9 ms·

Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7 (2016)

323 points by homarp 5y ago

Waterluvian 5y ago
I remember the D2 perspective mode was a neat trick but it made the game kinda fuzzy and broke core graphics features such as my character wouldn’t be green when poisoned.
- Tarsul 5y ago
  sometimes I wonder how much green/blue is/was lost in media due to greenscreen/bluescreen. Anyone has any idea about this?
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    You can key on any color; green is the most common mostly because it's pretty far away from the range of human skin/hair. You also only need to worry about this when you're doing effects shots. If you're doing relatively naturalistic filmmaking where your set/location isn't gonna be replaced, there's no need for any of that.
- BearOso 5y ago
  The green was a palette trick. The Direct3D mode used high-color mode, so that trick wasn’t free. It did draw a green light halo around the character’s feet instead, though.
  - Waterluvian 5y ago
    It did. But it was very subtle.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
"Fake perspective" was problematic in early flight simulators as well where texture-mapping was used. The classic example being a long runway. If the runway was a long polygon and you had a long texture map (with a dashed centerline for example) the standard code to map the bitmap to the projected runway polygon would not in fact apply perspective to the bitmap — the intervals between the dashes would be a fixed not perspective distance. The solution was to break up the runway into a whole bunch of shorter polygons — each with a bitmap of perhaps one stripe/dash.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
  The PlayStation didn't have perspective-correct texture mapping despite having a real 3D rendering pipeline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8TO-nrUtSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8TO-nrUtSI
  - sshumaker 5y ago
    Yes, which is why games that really took advantage of the hardware like Crash Bandicoot just used tons of small triangles.
    - mikepurvis 5y ago
      To be fair, the best N64 games did that too, though for different reasons (pitiful amount of RAM for storing textures).
  - bitwize 5y ago
    A lot of this has to do with the fact that many Japanese manufacturers of the era basically got to 3D hardware by improving 2D sprite chips so they could scale and do affine transforms. This is why the PlayStation couldn't do perspective correct nor filtered textures and lacked a Z buffer, and why the Saturn drew with quads instead of tris. Nintendo partnered with the most advanced Western 3D hardware manufacturer -- SGI. The N64 was kind of a cut down Indigo.
  - malkia 5y ago
    for that reason some games (on PS1) would subdivide on the fly, and have special code to avoid t-junctions (extend by pixel, such that there is no gap), also there were no sub-pixel coordinates hence the "shimmering" - still though some games brought quite impressive graphics for what the chip offered.
    - malkia 5y ago
      Another difference was using small 4-bit textures with own palette applied on different parts of the character body, instead of one huge skin (like done in Quake), not only this allowed for better sampling - e.g. no blurries around shoulders, but also better and more optimal use - for example most of your hands, or legs often are with the same texture,hence two (or more) different 4-bit textures might server better than one huge 8-bit one (and the pallette for it would be smaller too). But then there were also tricks of reusing textures (mapping) directly from what was drawn on screen (for blurring, etc).
bombcar 5y ago
2D games had so many tricks that they often looked better than their 3D replacements for quite some time. If you were able to do every pixel by hand for a few views you often ended up with more detail than you could in the low amount of polygons available early on.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  Hand-painted/drawn backgrounds were unfairly good back in the day. Something like Planescape: Torment looks better than its age because there’s really very little to render in real-time. Conversely, something comparable like SimGolf looks much worse despite coming out later because it couldn’t leverage anything pre-rendered.
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    Which SimGolf?
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Playing through Final Fantasy VII as a kid (albeit emulated) was a great introduction to that dichotomy. The game mixes both 2D and 3D art styles to varying degrees of success, but there's definitely a reason why the game's art direction is so iconic. Looking back on it, all I see is a watercolor, handpainted haze (as opposed to games from the system that haven't quite aged as well, like Metal Gear Solid)
  - RuggedPineapple 5y ago
