Trigger Happy Wireframe 3D was a nice start, but now it’s old hat. Real tanks don’t look like that. In two dimensions, you join the dots; in three dimensions, you join the lines. It was time to color in the surfaces, and in the early 1990s game types such as aircraft combat simulators, driving games and more tank games began to do this, while polygonal animated human forms first appeared in videogames with the martial arts game Virtua Fighter. Remember: a polygon (“many sides”) is any flat shape drawn with straight lines. A triangle, a square, an icosahedron—they are all polygons. Easy to draw. Easy, with a powerful chip, to draw an awful lot of them. The bloody, rotting zombies in House of the Dead 2 (see fig. 11) are constructed from many differently shaded and shaped triangles, which foreshorten and morph when the figure moves exactly according to the rules of scientific perspective. The play of virtual light31 off these baroque constructions gives them the appearance of solid objects in space in a way that flat graphic drawings (sprites) never accomplished. Shading of light and dark on a flat, static surface (for instance, in a painting) is sufficient to suggest depth _________________ 31 Another coinage by William Gibson, in his novel of that name (New York: Bantam Books, 1994).
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