It never hurts to have another "mirror" A bunch more ..

Darwinia ( PC )


Love ( PC )


Viewtiful Joe ( Gamecube )


Rakugaki Showtime ( PSOne )


Katamari Damacy ( PS2 )


Another World ( PC )


3D Dot Heroes ( PS3 )


The Wind Waker ( Gamecube )


Virtua Racing ( Arcade )


Loco Roco ( PSP )

@ghostwheel - Added a couple more .. including 2 PC games on top of the one ( Golf? ) you missed

There are tons of games going for realism, but often something more stylized can be so much more striking.

Agreed First batch off the top of my head ..

El Shaddai ( 360 )


Machinarium ( PC )


Rez ( Dreamcast )


Mojib Ribbon ( PS2 )


Noby Noby Boy ( PS3 )


The Neverhood ( PC )


Okami ( PS2 )


Shadow of the Colossus ( PS2 )


Journey ( PS3 )


Killer7 ( Gamecube )


MadWorld ( Wii )


Patapon ( PSP )


Jet Set Radio ( Dreamcast )


Nanatsu Kaze No Shima Monogatari ( Saturn )


Golf? ( PC )


X-Scape ( DSi )

The architecture of conventional processors isn't ideal for mimicking human-like intelligence. You end up with a thick simulation layer for dynamics that happen ( seemingly ) effortlessly in nature. Hopefully in the future we'll see hybrid chips consisting of traditional processors ( for number crunching ) and artificial synapses

You're not really playing against the machine though, you're playing against a algorithm designed and / or written by the software engineer.

That's the exact reason that animations are scarse / short in the Myst games. Their solution still works though .. animated areas are layered on top of the static background. Plus, you'll only need a limited range of angles. Once you get far enough from a animation, simply scaling / transforming the footage will be sufficient. And there's always the option of mixing in real-time 3D

Lighting pre-rendered scenes dynamically is not that difficult. Instead of rendering RGB(A), you use a deferred setup ( Albedo + Normals + Depth ) and calculate the required coordinates on the fly.

*The build uses 32 frames at 15 fps.

There are certain benefits of ray-tracing over real-time rendering .. but you could for example want to go with live-action film ( 360° lens ). That way you can simply use / rent a location instead of having to build it The possibilities are obviously a lot more limited compared to real-time, but it works pretty well in for example Railfan ( PS3 ).

@Utforska - Send you a PM

I can get you a Linux or Mac OS X build if you like.

The difference is that instead of jumping from panorama-to-panorama ( Exile / Revelation ), I'm rendering out intermediate steps which enables you to move "fluently" while still being able to look around. You do end up with a lot more data though

Quick lunch-break experiment trying out QTVR on movement-paths. Horrible scene / resolution / framerate, but it's the idea that counts Left mouse button is movement, right mouse button is looking around.

Download ( Windows )

@ghostwheel - Good voice-acting is just as rare

Would be interesting to see whether pre-rendering all paths* completely in 360° ( allowing the player to walk around "freely" ) gives you a similar immersion as the same game in real-time 3D.



*Most of the movement in these games is "on-rail" anyway ( see above ).

And while I certainly agree with ghostwheel that the environments could be done in real-time without too much wizardry these days, achieving that level of photo-realism in the actors is a little more tricky

Fantastic series! I wonder what the general consent is regarding QTVR versus real-time 3D .. the visuals of Revelation are absolutely stunning at times, but the sense of freedom in realMyst is truly liberating for the genre.

+ There's also a Playstation ( and Saturn ) port of Riven for those who prefer their couch

Technically it's easy, but you have to keep the restrictions of both media combined in mind ( video is a 2D format, even the stereoscopic variant ). On the other hand, live-action techniques such as motion-capture and 3D-scanning are common ground these days .. they're not exactly cheap though.

Some blasts from the past using digitized actors:

Time Traveler ( 1991 )


Mortal Kombat 3 ( 1995 )


Rise of the Triad ( 1995 )

And keep in mind that games made with GameMaker used to run just fine on a 1Mhz CPU back in 1985

Well, that's not true at all.

I knew somebody was going to say that Using abstraction layers doesn't inherently mean worse performance, it's just not worth the time to write intelligent compilers that scan entire projects and apply every trick in the book.

Anybody can use a Piano, but creating something of quality with it is another story.

There's certainly still room for lowering the entry barrier of software development, but we've already come a long way over the past 20 years. Back then almost every title was written directly "on the metal" using assembly, while these days you can create a fully-fledged 3D game without writing a single line of code.

Doesn't have anything to do with hardware though