Mar
3-D Games Overview
History of 3D Games:
First 3D Game was developed before 1985.These 3D Games used to run on 8-bit micros. The first 3D games were flight Sims or space shooters. Flight Sims was not easy to make. They used wire frame models they could move, rotate and so on. That was all 8 bit machines could do.
In late 1980’s the new technology was introduced that was Atari ST, Amigas and PC’s. These machines were 16 bit and it had much more computing power. New methods were introduced. Instead of wireframe models, the games used objects composed of flat polygons. Flat polygons were used to give solid look to objects and shades. Color was associated with each polygon. The polygons were in their simplest forms that is triangles.
In every 3D scene, one or more sources of light were introduced that depends on the position of the object with respect to the light source.
Methods of Shading:
There are several methods of shading:
· Flat Shading
· Gouraud Shading
· Phong Shading
In 1990’s a new technology was introduced called texture mapping. Texture mapping is defined as applying skin on the flat polygons. Textures in some instances also called decals. It is computationally intensive as it requires every pixel look up of the output image. It can also be combined with light to give it different shades.
Good examples of 3D Games are Quake or Descent.
A related technology that was introduced is z-buffering. When drawing complex 3D scenes, there are many overlaps between the polygons when they are viewed by the camera. To overcome this problem and for better results third dimension also called as z dimension was introduced .The main purpose of this method was to discard or replace the pixel that was closer to the camera according to the pixel depth information.
In 1995-1996 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics was introduced. It was 3D accelerator that took the world. It was totally different from general graphic cards. It could only run programs in full screen mode but ran them really fast. It not only draws textured polygons but also smooth them using technology called “bilinear filtering” and also removes jaggy look when the image was rendered.
Many technologies were introduced but today the last technology that I will talk about is tessellation. It is a method of rounding 3D models. It also adds more polygons to a model through some algorithm.
Now days with the emerging technologies 3D games are introduced with realistic view and you can’t even make a difference. For example Doom3, world of War craft etc
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