After posting >>9936609 I started wondering: what is the first "true" 3D console game?Feel free to disagree with me, but here's how I define a "true" 3D game:>It has to have three-dimensional movement.So something like 3-D Worldrunner, despite the name, doesn't qualify because it's a 2D game internally.>It must have at least one axis of camera rotation.This means that something like Super Mario RPG, despite having 3D platforming elements, doesn't qualify because it uses a fixed-angle isometric camera.Pilotwings meets both conditions, but there may be an older console game I'm not aware of that does as well.
>>9936842So specifically 3D movement internally rather than 2D with fancy tricks involved? Not a clue. There were first person games involving planes and space ships for the Atari 2600, but I think they worked by having you stationary at all times and everything existing on a 2D plane that's wraps around you.
Does The Black Onyx qualify?I don't really know what you mean by "three-dimensional movement"
>>9937104and if that one doesn't qualify, Star Cruiser should
>>9937104Three-dimensional movement simply means motion in 3D space. For example, if you look at some of the old racing games like F-Zero, you'll notice that the game is actually 2D: everything is on a 2D plane and nothing ever moves vertically.Even Doom is not technically a "true" 3D game. While it looks 3D, all the verticality in it is not actually verticality. Also, you can't rotate the camera vertically, only horizontally.
>>9937132Not sure if Pilotwings qualifies, by your definition.Star Fox does, though, and it came out before Virtua Racing on Genesis or Star Wars on 32x. So I think that's the first one.
>>9937175It does, because in Pilotwings you actually move in three dimensions.Although Star Fox was probably the first to have true 3D graphics (with polygons and such).
>>9937275>Although Star Fox was probably the first to have true 3D graphics (with polygons and such).Elite had 3D wireframe graphics on the NES.
>>9937293Never heard of that one before. Looks really interesting and impressive for the NES.
https://youtu.be/8ipzZD7BjhkSpeccysisters....
>>9937293I think that simulates 3D by swapping out the background tiles after figuring out what the object would look like when viewed from any angle or distance. Wouldn't consider that 3D since it doesn't render polygons or draw lines.
>>9937275>in Pilotwings you actually move in three dimensions.Like you do in Doom... and F-zero...
>>9937421Nope, those games are internally 2D.The only thing about them that is 3D is the graphics, which is why these games are considered pseudo-3D.
>>9937427>Nope, those games are internally 2D.>The only thing about them that is 3D is the graphicsYou don't know what you're talking about, do you?
mario 64 you dumb fucking niggers
>>9936842I really like Antarctic Adventure and Slalom on NES, but >>9937104 came much earlier and probably others even before that one.
>>9937548Star Fox and Virtua Fighter came years before that though, lol
>>9937552Meant to quote >>9937539
>>9937408>drawing lines doesn't count if it's done by swapping out background tileswut
>>9936842Probably Battle Zone or some game on Vectrex.
>>9937132You can move up and down along the Z axis. How is that not "actual verticality"?
>>9937408So technically no game is 3D because they process shapes and render them two a 2D buffer before displaying on the screen.
>>9937556fuk yu :)
>>9937621Why bother getting into semantics arcades in late 70s achieved this. Atari and ZX spectrum had games that achieved this as well. Boom /thread.
>>9937539fuk yu :)
>>9937132>and nothing ever moves verticallyLandscape does not move vertically. The car goes over jumps and the car's height during the jump matter and affects gameplay.
>>9937635SPECCY CHADS ROIGHTO
>>9937661Basically Gen1 had every variety of game. No they weren't the greatest of their respective genres but I can't thing of anything truly unique post G1 games just evolved generation after generation. Of courses there were dead ends in evolution. I think alot of people are here in /vr to appreciate the games that peaked in the past.
>>9937620It's actually a rendering trick.Look it up.
>>9937963It's still 'actual' 3D that uses an actual Z-axis. All rendering is 'rendering tricks', what you see on the screen doesn't correspond to a real life object. So, presumably, something isn't 'real 3D' unless is has 3 spacial and at least 2 rotational degrees of continuous freedom?
