I was just wondering if anyone knew what kind of engine D2 used. Is it 3d or 2d?

they used a 2d engine in 640X480 in 8 bit

ok., thanx fo r the answer. Anyway, it look much like 3d.. Are u sure?

No, it's partially 3D. Sort of isometric 3d. This makes it easier to do some of the light and clipping stuff.

it's all 2d, they rendered the characters and some stuff in 3d and then made these 2d (i dunno how but they did)
go check out www.gamedev.net >articles> game development-> postmortems, theres one guy whos writing stuff about how did they do Diablo 2
or check out their website www.blizzard.com
Ook <ermm....>

Diablo is more than 8 bit colour. Anyway, the rendering of 3D characters isn't that hard. You just put the camera in your 3D editor on a given angle from the character, and you render it to a bitmap. Then, you just use the bitmaps.
This is easier for the artist, as he only has to make one 3D model which can be more time-consuming than just drawing it, but then he can render it at different angles and views, without having more work than changing the camera point of view.
Command & Conquer used 3D Studio rendered images also.

If someone is actually thinking of make pre-rendered units/characters then don't change the camaras point of view! keep it fix just like the players pov is fixed and rotate the model insted belive me it will make things much easier... plus the fact that it would look like the "sun" has a fixed position relative to the object (unless the lightsource was parented to the camara at rendertime).
Anyway if you have questions regarding 3D modeling/animation part feel free to ask me.
neohashi@mail.tele.dk
(my allegro.cc account dosen't like my e-mail address it says that it is allready in use???)
[ July 16, 2001: Message edited by: BjornHM ]

C&C??? Did they did a bad job. I think the in-game GFX suck. I like their videos though.

I red the postmotem on Diablo II and it is made in 8-bit graphics. That pretty inpressive, that a game could look that great in 8-bit graphics. I think the levels were rendered in 3D and saved as a bitmap too. And when you walk behind a wall, the wall looks kind of transparent, I think this can be acheived by alpha blending the player with its ackground....maybe??

hm.. 3d renderedpictures. Sounds interesting, sounds easier than pixel by pixel drawing... Hm. Good idea!

Well. It does use 3D accelartion<sp> for doing some of the scrolling. Cause the game does look better on a Macintosh than my home computer. And my buddy has a 3D Accelarator.

And it also asks you to pick one when you first install.

I dunno about the 3d stuff. Can't use it really. Have a p166 with 64 mb ram and 2mb video nad 4mb accelerator (yes that game runs on my computer, somewhat slower than on a p450 but it runs well enough to play it)

Ook <donate me a new pc! please! >

It's quite obvious that it uses 3d acceleration. Why would it else support d3d, Glide and opengl?... It uses it to light walls faster but it's still not "real" 3D.

Ok, how it was done was
#1. Yes, they used 3d rendered pictures.
#2. Diablo II was not made so that you HAD to have a 3d accelerator card, but when you did, it would not only run faster (I think they might have had flat polygons simply textured with the rendered bitmaps from the ORIGINAL 3d models) but also the foreground would move slightly faster than the background, to make it seem much more lifelike. That would probably explain why Troy said it looked better on his mac then his buddy's PC, cuz it didn't have the different scrolling, and he probably didn't like the way the scrolling looked.
#3. They had really good artists and programmers (okay , so SOME of the GFX were kinda lame, but I'd like to know who could do any better?)

I think the 3d mode was implemented as a Pseudo-3d routine using curves to draw flat surfaces which makes them look real 3d
it is possible to make most 2D games look 3 dimensional in different ways
I think they managed well in Diablo 2 except it makes the graphics a bit blocky which they could've fixed with some AA on the textures... but I guess that would've taken a lot of CPU time
I'd guess you'd need a >1.7GHz CPU for that...

Diablo 2 isnt a 3D game, it supports 3dfx cards for things such as lighting and spell effects...I'm pretty sure its just a well designed isometric tile engine with a number of layers.
There is a program that allows you to open a 3D model from something like 3d Studio Max, and then rotate it to take different frames of animation or whatever. Cant remember what it's called though!