Famous visual tricks in vidya

And let's not forget the audiences in racing games.

Got any more mind blowing shit like this?

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The 'boulders' in Super Mario 64's Bob-Omb Battlefield were 2D sprites.

Motherfucker.

Wait, what is this?

I think only the textures are colored. There is no actual lighting.

How.

I realised it was software too after i posted it. Thats pretty weird. Maybe a source port.

None of them.

I'm pretty sure Half-Life's software renderer supports proper colored lighting.

So did Turok. And that trick improved the atmosphere of both immensely.

In the original Super Mario Bros., Bowser is onky shown with a black background to make black look like it's part of his sprite when really that space is clear. Also, the clouds are the bushes.

TECHNOLOGY

Here's a good one. Mega Man is actually two separate sprites which allowed them to get past the 4 color limit.

im more impressed with retro city rampage's port to the NES, he split sprites into 9 tiles in order to fit them in the game but doing so adds flickering

Dang, that's pretty smart.

This game right here damn near maxed out the N64. That's even considering it had it's own special onboard graphic chip.

I knew those wave effects were too good to be true.

What do you think maxed it out. In retrospect I'm surprised it didn't require the Expansion Pak.

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I don't even fucking know how they managed to pull this off.

Meanwhile DK64 neededthe expansion pak because of an unsolved memory exception

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r u tryinta ruse me

Any idea how they managed to make parallax work in MM5 and MM6? That's not supposed to be possible on the NES.

The Crestfallen Merchant in Sen's Fortress is meant to appear taller than the player because the knights of Berenike were supposed to be renowned for their physical strength and stature. In reality, he's the same size as all the other humanoid enemies, but just hovering off the floor a foot or so. You just don't notice this unless you explicitly look for it.

What the fuck have these Forza cunts done?

That's kind of amazing, actually. The default camera angle creates the illusion that he's on the ground, and the player has no reason to change it. Ingenious stuff like this makes me smile.

They've transcended beyond what us mortals could even hope to comprehend.

Isn't this the game that runs at 900p and they acted like it was some grand feat?

what is stephen colbert doing

This is hilarious.
Here's one I particularly like.

DaS is full of little tricks and attention to details.
Completely unnecessary yet still implemented purely for the love of rough geographical accuracy stuff like a very rough firelink shrine you can just BARELY see from way below in a completely different area.

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And this piece of Lordran you can only see up above from Firelink.

LoD isn't new or special.

Borderlands 2 lets you see many areas from others. Hell, you can see the optional bullshit boss, Terramorphous, from the spire where you fight BNK3R or whatever. Shame that Captain Cuck and Pansy Bitchford sully that game so much.

Alas, I can't think of much else in games that is on the level of "holy shit, that's clever", either due to my many concussions, or the fact that it was so clever, that I didn't suss it out when I saw it.

BRAVO BETHESDA

I love this.

That's fucking amazing.

I think his point is that they could have easily made the area directly above the Blighttown Swamp a blinding void of white sky, but they put in the little details because it made the world feel that much more interconnected.

Speaking of LoDs, Super Smash Bros. Melee uses low-res character models for characters in the magnifying glass and in the reflection on Fountain of Dreams. They can't actually accurately replicate the animations of the full character models, but I thought it was neat they rendered separate character models more easily than just shrinking and copying the one already in play.

fallout 4 did this and it took like 5 minutes to go up or down one floor

Probably the same way this was pulled off.

At which part specifically are you talking about?
There's different tricks to make it work.

Also you could permanently lose your companions because of them.
They wouldn't teleport in the elevator with you and just fuck off.
Took them an embarassing amount of time to fix it, and when they did they introduced a new, hilarious bug where every single guard in diamond city was suddently missing his helmet (took them even more time to fix that one).

Let's give a big round of applause for

In Gothic 1 when you go inside areas surrounded by trees the skybox will change to a darker one, thus giving the illusion that the vegetation is denser than it actually is.

I imagine it's the same technological wizardry behind early FPS games cheating out the illusion of 3D even though they only rendered lines and didn't keep track of proper 3D space. The section on Wolfenstein and early FPSs in this video (which is fucking amazing, by the way) has a more detailed explanation.

Talking about smash, the amount of visual tricks in Smash 4 to make that game look as good as it does on WiiU hardware is INSANE.

I don't have detailed pics but if you pay attention to the game and the character models and effects you'll realize everything is extremely optimized and relatively low poly, it's like 90% smokes and mirrors.
Smash 4 is truly a game that only looks high poly, but it's actually really low poly for a modern game, they pulled more tricks in it than any other smash game i think.

Pretty lighting.

A couple of games use the trick of swapping out tiles in the pattern table with new graphics depending on movement, Gravity Man and the first stage of Revenge of the Joker do this. What literally every other game does is just adjust the scroll position of different scanlines to adjust the offsets of backgrounds to make it look like it's moving. You have to remember the nes only has one background layer to work with.

Also excuse the shitty gifs, first time using Sharex's bullshit.

Pls no bully, somehow I mistook that from one of the characters from Rev60

On a side note, mixing 2D sprites with models to create the illusion of a horde is not quite unique to Kingdom Hearts - a good portion of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door has a shitton of sprites that are made from pre-existing models to be used during the crowd scenes, most notably during Chapter 2. Made it annoying for me to try to emulate for a while, but the sprite quality is really decent, I think.