Feels like you are splitting hairs. But anyway, I am guessing you mean the first console game to use either wireframes, polygons, raycasting, or voxels and actually move within that 3D space instead of use tricky manipulation of flat 2D objects to simulate the look of a 3D environment?First thing that comes to mind is X/Lunar Chase for the Gameboy, it's basically Star Fox if Star Fox was wireframe and first person, it came out a year before Star Fox. Faceball also came out a year before X, but I am not sure how it rendered the world so I don't know if it would count as 2D or 3D, it was also ported to several platforms IIRC so I don't know if any platform did true 3D or if all of them were 2D creating the illusion of 3D.I know there are dozens of PC examples that predate any of those, and if you count arcades I, Robot is generally considered the first 3D game ever made, but you specifically requested consoles.
>>9936842Maybe not the first but this one is legit
Okay, convince me Piltowings isn't a 2D game with height variable like Doom
It's 3D if there is a X-Y-Z axis, that's it. There is no other definition and it does not matter how it's technically achieved. Quake isn't "more 3D" than Doom because it uses polygons or because you can do "room over room", though you could argue it's "more 3D" because more things in level design and gameplay mechanics use the Z axis.with that said unless you can prove it wrong, I don't think Pilotwings is 3D, there is no Z axis. I don't think Sonic 3D Blast is either.so
Hard Drivin
Also for those arguments about Elite. Correct me if I am wrong, but from what I understand the NES just simply can't draw lines. As in, even if you wrote your own 3D engine in software and was ok with it running at 1 Frame Per Minute in wireframe mode the PPU just simply does not even have the commands or option to draw a line, it can only place tiles on the screen. While there was a lot of tricks employed by some of the more impressive games to modify and mess with these tiles in realtime to simulate all sorts of effects and better visuals that the PPU can't really do natively such as parallax scrolling or wavy effects, these graphics were almost always pre-made in some way. I think a very tiny handful were able to create a custom tile or two on the fly but for the most part the visuals were all pre-made, and those few rendered tiles were still 2D images. I think this was done by actually having a small part of SRAM that was on the cartridge mapped to the graphics data and writing the tiles directly to said RAM for the PPU to read off of.From my understanding Elite heavily HEAVILY abuses this to do what it does. IIRC it is actually rendering 3D wireframes on the CPU, and then writing those wireframes in pieces to tiles to display on the screen. So while the PPU is displaying a set of 2D tiles, those tiles are not pre-drawn like 99.99% of games, but are being rendered on the fly as actual 3D wireframes and then being split up into a grid of tiles in a part of memory mapped to the PPU to then draw on the screen as 2D tiles.(cont)
>>9938040If I actually got all of that right in how all of this works, this is a heavy gray area on if it "counts" as a 3D game by the OP's definition of one. First of all I am not sure if the gameplay itself takes place on a 3D plane although I am pretty sure it does, and second if the fact that the end result of the 3D wireframe engine is being then written to 2D tiles for the PPU to display. The NES's hardware simply cannot directly and natively do 3D in any way, but there IS a 3D wireframe engine running in the background of this game, only it has then render it's output as 2D tiles. One could argue if you say that does not count then no 3D game counts as it's not too different from writing the end image into a 2D framebuffer to display on the screen.
>>9938034bruh,>you can walk...(x-y)>and you can JUMP (z-axis)In the first boss fight, you have to jump from a HIGH place to a LOW place. Not to mention getting rings.Therefore, anyone who's the least bit acquainted in the Pythagorean arts, ought to acknowledge its diverse dimensionality.
>>9937621Not true. If a game can plot vertices in a 3D space and then draw lines connecting those vertices, it is 3D.
>>9937301You never heard of Elite? Did you know it contains eight galaxies, each with 256 planets?
>>9938042>It has to render to 2d so it's not 3d.ok.
