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Sometimes a technical investigation starts completely by accident – and end with a game engine torn apart, and discovering new cheats and eastereggs.
In my case, all I wanted to do was play Sierra’s 1996 3-D Ultra Pinball: Creep Night again on an emulated Windows 98 PC. It was one of those games I played so much as a child that, decades later, quite a surprising amount of it still seems to live in muscle memory.
While playing it again, however, I noticed something I had obviously never thought about as a child: despite its name, 3-D Ultra Pinball is not really a 3D game in the modern sense.
The tables look three-dimensional. So do the characters, ball, ramps and animations. But there is no polygonal 3D world being rendered in real time. Instead, the game developed by Dynamix relies heavily on pre-rendered 2D graphics.
That observation started a journey into the internals of its engine. 😊
3-D Ultra Interesting: Digital Archaeology in 3-D Ultra Pinball: Creep Night weiterlesen
