Wow, this takes me back of making my own software renderer and game engine as a teen in the 90s. Then OpenGL came out and fixed pipelines and some of the cool magic of doing anything with pixels disappeared (until pixel shaders came back). One cool rendering technique you don't see much today is voxel graphics.
Making Graphics Like it's 1993
51–60 of 169 posts
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#52Earlier 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…
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
Writing a retro-inspired game using retro approaches despite all the modern options is precisely what makes this interesting.
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#53This is a great write-up of your process and behind-the-scenes peek at the making of what looks to be a really fun game! Can't wait to play and delve into the code once you release it.
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#54Step 0 is missing: having a great taste. One look at the video example is enough to figure out that the author keeps things in balance and in style. Explanations of why pixel grid mismatch looks wrong, or why mismatch between texture density and geometric complexity (in both ways) looks horrible, or why smoothing does not blend with pixel art are then made in retrospect.
Some details are a bit too cool for 1993, though, and assume high frame rate (won't work that well at low fps). Smooth weapon animations with a lot of frames, tiny per-pixel effects on bullet holes and flash sprites, smooth movement and object position calculations that use precise math instead of fast rough estimates resemble Chasm: The Rift or Quake (the concept of idle animations, e. g. objects moving in the starting view of difficulty selection room, assumes that there is some performance to waste on details that make the world less empty).
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#55There is nothing wrong with using AI.
What I don't like is to see claims like "no AI slop"
And yet it's riddled with emdashes and language "by hand"
Seeing the skills of the writer, he definitely should be able to, but then I don't understand the claim.
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#56one of my very first solo projects during high school was writing a wolfenstein-like raycaster from scratch. I still hold some very fond memories of programming it, arguably one of the moments I fell in love with the craft
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#57I 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.
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#58There is nothing wrong with using AI. What I don't like is to see claims like "no AI slop" And yet it's riddled with emdashes and language "by hand" Seeing the skills of the writer, he definitely should be able to, but then I don't understand the claim.
I don’t know. Em-dashes are normal punctuation. The prose on the site doesn‘t strike me as particularly AI-y, but of course I might be wrong. Generally speaking, if the person wants to not use AI and tell people that, thats fine by me too.
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#59In the final video, it looks like the destructible vases take several shots to destroy. IMO, they should only take one. Real life vases only take one, so requiring more makes the gun feel weak. It seems to be cosmetic anyway, so there's no game balance reason to require more.
Re: Making Graphics Like it's 1993
#60Consider a premium, boxed version. I would buy it. And I think a lot other would. Maybe try a kickstarter to see how many are interested?