>>9938071>you can jump so there is Z axislol
There are many games that track position and motion in 3D space despite graphically appearing to be "2D".I have a strong feeling you're going to arbitrarily anal about that though. I don't particularly care about YOUR opinion of what games you think are actually "3D" or not, but you should probably be more specific, I bet what you really want to say is "game that uses polygons" but you're afraid to. Maybe "utilizes a projection matrix" or "defines a non-orthogonal view frustum". I see you've also intentionally limited it to consoles, for some needlessly silly reason.>>9937301>Never heard of EliteIf you're that ignorant, you lose the right to make demands about what arbitrarily qualifies as 3D or not. Another dumbass zooming thread.
>>9938098That's right. It's just not what people here 'mean' by '3D'.
>>9938097>>It has to render to 2d so it's not 3d.>ok.Again, you can argue literally every game on the planet is 2D if you are going to be that anal about the exact definition since EVERY GPU on the planet renders the final image to 2D before sending it to a screen. What you are asking for then to "count" as 3D is fucking sci-fi holograms if you are going to be that pedantic about it and ignore everything else that was said about how the game is running in 3D just so the lizard parts of your brain can have their neurons activate when they hear "render to 2D"
>>9937976Again, Doom doesn't really have a Z axis. This is why rooms can't be placed over other rooms, why the camera only rotates horizontally and why there's no jumping.
>>9938254Doom does have a Z axis and it makes plenty use of it both in gameplay and level design
>>9938283...but I'm not going to provide any examples.
>>9938392I mean it's only everywhere in the game...
>>9938392You can walk up goddamn stairs, how is that not a change in z axis?Just because the engine didnt support rooms on top of each other doesnt mean it cant to heights
>>9936842Sega dreamcast
>>9938254Floors and ceilings have height values, that is literally z-axis. Also, game objects have z-axis and move in 3d space. Also, I would argue that doom is one of the most 3d games ever created, whilst it does not support room over room, it uses the z-axis far more than any game created since.
>>9937132>Doom is not technically a "true" 3D gameDoom has a 2D map, but 3D objects. It's possible to shoot over monster's heads.
>>9937672/thread
>>9939743Doom maps specify floor and ceiling height, which I think qualifies as 3d. The maps are 3d with restrictions.
>>9938040Elite has a proprietary chip that calculates the 3D math and then renders it to a framebuffer which chops it up into tiles. It’s LITERALLY EXACTLY HOW ALL 3D GAMES ARE RENDERED WITH ONE EXTRA STEP.
>>9938081Yes dumbass that is the point I was making.This whole thread is a mess. Posters here try to discuss concepts without understanding them at all and then draw arbitrary lines in the sand using terms they don’t even know the meaning of. Holy shit.
>>9940115So basically, other than doing the 3D rendering on an addon chip instead of the NES's own CPU I was more or less correct about how Elite on NES works?
Arcade games were doing 3D for years but maybe Hard Drivin' for the Genesis was the first on console?
>>9937427>Nope, those games are internally 2D.They store your movement in 3 axes. Sounds 3D to me.It's only the maps which are internally 2D, but that's a different problem entirely.
>>9936842Destination Earthstar for NES has first-person space flight segments that move around in three dimensions.
>>9936842Battlezone for the Atari VCS.https://youtu.be/9X4_xy7rC1A
Yu Suzuki said in an interview that all his games used 3D calculations internally, in which case Hang-On would quality, it was released on Master System in 1987. However it can't rotate the camera (or even move in and direction except forward).>>9940170I found this really fucking funny, but both Hard Drivin and Star Cruiser were released on the same day - 1990 December 21. So it's a tie between those.Note also that Elite for NES came out in 1991, so it gets beaten by both of the above two titles.If you want to be a dick, C64GS came out in 1990 December too, so if that counts as a console then it had the first console 3d games due to having the entire C64 library compatible to some degree. But even then it beats Hard Drivin or Star Cruiser by only one or two weeks at best.
>>9940250Fixed camera, so not real 3d for our purposes, as impressive it is.
>>9937635So it took this long of a thread to realize the 1st gen Atari and ZX Spectrum had 3D games.Elite in 84' and many others around this time.