    I actually think of FF VII as one of the PS1 games that have aged the most, and far more to my eye then MGS. The 3d battle models are fantastic, but the overworld models are, like, laughably bad. It wasn't a hardware limitation either, because FF VIII and IX both fixed this with character models that actually look like the character, but VII looks like polygons are in short supply. They just didnt know how to fully utilize the system yet.
    - 5y ago
ChuckMcM 5y ago
Ah yes, such great tricks to fool the eye. Like programming tricks to fit into small memory footprints I suspect the "how" of these things will get lost over time. Contemporary with these game developments was an excellent series called "Graphics GEMS" which highlighted different ways to achieve various cool effects. Back in those days I felt a real sense of accomplishment when I got something to both work and "look right" (your eye is a very harsh critic!) and its a bit sad for me that you just call the right Unity of Vulcan API and voila, effect you were looking for on your scene appears.
- bob1029 5y ago
  > its a bit sad for me that you just call the right Unity of Vulcan API and voila, effect you were looking for on your scene appears. You are free to not call those APIs. You could constrain yourself. I did this and I am having way more fun than if I tried to use the full capabilities of a modern GPU+software stack.
  - ChuckMcM 5y ago
    True, there are always interesting ways to create challenges to enhance the experience.
- resonious 5y ago
  Yeah it does feel like this kind of clever graphics trickery is becoming a lost artform. Of course, niche circles can continue it. Retro console/PC programming circles, demoscene, etc. But I'm not sure how long those circles will last once the generations that grew up with that hardware die out.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  > you just call the right Unity of Vulcan API and voila, effect you were looking for on your scene appears. Nitpick: Vulkan (with a K) is a low-level graphics API, operating on a level that's comparable to OpenGL or DirectX, or perhaps even a bit lower. It's not going to implement any kind of interesting, nontrivial graphical effects for you -- doing that is going to take work, just like it would with older graphics APIs. With a higher-level framework like Unity, on the other hand... that's a fair comment.
WalterSobchak 5y ago
I wonder why they enforce a redirect from HTTP to HTTPS. https://simonschreibt.de/gat/dont-starve-diablo-parallax-7/ https://simonschreibt.de/gat/dont-starve-diablo-parallax-7/
- nextaccountic 5y ago
  I thought this was considered a best practice. Years ago people cited performance reasons but I think this doesn't make sense anymore. Relevant thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13301280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13301280 (but from 2017, can't find a 2021 discussion)
  - npteljes 5y ago
    Indeed it is, since browsers now mark http pages as "insecure". Let's Encrypt's certbot, for one, explicitly asks upon installation if you'd like to redirect http to https.
wyldfire 5y ago
"Moon Patrol" seemed like such an entertaining game at the time. But it grew stale very quickly. The parallax effect was really popular in home consoles like NES games just a few years later. This article is all about rendering but gameplay is what makes "Don't Starve" standout IMO.
- wincy 5y ago
  I really love the idea of Don’t Starve, but I felt like I had to read a guide to get better at it, so I lost interest. I adore the artwork, especially. At the same time, the main game loop of Don’t Starve seems like you have to memorize a bunch of survival tips and constantly read the wiki to survive, or you’re doomed after the first week for sure, and probably before.
  - wyldfire 5y ago
    > At the same time, the main game loop of Don’t Starve seems like you have to memorize a bunch of survival tips and constantly read the wiki to survive, or you’re doomed after the first week for sure, and probably before. In truth, I gave up after failing to thrive through four or five attempts. In other games, I hate the nagging tutorials and compulsory/free savepoints. But it seems like DS could've benefitted from some compromises here. So, I 'cheated'. After telling a friend who was excited about the game that I'd given up, they told me about the cues the game was giving me and how to mitigate them. The dynamics of the game are somewhat open world (not quite Dwarf-Fortess level but lots of great flexibility in interactions/systems). After getting past some initial hiccups and knowing what the threats are (beyond starvation) and potential solutions means you can have a lot more fun. And it's a drag when you die but going from a clean start to a workable place is easily doable after you know the basics. "Don't Starve Together" is a much easier way to be introduced to DS, especially when entering after the team has made some basic progress.
    - INTPenis 5y ago
      I never figured out those cues. I also gave up after a while because the only way to progress was to cheat. I think if I re-played it today I'd check one of the many gameplay videos on youtube to understand how to get started and then take it from there.
