Can you name another game that does what Chase the Express does...

inlimbo

Newcomer
...with prerendered backgrounds?


If you spend some time with that video you'll quickly realize what they've done with their prerendered backgrounds - they've cut them up and layered them onto simplified 3d geometry. This allows the game to use a limited dynamic camera and honestly it's almost shocking how effective that is.

I don't think I'd ever seen this game in motion until a few days ago, only shots in game mags when i was 15 and 16, intrigued by stealth-action-resident-evil until it reviewed like shit. And back then I figured it was merely using a combination of static backgrounds for interiors and a full 3d scene for exteriors. That it's doing what it's actually doing is incredibly clever and I wish more games had attempted it. Better games. Imagine REmake doing something like this for select scenes (the sheer amount of background animation would limit its use in that game)? Ocarina's castle town market does something similar but it's basic spherical projection of a prerendered background as far as I can tell. It's cool, but it's not nearly as clever. Can you think of another game that does anything like this?

Anyway, despite it's terrible reputation the game is kinda solid. A real 6/10, not the 3/10 its reviews would suggest. I've been playing it for the last few hours.
 
And I guess you could think of what Chase the Express does as proto-megatexturing. And megatexturing is basically what Bravely Default does. More than anything, though, I'm looking for examples pre-Xbox 360
 
Is this somehow different that rendering a 3d object into an image map? It's hard for me to see anything different than that in the video, and if so, there are a bunch of games that use 3d rendered objects as image maps. The trees in Super Mario 64 are an early example. Blast Corps on 64 looks to do something similar at least with the vehicles. And more than a few assets in DooM64 have that look as well. The guns, of course, but also switches and wall textures.
 
The trees in SM64 and the sprites in Doom 64 are just billboarded textures. This isn't that. It's a prerendered backdrop texturing a simplified 3D scene. If you need convincing this isn't just the spherical projection/cubemapped equivalent of billboarding (as in what Ocarina does in the castle town market) here's another longplay where rendering errors caused by emulation clearly show the seams of the geometry the game is rendering:


It's possible some rooms are just cubemaps but considering some of the more some of the more complex occlusion happening in some rooms I doubt even a single one is just a cubemap but I dunno.
 
hmm, maybe FF7 on PS1? the specific scene where you are being chased by spider crab boss. There a short scene where 2D video was in the background and 3D characters in the foreground and the camera moves.
 
I'm not sure it's a cube map at all. I think they just rendered each room out to bake in the lighting and whatnot, and then used those renders to texture the in game environments. I'm pretty sure that's how they textured the vehicles in Blast Corps, also.

There were some Doom texture packs for Doomsday back in the day where people did something similar. They 3d modeled and rendered out all the doors and wall textures with a fair amount of depth, and then turned them into flat image maps to replace the existing artwork.
 
Rare's stuff post-Battletoads after they got their SGI hardware comes to mind? Killer Instinct's backgrounds, etc.
 
I'm not sure it's a cube map at all. I think they just rendered each room out to bake in the lighting and whatnot, and then used those renders to texture the in game environments. I'm pretty sure that's how they textured the vehicles in Blast Corps, also.

There were some Doom texture packs for Doomsday back in the day where people did something similar. They 3d modeled and rendered out all the doors and wall textures with a fair amount of depth, and then turned them into flat image maps to replace the existing artwork.

Well, yeah, that's how prerendering detail works. Plenty of games have done it and plenty of games have rendered (or painted or some combination) entire rooms out as flat images that are then manipulated for occlusion and all that but remain static shots of a room: see Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil, etc. You can accent that technique by using some prerendered camera animation (as in Killer Instinct or FF7 or Fear Effect or what have you) and matching your real-time camera to it but it's expensive (or it was once) and not especially dynamic. You can also prerender detail to standard textures or sprites or whatever, as in Donkey Kong Country/most of Rare's N64 work or the completely static "normal maps" of something like Messiah or Sacrifice or again Rare's early 3D.

What this game is doing that is utterly unique as far as I can tell is that it's taking your basic idea of a series of prerendered 3D backgrounds a la Resident Evil, rendering those backgrounds to a texture sheet, and then building a very simplified recreation of those backgrounds in 3D space that it can then map those textures to, allowing the game to use a truly dynamic 3D camera to a limited extent. In something like Resident Evil those prerendered backgrounds are truly flat images projected as flat backgrounds. They're cut up a little bit to allow depth-based occlusion to happen but it's just layers of flat images on a 2D plane, like layers of stickers in a coloring book or something. Chase the Express is building something akin to a pop-up book by building out actual 3d geometry on which to paste those 2D renders. And it's really damned clever.

I can imagine there are Doom mods that use photo reference and renders as textures. And those count to the extent that they create the illusion of depth when there is none, I guess. If you can show me a Doom mod that leverages the basic principles of RE-style prerendered backdrops and places them in 3D space the way Chase the Express does, that's the kind of thing I want to see.
 
