Fan-Made Tomb Raider Remake Adds Multiplayer Using 3D Glasses

We’ve talked about some of the Tomb Raider fan remakes before, and some of them are pretty cool. But one of the projects has got a nice ace up its sleeve: support for two players, on a single screen.

The feature was shown off by Timur “XProger” Gagiev, the lead programmer behind OpenLara. OpenLara is an open-source remake of Lara’s original adventure, which has the added benefit of being able to run in Chrome and Firefox.

It’s been kicking around for a while, but the project now has one other benefit: support for two players within a single-screen, courtesy of those fancy multiplayer glasses that came with some 3D TVs.

If you bought a 3D TV back in the day, there’s a chance you might recognise this tech. When manufacturers were still trying to convince the public that 3D was cool, companies like Sony and LG basically invented a way to overlay two 2D images atop a single 3D screen.

The idea was that one person could wear a set of 3D glasses and get a single 2D image, while someone else could wear another set of 3D glasses and get a different 2D image. The glasses effectively had two left eye lenses or two right eye lenses, and in principle it meant two people could play a splitscreen game with the full width of the TV, rather than half the screen.

In practice, however, it was a pretty rubbish experience. The technology resulted in a normal splitscreen image being stretched to buggery – if you were playing on a standard 1080p screen, your “splitscreen” vision would then be blown out to 1920×540. Some TVs also handled audio better than others: Samsung provided separate earbuds that would play separate audio to both players, whereas other models sometimes would just play the audio from both players through the same set of speakers.

Nonetheless, it’s cool to see someone reusing the idea. You won’t need a fancy 3D TV to do it, although your monitor will need to support 3D. The multiplayer feature isn’t fully finished, though.

FYI, I’d recommend using Firefox: it’s better optimised than Chrome for this sort of thing, and there were a lot of textures and sounds that didn’t properly play in Chrome when I gave it a whirl. But your mileage may vary.


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