Actually, I COULD ask Matt to release the extensions he did. It is not perfect performance-wise and won't work with any exporter, but it is fun to play around with.
But anyway, I wish this thread hadn't died. I love old school 3D effects whether they're made with stacking and scaling 2D sprites or using rudimentary 3D engines with no texture filtering. That pixel art 3D cyberpunk game by Sinclair Strange looked amazing.
Did someone say fakey 3D-like effects using sprite scaling?
Here's something I toyed with a while back:
It uses the Text Blitter as a base for the tiles (of course), then changes their size using a shader, gives it that weird, fake-y depth using another shader, incorporates the sprites using a third shader, and then smooshes it all back together with a fourth shader. It's a big-ol' shader sandwich, and the result is kinda neat, but it's also got its drawbacks.
You can already see that the extending the tiles leaves these big-ol' gaps in the top/bottom and sides, and since it's all just the same tile repeated over and over, the only way to distinguish the top/bottom and sides is by making the tile with distinct edges, like the test tile here. This also means there'd be no texture variation on those surfaces.
Also, since for some reason you can't use the Text Blitter's "callback" at the same time as a shader, I had to resort to some clunky methods to get the tile data to display and update, which means that the framerate suffers pretty badly the more layers you give it in the back (what I've got here is pretty much the limit on depth), and also that I can't use anything beyond the normal/extended ASCII set for tiles, which, removing the unusable ones, ends up being about 220 tiles.
However, it DOES also have support for non-box-shaped tiles. Those weird purple tiles are testing that, where each "layer" of depth can be turned on or off. I just never made any tools to make these weird tiles a thing, so there's only the test garbage.
I don't know if I'll ever use it for anything, but it was a lot of fun to make!
Fifth, that's very impressive! I also remember Rolleroo which had a similar 3D look, although I don't think you were using shaders for that. I've never used text blitter for tiles, or shaders, so a lot of the explanation went over my head. I'm very impressed with the colour blending (is that what it's called?) that adjusts the shade of the tiles depending on their z-distance from the camera. Is that done with a shader or using some other Fifth magic? Good to see you're still using MMF!
Yeah, the Z-axis color fade is done in the shaders.
Glad you remember Rolleroo! I was going for something similar at the time, but had no idea how to use shaders, so that one was all Text Blitter tricks. Which meant I could adjust the size of the tiles, but not resize the tile's graphics. So any time a tile got smaller in that game, the edges would slowly be cropped away. It was kinda weird. It also had a ton of other issues.
And it's MMF (or CF) forever! ...since I don't think I'd be able to learn anything else, heh.
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Edited by BigAl0104