Fucking this. Say what you will about Sm4sh 4, but the dev team deserve some serious props for making a game that looks and runs as well as it does on the Wii U.

Oldest trick in the book dude. Every game engine post the year 2000 included filler versions of various content for creating the illusion of dense and expansive levels. These 2d images always face the camera but you don't notice them rotating from far away because the rate of rotation is indirectly proportional to the distance between them and the player – if you aren't a middle school drop out you should already know this principle from geometry. These images are usually called billboards in game engine lingo but I've seen them referred to as simply sprites or "sheets" in other contexts.

A lot of older LOD systems merely sub out 3d objects for 2d ones provided you are far enough away and if the object density is high enough that you won't notice the transitions in the backline.

Fucking 13 year old Dark Souls players.

NTSC hacks used in games on older consoles are also baller as fuck.

Most static lights are baked into the BSP uv's themselves when the maps are compiled.

Fuck, forgot pic related.

One thing I always loved about the Smash games (aside from just Melee) was, due to their sheer size, the devs had to get really creative. Even something as simple as the characters' faces and eyes being textures instead of full 3D organs inside a full 3D head is a technique you don't see in games nowadays.

I feel dishonest calling it a secret, since it was just something developers had to do during the PS2 generation (Devil May Cry looks better than most modern games), but I guess that's just the way the industry works.

peach has really cute eyes, okay

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And don't even get me started on Mr. Game and Watch. I'm almost surprised Hackurai hasn't tried to put 8-bit Mario in using the same technique.

What the fuck is this post.
Go see a doctor immediately.

I lost my shit when I'd choke Game and Watch as Snake in brawl and he'd just flail around like a ragdoll. It was pretty interesting to watch and made me realize how he was actually animated.

Wow vidya reviewers are idiots.

It was still a good fight

Oh yeah, that reminds me how the entirety of Guilty Gear Xrd is 3D rendered in Unreal 3, but all the in-game animations are done in such a way that it looks like it should be sprite art. Fucking genius, honestly. Shame KoFXIV didn't do it instead.

Brawl was pretty cool, in retrospect.

They were probably playing it on CRTs.

God, Xrd is so good looking. I wish there was a scene for it in my city.

Yeah, shame the gameplay was so shit modders had to fix it. And I distinctly remember the handling being somewhat WORSE in the SSE for whatever reason.

That fucking image. I have no words.
There is no reaction image strong enough to express my feelings.

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This guy sounds like the life of the party

Blood Money did a similar thing by using low resolution and limited AI NPCs for larger crowds in New Orleans and the Hell/Heaven level. You'll generally only notice if you decide to try and kill the entire map.

Let's get meta boys.

nigga, you wait until you lose your wizard license to break out the cheese ammo.

A TV draws pixels in reading order. Top left to bottom right. The electron gun draws a line of pixels and then arrives at the right edge of the screen, then it prepares to draw the next line by moving back to the left edge. When it's moving, the CPU is mostly idle because the gun isn't drawing any pixels. We call this moving/waiting period a "horizontal blank".

There's a value in the RAM you can set to change the horizontal scroll. Increase the value and the background will scroll to the right. Decrease it and the background will scroll left.

So what if you set the scroll value, then wait for the console to finish drawing 20 lines of pixels, then in that 20th horizontal blank period, change the scroll value again, *before the next line of pixels begins drawing?* The background will appear horizontally split in two, with the top half and bottom half with separate horizontal positions. A programmer would only need to write a few lines of code to register an "hblank interrupt" that tells the CPU to change the scroll value during that period. It's very time sensitive so those lines of code had better finish before the line begins to draw, or else you'll get artifacts on the left edge.

In this game's case, the effect is only possible due to the fact that the mountains and the foreground level never overlap, sharing a same horizontal line of pixels.

When taken to the extreme, an HBlank interrupt can give you backgrounds like this.
youtube.com/watch?v=nY9mSkiSSbM

Thank you, that was educational

Where did you learn all this, Cirno?

When you're the strongest you know all these things.

Math class, of course

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skip to 3:49

I certainly liked the music playing during that battle.

Shimomura is a god-tier composer

I mean it's alright, but there's better compositions in the series.

And for reference the walls and rafters is one background that not only changes scroll, but ALSO swaps between these two tilesets multiple times per frame. This is going on while the water effect is happening in another layer, AND the color is changing per line to make the blue sky gradient. Notice how the tileset for the rafters is drawn very uniformly.

CRT electron guns take no time to reset their position. They're solid state and the trajectory is controlled by electromagnets. This means that the time between two pixel draws is all the time you have to adjust the scroll value, which makes the trick much more impressive.

I have no idea if that's the case, but the hblank period on GameBoy is ~201 clock cycles whereas the time between them is ~246 clock cycles during which the VRAM becomes read-only.

GameBoy's just an LCD screen though.

Smash 3DS also has low and high resolution textures for characters. You don't notice it because the screen is so small, but during gameplay low resolution textures are used and when paused, high resolution textures are shown.

That's even lazier than Gran Turismo.

I don't know what's more impressive, the power of the system it runs on or the low amount of data to make this

People were actually fooled by this? No wonder gaming journalism is dead.

We can play the one upsmanship game all day.

