Marathon

I've put up a small Marathon page. Slightly related, does anyone know if a ray casting (e.g. Wolfenstein) used textures like this? Seems like an obvious thing to do, but maybe it would require too much memory because of all the angles you need to pre-render, especially in an engine where you can have player elevation. I think it could look impressive, anyways.

I'm of course not talking about modern stuff like normal/bump/parallax mapping here. Just a few pre-rendered texture view angles (still drawn square from the front). If a texture is symmetrical, we can do some mirroring when reading the raycasted columns and save some memory there. The textures would probably need to have flat L/R edges (unlike my example here).

Raycasting, baked in view angles illustration

2 comments:

John Nesky said...

Yay Marathon! This game is fun and accessible to mod. :D

I'm not aware of any Doom-style games that render walls like that. In the case of Marathon, I'm kind of glad they didn't: it would have been harder to create your own textures if you were expected to support multiple angles, and I probably wouldn't have gotten as involved in the community when I was younger and less experienced. :P

Note in case anyone is unaware: Marathon is now free and runs on all modern computers:
http://source.bungie.org/index.php/Get_Marathon

Unfortunately the modding tools are less well supported.

Arne said...

Well, isn't that a false dilemma? Some textures could have only one frame, like flat walls, so it would be a scalable system where you can create advanced textures if you want to.

However, I'm thinking that the perspective will probably look odd if the player stands close to a wall, because of the fisheye effect. Well, raycasting engines actually 'correct' fisheye, but still.

I installed Aleph One a few days ago. It's nice to be able to play the games. I couldn't get 'Classic' stuff to run on my Mac. I have a bunch of Mac games (mid 90's). Don't feel like installing emulators, so I'm gonna let it be.