>>9940287>So it took this long of a thread to realize the 1st gen Atariuh anon: >>9936954>There were first person games involving planes and space ships for the Atari 2600Literally the first post in the thread. The entire question is if it's actually 3D or effectively just 2D + fancy tricks.
>>9939853specification wise, gameplay is designed on a 3D axis but a significant amount of the visuals are compressed to a more flat 2D texture mapping and rely on pixel related graphics to create an artstyle.something like Sonic 3D is entirely designed in mind with third dimensional sensibilities on the most barebone levels that even the artstyle itself 'looks' 3D.
>>9940287Well, the OP asked for console games, so ZX spectrum is out.Also he wanted games that actually rendered in some form of 3D and had the gameplay happen in a 3D space, not use be a 2D game with visual tricks to appear 3D like Mario Kart or F-Zero did with Mode 7.Personally, I feel that Elite on the NES definitely qualifies. The game is running a 3D engine that renders in wireframes and the gameplay takes place in that 3D space. It's stupid to argue that it does not count because the end result is written into dynamic 2D tiles just so the PPU is actually able to display them on screen, it's not much different from framebuffers on modern GPUs writing a final 2D image to be displayed on screen.Also, whoever said that Elite had an additional processor on the cart to do the 3D math was wrong, looking at the details of the PCB of the cart all it had was the Mask ROM, the CIC, a MMC1 Mapper chip that was used in many games, and two SRAM chips. According to NesCartDB one of the SRAM chips was battery-backed, so that was assuredly used to save your progress similar to Zelda, and the other was mapped to the CHR RAM. In other words that is definitely where the wireframe gameplay area was being written to after being converted to 2D tiles so the PPU could display it on the TV.Again, I am no NES dev but from what I understand of the limits of the system and the chips that are laid out on this PCB that is the only way I can think of how the game would have worked. Impressive that the NES was able to handle that kind of 3D math at a playable speed.
so would 3D purely be down to a game's camera having to move around in a 3D plane in other to truly 'be' 3D? even if the entire game is made with 3D graphics in mind?its like saying moving a camera around in a flat 2D plane in three dimensions makes it 3D even though all the graphics are made in 2D.why can't it be the same the other way around too?
>>9940312>>9940314A lot of circular logic on this one. It would be both easier and correct to just recognize that 3D games have been around since the conception of video games. It is clear no research has been done on your behalf. So set up a complex system of qualifications and perceive yourself as a judge of your argument instead of expanding your knowledge. Good luck understanding anything.
>>9940314>Personally, I feel that Elite on the NES definitely qualifies.That game came out in 1991.Star Cruiser and Hard Drivin on Megadrive both had polygonal 3d and came out in 1990 December.
>>9940313That's a whole bunch of text to say absolutely nothing.
>>9936842I believe it has to be Ballblazer for the Atari 5200. Its a very beautiful looking and smooth running 3D game, as smooth and fast as a mode 7 snes game.>>9940115>>9940145>>9940314Elite does 3D calculation using a lookup table system, which contains a list of pre-calculated vector values. It's much simpler to do on computers with bitmap graphics and a hearty amount of RAM, like BBC Micro, C64, and ZX Spectrum. On the NES, you have to pre-render each line on a number of tilesets, store those those the ROM chip, and bank switch into one of them each time you need to draw a specific geometry. You'd end up needing more storage space and shifting through more lookup tables. The NES port of Elite utilises 128KB ROM (the original BBC Micro version only needed 32KB), MMC1 memory controller (for bankswitching), and 16KB of external SRAM.