slmjkdbtl 5y ago
Ulillillia's Platform Master also has a lot of really interesting parallax / pseudo 3d effects: https://youtu.be/Tc4djuMvP2k?t=2117 https://youtu.be/Tc4djuMvP2k?t=2117
anthk 5y ago
Fake 3D racing games with did it worse, as you just had a trig shifting road and some background scrolling right and left. When I played Road Rash 3D on the PSX the change was like night and day. Altough some of them did it really well, like Lotus Turbo Challenge I and II for the Mega Drive.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mbank 5y ago
I love You mentioning moon patrol. It was one of my first games back in the days on Atari 1024St. Spend hours in front of it, just a me a friend and a joystick...
quadcore 5y ago
Nowdays, I make the distinction between maintainable programs and hackable ones, the later of course being, imo, way better. What I mean by that is essentially that the ratio # by-design features over simplicity of code of the hackable program is considerably higher than the maintainable program (but there is no method to write a hackable program, you either have the sensibility for that or you dont, from my own observation - I'll be happy to discuss the nuances of that statement). I don't know today but blizzard used to write its game in the hackable way - which is both a feat and rare. Take WoW for example, do you know how the 3d engine basically work? It's so simple and so powerful, you are not going to believe it. WoW is made of levels that are connected by portals. That's it. A level will have portals that will get you to other levels which in turn will have portals which lead to other levels. For example, when you are "outdoor" (with quotes because the engine doesn't know outdoor actually, it knows levels!), you may find a portal that leads you into a tavern for example. Once you are in the tavern, the program can ignore the rest of the world and focus the whole computer resources on the tavern, just like that, by-design. So you'll have taverns as detailed as all of what you can see in the exteriors. Better, you can have landscape in each and every level. (note when the player is in the air, say on a gryphon, some portals are ignored.) This is both incredible simple and powerful. Remember the game run on early-2000 PCs. Imagine what you can do with that. Caves? Done. Houses that leads into catacombs? Done. Incredibly detailed cities? Add walls and portals, done. Texture streaming? Well, d-o-n-e. Buildings that leads to indoor landscape? Done. I wouldnt make a game engine differently today. As a comparison, I'm working on one of the most played game in the world atm which is a maintainable program. You have no idea the pain in the ass in comparison just to add simple features. Oh yeah the code is readable. You can fix bugs. But features, just forget it, it takes a shit load of money to get one done.
- exikyut 5y ago
  If I may ask, I would love to hear your perspective about the fuzzy, squishy reasons why hackable turns into maintainable from a management perspective. I think I understand what you mean about the two. I know embarassingly little about electronics despite being interested in it for a long time, and have boggled at how much a circuit schematic can differ from PCB layout. On a schematic you can just go "and here are 48 data lines and we'll just draw some dots to illustrate that they yeet all the way over there" but on a PCB you not only have to route them (possibly across multiple PCB layers) but maybe some of the lines have to have squiggly messes in them so they're all exactly the same length and the electrical impulses arrive at the correct nanosecond. The good electronic engineers are the ones who've learned to fluently translate between schematic and PCB layout in their heads, in exactly the same way someone might fluently translate between languages to the point that they forget which language they heard something in, their memory just encodes the meaning directly because the neural routing is that deep/strong/integrated. A good programmer has learned to understand/accept/integrate(/resign themselves to) the fact that the "focal point" of almost every program is in the programmer's head, not on the screen, and that whatever's onscreen is instead ultimately just a giant pile of little pinball-paddle nudges that hopefully prompt the reader to go "OH" and have the program structure "pop" into focus. Once you have that, you're good to go: that distinct mental model is detached from this class structure or that naming convention or whatever pattern, and thus not bound by the mnemonic/interpretative/structural limitations of the proverbial puzzle pieces that constitute the methodology; it's the superset of all of that and all the machinery that hasn't been set into stone yet. It is so, so weird how programming slams right up against the edge of design/engineering/bigger-picture-greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts vs Management™.
lobocinza 5y ago
Return of the Obra Dinn is a real 3D space but rendered entirely in 1bit monochromatic using dithering.

