As far as old-school 3D effects go, I like this tutorial on ray casting: <a href="https://permadi.com/1996/05/ray-casting-tutorial-1/" rel="nofollow">https://permadi.com/1996/05/ray-casting-tutorial-1/</a><p>It's great to see something similar on the effects used in driving games, which I always imagined to be akin to raycasting's vertical slices drawn horizontally.
This page is such a gem. I stumbled upon it many years ago, when making a classic pseudo-3D racing game for a hacked (and very underpowered) graphing calculator. Never ended up finishing it though. Turns out without debugging, floating point calculations or any real knowledge of C you struggle.
Kinda cool, I've never seen these techniques all in one place before. Growing up, I thought that SNES mode 7 scaling was so cool:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_7" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_7</a><p>The article mentions about halfway down the page that what made the 80s road rendering technique possible was racing the beam. Where say an Atari 2600 would toggle the color at certain pixel counts as the TV's electron beam swept the screen, producing graphics that seemed otherwise impossible from such underpowered hardware:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJFnWZH5FXc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJFnWZH5FXc</a><p>Some engines allowed for say 8 hardcoded sprites this way by toggling colors at each sprite's position, with various rules about overlapping, so sprites would flicker sometimes when they were next to each other.
You cango pretty far with fake 3D.For example you can take the same type of technique but then additionally move vertical "bars" of eight pixel (going along the entire screen) and it feels like the car/bike is turning more.<p>Here's an example from the early 90s in a PC DOS game (Word Rally Fever, heavily inspired by Power Drift):<p><a href="https://youtu.be/tn4lK2-pUxw" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/tn4lK2-pUxw</a><p>FWIW it was made by friends of mine, got published by Team 17, and I was a beta-tester of that one :)
I love the ingenuity, I also love youtube documentaries on this topic, but... as a child (in the 90s), I did not like these pseudo 3D racing games at all!<p>Mode 7 on the SNES was usually fine. I don't know how accurately it rendered a single flat surface in 3D, but it felt real enough and responsive enough. Except for the very rare cases where they simulated non-flat surfaces (Speed Racer, Super Off-Road), even though that was technically much more impressive.<p>The effect just didn't work for me - it didn't feel like turning, it just felt like what it was: The game displaying a "left turn" animation and telling you that your car will now start drifting to the right if you don't press left. And that felt more like playing a Game&Watch toy.
I remember Vroom killing the game on Atari ST : <a href="https://youtu.be/Z-RELFjDu_8?si=giyiDpRqUPNSNEK9" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Z-RELFjDu_8?si=giyiDpRqUPNSNEK9</a>
Insane depth of view with fluidity for the time