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Blue Byte's web site for their upcoming title Dragon's Lair 3D has been updated recently with six great new screen shots from the game. This remake of the classic Dragon's Lair is looking to be very polished, and quite an upgrade from the original. Although the game is completely 3D with a very advanced engine, the actual game characters themselves are rendered as pseudo-cartoon animation, similar to the 'anime' look of the PlayStation title Fear Effect or the animation of Fox's television series Futurama. Special effects such as fire, smoke and realistic shadows are also displayed in the new shots.

For those who never saw the rare original coin-op game, Dragon's Lair was an extremely unique title which used pre-drawn animated cartoon footage on video disc to create a game with totally unmatched visuals at the time. The game was extremely linear, due to its pre-recorded nature; this new incarnation will be quite the opposite, with a go-anywhere freedom and a much larger, longer adventure.

Here's a clip from the web site explaining some of the technical details about the game engine:

Dragon's Lair 3D's (TM) state-of-the-art 3D rendering engine will support Glide, Direct3D and OpenGL compatible 3D accelerators. Planned features include ultra-high-resolution and color depth combinations (up to 1600x1200x32 w/32-bit Z-buffer), with full scene anti-aliasing. The engine uses BSP-tree sorting, visibility portal calculations and dynamic Level-Of-Detail (LOD) switching to optimize performance on low-end systems and maximize performance and realism on high-end systems. Radiosity-based light maps, combined with dynamic diffuse lighting, will produce extremely realistic environments with proper light dispersion and shadow effects.

Finally, the beautiful world of Dragon's Lair 3D (TM) will be brought to life through the use of real world physics modeling and inverse kinematics, and will be populated with dangerous and extremely intelligent creatures featuring AI based on hierarchical Finite and Fuzzy State Machines.

New Dragon's Lair 3D Screen Shots

Dragon's Lair 3D Web Site

Blue Byte (add to watch list)

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