Technology
Other 3D games of the same era include Falcon (1987), Elite (1984), Starglider 2 (1988), or Hovertank 3D (1991). Alpha-Waves (1990) brought a number of innovations to the 3D gaming experience that make it a significant landmark in 3D gaming:
- No visible depth-of-field clipping (objects disappearing in the distance)
- True 6-axis motion and rotation (as opposed to simpler movements in Hovertank 3D for example)
- Large (for the time) number of 3D objects displayed simultaneously
- First gameplay relying primarily on interaction with 3D objects
- No bit-mapped graphics, even the player was drawn in 3D
- Full-screen 3D display, as opposed to 3D occupying a small fraction of the screen.
- First simultaneous 2-player split-screen mode on a single computer (only on the Atari ST and Amiga versions)
Alpha-Waves ran on 16-bit microcomputers that did not have hardware floating-point capabilities. For that reason, it performed all perspective and rotation computations using only integer arithmetics. In order to avoid using integer multiplications, which were expensive at the time, it described objects using displacements that were multiples of a base vector. For instance, a square in the Z plane would have been described as "+1X +1Y -1X -1Y". As a result, the vast majority of geometric computations were performed using only additions, not multiplications.
The computation of sine and cosines was similarly done using only integer arithmetic. All angles were represented using not degrees, but 1/256th of a circle. A lookup table contained the value of the sine multiplied by 32767. Multiplying this value by a 16-bit coordinate gave a 32-bit value, and the 16-bit high-half of that result was used.
Another key to performance was a highly optimized polygon-filling routine, which used a number of tricks, including an assembly version of Duff's device to achieve a very high fill rate, besting the in-house self-modifying routine Infogrames was using at the time.
The Atari ST and Amiga versions were written in assembly language. The DOS version was written in C.
Read more about this topic: Alpha Waves
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