Freescape

Thanks!! I got obsessed with it, so that's all I did for a month after work hahaha

The Sentinel is quite interesting indeed! And yes, exactly, I think sentinel is somehow pre-rendered, and you just pan around. But it's still quite interesting, it seems to pan around quite fast, so, I'd be curious to check their polygon rendering techniques

Yeah, The Sentinel renders a full 360-degree view to a 2d buffer each time you teleport and then just does a 2d scroll in that.

I also have a vague recollection that the Z80 versions are near-literal translations of the 6502 per Geoff Crammond’s limited Z80 exposure. So that could be interesting.

I hadn't even seriously contemplated that; especially given that it came out for the BBC Micro — 32kb of RAM total, including the screen buffer — there must be something clever afoot. Maybe it's fully transformed and object-sorted but not yet rasterised outside of the screen boundaries, for a 2d scroll of what's visible plus a 3d draw-in of the rest? Questions that a disassembly could answer!

I doubt that's the case, at least in the Spectrum version. The reaction time for a scroll depends on how much geometry there is around. I believe that the part of the view that is going to be scrolled in is rendered on demand, when the key pressed.

Wow, nice! I am quite impressed with the framerate they get with such a large viewport!