[FRandallFarmer]

Though they may look similar, overlapped in developement, shared key staff and infrastructural pieces, Maniac Mansion and Habitat had very different renderers and user interfaces.

MM used sprites for animating characters (severely limiting the number in a location at once) and it used characterset remapping for scrolling backgrounds and magic slipping maps to provide a sense of depth.

Habitat was a 2.5d renderer where every forground object was seperately rendered each frame and every background object was rendered each state-change. Any objects could be in front/behind any other objects at any time. Sprites in Habitat were used only for UI elements: The speach-bubble "quip" and the proto-pie-menu/cursor for commands.

[egypturnash]

Huh, I always figured they shared a lot more underlying tech based on the images I've seen! Especially given that I remember hearing the maximum number of avatars in a single location was eight. My entire experience with it was like a half an hour looking over the shoulder of someone logged into Club Caribe and various magazine articles, though.