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

[inlimbo]

If you take a look at the second video you can see the seaming of the approximate geometry pretty clearly. And if you play the game, or spend some significant time watching the first longplay, you'll run into some rooms that take advantage of the occlusion provided by the approximate geometry that I'm pretty sure would be impossible via cubemap alone.

What AITD New Nightmare did with dynamic lighting on the playstation is still impressive as ever but I'm more interested in a dynamic camera in this case.

 

[inlimbo]

But now you've got me doubting myself so I'll see if I can turn on wireframe in ePSXe when I get home.

 

[Nesh]

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.

I wonder how they did it

 

[milk]

But now you've got me doubting myself so I'll see if I can turn on wireframe in ePSXe when I get home.

Exactly what I was gonna sugest. Would settle this cery quickly. For occlusion, my guess would be they are indeed aprocimating the silhouettes with geometry, but maybe that's all. Just a couple layers of flat cutouts projected into a spherical dome around the camera.

Is there any point in the game where the camera actually tracks sideways/fowards rather than just rotate within a fixed center-point? Ignoring the full 3D scenes, of course.

 

[milk]

I wonder how they did it

My guess is just what I said. Roughly aproximate BG geometry with polygons, but project their pre-baked renders on top of their blocky world, and just use good old gourad shaded per vertex lighting.

It looks better than your average gourad shading on PS1 because they've tessellated those scenes quite finely.

The fixes camera angles allows them to optimize each scene very tightly, so the artists could place polygons exactly where they are the most needed. I'm sure they have a completely different proxy for every single angle.

At some points you may almost be fooled into thinking it's per pixel, but there are instances where its clearly not the case.

The baked in high detail lighting just masked in/out by the low detail dynamic system fools us into thinking all the fine detail in the lighting is dynamic, but it's our imagination doing half the work.

 

[see colon]

But now you've got me doubting myself so I'll see if I can turn on wireframe in ePSXe when I get home.

Did you ever turn on wireframe mode?

 

[inlimbo]

No, I got sidetracked by the hell that was my workplace last year and none of epsxe's basic plugins support wireframe anymore. I'll get around to it one of these days.