“It gave a real sense of depth to the world.” “It was doing real, 3D math, and making this grid scale slightly, stretch slightly,” Dave explained. Objects shimmered slightly, the result of bilinear filtering, a process baked into graphics cards that smooths out textures when objects are rendered larger or smaller than their native resolutions.Įverything, from characters and items to structures such as the cabins and towers in Act I, expanded and shrank in Perspective Mode, an option only available to users running 3D cards that the game supported. Trees and buildings, for example, seemed larger or smaller as players moved closer or further away, and scrolled by at a different speed than other objects in the foreground and background, creating a parallax effect. The game passed those textures to the video card, which painted them onto two polygons and then stretched them vertically and horizontally so that they appeared larger or smaller depending on the player-character’s position. His idea was to take the texture stored in every miniature tile and rotate it just a smidge, so that it wasn’t quite orthogonal, as players moved around the screen. A more granular layout facilitated Dave’s pseudo-3D solution, which he called Perspective Mode. This meant that objects such as player-characters, monsters, treasure chests, and items can occupy the same squares on a grid by standing in smaller squares within each larger square, an impossibility in the first Diablo. Each diamond-shaped tile is composed of several smaller diamond tiles that allow for some overlap. Like the original game, Diablo IIunfolds on a grid, with one major difference. (Lord of Destruction expansion shown.)Ī solution occurred to him late one morning. Thanks Paul! That’s awesome!Ī 3D graphics card was required to enable Diablo 2’s Perspective Mode. Paul Simary just mentioned this article on Gamasutra where more details about the perspective mode where revealed.

Diablo 2 save game map editpr