Andy Gavin: "[SGI's] stuff from the early '90s was all filled with this giro shading, as it was called, where things all looked like plastic, like colored plastic."
"giro shading" ? What is he referring to ? Is it a real thing ?
Crash Bandicoot: An oral history
21–30 of 42 posts
Re: Crash Bandicoot: An oral history
#22>That was just Crash 1. Two was even worse! [Laughs] Three was pretty bad, too. For me, from August of '94 to December of '98 was one entire, giant crunch. What a waste. I can't really think of any game or game series that would be worth four years of crunch.
Do you have a hobby? Would you consider time spent on a hobby a waste? Especially in this case, where Andy and Jason went from what's called now "indie" (the last game they've made before Crash was the Way of the Warrior[1]) straight into the big AAA. Most people in the games industry won't ever have a chance to do this. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_Ya4mSkDMI
> Do you have a hobby? Would you consider time spent on a hobby a waste?
If I was required to do it for 16 hours a day every day, hell yes I would.
Re: Crash Bandicoot: An oral history
#23Andy Gavin: "[SGI's] stuff from the early '90s was all filled with this giro shading, as it was called, where things all looked like plastic, like colored plastic." "giro shading" ? What is he referring to ? Is it a real thing ?
Perhaps it was another term for gouraud shading?
Re: Crash Bandicoot: An oral history
#24Andy Gavin: "[SGI's] stuff from the early '90s was all filled with this giro shading, as it was called, where things all looked like plastic, like colored plastic." "giro shading" ? What is he referring to ? Is it a real thing ?
Perhaps it was another term for gouraud shading?
I assumed the name didn't translate if the interview was face-to-face. He did mention using "the shaded mode" instead of the textured mode.
Re: Crash Bandicoot: An oral history
#25Andy Gavin: "[SGI's] stuff from the early '90s was all filled with this giro shading, as it was called, where things all looked like plastic, like colored plastic." "giro shading" ? What is he referring to ? Is it a real thing ?
Google has five results for "giro shading" and four of them are this article, so I doubt that's a common name. It sounds like he's talking about untextured polygons with smoothing applied to hide the edges; the result tended to look like smooth, shiny plastic, without the usual sharp pixelation of low-res textures and low-poly models. It was definitely a common effect in the early '90s, though I mainly remember it from the N64, particularly Super Mario 64 and similar cartoony mascot games.
Edit: Kierenelby is right, he meant "gouraud shading". Here's an example: http://imgur.com/h8vNeaD It's pretty distinctive because a gouraud-shaded ball mostly looks like a sphere, but the outline is clearly polygonal, and the surface highlights follow the otherwise-hidden polygon edges in a weird way.
Re: Crash Bandicoot: An oral history
#26This makes me want to look up the history of Earthworm Jim, because Sega & surrealism.
You might also be interested in the backstory of the video game Ecco The Dolphin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xUvhUK8Dv8
Re: Crash Bandicoot: An oral history
#27As someone who never played Crash Bandicoot, I immediately did a text search for "Baggett" to see if Dave Baggett mentions the bug that literally comes up in every online discussion about craziest debugging stories ever [0] and is the first thing I think about when I hear Crash Bandicoot mentioned. Surprisingly, it doesn't, but Baggett has a bunch of other interesting anecdotes about his work. CB doesn't look like my…
Thanks for the link, I had somehow missed that story. I think for a digital hardware engineer, bugs like that are not particularly strange. As software people we are usually shielded from it, because the hardware we are using has been thoroughly tested. Working with embedded software, you are often one of the first people to write code for a particular bit of hardware, and have to watch out for these things. On the other hand, it is tempting to blame the hardware for all mysterious bugs, and the hw engineers do not appreciate that much.
Re: Crash Bandicoot: An oral history
#28I hated this god damned game. The sound effects. The characters. The tropical theme. The color palette. The absence of anything worth knowing about within the context of game play. You played this game for 15 minutes, and you never had to play it again, because you had already explored everything the game had to offer. My cousin had the original Sony Playstation and this game, and even to this day, the only game that…
"because you had already explored everything the game had to offer" The value of platformers comes from level design. Crash certainly had great level designs. What youre saying is basically like "super mario sucks because all you do is jump and run the whole game"
Crash Bandicoot had repellent level design.
Placing it next to Super Nintendo's Super Mario World is like placing catfood on the same table as Thankgiving dinner.
Believe me, I suffered through more than 15 minutes of the game.
Re: Crash Bandicoot: An oral history
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have a hobby? Would you consider time spent on a hobby a waste? Especially in this case, where Andy and Jason went from what's called now "indie" (the last game they've made before Crash was the Way of the Warrior[1]) straight into the big AAA. Most people in the games industry won't ever have a chance to do this. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_Ya4mSkDMI
> Do you have a hobby? Would you consider time spent on a hobby a waste? If I was required to do it for 16 hours a day every day, hell yes I would.
Some people's hobbies are things like mountain climbing or sailing. Those take many days/months at 24 hour a day. Some even do multi-day camping/skiing trips. Some even do vacations in other countries. These are all 24 hour a day.
Re: Crash Bandicoot: An oral history
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do you have a hobby? Would you consider time spent on a hobby a waste? If I was required to do it for 16 hours a day every day, hell yes I would.
Some people's hobbies are things like mountain climbing or sailing. Those take many days/months at 24 hour a day. Some even do multi-day camping/skiing trips. Some even do vacations in other countries. These are all 24 hour a day.
But not for 4 years straight without a break?