This was so fucking cool

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Many people dismiss FMV game play as absolute trash. While the most popular examples show off well and clearly the failures of designing a game solely around watching movies, games like Silpheed on the Sega CD used special compression to render solid color blocks in the background FMV and cleverly interlaced it with playable elements. The game runs at a solid 60 FPS and uses polygonal enemies, but the backgrounds are entirely FMV but are presented in a convincing enough way that it looks as clear as the game on top of it.

all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot-part-1/

Here is a blog that discusses alot of the visual tricks and development process of Crash Bandicoot

Panorama Cotton made extensive use of parallax scrolling to provide a smooth image despite the inherent chunkiness of layered parallax. I'm not quite sure how this one works, but it is a standard Genesis/MD cartridge with no expansions, and runs on the base system. Easily the best looking 16 bit game around.

I think they arbitrarily restricted character movement speed and jump height so they didn't have to render fuckhueg environments. Pit's multi-jumps were the most noticeable since each one would get him about a character height in normal matches, but in SSE he would barely gain height at all.

As long as we're talking about Smash Bros., one thing I always thought was neat was how throw animations (most noticeably Mario's back throw) would scale their speed depending on the weight of the character being thrown. Bowser takes the longest for the animation to complete, whereas a character like Jigglypuff gets thrown almost immediately. I'm sure this cost almost nothing to implement, but it really lends a sense of weight to the characters. It even impacts competitive play naturally, because the timing of certain follow-ups differs greatly depending on the speed of the throw.

Damn. That does look good.

Holy shit this is amazing.

(((Journalists))) are retards, so yeah.

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You're a literal retard if you don't think those models are 👌👌👌

Say what you will about the gameplay, but you can't deny that Xrd is fucking gorgeous. You don't have to like playing the game to acknowledge that certain aspects were done well.

LOL what gay game is this? Care bears 4?

Son of a bitch, I wanted to mention that one.

Similar to this (not by much). In System Shock 2, the tunnel leading to the body of the Many is a 3D model. When you press the shuttle launch button, the model is getting closer to you, giving the impression that it's the shuttle that is moving. The Dark Engine cannot rotate or translate level geometry.

In Duke3D, level designers used many tricks to pretend they had a fancy, real 3D engine: they worked with sprites to make the ending bridge in Hollywood Holocaust (the teleport trick at the begining of the level is also rather neat). There's also that structure in E2L5 that I really like.

I knew something was up with the FoD reflection cause a puff that misses a rest still has its eyes open in the reflection.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the way maps work in Doom.

the bsp concept dates back to the 70s. A lot of people attribute things to Carmack, but the more I look into him, the more I find he just discovered things people did in the past that worked very well for something, and implemented them as an extremely fast solution. He's a great, functional programmer, but he's not some godly wizard or something. The same year Wolf3D came out, ultima underworld had full textured worlds, lighting/shading, a full physics system, slopes, proper 3D polygonal geometry, etc. It has its flaws, it's pretty slow, but it was truly innovative technology built upon previous inventions by the same team.

The game looks good but for some people GG is simply over.

Carmack is a brilliant man that never gave a single shit about video games.

That was the biggest mistake of the entire gaming community, thinking that Carmack was "one of them".
To Carmack video games are just a stepping stone for the next thing he can make/explore, he was never especially attached to the medium, regardless of what he says in public interviews to mantain his legendary persona.

If you read up about his personal life and his past and you look up the "couch story" you'll realize how disposable he considers everything and everyone around him.

You're giving him a bad rap. Carmack does care about video games, but he's got some interesting tendencies likely related to him being high on that autism spectrum. Mittsy and the couch story come to mind. I think he cares very much about video games, considering one of his projects, quake 3, which was entirely directed by him is such a masterful work of design.

It's hard to effectively describe how he appears to operate, but to me, I think function & efficiency over everything possible is accurate enough.

No.
Not giving a shit about video games doesn't automatically make one a bad person.
He's essentially a very efficient semi-sociopath that doesn't hurt people (aside, i guess, giving McGee an indirect mental breakdown but that was related more to McGee not being able to handle the stress of working with him and his team) but instead builds shit.
He's ok in my book.

In FEAR, they used parallax mapping to simulate holes in walls (these holes aren't just used for bullet impacts, there's a place in the game where they used for decoration), they also used several different methods to render lights (a bit like the first Splinter Cell did) and used transparent texture to make it look like they display more polygons (truck tires). I think People Can Fly also heavily used that method in Painkiller (in the Venice level, some arches are flat textures if I remember right).

I'm more surprised no one mentioned Zelda's stairs (didn't they use that in the first Mass Effect too? I remember seeing some real funky shit when watching a friend of mine play)

you're poorly representing him by saying he doesn't give a shit about video games

What about the stairs in zelda?
You mean just making a ramp and slapping stairs textures on there?
Wasn't it very common all the way to the end of the PSX era?
I remember basically every single PSX game doing this.

Hell, i remember some (tho i'll admit, rare) PS2 games doing this, even.

In Kiln of the first flame you can see your bloodstain far into the sky if you died around Darkroot Basin

Sauce?

Last one then I'm off to do productive things instead
There were no more 3D models on pre-rendered backgrounds in Resident Evil 4, but they had fake columns in their guardrails: two sprites plus some clever usage of the floor texture. Nice.

even the first mass effect does this and poorly fakes it with shitty looking bump mapping. it helps that zelda used some sort of inverse kinematics in its animation at least to represent stairs in more dimension while still saving on poly count.

the n64's hardware is so embarrassing. I find it a pathetic joke it took on while the Saturn debuted in the US with a game that looks better than anything ever released on the n64.

