Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

racenis.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 254 posts

Re: Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

#81

Post by wizzwizz4 »

Can you add the rule:

  @media (prefers-reduced-motion) {
    .animated {
       display: none;
    }
  }
to the page, please? no_gifs.css is alright, but I need to visit the page (and run JavaScript) before I can find and click it, and by that point the damage is done.

Re: Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

#82

Post by mathnode »

gleenn wrote: post #50

It only supports up to 800x600 resolution? For real? I know people like low res games and this is targeting old hardware but that is surprisingly low to me given the touting of how optimized this is.

Think of it as a fantasy console, like pico-8 which despite the extreme restrictions is home to some incredible content that of which exceeds many big studio engines. The imposed ceiling now allows a solo dev or a team to now concentrate on delivering gameplay and vivacious content instead of graphical gimmicks which eat resources both for the consumers and creators.

Nobody argues that FTL, Minecraft, baba is you, Stardew valley, RuneScape, or dwarf fortress are not a high enough resolution.

Re: Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

#83

Post by OCASMv2 »

speeder wrote: post #57
fidotron wrote: post #17

> Most Unity games look like very bad, even with fancy shaders, normal mapping and other techniques. This seems to be an increasingly common point of view among those of a certain age. It is definitely the case that the art of a certain sort of texture mapping has been lost. The example I go back to is Ikaruga, where the backgrounds are simply way better than they have any right to be, especially a very simple forest…

Yes. And the thing is, some modern games ARE overcast with no dynamic lights, and then go on to use Lumen of all things. This was the case with Silent Hill remake, and that thing runs very slowly, looks WORSE on PS5 Pro, the grass looks worse than in older games and so on. Seriously, the plot of Silent Hill was invented to justify optimization hacks, you have a permanent foggy space called "fog space" to make easier…

It's not the 90s anymore. Using basic linear fog with ultra-realistic assets would just look terribly out of place.

The point about Lumen stands though. Baked lighting would have been much better in this case.

Re: Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

#84

Post by OCASMv2 »

davikr wrote: post #36

Very cool! There need to be more options for developers with lower-end boxes, for gamers with low-end hardware. Unreal Engine 5 is a lost cause nowadays without 64GB of RAM, Unity is a mess and there need to be more options than Godot.

Still waiting for bevy to get an official editor.

Re: Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

#85

Post by kcb »

gmueckl wrote: post #19
robertlagrant wrote: post #13

I replayed Half-life 2 recently and was struck, even without high-res texture packs, how amazing the game still looks today.

I think this is because of how extremely cleverly they picked the art style for the game. You have a lot of diffuse surfaces for which prebaking the lighting just works. Overcast skies allow for diffuse ambient lighting rather than very directional lights, which force angle-dependent shading and sharp high contrast shadow outlines. And the overwhelming majority of glossy surfaces are not too shiny which also helps ou…

There's been a rumor going around that developers move away from prebaked lighting primarily because it complicates their workflow.

Re: Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

#87

Post by Yossarrian22 »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #74
shermantanktop wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to know how to respond to that. This could be applied to virtually all technology changes that benefit users but also make money for someone else. I assume you use a refrigerator and not a hole in the ground with ice. Have you been manipulated into giving money to Big Appliance?

I would argue refrigerators provide a lot more utility for most people than high poly counts.

I think I’ve gained more utility from being able to look at 3 spreadsheets at once than I’ve gained from my refrigerator(not if we’re counting the refrigeration of the supply chain for food and medicine then that wins out by a landslide)

Re: Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

#88

Post by mathnode »

davikr wrote: post #36

Very cool! There need to be more options for developers with lower-end boxes, for gamers with low-end hardware. Unreal Engine 5 is a lost cause nowadays without 64GB of RAM, Unity is a mess and there need to be more options than Godot.

In my youth I cut my teeth on the quake 2 sdk. And even without a 3D suite and a c compiler I could get creating. When the Rage toolkit became available, almost none of the community were as besotted with eagerness as they had done before. It was a 30GB+ download with some hefty base requirements. While rage could run on a 4 core machine, not many gamers at the time had 16 core Xeon’s and 16gb of ram! The worst the HL2 modding scene had to contend with was running Perl on windows.

Re: Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

#89

Post by vkazanov »

prettyStandard wrote: post #35
robertlagrant wrote: post #13

I replayed Half-life 2 recently and was struck, even without high-res texture packs, how amazing the game still looks today.

You might enjoy "Black Mesa", HL1 remade with the HL2 engine. Played it during the pandemic. No Regrets.

Black Mesa is how I remember the original game. Worth every second i spent with the game!

Re: Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines

#90

Post by devin »

tines wrote: post #39
tsumnia wrote: post #25

"A thing should be a thing. It should not be a bunch of things pretending to be a single thing. With nodes you have to pretend that a collection of things is a single thing." Just want to say this line was great, very Terry Pratchett. Feels like something Sam Vimes would think during a particularly complex investigation. I love it and hope you keep it moving forward. Haven't gotten a chance to mess around with it, bu…

In isolation, isn't the quote prima facie so bad and so wrong though? We think of collections of things as single things constantly . A human is a collection of body parts, body parts are collections of chemicals, chemicals are collections of molecules, molecules are collections of atoms... and yet at each level we think of those collections as being single things. Not being able to do that is just... absurd. The pro…

I think maybe it is intended as a critique of systems where the individual parts don't compose or scale particularly well, where it feels sort of hollow to call it a "system" because of how uncoordinated and inefficient it is at the "single things" layer.
Post reply on HN