Topic: Miyamoto: 'I Wanted to Experience Hyrule in 3D'

[King of Twitch]

Miyamoto: ...one thing I remember very well from that time was when my wife saw our child playing Ocarina of Time. She said, "When I'm just looking at it, I think it's pretty, but I'd never want to try it." I thought, "Something has to be done about this!" (laughs).

Iwata: Yes, I remember that (laughs).

Miyamoto: I mean, she'd never really cared about games at all before, and here she was, finally showing an interest, and yet… It felt as though a customer had come right up to the entrance, but then she'd turned around and gone back home.

Iwata: The roots of your later "expanding the gaming population" concept can be traced to that incident, right?

Miyamoto: They can (laughs). I thought, "No! I was so close!" That's what started it.

Thought this quote was at least interesting. MM wasn't exactly expanded audience friendly but Smash Brothers, Paper Mario, and Luigi's Mansion definitely were on that track.

[MaryJane]

@MB
Lol! Thanks for the explanation, and I hope I didn't sound arrogant or presumptious.

For WW, I'm not sure I understand what you mean about flattened cartoon effects. I saw a tech-demo at NJIT last week of cartoon gags remade in 3D. One of the ones I thought looked best was a flattened Daffy Duck rocking back and forth as he floated slowly to the ground (like a piece of paper or feather). So it can be done, but I don't know what specific elements of WW you mean. A lot of the cartoon effects were in 3D I thought, but I did misread your original comment on WW.

As for LttP in 3D, like I said and you restated so eloquently, I'm not a programmer, but I'm very 'into' 3D. I know about basically dual displaying an image to create 3D, but as that is what they did for Clash of the Titans with subpar results, I hope that isn't what Nintendo did for OoT. The new conversion process Hollywood studios are trying is basically the dual image trick, and then drawing in additional visual cues with CGI. I was thinking Nintendo, for whom quality is everything, would redraw/recode the game to be viewed in 3D, rather than go the cheap way which often leads to the cardboard cut-out look. And from the preliminary reviews of OoT, it seems they went the quality route.

Edit: @Frodo
That is an interesting quote and just goes to show that women really do control the world, even if they don't mean to... Miyamoto's wife inadvertently partially led to the greatest shift in video game history, by being disinterested in video games. What's MM though? That kind of came out of nowhere without any reference.

[Ian Sane]

I'm assuming any 3D remake of A Link to the Past would use polygons.  Switching a sprite game to polygons would be like making a new game.  With Ocarina of Time they can take the existing game, port it over to the 3DS, and then replace the existing models and textures with better ones.

For LttP in 3D to really mean squat it would have to be reworked into a full 3D (as in polygons; stupid Nintendo goofing up our old terms) game.  LttP uses a fixed top down view.  Seeing THAT in 3D would be pretty lame.  So they would need to convert it to full 3D where you're going to need a controllable camera and probably z-targetting and the whole works.  Meanwhile since LttP was designed to show only one screen at a time it's current layout might not work in 3D where you can see far off in the horizon.  There might be points in LttP that the draw distance could go on for miles and that hardware can't handle it without pop-up.  So they would have to tinker with the layout to get it to work.  Plus because it uses one screen at a time it might goof up certain puzzles.  Or because the enemies could pursue you off their individual screen the difficulty might be thrown out of whack with hugely difficult areas caused by enemies "seeing" you before they could in LttP and pursuing you when you're aleady dealing with several enemies from the current screen.  It is not even close to a quick port job.

Unless you just want to see sprites in front of your face like some 3D Sega Master System game.  I think OoT would be more impressive.

[MegaByte]

@MaryJane:
The difference is in how stereoscopic 3D is generated. For 3D (polygon) games, all of the information is already there, you basically just have to set the camera from two different angles, and BAM, stereoscopic 3D.
For cartoons (not Pixar/Dreamworks) and movies where they didn't use multiple camera for filming, you have multiple flat planes, which have to be manually positioned.
With Wind Waker, you have 3D models, but they used cel-shading to make them look more 2D. The problem is that there is still an invisible third dimension, which would become apparent to the eyes if you used the first method for generating the stereo video. It's hard to describe, but everything would probably end up looking like plastic. It would work, but it would lose some of the cartoon animation quality. I'm sure there are ways around it, but it would be tricky to do, especially in real-time.