Slashdot Mirror
Creating 3D Environments Without Polygons
Igor Hardy writes "I've conducted an interesting interview concerning a new episodic indie adventure game series called Casebook. What's quite uncommon, especially for these kinds of independently developed and published productions, is that they include professionally created FMV — all of the footage is filmed in real locations. Yet what's even more interesting is that the games use an innovative photographic technology which recreates a fully explorable 3D environment through the use of millions of photos instead of building from polygons. The specifics of how it works are explained by Sam Clarkson, the creative director of the series."
Something like this?
That's so eighties...
Do not click parent link, it is a shock site.
These posts are for a REPLY to my original post; it was trolled down and thus became invisible, making it look like my original post was the malicious one.
Srsly, do not click on the zoy.org link.
This is called photogrammetry, and was used to create CG environments in the Matrix trilogy, for one.
Quite impressive. Not much information how it works though.
To oversimplify things, these scenes are just prerendered videos with more or less all possibilities of position in a database. So no matter where you are, you're seeing a prerendered "still" picture. They just select and display the pictures fast enough that it looks like its 3d. So it doesn't need hardware acceleration for anything beyond buffering the images, which are probably rendered as textures on a flat plane.
Right in the video they say they are doing Light Fields:
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/light/
Nope. It's not part of the same series. The way the Prince of persia franchise has functioned is more like an isolated series of different worlds based on the core general ideas.
The sands of time is the first installment in what we might call the "Sands of time" trilogy, where the 2nd and 3rd games (warrior within + two thrones) were the same world referring to the same storyline.
Here's a wiki entry (in case you're interested)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Persia
The way the Prince of persia franchise has functioned is the games that bear the Prince of persia name, are usually different games more along the lines of reimagining the series in alternative world/universe.
Prince of Persia "2008" (as many call it to differentiate it from the original), is another re-imagining of Prince of persia - new universe, cast of characters, and storyline.