8 ms·

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

113 points by luu 10y ago

steeve 10y ago
For those wondering what it looked like: https://youtu.be/38tJGachSfg?t=10m13s https://youtu.be/38tJGachSfg?t=10m13s It looks pretty amazing to me and fluid for a purely software rendered video game.
- officialvke 10y ago
  I've seen screenshots of Thief before but I never thought that the actual game is this smooth!
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  ...Actually, I'm pretty sure Thief did get hardware rendering at some point. For one thing, the finished product uses D3D.
  - codinghorror 10y ago
    You are correct the shipped game absolutely used hardware 3D acceleration .. by 1998 3D cards were quite popular, that was the early nvidia and late 3dfx era.
  - joakleaf 10y ago
    This was even mentioned in the post.... The author left the company for a short while and returned to add hardware rendering.
- quadcore 10y ago
  In that video, the game is using hardware accelerated 3D because we can clearly see the bilinear-filtering.
- Narishma 10y ago
  In that video it's running on a modern system using hardware accelerated rendering. It didn't look like that back in the day.
- joakleaf 10y ago
  This one looks more like Software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXLNk99JMfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXLNk99JMfY
- rasz_pl 10y ago
  because its not software rendered, you "can tell by the pixels"
blunte 10y ago
This game was beautiful and truly exciting to play when it came out. The graphics really contributed to the feeling of being there, sneaking around, watching light dancing from torches and shadows of moving NPCs.
- hacker_9 10y ago
  The audio was done well too, gave a real sense of atmosphere. I find their latest installment with all the fancy graphics, high quality models, cutscenes and so on just not as fun to play. They just don't capture the same atmosphere.
  - AJ007 10y ago
    The mental abstraction layer primitive graphics provides may communicate more value than we gain from a near accurate simulation. I'm not sure if this is because realism in a game contains mostly unnecessary information and our brains don't have to filter all of that out, or it is something else. The part of me that is bearish on VR is for this reason.
    - zardo 10y ago
      VR graphics don't have to attempt photo realism. Realism is a particular artistic choice, the technology doesn't force it on you.
    - braveo 10y ago
      It's a problem with a lot of newer games. As someone who remembers playing on the old Atari 2600, the hyper realism gets tiring really fast. It manifests itself, not just in the graphics, but in forcing me to watch yet another ladder climbing animation, my character not being able to stop on a dime and turn completely around, ad nauseum. I vastly prefer games that don't go for realism.
  - ionised 10y ago
    The latest installment is something else entirely with the Thief name slapped on it. It's not even the same studio.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Funnily enough, I've been playing Thief recently (this one, not the rubbish new one). And wow that game is hard. It's also an absolute blast to play, and an important piece of gaming history (one of the first First Person Stealth games, helped codify 3D stealth as a genre, engine later used in System Shock 2, had some influence on Warren Spector's next game, Deus Ex). While the renderer wasn't particularly impressive for the time, the AI, sound, and lighting engines were, which was essential for a stealth game.
- simonh 10y ago
  > And wow that game is hard. It's brutal. I ended up way down at the far end of a level (a sewer I think) only to find that I was missing something I needed to do or have from back near the beginning. Lack of attention gets punished hard. Great game though, you really feel like you earned beating each level.
  - moomin 10y ago
    Finished that and Thief 2 on max objectives on every level. Not because I'm particularly fond of rock hard gameplay, but because you got to appreciate the game to its fullest extent. Games that up the difficulty by making the mobs bullet sponges, meh. (With that said, some levels in the first were a real grind to deal with all the guards.)
    - talmand 10y ago
      I really appreciated the fact that one of the ways they ramped up the difficulty was by increasing the required objectives.
      - moomin 10y ago
        There's literally entire areas you don't need to visit if you use the lower difficulties. On the other hand, the extra cash you get lets you buy a lot more stuff... which you're going to need to accomplish all those objectives. I don't particularly ever wish to revisit The Cathedral. Spent three hours retracing my steps trying to find about 15 gold...
AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
The amazing thing here is that Looking Glass studios was known for its well-written stories and innovative gameplay, in addition to its technology. The first two generally come from highly creative people that are not necessarily trained in the minutiae of high-performance technical design. It must be incredibly difficult to assemble a team like that while also recruiting someone with the technical chops to create the engine.
- mihaifm 10y ago
  I remember reading some rumors that part of the dev team behind Thief also works on Dishonored. Thief was a fantastic game, so is Dishonored, and the similarities are striking. It would be interesting to know if this fact is true.
  - tannhaeuser 10y ago
    Ironically, Dark Shadows has been one of my all-time-faves because of the great atmo. Today I'm sitting next to my 16-year-old watching him playing Dishonored (+ Skyrim and others) on the Paystation.
  - BOBOTWINSTON 10y ago
    This would not surprise me at all. One of the main level designers for Dishonored also did City 17 in Half-Life 2. When I first played through it I was like "wow this person really got inspired by HL2". Turns out it was the same guy. Dishonored was honestly a better Thief reboot than the new Thief, but then again the new Thief really made me furious. I think I got < 2 hours in before I just couldn't stand it anymore.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    That's true. At the very least, one of the head designers was on the Thief team.
Zardoz84 10y ago
A small incise : On 2001 Blade, the edge of darkness (aka Severance : Blade of darkness outside of Spain), did a really nice job displaying indoor/outdoor dungeon ambient. The ambient, and the water effect and realtime shadows was really awesome.
iainmerrick 10y ago
I find software 3D rendering really interesting, as somebody who works on indie games. GPU-accelerated rendering is obviously much faster and you can get much better results; but it does have drawbacks! With GPU rendering, I spend the majority of my time testing and debugging on various platforms. 3D APIs are very complex, hardware capabilities vary a lot and driver quality is very poor. So even though you can get much better results in principle, in practice you can't get it as good as you hoped (or at least I can't) while also making it robust and reliable. With software rendering, you needed a ton of effort (by really smart programmers like Barrett) to get viable results, but at least you had confidence that it would work on everybody's computer, rather than crashing randomly on drivers that don't implement a 300-page 3D spec correctly. I'm told that Vulkan should improve matters, being simpler and better-specified than OpenGL, but I'm skeptical. It still seems very complex, and it doesn't run everywhere yet so it's not a great fit for low-end indie games.
- jeremiep 10y ago
  "Much Faster" is a bit of an understatement. The last software rendered title I can think of is the first Unreal Tournament. No CPU can handle the load of a modern game's graphics, not even close. Even badly integrated OpenGL is still orders of magnitude faster than the most optimized software rendering. And you're getting a lot more in terms of image quality on the GPU: texture filtering, anti aliasing, "free" conversions to gamma/linear space and more. Vulkan IS simpler than OpenGL, theres no arguing about that. But simpler does not mean easier. There's just much less stuff to worry about as engine developers to hit the fast path. On the other hand, you're managing a lot more memory by yourself. And even in software rendering you still get different results on different hardware. And even different results in debug vs release. Floating point arithmetic is fun like that. CPUs varies in power just like GPUs do; cache sizes vary greatly, number of cores, base clock speed, amount of available memory, memory speed, etc. And we're not even touching SIMD yet. You can't replace having to learn the hardware and the APIs to access it in order to build a game engine. That was also true of software renderers; they're closely tied to the properties of the CPU they target. That's why you get access to Unreal4 or Unity3D; very, very few people can actually make stable and portable game engines. Its just a hard problem space to begin with. Making it easier only means losing lots of flexibility and performance.