>>9937275>Although Star Fox was probably the first to have true 3D graphics (with polygons and such).Star Fox wasn't even the first home console game to have polygon filled graphics. Hard Drivin' - Genesis/ Mega Driive (1991)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcAYJk1OYawAbrams Battle Tank - Genesis/ Mega Driive (1991)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpI5P6jMRakare just two examples. Star Fox's big thing was that it brought the SuperFX chip to the table. Which aided the SNES in producing polygon graphics. Even the SNES had games like Race Drivin' before Star Fox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKfkZCvdqqYThe Atari Lynx is a handheld, it could do hardware scaling and had games like ElectroCop, which was released in 1989, and featured quasi-3D gameplay. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKc_QznAIJY&t=771s
>>9942568I've just learned that unlike Mode 7 graphics games on the SNES, where the objects on the screen are just sprites, Ballblazer actually has scaling routine for them, thus making it even smoother than Mode 7 graphics.>>9942732>The Atari Lynx is a handheld, it could do hardware scaling and had games like ElectroCop, which was released in 1989, and featured quasi-3D gameplay.And the hardware scaler is capable of manipulating any graphic data. I wonder why nintendo only made Mode 7 do background transformation. Would adding two math ASICs be too much? Lynx's scaler is older and more powerful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvHSEghdS3whttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0t366SQ0PEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9ibCVW7tvkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N4bpVOL7r0https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z-PKq21SIE
>>9942732>Star Fox wasn't even the first home console game to have polygon filled graphics.I'll just say this. Star Fox was an important game for Nintendo, because it was the first game that they developed to use polygons. The SuperFX chip was a neat piece of technology that worked like a math co-processor. Star Fox came out in early 1993. While it was a cool technical demonstration for the SNES and one of my favorite games for the console overall. Later in 1993, the Atari Jaguar came out with Cybermorph: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s_hpKskI1cwhich was a pretty big leap over Star Fox. Also the 3DO came out in 1993 as well. It launched with Crash and Burn. Not long after; Total Eclipse came out. This was an early 1994 release: https://youtu.be/z54t2KgARRo?list=PLZ4t6H1eKaQm7S5oSGVlgnMeyk-whsfw3&t=54By home console standards, Star Fox was quickly over shadowed by the 'then' new 32bit 3DO and "64bit" Jaguar, which was not really 64bit outside of the data bus.
>>9942515This thread is trash. Just someone jacking off. Or bot training. Absolutely not one piece of useful information.
>>9942758>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvHSEghdS3w [Embed]>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0t366SQ0PE [Embed]>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9ibCVW7tvk [Embed]>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N4bpVOL7r0 [Embed]>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z-PKq21SIE [Remove]I never owned a Lynx, and never saw them in retail anywhere around me in Canada. But, I would look at screenshots in magazines and be blown away by what the Lynx was doing in comparison to the other handhelds and game systems. War Birds looks amazing. Battle Wheels looks impressive too, for a vehicular car combat game on a 1989 handheld. Battlewheels you can leave the car too and run around on foot and steal enemy vehicles. The boasted feature for both of those games were the 8 player multi-player. For a handheld that didn't sell enough units. There's also Hydra: https://youtu.be/hEyLQoDAcSM?t=260S.T.U.N. Runner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGUQgAhbpzAXybots, good port of the arcade game. features 3D gameplay from 1991. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZKFk72KvHUBattleZone 2000 port is interesting, because the devs actually made a completely different game initially, and they were told that it would be too complicated. So they made a port of the arcade game instead. But his their original version of BattleZone 2000 in it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxnT3O56AIQ&t=115s
>>9942352I see. Honestly, I was more caught up in understanding how it worked properly and making the argument that is is a "true" as the OP wants 3D game instead of one that fakes it through special effects over arguing if it was actually the first. Definitely up there as among the first though even if Star Cruiser and Hard Drivin beat it by a year.>>9942568>Elite does 3D calculation using a lookup table system, which contains a list of pre-calculated vector values.Wait, pre-calculated? So it's not actually doing the 3D math to draw the wireframes? How would you get every possible angle something could be at then without having a shitload of values in the lookup table?
>>9944491>Wait, pre-calculated?I guess trigonometric functions work by using a lookup table or something? (trigonometric functions are needed for 3D rotation of the camera or any objects)
>>9937398As far as I know vector based systems were the first to do polygonal 3d. Systems like the Vectrex were a lot better at computing wireframe graphics like arcade systems used too. In 1983, 3D Crazy Coaster used vector graphics to present a 3D ride on a roller coaster before Elite in 1988.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOnOnlL3I_U
