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Making Graphics Like it's 1993

staniks.github.io

21–30 of 169 posts

Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993

#21
This game looks great I really like the style it is inspiring.

The author seems to consider open-sourcing the engine, I would also be interested in the mentioned scripts for asset creation. Those scripts would make a great toolset for asset creation in this style.

Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993

#22
This is terrific. I love reading about the creative process involved in a project like this, finding cool solutions to self-imposed boundaries.

I think the mix of highly rational reasoning and "it just feels right" is a killer combo too, it gives a rigorous basis for a lot of the decisions made, while also allowing for a strongly personal aesthetic to emerge. Very cool indeed.

Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993

#23
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? Doing this with modern OpenGL would be much simpler than the software rasterizer solution. I think I'm gonna have to do it anyway, because some players claim they get nausea when playing at such low resolution (320x240), and the only way to give them higher resolutions that perform reasonably is to have it hardware accelerated. Renderer is abstracted away already, but the real difference would probably be occ…

Unless you plan on rendering the level on some very retro hardware (think S3 Virge, maybe Voodoo 1) you can render the entire level in OpenGL with just zbuffer and alpha tested sprites and it'll run perfectly fine - if anything with such low polycount, chances are you're going to make the renderer slower by trying to do occlusion culling on any GPU released in the 21st century :-P. If you pack the geometry in a few v…

That's really cool.

Thinking about modern games, a single character model probably has more vertices than my entire level (and yours probably), so it's definitely reasonable to expect occlusion culling for such simple geometry might actually reduce performance rather than increase it.

Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993

#25
I really loved that article. Creating games always seemed so daunting to me since I don't know a lot about how it's done, there are so many different processes involved. The solutions described here are so satisfyingly compact and so easy to understand given the simple constraints, and yet they produce an actual game that looks nice.

Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993

#26
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you plan on rendering the level on some very retro hardware (think S3 Virge, maybe Voodoo 1) you can render the entire level in OpenGL with just zbuffer and alpha tested sprites and it'll run perfectly fine - if anything with such low polycount, chances are you're going to make the renderer slower by trying to do occlusion culling on any GPU released in the 21st century :-P. If you pack the geometry in a few v…

That's really cool. Thinking about modern games, a single character model probably has more vertices than my entire level (and yours probably), so it's definitely reasonable to expect occlusion culling for such simple geometry might actually reduce performance rather than increase it.

I rendered some Source engine levels on a shitty laptop in 2012ish and they still rendered at perfectly acceptable FPS (30+) just by rendering all the geometry in the level in one shot.

Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993

#27
post #10

I just noticed that this might be one of the rare shooters with a female protagonist: the cat has a calico pattern, and those are almost always female ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_cat ).

> one of the rare shooters with a female protagonist

No, this isn't a Perfect Dark game

Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993

#29
Much respect -- at first glance when I saw the animated gif I thought this was just a project making assets from scratch for an existing game engine (e.g. Doom or Wolf 3D) but then I realize it's creating all the game code from scratch too! (But using similar techniques from the old days). Amazing work.
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