[smokel]

Some items in the inventory, such as the knife, and the book appear to have some kind of "metal shading", which was typically implemented as a modified Gouraud shader. It could all be texture mapping of course, but somehow I doubt that.

And what about these fancy ballroom dresses? https://www.mobygames.com/game/325/alone-in-the-dark/screens...

We can only do two things now: contact the original author, or reverse engineer the binaries! Does anyone know if there is a DOS emulator that allows you to visualize and override RAM access easily?

[pandaman]

Yeah, it had different algorithm to render inventory and also could add/remove some objects to the background (those figures in dresses do not move if I recall, only toggle in and out). The inventory was not free camera with only controls to zoom, so you could do a lot of tricks with pre-computed shading. The general purpose rendering of the animated character and items they held was flat shading though.