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Well, yeah, that's how prerendering detail works. Plenty of games have done it and plenty of games have rendered (or painted or some combination) entire rooms out as flat images that are then manipulated for occlusion and all that but remain static shots of a room: see Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil, etc. You can accent that technique by using some prerendered camera animation (as in Killer Instinct or FF7 or Fear Effect or what have you) and matching your real-time camera to it but it's expensive (or it was once) and not especially dynamic. You can also prerender detail to standard textures or sprites or whatever, as in Donkey Kong Country/most of Rare's N64 work or the completely static "normal maps" of something like Messiah or Sacrifice or again Rare's early 3D.

What this game is doing that is utterly unique as far as I can tell is that it's taking your basic idea of a series of prerendered 3D backgrounds a la Resident Evil, rendering those backgrounds to a texture sheet, and then building a very simplified recreation of those backgrounds in 3D space that it can then map those textures to, allowing the game to use a truly dynamic 3D camera to a limited extent. In something like Resident Evil those prerendered backgrounds are truly flat images projected as flat backgrounds. They're cut up a little bit to allow depth-based occlusion to happen but it's just layers of flat images on a 2D plane, like layers of stickers in a coloring book or something. Chase the Express is building something akin to a pop-up book by building out actual 3d geometry on which to paste those 2D renders. And it's really damned clever.

I can imagine there are Doom mods that use photo reference and renders as textures. And those count to the extent that they create the illusion of depth when there is none, I guess. If you can show me a Doom mod that leverages the basic principles of RE-style prerendered backdrops and places them in 3D space the way Chase the Express does, that's the kind of thing I want to see.
Here's a link to one of the Doomsday projects WIP, although this is much more recent. The one I remember was from about 2000. But there are other games that prerendered textures. Take a look at Killer Instinct Gold. It used the prerendered 3d backdrops from the arcade game (KI2) and used them to texture 3d backgrounds to save cart space. The helicopter in Orchid's stage is clearly using prerendered textures.
 
I think I misunderstood you initially, you're saying there are plenty of properly 3D games that have prerendered their textures or used photo reference to create some illusion of depth akin to the way SM64's billboarded trees are prerendered as if they're sumptuously detailed 3D pine trees. And that's all very true. What I think makes Chase the Express unique in this respect is that it's not really trying to build 3D environments. It's trying to preserve the same illusion that Resident Evil was trying to accomplish at the time - the illusion of a totally convincing, hyper-detailed 3D space when all you're really rendering is one prerendered backdrop - but doing so in that pop-up book fashion that allows them to use a limited dynamic camera. I think it's clever as shit because it gives you all the advantages of RE-esque games of the era - less render load that you can then use for higher fidelity characters, more characters on screen at any time, higher quality effects - while allowing the camera to actually move to some extent. Seeing that dynamic camera in a Resident Evil game would've been mind blowing at the time.
 
I think it's just prerendered textures on real low poly geometry. I don't really get your "pop up book" analogy, the environments are't built out of billboards like that, just normal for PS1 boxy environments with a fixed camera angle. But there's real geometry there.
 
yeah, there's real geometry there but it's so low poly that it's like stage dressing. not billboards, but carefully arranged cutouts. it only looks right from maybe three angles, so you couldn't put a true third person or first person camera in that environment because it would quickly ruin the illusion. but that's okay all they really need are those fixed cameras on a swivel to sell the effect and it wirks really well. they're not just building your average low poly 3d space, they're building a carefully constructed illusion
 
yeah, there's real geometry there but it's so low poly that it's like stage dressing. not billboards, but carefully arranged cutouts. it only looks right from maybe three angles, so you couldn't put a true third person or first person camera in that environment because it would quickly ruin the illusion. but that's okay all they really need are those fixed cameras on a swivel to sell the effect and it wirks really well. they're not just building your average low poly 3d space, they're building a carefully constructed illusion
The backgrounds in KI Gold would be the same. I think a lot of those objects don't have backs.
 
I guess KI Gold comes close but it's not really what I'm looking for. I'd love to see examples of games going after that Resident Evil/Alone in the Dark/Grim Fandango experience but doing what Chase the Express is doing with its backdrops.
 
While the idea of mapping a prerendered BG into proxy geo sounds interesting, I don't see where that is the case in this game. It still seems to me like just a scrolling panorama in the aame style as streer view or the town market from tLoZ OoT. The camera just scrolls very smothly making it feel slicker. I did not see any parallax ever as I checked random gameplay sections in that video.
 
I guess KI Gold comes close but it's not really what I'm looking for. I'd love to see examples of games going after that Resident Evil/Alone in the Dark/Grim Fandango experience but doing what Chase the Express is doing with its backdrops.

I think KI's arcade version was a more apt comparison as they had the ability to store video backdrops that could be scrubbed through to sync with the camera movement, whereas N64 titles obviously didn't have the luxury of an internal HDD nor significant amounts of ROM storage. I feel like the other consoles of that era, while lacking the performance grunt to do real-time rendering, were also very constrained in their ability to stream larger pre-rendered assets from a 2x(?) CD drive.
 
In fact, i think Alone in the Dark The New Nightmare is doing a better aproximaton of the BG geometry than Chase the Express, only there it is not for the sake camera movement, but for lighting instead.

 
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