Aesthetically pleasing early 3D (<= 1998) computer graphics.

[Nutmeg]

Mr. Pink

D is not being rendered in real time, but it's a cool example of early 3D nonetheless. Thank you.

 

[Astral Rag]

DEUS, the 1996 sequel to Robinson's Requiem is an early 3D "open world game". Impressive game but not very aesthetically pleasing... The first game is sprite-based and looked/ looks better.

http://www.old-games.ru/game/screenshots/614.html
http://www.mobygames.com/game/deus/screenshots

 

[Astral Rag]

Probably already posted (and from 1998) but I'm replaying it now and those voxely vistas still look great. The game also has very impressive animations.

Spoiler

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Mr. Pink

D is not being rendered in real time, but it's a cool example of early 3D nonetheless. Thank you.

And it was rendered using only three Amiga computers. IIRC Amiga wasn't good for 3D, but I might be wrong.

 

[Astral Rag]

No you're right. 3D only really became possible with the advent of Pentium PCs. By that time Amigas were (sadly) on their way out. I think the fastest stock Amiga computer ran at 50 MHz.

 

[otsego]

 

[octavius]

For those who don't know you can play the Marathon Trilogy on a modern PC with Aleph One:

Aleph One is the open source continuation of Bungie's Marathon 2 FPS game engine. Aleph One plays Marathon, Marathon 2, Marathon Infinity, and 3rd-party content on a wide array of platforms, with (optional) OpenGL rendering, Internet play, Lua scripting, and more.

http://marathon.sourceforge.net/

Make sure to play in software mode also don't forget to disable mouse acceleration and lower the mouse sensitivity.

And if you get motion sickness from the Aleph versions, like I do, there is a brillian Unreal Tournament TC of the first Marathon game available.

 

[Astral Rag]

there is a brilliant Unreal Tournament TC of the first Marathon game available.

Nice, I didn't know that.

 

[octavius]

Nice, I didn't know that.

I discussed it more detail in another thread.

 

[DraQ]

No you're right. 3D only really became possible with the advent of Pentium PCs. By that time Amigas were (sadly) on their way out. I think the fastest stock Amiga computer ran at 50 MHz.

Frontier: Elite 2's visuals packed a hell lot of bang for a nascent 3D game.
It ran on 'Miggy, Atari and 286.

And the 3D part is?

 

[A user named cat]

I tried playing SimCity 3k a couple weeks ago but it's fucked. Whenever you try to scroll your view, it moves at lightning speed and there is no fix. Begins to drive you insane. Then SimCity 4 even with the launcher mod tweaks chugs and gets choppy on modern hardware once your city builds up, still crashes too. Then we have Cities XL which should be a decent replacement except it's even more fucked up, with random crashing and framerate dropping to single digits when doing things like laying down roads. The latest SC travesty isn't worth mentioning.

Why can we not get a playable modern SimCity game?

 

[Mr. Pink]

I tried playing SimCity 3k a couple weeks ago but it's fucked. Whenever you try to scroll your view, it moves at lightning speed and there is no fix. Begins to drive you insane. Then SimCity 4 even with the launcher mod tweaks chugs and gets choppy on modern hardware once your city builds up, still crashes too. Then we have Cities XL which should be a decent replacement except it's even more fucked up, with random crashing and framerate dropping to single digits when doing things like laying down roads. The latest SC travesty isn't worth mentioning.

Why can we not get a playable modern SimCity game?

five more days until cities skylines.

 

[warpig]

Crusader is fucking awesome but it's not "early 3d", it's pre-rendered stuff.

 

[grudgebringer]

Probably already posted (and from 1998) but I'm replaying it now and those voxely vistas still look great. The game also has very impressive animations.

Spoiler

Spoiler

Nice find! And it instantly reminded me of Z.A.R. - voxels based game with dynamic landscapes.

 

[octavius]

No you're right. 3D only really became possible with the advent of Pentium PCs. By that time Amigas were (sadly) on their way out. I think the fastest stock Amiga computer ran at 50 MHz.

Frontier: Elite 2's visuals packed a hell lot of bang for a nascent 3D game.
It ran on 'Miggy, Atari and 286.

I remember failing a morale check when I saw how much better the PC version looked (at least judging from the screenshots) than the Amiga version I was playing.

 

[Astral Rag]

Revisited Mad Trax for the first time in 15 years or so, this 1998 arcade racer looked amazing back then and it still holds up well today. It's certainly no Rollcage or POD but it was enjoyable enough, there are weapon pickups and quite capable adversaries in the non-time trial modes.


This is the Direct3D mode, it's a crying shame the game doesn't support resolutions above 800x600.

 

[Siveon]

Probably already posted (and from 1998) but I'm replaying it now and those voxely vistas still look great. The game also has very impressive animations.

What game is this?

 

[Excidium II]

What game is this?

Delta Force

 

[Immortal]

All these graphics were pre-rendered and built using tiles.
The reflection in the water is actually about 32 Tiles or pieces of an image.
Same with Galava and the Necromancer Castle - The they are just painted in small tiles in the background with sneaky collision.
Sort of like the IE games except broken down into smaller chunks (which allowed way more asset reuse)

Nothing in the game is 3D.. The protagonist was made up of like 60*4ish images. They generated the images using some type of 3D modelling tool though, but the game couldn't handle 3D..
It did have a particle system though!

(The character boundaries / hit boxes were Fake-3D but they are made with primitive cylinder / cube shapes)

Spoiler

Spoiler

 

[Ninjerk]

I remember liking the way the Pitfall 3D demo looked.

 

[Alfons]

2001 but fuck it. It's one of the most aesthetically pleasing games I played in the last five years.

 

[Animal]

Virtua Racing (1992)

 

[taxalot]

YES. I remember thinking it looked better than Daytona USA.

 

[Akratus]

Dungeon Keeper aesthetic is best aesthethic.

But it looks good partially because of the pixelation. It looks like a 2d game in stills.

I'd really like to see a game that would have struggled with the 3d technology of the time but got over it somehow. Naturally it would need good art direction, that trumps everything in prettiness. But I think something else too. The monsters and such in this game would be uglier if they weren't 2d sprites that are billboarded.

 

[taxalot]

I'm not usually put off by pixels, but I remember trying the GOG version of DK1 and it really looked like a terrible unreadable mess. Doesn't it use some kind of graphical filter that makes thing a bit distorted ? I think that's what made it worse for today's screens.