***E3: 3D Playsets
By Rob Glidden
Can branded 3D worlds slay the tired 2D kid's storybook genre? The
latest and largest effort could be Mindscape's Lego project
announced at E3. Due out Spring 97, only a pre-rendered clip was
shown at E3. Producer is Scott Anderson, D3D is the engine.
The idea is that you can use 3D bricks identical in shape to regular
Lego bricks and built a set of pre-designed houses, cars and so forth.
The cars drive, and when the crash Lego police and ambulance come
to help.
You may be able to share Lego objects over the Net, but it seems
there are open issues about just how flexible the product should be.
Will kids want to do free form building, or just play with prebuilt
objects? Is 3D world composing, even from Lego bricks, too hard on
the computer for a consumer product?
And there is still life in the 2D storybook. The Disney/Pixar Toy
Story storybook showed the best image quality on the E3 show floor.
Pre-rendered 3D, 8 bit color, antialiased animation cut to look like
moving sprites on a fixed background. The 8-bit color surpassed any
16 real-time rendering seen at E3--perhaps shows that palette
management will continue to be an important art form. Also,
unaliased real-time 3D sprites will have trouble matching the Toy
Story rendered-on-background look.
Wave Issue 9601 6/23/96 Article 92-01