Looks real to me but I am not super familiar with Tomb Raider 1. Right off the bat I notice that she has a ponytail and sun glasses. (IIRC in the final and E3 beta she has her hair in a bun and no sun glasses.)
Never heard of this till now. Got a hefty amount of views already, too. I must have missed the memo Here's the video for anyone interested.
Yes, it is real. There's a few screenshots of early Tomb Raider 1 builds looking like this in various gaming magazines. The footage wasn't leaked, it has been officially released. It's great to finally see better quality footage of this build. Also, there's a 20th Anniversary of Tomb Raider book releasing October this year. It will contain information about cancelled Tomb Raider games. Tomb Raider Anniversary Edition is already confirmed to be present: clicky I wonder what other games got canned.
Thank goodness free cameras like that weren't available at the time. It would completely ruin the experience. Also they really did a good job with the final camera. I wonder how powerful was the PC running this. The model sharpness is like the 640x480 with video card, not the 320x240 Saturn, PS and PC low settings.
I wouldn't mind playing the game with a camera like that. While it would have indeed changed how the game felt, it could have given a different feel a second or third time around.
Based on the video's description, it sounds like that Planet Lara fansite is in possession of this early build.
I doubt this is running on a PC circa 1996. More likely it's running on an emulator. The walls and the ground aren't perfectly straight, it curves when the camera moves. Look at :52 to see what I mean. PC games don't do that, but a PS1 game being emulated on PC would. The Tomb Raider video looks like it's using the gte accuracy hack which kinda helps but doesn't completely fix it (unlike the hack used in the video above).
PC games used to jitter as well before there were 3d cards. This is clearly a PC build. You can see this by the colour depth alone.
It's a PC build, footage of it has been around for years from the old Planet Lara website showing it running on a PC. This is the first time direct feed has been shown though. It's nice to see but I'd be a little more impressed if they released it for fans to play around with, the 20th anniversary stuff so far had consisted of things we've seen before.
I guess you learn something new everyday. I always thought the polygon jitter was a PS1 thing. I don't remember it happening on the Saturn or 3do, but I guess it happens with them too?
Wasn't that also a thing with the NV1 3D cards and/or anything based on quads? However, an early demo like this already running with acceleration is somewhat unlikely.
It's because, without accelerated graphics, there's no Z-buffer - and without a Z-buffer, the geometry is not as accurate (not "perspective correct"), and that's what causes the bendiness of the polygons. This is the case with any system that lacks a hardware Z-buffer.
Lack of Z-Buffer cause this, but Quake 1 and 2 had trembling models, but i've heard it was because the animation system used fixed point instead of float, resulting into no perfect accuracy of the vertex positions for each frame.