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Noclip.website – A digital museum of video game levels

noclip.website

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Re: Noclip.website – A digital museum of video game levels

#33

Post by ToucanLoucan »

nness wrote: post #22

Every time I stumble upon this I end up losing an hour. The Rare era Nintendo 64 games are particularly interesting from a graphical stand-point, as Rare really got the most out of the N64's limited texture cache by blending textures with vertex colours. In Banjo-Kazooie its mostly for used as a primitive baked-lighting (Mad Monster Mansion being a great example of this.) But by the time you get to DK64, they're real…

I also enjoy how WELL most Nintendo games' levels render in browser, because unlike the other two (Sony and Microsoft), their render pipelines are incredibly simple. This of course isn't a complete win, you obviously miss a lot of features of bigger/beefier GPU's like advanced shaders, but at the same time it really draws attention to how the artists developing for those platforms, at least first party, are continuing those traditions of covering a lack of technical ability to, for example, render real caustics in real time, and instead simply make water textures that are so evocative of water that they appear as good as, if not better, then technically superior water effects.

I say this as a slight graphics nerd who loves this shit and plays some games solely to see the visuals they can pull off: I mad respect artists who go the complete other direction, who barely use any "real" graphics tech, to make absolutely beautiful things.

Re: Noclip.website – A digital museum of video game levels

#37

Post by svelle »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #3
twostorytower wrote: post #2

This is actually wild. I have no idea how this works. Does it somehow emulate the rendering engine of each of these games to render the map? The water in Half-Life 2: Lost Coast is just how I remember it. Very cool.

It's open source: https://github.com/magcius/noclip.website I wouldn't say it emulates so much as implements a renderer for each game. It's totally nuts.

Yes! I loved the thread on twitter back in the day where Jasper explained how he implemented the Half-Life 2 water shader using the two camera method.

I can wholeheartedly recommend going through his account there and on bsky, lot's of interesting stuff.

Re: Noclip.website – A digital museum of video game levels

#38

Post by therobots927 »

This is cool. I recently bought a GameCube and a few games, it’s just as fun and engaging as I remember it being as a kid. The graphics aren’t as “good” as modern games but if a game was fun 20 years ago it’s still fun now… nothing about the game changed. Just our expectations. And the modern game industry is beyond saving at this point outside of a few independent studios.

Re: Noclip.website – A digital museum of video game levels

#39

Post by moffkalast »

Ah yes, copyright infringement simulator.

Kidding aside it's really cool, it's insane to me that one can just download the entire map of Most Wanted to their browser in seconds. Some of these maps would make great webgl case studies for shaders and rendering, they're reproduced really well. Also god were they efficient in those days, any polygon that can't be seen from ground level is just removed from the mesh entirely instead of culled at runtime.

I'm glad to have seen this before Nintendo's lawyers load their book throwing catapults.

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