113 points by luu 10y ago

For those wondering what it looked like: https://youtu.be/38tJGachSfg?t=10m13s https://youtu.be/38tJGachSfg?t=10m13s It looks pretty amazing to me and fluid for a purely software rendered video game.

officialvke 10y ago
I've seen screenshots of Thief before but I never thought that the actual game is this smooth!
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
...Actually, I'm pretty sure Thief did get hardware rendering at some point. For one thing, the finished product uses D3D.
- codinghorror 10y ago
  You are correct the shipped game absolutely used hardware 3D acceleration .. by 1998 3D cards were quite popular, that was the early nvidia and late 3dfx era.
- joakleaf 10y ago
  This was even mentioned in the post.... The author left the company for a short while and returned to add hardware rendering.
quadcore 10y ago
In that video, the game is using hardware accelerated 3D because we can clearly see the bilinear-filtering.
Narishma 10y ago
In that video it's running on a modern system using hardware accelerated rendering. It didn't look like that back in the day.
joakleaf 10y ago
This one looks more like Software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXLNk99JMfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXLNk99JMfY
rasz_pl 10y ago
because its not software rendered, you "can tell by the pixels"

blunte 10y ago

This game was beautiful and truly exciting to play when it came out. The graphics really contributed to the feeling of being there, sneaking around, watching light dancing from torches and shadows of moving NPCs.

hacker_9 10y ago
The audio was done well too, gave a real sense of atmosphere. I find their latest installment with all the fancy graphics, high quality models, cutscenes and so on just not as fun to play. They just don't capture the same atmosphere.
- AJ007 10y ago
  The mental abstraction layer primitive graphics provides may communicate more value than we gain from a near accurate simulation. I'm not sure if this is because realism in a game contains mostly unnecessary information and our brains don't have to filter all of that out, or it is something else. The part of me that is bearish on VR is for this reason.
  - zardo 10y ago
    VR graphics don't have to attempt photo realism. Realism is a particular artistic choice, the technology doesn't force it on you.
  - braveo 10y ago
    It's a problem with a lot of newer games. As someone who remembers playing on the old Atari 2600, the hyper realism gets tiring really fast. It manifests itself, not just in the graphics, but in forcing me to watch yet another ladder climbing animation, my character not being able to stop on a dime and turn completely around, ad nauseum. I vastly prefer games that don't go for realism.
- ionised 10y ago
  The latest installment is something else entirely with the Thief name slapped on it. It's not even the same studio.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