I'd like to see that specifically. Best I've seen was a blood stain in the demon ruins being viewed from the tomb of giants

The point of the thread is: "famous visual tricks". So yeah, that's why I included Zelda stairs in there.

#3,4 is paintguardian room in anor londo

what a strong sense of eeriness.

I can never decide if the interiors, especially the castle, in RE4 look nice, or an absolute fucking mess.

Like the exteriors look decent enough, but the interiors of the castle is this strange visual clusterfuck.
RE4 has been trough many, many iterations and redesigns and i think in that part of the game you can feel it more than anywhere else in the game.

the shadow for conker was just a texture that followed him around, I'm pretty sure they mention this in the making of.

John Carmack had a cat, Mitsi, that he was attached to, but when the cat peed on his new leather couch, he got rid of the cat by dropping it off at the animal shelter, where it was presumably put down. He was extremely dedicated to coding and pretty much anything that disturbed him or got in his way was not something he looked kindly on.

davids-book-reviews.blogspot.com/2014/01/masters-of-doom-how-two-guys-created.html

you can still feel the DMC "touch." I feel bad for not having yet played RE4, but that's an entire series I want to get in from the start.

Romero's description of it in masters of doom was great. "She's going down! Down to china town!" to which carmack replied with a "Mmm." before resuming work.

I think he's got a clear empathy problem, but this paints him in a fairly negative and unfair light. Don't you think?

Is Build Engine (Duke 3D) the one where there are no second floors to buildings and stairs are actually teleports to different parts of the map or something?

Mittsy and the couch story?

I'm gonna get so billy for this but Mode 7 on the SNES, particularly in Castlevania IV, was pretty fucking cool. Not that it did anything super interesting, but in a game all about horror and the nightmare's of Dracula's castle, suddenly having rooms spin and rotate on you to simulate the crazy gravity and shit that actually happened in the Dracula novel was a pretty sweet way to fuck with the player and give them a very basic jump scare/WTF moment.

All the games that are related in one way or the other to RE4 long and troublesome development feel "tied" visually.
Another one is Haunting Ground.

RE4 has those typicals settings made to be seen, not to be watched. More cheating, this time mixing models and textures.

This is weird, I don't remember the castle looking nearly this messy. Nor was the lighting this flat. Did they fuck it up that bad when porting or am I just really nostalgic?

it looks a lot better on a good CRT with rgb.

PC version: the port is a fucking mess and it was worst before the patch. Get away from the PC version at all costs. Being able to increase the resolution made the game worst (these cheats weren't as visible in low res) on a gameplay level, most stuff that should be visible on the floor are cropped by the resolution. The gamepad support is poor, no control with mouse, key config is…

I'll stop there. Avoid.

Are you talking about the original RE4 PC release or the HD re-release?

If you originally played the GC version, it looked slightly different.

Then you've got the modern PC, PS3 and 360 port that is based off the GC version but it's missing effects.

Then you have the PS4 port that is missing it's own, different effects.

It's quite frankly a mess and if we nitpick all the differences we're gonna be here all day.
Point is, the GC version is the "proper" version, it was the version the game was originally designed for so it has all the effects.
But obviously the trade off are actually playing the game with a GC controller, have fun with that shit, goddamn.

I FUCKING REMEMBER THAT
I REMEMBER THAT FUCKING THREAD

THAT GUY WAS A FUCKING RETARD

That fucking game has been ported around more than a redheaded stepchild

What about the Wii version?

It's what most people consider to be the "best" version due to the motion control aim.

I consider it the most casual version, it makes the whole game trivial and doesn't feel nearly as good to play.

RE4 Wii was "OMG THE ONLY GOOD VERSION" according to halfchan Holla Forums, aka nintendogaf.
To me it's just boring.

The original. Don't know about the HD re-release.
That port used most assets from the PS2 (which was already a downgrade from the GameCube): cinematics that were handled in real time on the GC were converted to videos for the PS2, and those videos were re-compressed (no shit) for PC. A shameful mess.

The PC HD release is based off the GC version.
It's essentially like the 360 and PS3 port, running at an higher resolution and framerate.
So it's missing the same effects those versions are, but it's nowhere near as shitty as the original PC port, it's playable just fine.
I think there's even mods floating around that fine tune the filter, the lightning and other things.

It's like the reverse of autoaim. It's still bullshit, but it's bullshit made to add difficult by taking skill out of it.

but the only way to install the fan made visual patch is through the pc port

Loved it.

Yes and no. Content-wise, it's the GC version (there's been some extra stuff in the PS2 version that is not in the PC version). Assets wise, it's the PS2 game:
pixelsplasher.com/_knowledgebase/How.To.Improve.3D.Graphics.Game.Experience.Resident.Evil.4.PC/

I really dislike how they change these textures by such a large extent. Inaccuracies and unfaithfulness really irritate me.

My bad. I'm a retard. Skipped "the HD release". I was talking about the original port all along.

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The magicians at Rareware were always able to squeeze a fuckload of power out of the systems they worked on, seeing the boss Galdon cast shadows on himself before other games did blew my mind when I was younger, also the fur shader on fox and then reusing them for the grass was really smart, I wonder why it hasn't been used again in games, actually I think GTAV does it for it's short grass.

