History of "Gods Eye View" 3D Game Perspective? 70
Milo_Mindbender asks: "A lot of games today feature a 2D or 3D 'instant replay' system that lets you watch the game you just played on a map or from a third person 3D view. Some multi-player games also let you watch live games in play this way. I'm trying make a time-line on the history of this feature and was hoping the Slashdot crowd could help me out with names, dates and other info on games that had replay features. I think the Army SIMNET tank simulator was the first to have this (called the 'flying carpet') sometime in the late '80s early '90s. References to games with replay are harder to find because it usually wasn't advertised. I'd particularly like to find the first game with user controlled 2D and 3D game replay/spectating and the first replay systems with automatic camera controls creating cinematic 'wide world of sports' quality real-time movies of the game."
Re:No lawsuits, no patents (Score:3, Interesting)
Way back in 90-91 I wrote several replay systems for the Virtual World Entertainment multiplayer cockpit simulator games "BattleTech" and "Red Planet". One replayed the game on a 2d scrolling map (overhead view), another generated a play-by-play description of the game (text plus a map with highlight points marked), a third did a cinimatic 3d view that could either be live or a recorded game. You could manually control the cameras or let the computer do it.
I was thinking about this the other day and decided I needed to look into the history of this feature. I'm pretty sure other people had 3d replay before me, but couldn't remember if anyone had tried to do the cinematic-style with automatic AI camera control.
Re:So... (Score:3, Interesting)
He's R&D at Sony, in other words.
"Developed single-pixel particle demonstration, covering physics based particle motion, use of alpha blending and optimized rendering of this type of particle using VU1 microcode on Playstation II
Developed demonstration of high-speed texture loading (10 megabytes per frame) and presented the technique at Playstation II developers conference and several smaller gatherings.
Developed application to do "zoom from orbit" going from a full-earth weather satellite photo down to a 1 meter resolution image of San Francisco in one continuous zoom. This included development of a new (so far as I know) technique for mapping corrected or uncorrected satellite photos onto a globe with a minimum of distortion.
Research on the consumer ease-of-use, economic and technical issues surrounding downloadable music and music subscription services.
Early testing of a number of Playstation II code libraries in development.
Participation in internal Sony groups dealing with networking and interoperation of Sony products.
Support of misc Sony developers.
One Patent pending"
He's also doing something with macs [apple.com], though that might be unrelated to his work at Sony. He's also a nexistentialist [xyroth-enterprises.co.uk] and a commie [wwug.com].
Isn't google fun?
Anyway, I'm not trying to rain on your parade, Greg, I just hope this wraps up questions about who you are.
BBC TV Game Show (Score:4, Interesting)
There were 5 3D computers in the network, one each generating a first person view and a map view for each of two teams, and then a "virtual camera" in the vision gallery. This was used to get a view into the game zone for the tape, and could select any of the player's viewpoints and many others.
The pilot episode was filmed in late 1991 at Anglia TV in Norwich (England) and was a star network based on 9600 baud serial cables.
By the time the series was actually comissioned in 1993, we had a more robust thin Ethernet solution to the networking problem, and the BBC made one series of the program before it became a casualty of regime change in the organisation.
The program was critically panned, but there was one positive outcome - Craig Charles (of Red Dwarf fame) bought me a drink.