323 points by homarp 5y ago

I remember the D2 perspective mode was a neat trick but it made the game kinda fuzzy and broke core graphics features such as my character wouldn’t be green when poisoned.

Tarsul 5y ago
sometimes I wonder how much green/blue is/was lost in media due to greenscreen/bluescreen. Anyone has any idea about this?
- egypturnash 5y ago
  You can key on any color; green is the most common mostly because it's pretty far away from the range of human skin/hair. You also only need to worry about this when you're doing effects shots. If you're doing relatively naturalistic filmmaking where your set/location isn't gonna be replaced, there's no need for any of that.
BearOso 5y ago
The green was a palette trick. The Direct3D mode used high-color mode, so that trick wasn’t free. It did draw a green light halo around the character’s feet instead, though.
- Waterluvian 5y ago
  It did. But it was very subtle.

JKCalhoun 5y ago

"Fake perspective" was problematic in early flight simulators as well where texture-mapping was used. The classic example being a long runway. If the runway was a long polygon and you had a long texture map (with a dashed centerline for example) the standard code to map the bitmap to the projected runway polygon would not in fact apply perspective to the bitmap — the intervals between the dashes would be a fixed not perspective distance. The solution was to break up the runway into a whole bunch of shorter polygons — each with a bitmap of perhaps one stripe/dash.

aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
The PlayStation didn't have perspective-correct texture mapping despite having a real 3D rendering pipeline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8TO-nrUtSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8TO-nrUtSI
- sshumaker 5y ago
  Yes, which is why games that really took advantage of the hardware like Crash Bandicoot just used tons of small triangles.
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    To be fair, the best N64 games did that too, though for different reasons (pitiful amount of RAM for storing textures).
- bitwize 5y ago
  A lot of this has to do with the fact that many Japanese manufacturers of the era basically got to 3D hardware by improving 2D sprite chips so they could scale and do affine transforms. This is why the PlayStation couldn't do perspective correct nor filtered textures and lacked a Z buffer, and why the Saturn drew with quads instead of tris. Nintendo partnered with the most advanced Western 3D hardware manufacturer -- SGI. The N64 was kind of a cut down Indigo.
- malkia 5y ago
  for that reason some games (on PS1) would subdivide on the fly, and have special code to avoid t-junctions (extend by pixel, such that there is no gap), also there were no sub-pixel coordinates hence the "shimmering" - still though some games brought quite impressive graphics for what the chip offered.
  - malkia 5y ago
    Another difference was using small 4-bit textures with own palette applied on different parts of the character body, instead of one huge skin (like done in Quake), not only this allowed for better sampling - e.g. no blurries around shoulders, but also better and more optimal use - for example most of your hands, or legs often are with the same texture,hence two (or more) different 4-bit textures might server better than one huge 8-bit one (and the pallette for it would be smaller too). But then there were also tricks of reusing textures (mapping) directly from what was drawn on screen (for blurring, etc).

bombcar 5y ago

2D games had so many tricks that they often looked better than their 3D replacements for quite some time. If you were able to do every pixel by hand for a few views you often ended up with more detail than you could in the low amount of polygons available early on.