Conker's Tail in Conker's bad fur day was amazing, and I don't remember fancy stuff like this much in video games beforehand.

I've played through RE4 at least 5 times on the GC, it was designed for the GC controller and worked perfectly fine with the GC controller, I never had a single issue with it, and I'd argue the inability to turn and aim while moving normally added to the gameplay.

you sound salty.

Even crapcom didn't fix the shity uv mapping in their PC port, fucking hell.

Some of them have to be changed, in the second picture that relief is mirrored that would be blatant in higher res and with the uv maps being all kinds of lazy they'd have to replicate errors and poor workmanship to make it accurate which is blatantly obvious in the first picture, no thanks.

Xrd is really quite good looking, considering what it's working with.

It looks very close to 2D, and because of it we can continue to have 2D looking fighters into the future rather than KoFxiv or SFV looking visuals.

Because faggots only started complaining about Doom not being real aimulted 3D when some eceleb complained about the way the engine actually worked when how the Doom engine works is thoroughly documented in fan maintained wikis. The experience is 3d however despite this; the flying enemies can stack vertically and pass over eachother, projectiles like rockets can and do pass over and under enemies when you miss, height actually matters and enemies of certain size can't fit through certain sized openings and you can't just waltz over a wall to get to a higher sector. You couldn't look up or down because the engine couldn't handle extreme values for angles.

Technically the whole engine is a visual trick if you want to go there, but does an engine that doesn't actually simulate 3D count?

I don't know where you found this "complaining".
It's more like

read through this blog a while back, would recommend

crashbandicootslammingthegroundviewedfromanangleoveraboxofnitrosothatitlookslikeitwillhittheboxofnitrobutitsactuallyjustinfrontofhim.JPEG

Oh yeah, this reminds me.

For anyone looking for high quality versions of the various crash OSTs, the original composer uploads all his stuff here:

soundcloud.com/joshmancell

I see you like this game a lot, it's also one of my favorites, ever got the platinum cross thingies in 3?

thanks for the OST, i don't like many songs but a couple like the one in the pyramid levels are good

You been hiding in a hole for nearly two decades, user?

simonschreibt.de/game-art-tricks/

Not necessarily famous or anything, but this has some really nice analysis of a lot of the smoke and mirrors in games. 15 (L4D's puke) and 26 (Homeworld's backgrounds, those crazy ass artists)

I know shadow of the hedgehog had a gradual rendering system, where the resolution of objects was proportional to how far away you were.
It was pretty impressive at the time.

this kind of ruined the game for me honestly

all this shit will melt my brain

That's almost cute

That's not bad, it's just a way to make a game look good from a proper angle with a fixed camera. Lots of isometric 3D games do this too. Ever seen a free view camera in the 3D Bard's Tale game? Shit's fucking crooked everywhere.

tessellation?

That's kind of funny, but don't some other top-down 3D games do this? It can't be the first.

You can play RE4 Wii Edition with GCN or Classic Controller.

Activation of enemies looks pretty fucking immaculate, I can't imagine somebody not believing it in the middle of the fight with the camera movement and parallax covering for the lack of proper rotation on the mooks waiting their turn.

Zelda's voice acting.

Faggots would tell you the games have none, when characters actually speak a retarded "mep mep mep" sound.

For reference on what user here is talking about.

Yes, and the teleporting effect has been done in Doom maps as well. Part of what made Quake impressive, is the lacks of these limitations.

There's not a single map in the official campaign of Duke Nukem 3D where teleports are puts on stairs. The biggest issue you have is to make sure that at no point the player is able to see two floors partially on top of one another.

It's called optimization, most games with many enemies do that. Even back in Doom, the enemy AI doesn't calculate new decisions every frame.

All of these tricks are optimization, it's the point of the thread. In a few gens, gamers will probably laugh at the idea that not every leaf of a tree is properly modelized and we used to put together a bunch of flat surfaces to simulate branches, similarly to people laughing at environment mapping being used when we can process real-time accurate reflections with more or less efficiency. There's no reason to use those tricks if you have the processing power to do the real thing (and everything else the game needs); but sometime that level of creativity to make-believe it's the real thing is just too good.

They made use of this in one level where you would walk in a seemingly perfect circle but you would keep seeing new stuff. Was really weird.

E3L10 (Tier Drops)? Not even. They are playing with the way Build doesn't really understand how space works: the surrounding of the arena (where the "stairs" are) is one continuous hallway. However, they did use teleports so you can "fall through" pipes from "one level to the other", but it's another mind-fuck more than pretending there's a story above/under the current one (since there's no elevation whatsoever in that map)

Maybe you have another level in mind?

Sorry, you were more likely talking about E2L11 (Lunatic Fringe), which relies on the same trick as E3L10: you have two sets of stairs overlaping the same physical space, but there's still no teleport involved.

it can be very noticeable at some points, but otherwise they did a good job of concealing it.

iirc it used a framebuffer technique where it snapped a flat for the background and only updated it the closer you got to it. It's an extremely convincing technique but it unfortunately shows flaws at higher resolutions. All the more reason to stick to original hardware right? What's nice, is, if I recall correctly it uses the exact asset to snap this flat. Really grants the game the means to shine in all its picturesque glory

Old scene coder here. One really fun trick back in the day was infinite smooth scrolling via fucking with the VGA card to get it going impossibly fast on 386s (this was back when even clearing the screen couldn't be done at 60fps let alone drawing graphics). Several space shooter games used the technique but you might be more familiar with epic pinball which did it for vertical only.

