Graphics programming in the early to mid 1990s was pretty fun: write pixel data into the memory-mapped video RAM and it appears on the screen! A pointer to 0xA0000 was all you needed - no API or anything. The reason for the non-square-pixel 320×200 VGA mode they mention was that the video buffer took 64000 bytes, which fit into a 16-bit segment, making addressing it easy in 16-bit code/CPUs.
Making Graphics Like it's 1993
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Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#32This is a wonderful deep dive into your project. I'm early days on creating pixel art style procedural art systems, and this gives me plenty to think about.
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#33Earlier 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.
Yeah, even this model[0] i made a few years ago for a game i wanted to make for the OG xbox (which has a GeForce3-like GPU) has ~2230 triangles and the entire first level of Post Apocalyptic Petra is ~5800 triangles, so you could say that even a turn of the century 3D character has more or less the same polycount as an entire 90s level (the game i wanted to make would have many characters on screen so i kept the polycount low but i've heard games having 5-6K character or more - e.g. Kingdom Under Fire had ~10K triangles for the main character and a game like Dead or Alive where there are few characters on screen had 15-20K triangles).
Meanwhile more current games have much higher polycounts, easily going above 100K triangles - e.g. Dante from DMC5, a ~7 year old game, apparently has ~190K triangles and that had to run on the more anemic PS4/XBone hardware :-P (though i'm not sure if it used the full 190K model there or some cut down version).
[0] http://runtimeterror.com/pages/iv/images/1073c7062db40837240...
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#34Graphics programming in the early to mid 1990s was pretty fun: write pixel data into the memory-mapped video RAM and it appears on the screen! A pointer to 0xA0000 was all you needed - no API or anything. The reason for the non-square-pixel 320×200 VGA mode they mention was that the video buffer took 64000 bytes, which fit into a 16-bit segment, making addressing it easy in 16-bit code/CPUs.
> A pointer to 0xA0000 was all you needed
Though your extender could make things a little more annoying on that front :-P
(DJGPP and Free Pascal -which use the same "go32" extender by DJ Delorie- do not do a full linear mapping so you need to do a bit more juggling to get stuff on screen there)
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#35I 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 ).
> rare shooters with a female protagonist
It's not that rare, is it? Off-hand, and very mainstream; Perfect Dark, Mirrors Edge, Dishonored (don't remember if it's the first or second one), Metroid and more are all kind of "shooters" with female protagonist, although maybe Mirror's Edge is more just "first-person" than "shooter" to be 100% accurate.
Not to mention the large selection of "RPG + FPS" where you can be either man or woman.
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Seems the author also realize the thing with the pattern and likely gender of the cat:
> After all, I do need to give the protagonist his fair share. [image] (Yes, I know it's a female, but call it convention rooted in dialect.)
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#36I 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 ).
> rare shooters with a female protagonist It's not that rare, is it? Off-hand, and very mainstream; Perfect Dark, Mirrors Edge, Dishonored (don't remember if it's the first or second one), Metroid and more are all kind of "shooters" with female protagonist, although maybe Mirror's Edge is more just "first-person" than "shooter" to be 100% accurate. Not to mention the large selection of "RPG + FPS" where you can be ei…
They're definitely rare. Mirror's Edge is almost 20 years old. Reaching back that far for an example just reinforces how rare it is.
If you tally all the FPS releases in a given year, a supermajority are going to have male protagonists.
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#37I'm tinkering with a voxel space rendering tech demo as a PlayStation homebrew. After one weekend of work I'm getting decent results (like, 10-15 FPS) and I've yet to use the DMA, the GTE or even polylines primitives.
It's refreshing to dust up trigonometry and good old low-level optimization tricks. When the scratchbuffer has 1 KiB and the stack can only use a fraction of that, it makes me realize how spoiled I'm at work with the microcontrollers we have, with threads being allocated 8 KiB of stack and backtraces with over 50 functions of C++ templates on it.
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#38It'd be more interesting if you made a similar looking game using modern APIs imo
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…
Sure, but it becomes a question of how far you can push things. Maybe you raytrace the whole thing. Maybe there's some fractal geometry going on. Maybe you use a fisheye lens projection. Maybe your levels are dynamically tesselated. Maybe you have to do a few fancy tricks to achieve equivalent texturing etc.
But ignoring the GPU you have on your system is boring
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#39I 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 ).
> rare shooters with a female protagonist It's not that rare, is it? Off-hand, and very mainstream; Perfect Dark, Mirrors Edge, Dishonored (don't remember if it's the first or second one), Metroid and more are all kind of "shooters" with female protagonist, although maybe Mirror's Edge is more just "first-person" than "shooter" to be 100% accurate. Not to mention the large selection of "RPG + FPS" where you can be ei…
Not a "shooter", but the "No One Lives Forever" franchise is another example of a female protagonist in a first person game.
Edit: I completed forgot Chell from Portal, too!
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> rare shooters with a female protagonist It's not that rare, is it? Off-hand, and very mainstream; Perfect Dark, Mirrors Edge, Dishonored (don't remember if it's the first or second one), Metroid and more are all kind of "shooters" with female protagonist, although maybe Mirror's Edge is more just "first-person" than "shooter" to be 100% accurate. Not to mention the large selection of "RPG + FPS" where you can be ei…
They're definitely rare. Mirror's Edge is almost 20 years old. Reaching back that far for an example just reinforces how rare it is. If you tally all the FPS releases in a given year, a supermajority are going to have male protagonists.
> Reaching back that far for an example just reinforces how rare it is.
Choosing one specific example when I also made more recent ones, isn't such a big dunk you think it is.
> If you tally all the FPS releases in a given year, a supermajority are going to have male protagonists.
Sure, I agree, I'm not saying it's more popular, just that I don't think it's that rare, but I guess ultimately I'm a bit nitpicky (sorry) and we're just disagreeing with the specific definition of "rare".