Great article. I particularly enjoyed the approach to creating gibs.
Although it was a tech demo, I created something like this around the mid 90s. One thing I did that I don't see mentioned in this article was I used 8x8 (or 16x16) light maps on the textures, which allowed me to easily have things like flickering torches and rockets that lit up the hallways as they shot down them. Lightmaps can also be used to "bake in" lighting if desired.
Since the light map is "only" 8x8 you can afford to do some math on each luxel (each unit in the light map) to calculate distance and line of sight to light sources to determine a brightness value. When rendering the texture, the luxel was used with a lookup table to determine the actual color of the pixel being drawn. The light maps were updated 15 times a second if I recall correctly to help performance. Thanks to DJGPP, I was using inline assembly for the rendering. Since floating point math was slow at the time I used fixed point math which optimized well. The rendering was surprisingly performant on computers of the day.
Making Graphics Like it's 1993
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Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#82I 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 ).
A lot of boomer shooters nowadays have a female protagonist, e.g. Selaco[0], Supplice[1], The Citadel[2] and its sequel[3], Zortch[4] (and its upcoming sequel[5]), Nighmare Reaper[6], COVEN[7], Viscerafest[8], Hedon[9], etc. If anything i'd say that nowadays there are way more boomer shooters with female protagonists than not :-P (combining the tags "boomer shooter" with "female protagonist" on Steam search gives 143…
"boomer shooter": 1105 matches
"boomer shooter" + "female protagonist": 106 matches.
So a bit less than 1/10 of the games tagged with "boomer shooter". With your caveats above about being able to choose a gender, or a single brief segment where you're a lady in a game where you're mostly a dude. Is that a lot? I dunno, doesn't feel like a lot to me. Probably feels like a lot to the people who inevitably show up in the Steam discussions of any successful game that makes you be a lady for most of its length and complain about it being "woke", even one game with a female protagonist seems to be too many for them.
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#83> Well, it would work, but the result would look terrible because pixel scale is no longer consistent.
This is my complaint with a lot of "graphical enhancement" mods for games like Deus Ex.
Unless they touch everything, the inconsistent level of detail is worse than consistently low-res meshes/textures.
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#84[dead]
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#85What does he mean by inconsistent pixel scale when he talks against increasing sprite resolution?
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#86This is taking a lot of inspiration from Doom, but the actual raycasting engine is more like Doom's predecessors, the most well-known of which is probably Wolfenstein 3D: perpendicular walls, constant floor and ceiling height. Wolf3D didn't have textured floors and ceilings because of performance reasons, but several other similar games had them. Doom and IIRC Duke Nukem as well used a BSP engine which was much more…
With regard to floors, afaik even DOOM didn't do them correctly. With vertical walls, the perspective divide needs to be done only once per column of pixels for a given wall segment. For floors, unfortunately there's no such luxury, and if I remember correctly DOOM subdivided floors into patches, and only did proper perspective at the corners, and interpolated inbetween.
For floors the perspective divide is once per row, just like for walls it's once per column.
The BSP may have led to some floor subdivisions, especially as it needs convex sectors. I don't remember if the engine would coalesce adjacent floor spans into a single one, but I hope it did.
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#87What does he mean by inconsistent pixel scale when he talks against increasing sprite resolution?
Just a guess: if you want to scale a sprite at anything less than a whole ratio (e.g. 1.5, 0.7, etc), you have to choose pixels to drop out and pixels to repeat , on some pattern that looks good. There are going to be scaling ratios that look like a hot mess, especially at a low resolution like 320x240.
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#88Great article. I particularly enjoyed the approach to creating gibs. Although it was a tech demo, I created something like this around the mid 90s. One thing I did that I don't see mentioned in this article was I used 8x8 (or 16x16) light maps on the textures, which allowed me to easily have things like flickering torches and rockets that lit up the hallways as they shot down them. Lightmaps can also be used to "bake…
> I used fixed point math which optimized well.
I feel like the idea of fixed-point is under-utilized and very under appreciated. There are loads of applications where this is a better choice, let alone more performant.
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#89I 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 ).
I doubt it was intentional, but in general, I am not impressed by that and don't find any value in that. Same with Hollywood's depiction of women knocking out guys twice their size. Unrealistic, ridiculous, and harmful.
>Unrealistic, ridiculous
So, a videogame?
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#90What does he mean by inconsistent pixel scale when he talks against increasing sprite resolution?
Just a guess: if you want to scale a sprite at anything less than a whole ratio (e.g. 1.5, 0.7, etc), you have to choose pixels to drop out and pixels to repeat , on some pattern that looks good. There are going to be scaling ratios that look like a hot mess, especially at a low resolution like 320x240.
In context, it's talking about sprites that are going to get non-integer scaled anyway (in-game pickups), so it's just about maintaining a consistent detail level. If those specific sprites had their resolution increased, everything else would need its resolution increased to match them.
Inconsistent resolution isn't necessarily a bad thing, e.g. Elite for the BBC Micro changes video mode part way down the screen so it can display both high resolution monochrome wireframe 3D and a lower resolution color map/UI below, but it's not idiomatic to the MS-DOS style this game is going for.