The prep for this trick was to take the VGA card out of its default mode and into what was known as "unhained mode". In this mode, the full RAM of the card (256k) was accessible rather than the ~64k (320*200) it normally let you access. The added difficulty was it split the ram into 4 display planes and interleaved all the pixels (and changing plane was expensive so sprite blits got very complicated), but it also let you configure the dimensions of the available RAM. We'd configure it so there was a 2x2 set of 320x200 (or 320x240, "mode X") screens in RAM. The origin point the VGA card would start drawing from could be changed via some register I've forgotten the name of (HC?) almost for free.

So now if we wanted to scroll down we'd add to the VGA card's origin register and then draw only the portion of the screen newly exposed, no need to redraw the entire screen (VERY expensive). But here's the problem: once scrolled down a full screen, we couldn't scroll further as the VGA card couldn't handle wrapping below the RAM. The trick here was that when we drew the exposed portion in the active buffer we'd also draw the exposed portion in the previous buffer. When we reached the bottom of the first screen we'd just reset the register to the top screen and you'd never notice the whole thing had jumped, it just looked smooth.

The added complication here is that since we were avoiding redrawing the whole screen, any 'sprites' that existed on top of the background had to be un-drawn then re-drawn when they moved with care taken to handle overlapping sprites correctly. For epic pinball, all those dot text effects that go over the background were being handled that way, it's way more complex than it might have appeared.

I miss those times. Shit was fun and everyone involved was doing it out of pure love for tech.

It's neat how the 3d animations mimic how sprite animation typically looks, with all those quick choppy movements, but the 3d looks kind of shit to be honest.

I just pretend every single object and character in the world is doing the Michael Jackson anti-gravity lean from Smooth Criminal and it makes the game so much better.

Here's an extra, sage for off-topic.

Where can I read about all this shit, how old consoles and PCs work with memory, CPU, monitor/color tricks etc?
Maybe there's some youtube channel for this kind of stuff?

I like the violin part most. Sounds amazing in the remastered version.

looks like quake3 in the quake1 engine

This is your brain on autism.

stopped reading there.

Holy shit my sides.

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checked and keked

Its an Impostor system. Sims 4 used to have one, I just cant for my life find the article for it anymore.

Basically, to save drawing calls, you render objects into billboards, then render the billboard. Gamasutra discusses the implementation of a Impostor system at please use archive.is/view/feature/2501/dynamic_2d_imposters_a_simple_.php?print=1

Other games that use Impostors are older Dynasty Warriors and Total War.

So we're the boboms and scuttlebugs

Where do you think we are, etc.

ITT people posting 3D vidya and no one has yet mentioned that it was John Carmack at id Software that was the first human to implement binary space partitioning in software.

Found out how this programmer's one little trick revolutionized vidya!

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When any nigger tells you Nightmare in Dream Land looks better you call them out on that horseshit that Butter Building's revolving building wasn't recreated.

Also that it's actually easier than the original.

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But this game looks and sounds like shit.

Almost all Genesis games sound pretty harsh and grating.

float Q_rsqrt( float number ){ long i; float x2, y; const float threehalfs = 1.5F; x2 = number * 0.5F; y = number; i = * ( long * ) &y; // evil floating point bit level hacking i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); // what the fuck? y = * ( float * ) &i; y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 1st iteration// y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 2nd iteration, this can be removed return y;

Technically speaking, MM's body overlaps his face sprite. You could give him colored pupils but it'd come at the cost of him being unable to blink.

SS2 had elevators though.

/thread

But that's not an actual visual trick.

Moving models like doors. Not part of the level geometry.

It's used to calculate reflections and dynamic light quickly in realtime, dipshit.

It's still not a visual trick. Is using preallocated arrays instead of lists for graphics stuff also a visual trick? Fucking idiot.

Might as well throw this thing in.
yzergame.com/doomGlare.html

How is this more famous than the first implementation of BSPs or ray casting for graphics?

Did they ever fix this in the vanilla game? Or are they at least planning to fix this for the deluxe or whatever edition coming out soon?

because it's not some impressive mindblowing algorithm but a simple arbitrary number added to the equation that sped up things in 3d technology a whole lot

sure he does give a shit, look at this year's E3 and see how psyched he is playing miney crafta on VR device

Fix…things? In the remaster? What the fuck are you smoking man, we are just selling the same game with a filter slapped on it while marketing it as a improvement

Not good enough of an excuse, try:

You forgot the most important part of the remaster.

To be fair though, they did at one point implement guns in one of them.

Dark Souls did this, also the long walk from the Undead Parish to Sen's Fortress work in similar fashion.

Your pic reminded me, N64 uses triangular texture sampling instead of square sampling used most commonly. I think that may have been what you meant?

If this is a visual trick then you can argue that vectors, as a concept, is the most famous visual trick.

Reminds me of Mario Sunshine showing other levels in the background. No big deal today but looked amazing back then, the 6th gen was groundbreaking in how it was the first gen that had 3D that could more or less represent what you want.

Pretty ingenious. It shows how poor the FO3 engine is but only gives more credit to the artists finding ways around its shitty limitations.

If you think that's impressive look at this shit.

4x is a lot.

