If you can’t implement real 3D, then fake 2D 3D graphics might work.
Back in the Super Nintendo (SNES) days, we enjoyed some pretty rad “fake” 3D games like F-Zero and Mario Kart. SNES had “mode 7″. Now that I’m developing my own 2D game engine, I really want to implement at the least some parallax for my backgrounds. While I’m sure I could accomplish this with OpenGL or DirectX, I don’t want to rely on anymore external DLL dependencies unless I need to. Qt provides a QTransform function, but it’s not quite there. I’ve been playing around with it.
My Mode 7 wannabe implementation concept
In order to complete a full illusion of 3D, I’ll have to implement many separate buffers and composite those onto a final output buffer. Animation is just a bunch of output buffers played really fast to give you the illusion of movement.
I was able to produce the mock-up in Photoshop, which seems to have the perspective algorithm down. Now, it’s just a matter of figuring it out on my end for my Qt/c++ implementation.
Tags: 2d, 3d, concept, development, fake 3d, game, howto, mode 7, nintendo, nokia, programming, qt, snes, test
