From: bise@aludra.usc.edu (Daniel W. Bise)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games
Subject: Wolfie Amazement (Was: Wolf 3D Cannibalism)
Date: 18 Aug 1992 13:56:38 -0700
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: aludra.usc.edu

vargish@sura.net (Nick Vargish) writes:
>>IBUJAM@ASUACAD.BITNET> writes:
>>[...]
>>Apogee has done some wonderful work in the PC gaming arena. 
>>I only hope that they use better judgement in 
>>the future; Wolf 3d is morally indefensible.
              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This is hilarious, BTW. As if "moral defensibility" were any
kind of requirement for an entertaining game.

>Regardless of your ideas of "morality", Wolf 3D is one of the most
>amazing shareware games ever written

I'll give you that, but it might be a little less amazing than
it seems to be, thanks to some graphical trickery now being
discussed over in comp.graphics:

	Newsgroups: comp.graphics
	From: slumos@unlv.edu (Steve Lumos)
	Subject: Re: wolf 3D

	Try watching the game VERY closely. You will begin to 
	notice alot of little tricks that they use. The guards 
	just bitmaps and have only 8 positions. Look carefully 
	at the skeletons you see hanging around they only have 
	ONE position! The idea is that you are so busy playing the
	game that you never notice that as you walk around a 
	skeleton, you are always looking at the front.

	Anyway, it DOESN'T generate images at all. It stores 
	them on a hidden page and copies them.

	From: ads@canon.co.uk (Adam Billyard)
	Subject: Re: wolf 3D

	[...]
	The trick used in Wolf3d to get fast texture-mapping 
	seems to be to use a non-regular scaling of a pixmap.  
	If you look at the images generated you'll see that 
	the texels are not perspective projected - they're
	simply scaled (axis-aligned) rectangles.  This gives 
	an OK result but has the nasty side effect that you're 
	not really texturing polygons. You're scaling images.  

	This means that the larger the texels the more raggy the 
	edge of the "polygon" is.  The people that did Wolf3D
	cunningly arranged for the very "fat pixels/texels" to be
	clipped off the edge of the viewport in most cases since
	they only get real big as the scaled pixmap gets "close"
	to the view plane.  It is a really good effect, but not 
	much use for general 3D geometry. 

	Also, keep in mind that in your "younger days" the 
	processors were a lot slower - well thats what I tell 
	myself when I see some of these games. :-)

>The latest issue of _GameBytes_ (issue #4) has a great interview
>with the guys who wrote Wolf-3D... well worth checking out if 
>you enjoyed Wolf-3D. And it has the story behind the copyright 
>on the original game.
>No, I'm not affiliated with GameBytes... just a satisfied customer.

I agree, this is a great interview (and I'm no big Wolfie fan)! 
The best stuff I've read in GB to date. I hope they do more of
this sort of thing.

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