4 ms·

I'm more on the Quake side of the Quake/UT split. Also, why did the dev have to pull crazy hacks to make 3d performant on the PS2? I mean, if he was trying for

I'm more on the Quake side of the Quake/UT split. Also, why did the dev have to pull crazy hacks to make 3d performant on the PS2? I mean, if he was trying for something particularly impressive, or xbox-level graphics, sure, but the PS2 was built for manipulating polygons. It was, in a very real sense, the last console that was so aggressively optimized for one use case.

korethr 10y ago
Oh, I logged plenty of hours in Quake as well, Quake 2 especially, but not because OMG! Graphics! as I thought at the time, but because I was having fun. As for the game dev, I don't know, I didn't ask. I might be mis-remembering and he might have been bitching about the PS1 instead of the PS2. shrug
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Yeah, I'm not so much a fan of Quake 2, but Quake 1 and Quake 3 were also actually really fun. And this is as somebody who wasn't alive in the 90's. While we're discussing how high tech isn't required in a game, I feel the need to say that they aren't mutually exculsive, either.
  - korethr 10y ago
    >While we're discussing how high tech isn't required in a game, I feel the need to say that they aren't mutually exculsive, either. That's fair. I think part of the whole pixel art thing is a backlash against modern graphics tech, born of one-too-many experiences with a game that, while using the latest and greatest tech to achieve visually-stunning results, was no fun to play. Taken to the extreme, it can easily become a reverse-pixel-tax attitude: A game using modern graphics tech wont be fun, or at least, not as fun as it could have been. Such an attitude is as equally silly as a pixel-tax attitude, and I think part of what drove the the author to write the original article is realizing such.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      Actually, literal cases the of the reverse pixel tax, while rare, is very visible: When you try to create a game that's technically impressive, or even one that's not especially so, and you don't have the time or technical chops to back it, you wind up in a bad situation: Assassin's Creed: Unity would have been the mess it was without this, but the attempt to be technically impressive and up the crowds just made the problems worse, and further highlighted the embarassing pop-in, and embarrasing problems prior games never had. Meanwhile, the latest Call of Duty makes a hojillion dollars, still running on a heavily modified Quake 3 engine, with relatively unimpressive graphics for its time. Meanwhile meanwhile, Valve makes another smash hit, still running off of a heavily modified Quake 1 engine.
SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
I was working on a version of Tetris (Tetris Worlds) for the Game Boy Advance, and the team that was doing the PS2 version was having problems with performance. For Tetris. A lot of the PS2's speed came from vector processing; not sure how great the tools were for taking advantage of vector math. Didn't code on one myself. Also possible they were just using too many polygons; it's easy to kill your performance when you push your polygon numbers too high, or if you have too much overdraw and you blow past the pixel fill rate. (The design of the game had various animations happening in the background, which no player could ever see because of course you're paying attention to the Tetris board in the middle...not my idea; I just implemented what they asked for.) I didn't have performance problems on the Game Boy Advance because even though my CPU was slower, I was in 2d-land. It was funny to me that they eschewed the C++ engine and rewrote their in C because "performance!", while they ended up with performance problems and I didn't, but what can you do...
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Ah well. It guess it's just a case of not knowing the machine, and them being bad at their job. Or something. Neat story, anyways.

korethr 10y ago

Oh, I logged plenty of hours in Quake as well, Quake 2 especially, but not because OMG! Graphics! as I thought at the time, but because I was having fun. As for the game dev, I don't know, I didn't ask. I might be mis-remembering and he might have been bitching about the PS1 instead of the PS2. shrug

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Yeah, I'm not so much a fan of Quake 2, but Quake 1 and Quake 3 were also actually really fun. And this is as somebody who wasn't alive in the 90's. While we're discussing how high tech isn't required in a game, I feel the need to say that they aren't mutually exculsive, either.
- korethr 10y ago
  >While we're discussing how high tech isn't required in a game, I feel the need to say that they aren't mutually exculsive, either. That's fair. I think part of the whole pixel art thing is a backlash against modern graphics tech, born of one-too-many experiences with a game that, while using the latest and greatest tech to achieve visually-stunning results, was no fun to play. Taken to the extreme, it can easily become a reverse-pixel-tax attitude: A game using modern graphics tech wont be fun, or at least, not as fun as it could have been. Such an attitude is as equally silly as a pixel-tax attitude, and I think part of what drove the the author to write the original article is realizing such.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Actually, literal cases the of the reverse pixel tax, while rare, is very visible: When you try to create a game that's technically impressive, or even one that's not especially so, and you don't have the time or technical chops to back it, you wind up in a bad situation: Assassin's Creed: Unity would have been the mess it was without this, but the attempt to be technically impressive and up the crowds just made the problems worse, and further highlighted the embarassing pop-in, and embarrasing problems prior games never had. Meanwhile, the latest Call of Duty makes a hojillion dollars, still running on a heavily modified Quake 3 engine, with relatively unimpressive graphics for its time. Meanwhile meanwhile, Valve makes another smash hit, still running off of a heavily modified Quake 1 engine.

SomeCallMeTim 10y ago

I was working on a version of Tetris (Tetris Worlds) for the Game Boy Advance, and the team that was doing the PS2 version was having problems with performance. For Tetris. A lot of the PS2's speed came from vector processing; not sure how great the tools were for taking advantage of vector math. Didn't code on one myself. Also possible they were just using too many polygons; it's easy to kill your performance when you push your polygon numbers too high, or if you have too much overdraw and you blow past the pixel fill rate. (The design of the game had various animations happening in the background, which no player could ever see because of course you're paying attention to the Tetris board in the middle...not my idea; I just implemented what they asked for.) I didn't have performance problems on the Game Boy Advance because even though my CPU was slower, I was in 2d-land. It was funny to me that they eschewed the C++ engine and rewrote their in C because "performance!", while they ended up with performance problems and I didn't, but what can you do...

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Ah well. It guess it's just a case of not knowing the machine, and them being bad at their job. Or something. Neat story, anyways.