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There was a 3d game using software rendering spheroids instead of polygons... do you remember the name?

I've just found it by myself: Ecstatica

Ballz

Spheroids!!! Coming soon to a demoparty near you!

Ecstatica was FREAKY

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=22196 similar engine

yes unseen but... spheres are not exactly spheroids. Spheroids looks much better for modelling

Spheres are spheroids.

What is a spheroid?

Spheroids is a creative collective of low surface brightness which will leave its mark upon in the scene in 2007. It will then disappear into the dark matter never to be seen again.

I tought a spheroid was the surface of revolution you get when you rotate an ellipse about one of its axis. So a sphere is in particular a spheroid, since a circle is a particular ellipse.

How can you use spheroids instead of polygons? Something is fishy here. I sense a plot to overthrow the King.

your mom's a spheroid

It's so interesting how some games use preety rare ways to render before they got used to polygons. I am still not sure how Ecstatica is rendering those spheroids. Also, what kind of rendering is that on Rescue on Fractalus? Wicked!!!

unlimited bobs!

Optimus, it is easy. First, backgrounds were prerrendered with z-buffer (this means not the full screen is rendered, only a little part where the characters are, it is very fast. This was done the same in Alone in the Dark I to III). Then, spheroids are rendered on top, using also the z-buffer. The time to render a spheroid is a bit higher than a triangle of the same size, but you get something that looks much more detailed. I suppose it renders spheroid by spheroid with parallel raytracing. This kind of raytracing, without reflection and parallel is fast as hell and also, it could be easily done with integers, so the sqrt you need is in a lookup table, being very fast also. Also, I suppose spheoids are some way ordered before rendering, so the need to calc illumination is minimum. Any other speeding up methods for raytracing could be used here too, like rendering borders at 1x1 and interpolating color at 4x4 for example.

I did years ago something similar with spheres, and in nowadays computers, I suppose you can render thousands or maybe dozens of thousands spheres/spheroids in a decent resolution and fps. For convex surfaces it rules, but the main problem are concanve surfaces...