Mike Works said:Here I'll explain it to you, it's pretty simple (and I'm not trying to sound condescending, i was just confused as to what you were saying);
A pre-rendered background is like a picture. So imagine drawing a picture, putting it on the floor, then putting an army man on it's back and laying it on top of the picture, all the while you're viewing the picture standing up. So you can move the army man around (on his back, so it looks like he's standing up) against that picture. The army man can turn around, pivot, etc because he's in 3D, but the picture can't change perspective because it's only 2D. It's just a picture. If you were to lean to the left or change the perspective/angle of the piece of paper, it wouldn't work, the perspective would just get distorted.
Now imagine putting that army man in a doll house (heresy!). The doll house is a 3D environment- if you were to lean to the left or rotate the doll house, you'd see it in a 3D space, you could view the room the army man's in from any different angle.
That's the difference between 3D environments and pre-rendered backgrounds. Pre rendered backgrounds are basically just static pictures, often with a 3D character (and some 3D objects) moving around "on top of the picture". Thus a game like this would not work at all with pre-rendered backgrounds, since you could never change the perspective on the fly. Every single first person shooter basically has to be in 3D, since most pre-rendered backgrounds require a third person perspective so you can see your character move around on top of the picture (like Resident Evil or the playstation Final Fantasy games).
Does that explanation make sense?
Yeah I was wrong AND I said what I meant wrong. I think what I meant to say was that all the 3D environments looked better than the character models, like as if someone slapped a bunch of photos over the walls (backgrounds) and the objects (environments) therein. I realize what I'm describbing is basically texture mapping...but they just don't look like textures to me...they look semi-photo-realistic, especially when compared to the character models.
The envirnments/backgrounds look really good, like Baten Kaitos REmake good...only...in real-time 3D. Cube-Mapping FTW?