However, Quake 3 (pretty sure all idTech) also uses BSPs. Does that not speed up rendering a whole lot?

The BSP system sorts the subsectors into the right order for rendering. The algorithm is fairly simple: Start at the root node. Draw the child nodes of this node recursively. The child node closest to the camera is drawn first using a Scanline algorithm. This can be found from looking at which side of the node's dividing line the camera is on. When a subsector is reached, draw it.[7]The process is complete when the whole column of pixels is filled (i.e., there are no more gaps left). This ordering ensures that no time is used drawing objects that are not visible and as a result maps can become very large without any speed penalty.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I am old enough to remember 3D games before Doom, and after Doom. IMHO the BSP technique fits the OP…

Fuck man you're going to make us get into Phong and Gouraud…

What's this, Carmack's Reverse or somethin'?

Inverse square root, though it actually wasn't invented by Carmack. Basically, it estimates the inverse square root with some bit manipulation* and improves the guess with Newton's method.

* The exponent e is replaced with -(e+1)/2 or -e/2 depending on its parity and I suspect the rest of the constant keeps the error in the mantissa small, but I haven't actually cracked that one yet.

Ratchet and Clank made every level out of modular components so they could use an occlusion system that would know what you can see from certain locations so they could know what things not to draw and so they could draw only part of each building. Less of a visual trick and more to do with performance but I still found it neat.

There's plenty of interesting things in R&C, more than I can actually remember.

youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBE216F8E761D085C
youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7D649DF9B66678B7

gonna need proof

Another neat thing to note about this battle is that the cutscene before it happens is actually prerendered, but prerendered so fucking good that it looks like a regular ingame cutscene. I don't know if that was changed in 2.5 or not but emulating KH2FM I finally noticed that.
Kingdom Hearts 2 was really good

In that case, it's still a pretty good trick.

KH2 being bad is a meme.
Anyone that played KH2FM on Critical understands just how polished that game is in terms of core design and how balanced it is (both in in various mechanics and in systems the game doesn't even tell you about working in the background).

KH2FM gameplay wise, especially on Critical is one of the best designed PS2 games ever made.

Threads like this make me realize how comfy older games really were.

Does Final Mix have less press triangle to win? I liked the second game, but that shit really irked me.

The base game itself stays the same with the press triangle shit, but everything added to the Final Mix version I believe has been stripped mostly of that. I can think of Terra and the data Organization bosses, as well as the Cavern of Remembrance as a whole.

IIRC it's more or less the same in that category but it adds a shitton more gameplay between the triangle presses, and actually does something amazing and turns a cutscene into a full fledged bossfight.

The amount of content they added in the FM+ was kinda ridiculous.

Final Mix has Critical, and additional bosses.
On Critical, triangle to win won't really work most of the time, and will get you straight up killed when facing the optional bosses.

Not only that, additionally you get an ability to deny yourself all xp and the game is secretly balanced so that you can clear everything (including the optional bosses) at lvl 1 if you're good enough and use your entire toolset.

Guys, guys, you're all right. The issue is you're not as right as this.

youtube.com/watch?v=K0moBNPtIUA

I remember reading that was because all the reflections in the water are really the low-poly versions of the character models but blurred so you can't tell

Thanks for sharing though. I'm a younger programmer so hearing all the workarounds people used to have to make for older tech is always fun to read about.

Will this work on any vga compatible card? I might try messing with this on my 486 machine.

The worst part is that it doesn't adjust when you go into Portrait mode, making everything look off-center and disgusting

keep in mind this was meant to be rendered at a small native resolution while moving fast

Don't post for a week at least.

a Swede with a computational fluid chemistry problem.
beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/

Are you making the argument that "a + b" is a visual trick because it can also be used to compute some rendering process?

Not talking about texture filtering: just the optical illusion of the stair texture in order to reduce the number of triangles.

and here I thought that was DSFix fucking over with collission detection. Well played, Fromsoft

This pissed me off for some reason.

I was expecting to hear Billy Herrington throughout that entire thing.

Theres something I don't like about 1.5 and it's arrangements, while they use a lot more realistic sounds, I feel a lot of songs lost something in the transition. For example, The ps2 version of Monstrous Monstro feels more frantic and intense than 1.5. Must be the of the lack of Pokemon french horns.

2.5's music … oddly feels more like a straight upgrade. They somehow managed to stay in tone with how the originals feel 95% of the time.

Old coder here too. Your post reminds me of raster interupts on C64. Instead of blitting I seem to remember we could change the register to point to some arbitrary address at the cost of like 1 cycle. Was pretty slick.

Some rearrangements are good, some are bad, some are about the same as the original, it's a mixed bag.

Night of Fate sounds pretty solid in this rearrangement, to name one.

the fuck did I just watch?

software doesn't necessarily mean you cant have all those colors- this is an explanation of how they could do these things:

fabiensanglard.net/quake2/quake2_software_renderer.php

If you have to defend someone by saying that whatever someone else said paints your someone in a negitive light, chances are he's right.

You're not a good person just because you made a good video game, morality's more complex then that.

If anything, if you want to look up to him, do so, but don't look up to your heroes as a person, but rather someone to match or surpass in acheivement, because honestly, your idols aren't necessarily good people, they just accomplished something, that's all.

You already surpass many of your idols in character, you just don't know it. Surpassing them in achievement, THAT'S that hard part.

Unreal had a really fucking impressive software render engine too.

