Gear up for battle! Whether it’s an invading robotic army or hostile megafauna, Cutter Slade’s ready to take on any threat to the planet of Adelpha and its p...
Oh wow, I never expected a follow-up to this. Like ninjan said - it was peak software rendering. It essentially drew a metric buttload of sprites to show a lumpen heightmap. It even abused that for a few special effects, like a scanning grid that would’ve been nightmarish to recreate before shaders existed. Games barely had z-buffers.
But this was right when everybody bought a 3D accelerator card. Quake 3 Arena came out six months later and required one. Unreal Tournament supported software rendering up until UT 2004, but even with Michael Abrash optimizing so hard that removing instructions actually hurt performance, a cutting-edge Pentium 4 could get walked by a Voodoo card.
This soft reboot looks appropriately silly for what made the original fun.
Oh wow, I never expected a follow-up to this. Like ninjan said - it was peak software rendering. It essentially drew a metric buttload of sprites to show a lumpen heightmap. It even abused that for a few special effects, like a scanning grid that would’ve been nightmarish to recreate before shaders existed. Games barely had z-buffers.
But this was right when everybody bought a 3D accelerator card. Quake 3 Arena came out six months later and required one. Unreal Tournament supported software rendering up until UT 2004, but even with Michael Abrash optimizing so hard that removing instructions actually hurt performance, a cutting-edge Pentium 4 could get walked by a Voodoo card.
This soft reboot looks appropriately silly for what made the original fun.