Very Computer

Hi all,

Long time no C, but oh well....

In Killer Instinct (and Donkey Kong Country) the game seems to be real
3D. How do they do this? Are there any places on the net that have
information on this?

Thanks in advance....

Marc Wilson (aka Anthrax)

Quote:

>In Killer Instinct (and Donkey Kong Country) the game seems to be real
>3D. How do they do this? Are there any places on the net that have
>information on this?

The characters themselves are simple scaled sprites.  They are based on
rederings of real 3D models in all they required positions though.

Notice how they cheat compared with the much cooler Virtua Fighter 2.

The viewpoint of the fight is always side on, even when the "camera"
pulls back.  This allows simple sprite scaling, but sacrifices realism.

As someone else mentioned, the floor are probably done by scrolling them
at different speeds.

I'm not sure how they handle the large objects in some scenes.  These
may be true 3D, but I somehow doubt it since they ported Killer
Instinct to the Super Nintendo.

Ken Carpenter

-> In Killer Instinct (and Donkey Kong Country) the game seems to be
-> real 3D. How do they do this? Are there any places on the net that
-> have information on this?

No, they are sprites. I haven't seen KI on the SNES, but the video
footage on the arcade is all pre-rendered(and the actual game play are
sprites), and all the sprites in DKC are prerendered with Alias on
SGI's.

Probably the background is pre-rendered in all its horizontal positions,
and a new 320x200 screen is displayed depending on the characters'
positions.  Don't need an Ultra64 for that!

Quote:>Thanks in advance....
>Marc Wilson (aka Anthrax)

-------------------
"No, you Americans won't accept Communism, so we'll keep feeding you small
doses of Socialism until you wake up and find you have Communism!" - Kruschev

Its called raytracing.  Tracing beams of light til the hit object and
then calculating the intesity of the light that bounces off that object to
your viewpoint.  Simple really :).

The Careless Gamer

You missed a point --the Nintendo is not raytracing the figures.  These
pictures were rendered on a high-end box (an SGI for Donkey Kong
Country).  The renderings are then stored in ROM as bitmaps.
---
John Hattan          High UberPopeness of the First Church of Shatnerology
The Code Zone        Sweet Software for a Saturnine World

Quote:>> In Killer Instinct (and Donkey Kong Country) the game seems to be real
>> 3D. How do they do this? Are there any places on the net that have
>> information on this?

>Ultra 64 chipset does hardware 3d, rotation, scaling, colour mapping,
>etc. anything under the sun....  That's how you do it.  

Actually, many people seem to think that the characters in the game are
rendered real-time.  They aren't.  All the graphics were done on SGI
workstations, then were captured as sprites.  The chipset is not 64-bit,
it is a 32-bit version of what the Ultra 64 will be.  It barely uses
the 3D functions of the U64.

Robin Ward

http://www.io.org/~sward

Quote:> >> In Killer Instinct (and Donkey Kong Country) the game seems to be real
> >> 3D. How do they do this? Are there any places on the net that have
> >> information on this?

> >Ultra 64 chipset does hardware 3d, rotation, scaling, colour mapping,
> >etc. anything under the sun....  That's how you do it.  

> Actually, many people seem to think that the characters in the game are
> rendered real-time.  They aren't.  All the graphics were done on SGI
> workstations, then were captured as sprites.  The chipset is not 64-bit,
> it is a 32-bit version of what the Ultra 64 will be.  It barely uses
> the 3D functions of the U64.

Sorry, I think you misunderstood my reply;  Alias (by Alias Research) was
used to pre-render the CHARACTERS.  And backgrounds in some scenes;  
however, scenes like the building, in which the camera pans off the side,
clearly use the chipset to do real-time 3d.

I thought he was referring to the 3d aspect of the backgrounds, such as
the bridge scene.  Not the characters.

- Patrick

Since about the time the IBM PC was... AGES ago. It's not raytracing either.
Phong and Gourad (sp?) shading are computationally a lot quicker than
raytracing and can give similar effects. Look at many of the demos
around today (Stars by Nooon for eg, ftp from
ftp.cdrom.com/pub/demos/alpha/n/nooon_st.zip)

and you'll see that it's not that hard, especially with custom hardware.

Daytona USA uses Martin Marietta 3D chips to attain it's huge speed.
Martin Marietta make commercial flight simulators. The chips in Daytona USA
are available in cards for the PC, they can do 500,000 texture mapped
polygons per second. At 50HZ, that's 10,000 polys/sec. Not bad huh?