Digital Foundry: getting CP2077 to work on the last gen of consoles was a herculean task

[taiwanluthiers]

Verticality is limited to a few roads, terraces or underpasses. The rest is just terrain at different heights but the map is pretty bidimensional. Interiors are also pretty limited too: no building is fully navigable like they said in one of the previews. Also, having so many flat perpendicular surfaces helps a lot with hidden surface removal since all the vertical walls and tall buildings hide everything behind them. A nature scene with grass, trees with branches (which must rendered as masked polygons) is pretty intensive to draw. Not to mention that the lack of perpendicular surfaces makes it more difficult to compute collision and navigation. That's why early 3D games were mostly complex mazes or urban landscapes.

Yea, first game I saw with outdoor scenes was Serious Sam. I forget when it came out... maybe in 2001 or so. Before that there weren't many outdoor scenes, and those that exist looked very cartoonish.

 

[ottakanawa]

If only the game played as well as it looked.