Microsoft Excel: Revolutionary 3D Game Engine?

via Josh Morey (www.JoshMorey.com) Gamasutra - Microsoft Excel: Revolutionary 3D Game Engine?

Maybe not a revolutionary game engine - but a pretty cool demo of what one can do with Excel!

According to the author:

Cutting-edge computer games use different graphics subsystems -- so-called 3D graphics engines. Source (used in Half Life 2), Unreal Engine (Unreal Tournament), idTech 4 (Doom 3), CryENGINE2 (Crysis) or Clever's Paradox engine are well-known among the players and the game industry experts.

It's time to learn a new 3D game engine name: Microsoft Excel.

It is understood that Excel is an all-round office tool, but probably it is unknown that it has a bunch of features that makes Excel a high-class 3D graphics engine.

In this article I will demonstrate Excel's arithmetical facilities, the embedded rendering subsystems (there are two of them!) and the revolutionary approach which might just cause a paradigm shift. I hope you will discover that Excel effectively and efficiently incorporates practicality, tons of features, the multi-platform portability and the high performance with the unique and futuristic 3D engine features.

The chapters even have demo programs and movies created with the Excel 3D engine.

And here are a couple of the cool videos! Awesomeness!

In the first one - each cell in Excel has been used as a pixel. The author calls this Excel-native Cell Graphics (ECG).

The next one is called Office-level Graphics Abstraction Layer (OGAL).