I always wanted a Vectrex
Monday, July 14th, 2003
If there’s one thing I absolutely have to be working on right now, it’s a version of Lunar Lander. Ah, the purity of the vector graphics [anti-aliased of course], with the simplest possible shapes employed to represent the ship… there’s just something about it that is so much more pleasing than textured / tesselated models, with lens flare and bump-mapping and all that other bollocks. Maybe it’s just a phase I’m going through, but sometimes it really does seem like some great ideas are being left behind as progress marches on.
Too Much Freedom
Part of the problem with 3d in space is that we really aren’t used to moving in all 3 dimensions. Because of gravity we tend to crawl the planet surface for most of our lives, limiting our freedom to just the 2. This means that a lot of our spatial skills are essentially 2 dimensional. Once you find yourself in [simulated] space, you have so much choice in movement that it becomes really hard to create a gaming environment. In 3D space you constantly find yourself miles away from anything, disoriented as all hell, trying to work out where that enemy ship went to [behind you]. Also in 3D the chances of being hit by say, an asteroid, are really amazingly small, so for an asteroid field to be at all challenging it will have to be ridiculously dense. The same is not the case in 2D.
It all has to do with intersecting lines… for any 2 objects to collide (eg for a bullet to hit its target) the paths of the 2 objects must cross. Even then they won’t necessarily collide, but they certainly can’t collide if their paths do NOT cross. In 2D, any pair of randomly selected paths will cross somewhere (unless they are parallel), so there are plenty of opportunities for things to bump into each other. In 3D however, a pair of randomly selected paths will almost certainly NEVER cross, so we have to add lots of external influences to encourage objects to meet.
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