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

3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2011)

nothings.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 37 posts

Re: 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2011)

#11

Post by kevingadd »

causality0 wrote: post #8
FooHentai wrote: post #2

>This result could be less tight; for example, if you had a long corridor with many side rooms, and that long corridor was a single cell, then in Quake it would always try to render all the side rooms, whereas Thief would only try to render the entry cell to each of the side rooms (since those cells would always be adjacent to the corridor and visible), but Thief could cull the rooms themselves if they weren't curren…

That's quite interesting. I wonder why visual culling on PC appears to have been much more primitive than culling on, say, the Nintendo 64. Some games there seem to dynamically cull every single polygon not in sight. For example, Banjo Kazooie: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=se6y5we3p2I

That's just backface and/or frustum culling, likely being done by the N64's equivalent of the hardware transform unit or the rasterizer. Completely separate matter from visibility culling which is usually done at a very coarse level - objects, rooms, etc. Not individual triangles. It's true that game consoles typically had better culling capability of this sort built in, since without it games wouldn't have acceptable performance.

When a scene contains a truckload of triangles, culling them all one at a time like that does not win you as much performance as you might think. You always needed to do additional things on top of it.

Re: 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2011)

#12

Post by kevingadd »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #5
pkphilip wrote: post #3

Thief was a brilliant game for the era. The rendering of shadows etc was very well done and so also I believe it used 3D positional audio better than the contemporary games

We're the shadows actually rendered in real time or were they prerendered and baked into the textures along with the environment lighting? Genuinely curious. I could be wrong but, AFAIK, Doom 3 was the first game with real time shadows and dinamic lighting and every game before that employed various tricks that simulated those instead.

Thief 3's lighting and shadows were mostly dynamic, but I don't think that was true for 1 & 2. The lighting tech in Thief 3 was fairly similar to what Doom 3 did - per pixel lighting with stencil shadows, etc.

Re: 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2011)

#14

Post by ovao »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #5
pkphilip wrote: post #3

Thief was a brilliant game for the era. The rendering of shadows etc was very well done and so also I believe it used 3D positional audio better than the contemporary games

We're the shadows actually rendered in real time or were they prerendered and baked into the textures along with the environment lighting? Genuinely curious. I could be wrong but, AFAIK, Doom 3 was the first game with real time shadows and dinamic lighting and every game before that employed various tricks that simulated those instead.

Doom 3 wasn’t necessarily the first game with fully-dynamic lighting/shadowing, but it was among the first to use what Carmack referred to as “fully-unified lighting”, in that no pre-baked lighting was used. There were some projection light hacks here and there, but generally speaking all lighting in Doom 3 was dynamic.

The original Quake used a mix of pre-baked lightmaps and dynamic lights, just like the original Thief; Quake 2 (the OpenGL renderer, anyway) added character shadows that’d react to dynamic lights, so in some cases Quake 2 actually got pretty close to the goalpost.

Re: 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2011)

#15

Post by exikyut »

brobinson wrote: post #4
pkphilip wrote: post #3

Thief was a brilliant game for the era. The rendering of shadows etc was very well done and so also I believe it used 3D positional audio better than the contemporary games

First game to use ECS (or an ECS-like system), too, if I recall correctly. DromEd is one of the strangest programs I've used.

Screenshots don't hold a candle to actually using something, but I'm honestly not too dissuaded to disagree with you: https://thief.fandom.com/wiki/DromEd?file=Dromed.png

Seems to be downloadable at https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=141708 (and have a bit of a niche following)

Googling the name also turns up a comprehensive 4-part YouTube video series from 2012-2013 showcasing the UI and how to build a level: https://youtu.be/C0dHgEaUCEQ (20:02), https://youtu.be/A1wm0RZXlh0 (41:50), https://youtu.be/UlVJHCcaUAo (27:45), https://youtu.be/yyq5Z2ioM-0 (11:31)

Re: 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2011)

#16

Post by namdnay »

smackeyacky wrote: post #6
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're the shadows actually rendered in real time or were they prerendered and baked into the textures along with the environment lighting? Genuinely curious. I could be wrong but, AFAIK, Doom 3 was the first game with real time shadows and dinamic lighting and every game before that employed various tricks that simulated those instead.

The article doesn't make it completely clear but it infers the shadows were not dynamic because it affected the gameplay in that the player needed some certainty about where stealth was effective, and the level designs hinged on that. Great game. Thief and Descent were pretty challenging compared to quake.

Quake actually got really hard in the last chapters. Those annoying purple blobs were murder

Re: 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2011)

#17

Post by gilbetron »

My wife and I were just telling my 13 year old about this game. It was incredibly immersive for the time, running on my Voodoo graphics card and soundblaster 3D audio card :) I would be sneaking around and my wife would try to talk to me (in real life) and I would shush her because I didn't want to be heard :) She also played the game, and both of us would commonly bonk our head on the monitor (old CRT style) as we were trying to look around a corner in the game :D

Good times - great game!

Re: 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2011)

#18

Post by gilbetron »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #5
pkphilip wrote: post #3

Thief was a brilliant game for the era. The rendering of shadows etc was very well done and so also I believe it used 3D positional audio better than the contemporary games

We're the shadows actually rendered in real time or were they prerendered and baked into the textures along with the environment lighting? Genuinely curious. I could be wrong but, AFAIK, Doom 3 was the first game with real time shadows and dinamic lighting and every game before that employed various tricks that simulated those instead.

https://nothings.org/gamedev/thief_rendering.html#lighting

"The core technique for rendering texture mapped polygons with decent precomputed shadows is very similar (identical?) to Quake. Thief used light mapping and a surface cache to store the lit surfaces. I refer you to Mike Abrash's articles."

Mike Abrash is a cool guy, not as well known as Carmack but had as big, if not bigger, impact on the gaming world. Got to sit in a panel with him and Carmack once at GDC to talk about networking stuff (I wasn't in the actual panel, but it was a tiny room with about 20 people plus the panelist)

Re: 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2011)

#20

Post by morganvachon »

gilbetron wrote: post #17

My wife and I were just telling my 13 year old about this game. It was incredibly immersive for the time, running on my Voodoo graphics card and soundblaster 3D audio card :) I would be sneaking around and my wife would try to talk to me (in real life) and I would shush her because I didn't want to be heard :) She also played the game, and both of us would commonly bonk our head on the monitor (old CRT style) as we w…

This was exactly me and my girlfriend at the time (still good friends today). We were obsessed with the game, we both beat it several times then explored the world of custom missions. I think our mutual favorite was "Hush Hush, Sweet Harlot".

Years after we broke up we remained friends, and one day she called me asking for help getting it to run on her then-new Windows Vista PC. I never could get it to work correctly so I cobbled together a working PIII era machine for her with Windows 2000 installed, and period correct GPU, and she was in sneaking heaven!

These days the GOG version plays perfectly well on modern hardware and OSes, no need for hacks or period hardware anymore.

Post reply on HN