Funnily enough, I've been playing Thief recently (this one, not the rubbish new one). And wow that game is hard. It's also an absolute blast to play, and an important piece of gaming history (one of the first First Person Stealth games, helped codify 3D stealth as a genre, engine later used in System Shock 2, had some influence on Warren Spector's next game, Deus Ex). While the renderer wasn't particularly impressive for the time, the AI, sound, and lighting engines were, which was essential for a stealth game.

simonh 10y ago
> And wow that game is hard. It's brutal. I ended up way down at the far end of a level (a sewer I think) only to find that I was missing something I needed to do or have from back near the beginning. Lack of attention gets punished hard. Great game though, you really feel like you earned beating each level.
- moomin 10y ago
  Finished that and Thief 2 on max objectives on every level. Not because I'm particularly fond of rock hard gameplay, but because you got to appreciate the game to its fullest extent. Games that up the difficulty by making the mobs bullet sponges, meh. (With that said, some levels in the first were a real grind to deal with all the guards.)
  - talmand 10y ago
    I really appreciated the fact that one of the ways they ramped up the difficulty was by increasing the required objectives.
    - moomin 10y ago
      There's literally entire areas you don't need to visit if you use the lower difficulties. On the other hand, the extra cash you get lets you buy a lot more stuff... which you're going to need to accomplish all those objectives. I don't particularly ever wish to revisit The Cathedral. Spent three hours retracing my steps trying to find about 15 gold...

AdmiralAsshat 10y ago

The amazing thing here is that Looking Glass studios was known for its well-written stories and innovative gameplay, in addition to its technology. The first two generally come from highly creative people that are not necessarily trained in the minutiae of high-performance technical design. It must be incredibly difficult to assemble a team like that while also recruiting someone with the technical chops to create the engine.

mihaifm 10y ago
I remember reading some rumors that part of the dev team behind Thief also works on Dishonored. Thief was a fantastic game, so is Dishonored, and the similarities are striking. It would be interesting to know if this fact is true.
- tannhaeuser 10y ago
  Ironically, Dark Shadows has been one of my all-time-faves because of the great atmo. Today I'm sitting next to my 16-year-old watching him playing Dishonored (+ Skyrim and others) on the Paystation.
- BOBOTWINSTON 10y ago
  This would not surprise me at all. One of the main level designers for Dishonored also did City 17 in Half-Life 2. When I first played through it I was like "wow this person really got inspired by HL2". Turns out it was the same guy. Dishonored was honestly a better Thief reboot than the new Thief, but then again the new Thief really made me furious. I think I got < 2 hours in before I just couldn't stand it anymore.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  That's true. At the very least, one of the head designers was on the Thief team.

Zardoz84 10y ago

A small incise : On 2001 Blade, the edge of darkness (aka Severance : Blade of darkness outside of Spain), did a really nice job displaying indoor/outdoor dungeon ambient. The ambient, and the water effect and realtime shadows was really awesome.

iainmerrick 10y ago

I find software 3D rendering really interesting, as somebody who works on indie games. GPU-accelerated rendering is obviously much faster and you can get much better results; but it does have drawbacks! With GPU rendering, I spend the majority of my time testing and debugging on various platforms. 3D APIs are very complex, hardware capabilities vary a lot and driver quality is very poor. So even though you can get much better results in principle, in practice you can't get it as good as you hoped (or at least I can't) while also making it robust and reliable. With software rendering, you needed a ton of effort (by really smart programmers like Barrett) to get viable results, but at least you had confidence that it would work on everybody's computer, rather than crashing randomly on drivers that don't implement a 300-page 3D spec correctly. I'm told that Vulkan should improve matters, being simpler and better-specified than OpenGL, but I'm skeptical. It still seems very complex, and it doesn't run everywhere yet so it's not a great fit for low-end indie games.

jeremiep 10y ago
"Much Faster" is a bit of an understatement. The last software rendered title I can think of is the first Unreal Tournament. No CPU can handle the load of a modern game's graphics, not even close. Even badly integrated OpenGL is still orders of magnitude faster than the most optimized software rendering. And you're getting a lot more in terms of image quality on the GPU: texture filtering, anti aliasing, "free" conversions to gamma/linear space and more. Vulkan IS simpler than OpenGL, theres no arguing about that. But simpler does not mean easier. There's just much less stuff to worry about as engine developers to hit the fast path. On the other hand, you're managing a lot more memory by yourself. And even in software rendering you still get different results on different hardware. And even different results in debug vs release. Floating point arithmetic is fun like that. CPUs varies in power just like GPUs do; cache sizes vary greatly, number of cores, base clock speed, amount of available memory, memory speed, etc. And we're not even touching SIMD yet. You can't replace having to learn the hardware and the APIs to access it in order to build a game engine. That was also true of software renderers; they're closely tied to the properties of the CPU they target. That's why you get access to Unreal4 or Unity3D; very, very few people can actually make stable and portable game engines. Its just a hard problem space to begin with. Making it easier only means losing lots of flexibility and performance.