Curious if anyone remembers the original UO, before it got hacked, sliced, and diced to become whatever it is today. 2.5d, but I am curious, the models and animations themselves, where they done in 3D and then saved out as images and then animated that way? If so, how did they account for all the gear/item changes with each of the animations? Wouldn't they have had to redo all of them for each item/piece of clothing? Just curious, not exactly sure why. Thanks to anyone who knows more then I.

All the 2d animation frames were created by rendering 3d models from various angles. All pieces of clothing and gear had their own sprites and a character was basically those sprites layered on top of each other.

They used numerous tricks to optimise the data.
For example only half left facing angles were rendered and right facing sprites were simply mirrored left facing ones. If you look closely you can see that shields and weapons actually change hands when you turn around.

Another example are gloves and clothes on the arms. Both arms were in the same sprite, but of course, often, one of them would be covered by the torso. So they went ahead, and cut out the silhouette of the arm in front of the torso from the torso clothes. You can see numerous artifacts with gauntlets bigger than these cut outs. They appear smaller when they are in front of the torso.

And so on.

All in all it was a terribly inefficient and complicated system, which had a lot of artifacts. But it looked very good at its time none the less.

I wouldn't attempt to copy it nowadays tough, there are much better options available.

Here's a link to a viewer for UOs assets. I don't know if it still works, but it used to be quite insightful.

Great info, curious if you have some examples of it being better optimized today?

Quote: Original post by Enlighter
Great info, curious if you have some examples of it being better optimized today?

Today it is done in straight up 3D model rendering. The reason they went with the pre-rendered options was computers at the time couldn't keep up. With all the extra horsepower average computers have these days, you don't need to skimp and save to get the graphics to look like that.

Quote: Original post by Enlighter
Great info, curious if you have some examples of it being better optimized today?

What Talroth said. Todays computers can easily render the amount of characters needed in the same detail as the pre-renders were. In addition you'd get less artifacts and more and smoother animations.

Last but not least, it'll probably even use less memory and certainly less disk space.

What about something like the iPhone though.

Or other mobile platforms? psp can handle an incredible amount, but the iPhone it couldn't handle 50 140 poly models on screen at the same time.

But what if they where pre rendered, like in UO? Would mobile platforms benefit from something like that?

Absolutely. However, you'll have to be smart to manage your graphics resources, since they will take a fair bit of memory, which isn't the forte of mobile platforms. Hence the Ultima Online tricks.

Diablo 2 is another example.

would be nice to see an iphone screen clustered with characters all doing different things and running smooth.

Didn't think it was something this generation could do.

Quote: Original post by Enlighter
would be nice to see an iphone screen clustered with characters all doing different things and running smooth.

Didn't think it was something this generation could do.

Well, the iphone has a pretty powerful processor and gpu, as well as a quite low screen resolution (exactly half of what UO used).

So it should be perfectly possible, unless there are issues with the iphone that I'm not aware of.

I know it's limited to roughly 7k polys on screen, but with pre renders you kinda eliminate that all together.