Hacker News Reader

Comment by reificator | Hacker News Reader

I remember being amazed by Prince of Persia's crazy fluid animations when it came out. Very impressive game and an impressive port as well.

I should point out though, where it has the Bitshifters logo multiple times on the loading screen... It's cut off in the middle one and the `f` looks more like a `t`.

View on HN

He has actually taped his son doing the game stunts in real life, and applied a very early motion tracking methodology to produce the fluid animation. So much ahead of his time.

His son? I think it was his brother. His sister played the princess IIRC. He might have used a video camera from his father to capture the movements. Jordan Mechner was still quite young when creating POP.

It was his brother, David Mechner. http://www.gameanim.com/2014/01/07/prince-persia-rotoscopy/.

> I remember being amazed by Prince of Persia's crazy fluid animations when it came out.

Rotoscoping for you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotoscoping

Later used in Another World and Flashback to similar effect.

For a more current use of rotoscoping, see the movie A Scanner Darkly.

There is some original footage here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gC3WEwSJoHs

The loading screen is an homage to Acornsoft's loading screens:

https://i.imgur.com/SayhPeA.png

If you were loading from tape, the loading progress would go in the box inside the blue logo at the bottom.

No I get the homage to screens of that era, I'm just pointing out that it turns bitshifters to bitshitters.

Just one opinion, but I think this is a funny and cool name.

Not sure how it would be in other dialects, but I expect most British English speakers would think it a bit shit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com