Universal Videogame List - www.uvlist.net

This refers to rotating and scaling a layer of graphics to achieve a simple perspective effect on a texture-mapped plane. On Gameboy Advance and Super NES, the scaling is in hardware done on a scanline-by-scanline basis. It can also be achieved with software on sufficiently fast system such as is the case with DOS/Windows without 3D hardware, Sega Genesis, Adobe Flash, and more. The technique in both cases can also be modified to stretch portions of the layer at different rates and achieve the illusion of curves in the otherwise flat plane. The result appears to be 3 dimensional even though the layer is still technically 'flat' (2-dimensional).
Notably this effect is limited to manipulating one layer on most systems. Thus sprites or any other object draw on the screen must either have every angle prerendered so that one matching the layer can be selected or an alternate way to scale and rotate the sprites must be found (software rendering for example.)
Zerothis - # 2010-03-10 22:26:08