Anybody have the faintest idea how the game ''F-Zero'', for the Super Nintendo, did it''s neat 2.5d graphics? I am wondering mainly how such a software engine was so fast, and so detailed (For it''s time, mind you... 1991...)

SNES had a cool effect called Mode-7 rotation. I don''t know what it is exactly, but I remember hearing that''s how they did the F-Zero (and Mario Kart, etc) graphics.

And castlevania.

It looked to me like Mode7 rotation (or whatever) was just a set of functions for manipulating a sprite. Did you ever play an SNES game where the graphics zoomed in until there like 4 HUGE pixels on the screen? Mode7, I beleive. And also, in castlevania, I remember being on a chandalier that swung from left to right (cool....) but also rotated!!! (those were the days). It gave the graphics a funky pixelated effect, and I have no idea how to replicate it programming wise, but I think that''s what it was.

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"I couldn't break the rules if we didn't have any." - Me on discussing why anarchy is better than democracy in History class.

I remember mode-7. It was awesome, in its day. It did rotations and scaling of stuff(?), which I''d never seen before in a game. A good example of it is in Contra: Alien Wars. Levels 2 and 4 rotate the whole screen. It was an overhead prespective, and instead of your character facing left or facing right on the screen, he always faced towards the top of the screen, while the environment rotated around him. Cool as hell.

To answer the original question - you could actually create your engine very easily with Direct3D. Mode 7 was only a method to map a layer on to a transformable (translate, rotate, zoom) square polygon. You could use timing tricks to have one at the top of the screen, and one at the bottom.

Jim Adams

woah, woah, can you guys elaborate on this mode 7? i''m curious as to what it is, if it''s worth knowing about, and if i can implement it with opengl/c++. i''m working on a fast-paced racing game, and would like to know if this mode 7 would help to the exhilaration of the racing experience. or is this something that has nothing to do with it?

a2k

I actually don''t know much about mode-7. It was a graphics mode (or something) in the SNES that could produce some pretty cool effects in 1991, but by todays standards they are pretty lame. It is pretty useless to know, other than for historical value (IMHO). Jim Adams reply pretty much sums up what mode-7 is. I don''t think it would be any easier to make a game look fast in mode-7, than it would be in just straight 3d, and the 3d would look much better.

(of course, all this could be BS. As I said, I don''t know much about it, but I''m pretty confident you don''t need to know about it)

By the way, mode-7 effects were in done hardware, which is what made it fast in its day. (in reply to original)

Mode 7 didn''t have anything to do with polygons actually, the SNES didn''t have any hardware texture mapping support, and the processor was barely fast enough to draw a single, flat shaded, unlit polygon, let alone texture it. The hardware had background layers, the display hardware had its RAM split up into 4 layers, so if you loaded an image on layer 1, then another onto layer 2, the image on layer 2 would be overlayed on top of image 1, but it wouldn''t affect image 1. That''s how it could handle 4 simultaneous backgrounds at once, with that parallax scrolling effect. With mode 7, the video hardware could only display 1 background, but the background could be scaled and rotated and skewed, and it would all be handled by the hardware. If you looked at all the games mentioned, the actual sprites didn''t scale, only the backgrounds. To replicate that sort of thing on a PC you would need to get a card that had scaling acceleration (don''t know too much about 2D acceleration so I don''t know if cards these days actually do this), or write your own scaling routines that can skew an image, instead of scaling it evenly, and it would get really pixelated the more you scaled, so you would have to also write interpolation routines, or just use the above suggestion and stick your image on a quad, tilt it, and turn texture filtering on to avoid pixelation, unless you wanted to go completely with the 2D approach.

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- outRider -

Basically, today, you would simply draw the map of your race on a nice flat face, and render it with whatever Direct3D/openGL, and simply do the rest with sprites ... it sad to say that today it''s nothing extremly impressive. Just look at Doom and you already can do better