth of the game window. The palms on the left and right side of the street are the same bitmap, but have been scaled to different sizes, creating the illusion that some are closer than others. The angles of movement are "left and right" and "into the depth" (while still capable of doing so technically, this game did not allow making a U-turn or going into reverse, therefore moving "out of the depth", as this did not make sense to the high-speed game play and tense time limit). Notice the view is comparable to that which a driver would have in reality when driving a car. The position and size of any billboard is generated by a (complete 3D) perspective transformation as are the vertices of the poly-line representing the center of the street. Often the center of the street is stored as a spline and sampled in a way that on straight streets every sampling point corresponds to one scan-line on the screen. Hills and curves lead to multiple points on one line and one has to be chosen. Or one line is without any point and has to be interpolated lineary from the adjacent lines. Very memory intensive billboards are used in Out Run to draw corn-fields and water waves which are wider than the screen even at the largest viewing distance and also in Test Drive to draw trees and cliffs.
Drakkhen was notable for being among the first role-playing video games to feature a three-dimensional playing field. However, it did not employ a conventional 3D game engine, instead emulating one using character-scaling algorithms. The player's party travels overland on a flat terrain made up of vectors, on which 2D objects are zoomed. Drakkhen features an animated day-night cycle, and the ability to wander freely about the game world, both rarities for a game of its era. This type of engine was later used in the game Eternam.
Some mobile games that were released on the Java ME platform, such as the mobile version of Asphalt: Urban GT and Driver: L.A. Undercover, used this method for rendering the scenery. While the technique is similar to some of Sega's arcade games, such as Thunder Blade and Cool Riders and the 32-bit version of Road Rash, it uses polygons instead of sprite scaling for buildings and certain objects though it looks flat shaded. Later mobile games (mainly from Gameloft), such as Asphalt 4: Elite Racing and the mobile version of Iron Man 2, uses a mix of sprite scaling and texture mapping for some buildings and objects.
Bump mapping, normal mapping and parallax mapping are techniques applied to textures in 3D rendering applications such as video games to simulate bumps and wrinkles on the surface of an object without using more polygons. To the end user, this means that textures such as stone walls will have more apparent depth and thus greater realism with less of an influence on the performance of the simulation.
The first video games that used pseudo-3D were primarily arcade games, the earliest known examples dating back to the mid-1970s, when they began using microprocessors. In 1975, Taito released Interceptor,[11] an early first-person shooter and combat flight simulator that involved piloting a jet fighter, using an eight-way joystick to aim with a crosshair and shoot at enemy aircraft that move in formations of two and increase/decrease in size depending on their distance to the player.[12] In 1976, Sega released Moto-Cross, an early black-and-white motorbike racing video game, based on the motocross competition, that was most notable for introducing an early three-dimensional third-person perspective.[13] Later that year, Sega-Gremlin re-branded the game as Fonz, as a tie-in for the popular sitcom Happy Days.[14] Both versions of the game displayed a constantly changing forward-scrolling road and the player's bike in a third-person perspective where objects nearer to the player are larger than those nearer to the horizon, and the aim was to steer the vehicle across the road, racing against the clock, while avoiding any on-coming motorcycles or driving off the road.[13][14] That same year also saw the release of two arcade games that extended the car driving subgenre into three dimensions with a first-person perspective: Sega's Road Race, which displayed a constantly changing forward-scrolling S-shaped road with two obstacle race cars moving along the road that the player must avoid crashing while racing against the clock,[15] and Atari's Night Driver, which presented a series of posts by the edge of the road though there was no view of the road or the player's car. Games using vector graphics had an advantage in creating pseudo-3D effects. 1979's Speed Freak recreated the perspective of Night Driver in greater detail. 2ff7e9595c
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