Game Engine
Table of Contents
Overview
Time Commando (TimeCo) was an evolution of the tooling created during the development of Little Big Adventure 1 which was based on Alone in the Dark (AITD). These gamees shared pre-rendered backgrounds with 3D software rendered characters, a technique use in the early 90s due to hardware constraints. AITD was the pioneer of pre-rendered backgrounds and use static images that were hand drawn on top of wireframes of a 3D scene. Each image corresponding to a different camera view of the scene.
LBA did it differently and use isometric sprite composition in order to create a scene and use a single isometric camera view panning around the environment. The isometric scenes were composed in a grid format with limited width, depth and height. Various objects were composed by a number of sprites following a set of standard dimensions and then placed together to create scenes. They are also used for collision detection with slopes to make the height transition smoothly.
The team continue the trend in Time Commando (TimeCo) and used pre-rendered backgrounds with video motion. A similar technique used in LBA movies but improved to be used not only as cut-scenes but in-game backgrounds with depth information attached and other scene information.
TimeCo had another enhancement by adding texture mapping to their 3d model formats, feature then used in LBA2.