Okay, so using Carmack's Reverse for shadows in Doom 3 is impressive even by today's fuzzy pixel shadow standards, but the tradeoff is no self-shadowing. Prey was built on id tech 4, and uses the same stencil shadow method, but it does have self-shadowing. The trick is to break every model down into its simplest convex shapes and cast a shadow for each one. It's only a little bit more expensive, and the payoff in quality is huge.

Remember when games would use fog to hide bad draw distance instead of just baring it's disgusting render distance making us see they playdough objects in the far distance? Those were good days

Any idea how Croteam manages to do this in their games?

Because they're not slavs

You could read the original Serious Engine's source code, although the rendering code is really out of date since GL1 techniques don't translate well to modern hardware or GL revisions.

One part engine magic, twenty parts "no AI at all"

Serious Sam games are fun as hell, but basically every enemy's AI is to move straight towards you, spam a projectile if you have one, use a lunging attack if you don't.

probably similar to EDF

Most games don't use more than a few percent CPU on non-graphics tasks in the first place.

The Gamebyro engine is literally the worst engine of all time.
Why the fuck do they use it?

It can do all of those things. Bethesda are just incompetent retards.

Bethesda is using the same 2001 codebase for it. They're only stupid, which is the only reason why.

it can do all of those

welp

It is, that game really fooled me as a kid and made me wonder why other SegaCD games looked so bad in comparison.

Only the scholarship edition, the original wasn't made in Gamebryo. Which is why the Scholarship Edition has all the problems it has and is generally seen as inferior.

this is the opposite of a trick.
because the GBA gave you so much control over the hardware (I've seen comparisons to the C64 in this regard) many developers tried to make full 3D engines through sheer optimization and intelligent use of every last bit of power the console had to varying results.

Did any voxel-based GBA games get released? Banjo Pilot got downgraded massively.

I forgot which game it was, but there was some racing game where they rendered the player car to an otherwise blank texture in 2 or 4 times the desired size, then rendered all the terrain and shit normally, and finally slapped the texture over it to get a nice

Quad Desert Fury

in what universe, fictional or otherwise, would this phrase work towards seducing a female?
bring oil

Archive? Caps? OP's post number?

Relevant.

great post, thanks. PC graphics required a ton of fuckery in the DOS days to get decent performance.

Fuck, I just spent about 12 minutes searching for an image. I lost it on my old harddrive and couldn't find it on google. There's a picture of this with the scene hand drawn below but on a different perspective and it makes it look like link's doing an insane limbo and holding the sword backwards. Anyone have it?

Here's a pic of zelda being about fighting juden as compensation. :^)

Duke had that 720° level as well, that was ridiculous even if it's a touch glitchy.

They mention a lot of interesting stuff when not trash talking everything. How they model his tail as well as just "a bag of air trying to float upwards" is my favourite one.

FISR is an enabler of fancy graphical effects by making them affordable.

second image HD version

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THANK YOU! I saw this at least 6 years ago, wew lad.

FISR, at least the one used by id, is nothing anymore because it's slower than the standard one now.

I think Computerphile has a few videos on this topic, but I don't know about a full channel.

The textures can be anything you can have a red door that appears to give off white light in Quake and Quake 2 maps. You can tie and entity to a solid or just drop a light entity where you want light. I think they were called entitys anyway it has been a long time.

All that time spent building quake and Q2 maps without realizing there were prefabs that could be imported. Anyone recall what hammer was called before it was called hammer. I want to say "world" something.

Hardware rendering isn't magic (and it is still technically software, even though it's not called it). It's just shader programs running on the GPU. You can do the exact same thing- on the CPU, it's just slower. It's only math.

(checked)

I haven't laughed so much in so long holy fuck.

This looks so shitty when I upscale it on PCSX2.

96 KILOBYTES
6
K
I
L
O
B
Y
T
E
S

The trees at 4 minutes and 30 seconds.
two 2d sprites put together that look like a 3d object from a distance.

that's famous for the stupidity of advertisers/game reviewers; this trick was done on ps2 a long time before kingdom turds; i can't remember the game, but retarded sonyggers praised it for having 60.000 enemies on screen at once, while only 10 or so were actually 3d-rendered models.

Now if only we could apply this kind of programming in actual software instead of dick-measuring contests, i.e. demos.

It fooled me. Especially since the ps2 Doesn't do HTMI. They did it really well.

luuuul

are you that one retarded anti-emulation troll?

That's nothing, if you die in the first part of Demon ruins and go to the part of the giants tomb were you can see the ruins from you can see your bloodstain.
I thought it was just a skybox not the actually level being rended.

so it renders a low res version of the environment? maybe i just don't know much about game development, but i don't see what's so unusual about it

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The problem is, the idea behind this game isn't really practical in ways other than having a ridiculously small filesize. You have to make a lot of compromises in load times, specific aesthetic details, and other common quality of life shit. Not to mention, creating something with that much dynamic generation is harder from a programming standpoint. Even if you know what you're doing, there's still a lot more room for error. If you don't know what you're doing, you're going to create an unstable mess.

In the end, it still follows the same premise of a demo. It doesn't strive to be practical, it strives to be a decent first person shooter stored in a stupidly small file size because fuck you, we can do it.

The fact that the level geometry is connected so that you can see parts of levels from other parts of other levels mainly. Adds personality to the game other than going through the same setpiece corridors over and over.