Freescape

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The Freescape engine is an early 3D game engine used in games such as 1987's Driller.

1 History
2 Technology
3 Software using the Freescape engine
4 See also
5 External links

History

Developed in-house by Incentive Software in 1986, Freescape is considered to be the first proprietary 3D engine ever to be used in computer games, although the engine was not licensed outside of Incentive's own titles. The project was originally thought to be so ambitious that according to Incentive designer Ian Andrew, the company struggled to recruit programmers for the project, with many believing that it could not be achieved.

The engine was originally designed for the ZX Spectrum and IBM PC, but the success of the engine led to later ports to the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Commodore Amiga and Atari ST.

Technology

The Freescape engine allows the generation of complete 3D environments. This environment consists of a floor and any number of primitives that memory and processor speed realistically allows for. These primitives are "cuboids", pyramids, rectangles, quadrilaterals, pentagons and hexagons. A further primitive, "sensor", is used for gaming purpose to detect the position of the camera relative to the sensor in the game world.

Freescape was designed with limited hardware in mind and as such contains a number of inherent limitations that are necessary to enable the games to run properly on these computers:

Individual regions are restricted to a size of 8192 × 4096 × 8192 units. These units are arbitrary but each region always corresponds to the dimensions.
The engine does not allow for fractional movements. Each movement - camera or object - must be a multiple of one unit.
Objects in the 3D world can only be placed at 64 unit intervals, for example, 0,32,64 or 128,128,32.
Objects may not overlap.
All objects possess a "bounding cube", for which detection rules apply as per a cube, i.e. no overlapping.