jimbob45 5y ago
Hand-painted/drawn backgrounds were unfairly good back in the day. Something like Planescape: Torment looks better than its age because there’s really very little to render in real-time. Conversely, something comparable like SimGolf looks much worse despite coming out later because it couldn’t leverage anything pre-rendered.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  Which SimGolf?
smoldesu 5y ago
Playing through Final Fantasy VII as a kid (albeit emulated) was a great introduction to that dichotomy. The game mixes both 2D and 3D art styles to varying degrees of success, but there's definitely a reason why the game's art direction is so iconic. Looking back on it, all I see is a watercolor, handpainted haze (as opposed to games from the system that haven't quite aged as well, like Metal Gear Solid)
- RuggedPineapple 5y ago
  I actually think of FF VII as one of the PS1 games that have aged the most, and far more to my eye then MGS. The 3d battle models are fantastic, but the overworld models are, like, laughably bad. It wasn't a hardware limitation either, because FF VIII and IX both fixed this with character models that actually look like the character, but VII looks like polygons are in short supply. They just didnt know how to fully utilize the system yet.
  - 5y ago

ChuckMcM 5y ago

Ah yes, such great tricks to fool the eye. Like programming tricks to fit into small memory footprints I suspect the "how" of these things will get lost over time. Contemporary with these game developments was an excellent series called "Graphics GEMS" which highlighted different ways to achieve various cool effects. Back in those days I felt a real sense of accomplishment when I got something to both work and "look right" (your eye is a very harsh critic!) and its a bit sad for me that you just call the right Unity of Vulcan API and voila, effect you were looking for on your scene appears.

bob1029 5y ago
> its a bit sad for me that you just call the right Unity of Vulcan API and voila, effect you were looking for on your scene appears. You are free to not call those APIs. You could constrain yourself. I did this and I am having way more fun than if I tried to use the full capabilities of a modern GPU+software stack.
- ChuckMcM 5y ago
  True, there are always interesting ways to create challenges to enhance the experience.
resonious 5y ago
Yeah it does feel like this kind of clever graphics trickery is becoming a lost artform. Of course, niche circles can continue it. Retro console/PC programming circles, demoscene, etc. But I'm not sure how long those circles will last once the generations that grew up with that hardware die out.
duskwuff 5y ago
> you just call the right Unity of Vulcan API and voila, effect you were looking for on your scene appears. Nitpick: Vulkan (with a K) is a low-level graphics API, operating on a level that's comparable to OpenGL or DirectX, or perhaps even a bit lower. It's not going to implement any kind of interesting, nontrivial graphical effects for you -- doing that is going to take work, just like it would with older graphics APIs. With a higher-level framework like Unity, on the other hand... that's a fair comment.

WalterSobchak 5y ago

I wonder why they enforce a redirect from HTTP to HTTPS. https://simonschreibt.de/gat/dont-starve-diablo-parallax-7/ https://simonschreibt.de/gat/dont-starve-diablo-parallax-7/

nextaccountic 5y ago
I thought this was considered a best practice. Years ago people cited performance reasons but I think this doesn't make sense anymore. Relevant thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13301280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13301280 (but from 2017, can't find a 2021 discussion)
- npteljes 5y ago
  Indeed it is, since browsers now mark http pages as "insecure". Let's Encrypt's certbot, for one, explicitly asks upon installation if you'd like to redirect http to https.

wyldfire 5y ago

"Moon Patrol" seemed like such an entertaining game at the time. But it grew stale very quickly. The parallax effect was really popular in home consoles like NES games just a few years later. This article is all about rendering but gameplay is what makes "Don't Starve" standout IMO.

wincy 5y ago
I really love the idea of Don’t Starve, but I felt like I had to read a guide to get better at it, so I lost interest. I adore the artwork, especially. At the same time, the main game loop of Don’t Starve seems like you have to memorize a bunch of survival tips and constantly read the wiki to survive, or you’re doomed after the first week for sure, and probably before.
- wyldfire 5y ago
  > At the same time, the main game loop of Don’t Starve seems like you have to memorize a bunch of survival tips and constantly read the wiki to survive, or you’re doomed after the first week for sure, and probably before. In truth, I gave up after failing to thrive through four or five attempts. In other games, I hate the nagging tutorials and compulsory/free savepoints. But it seems like DS could've benefitted from some compromises here. So, I 'cheated'. After telling a friend who was excited about the game that I'd given up, they told me about the cues the game was giving me and how to mitigate them. The dynamics of the game are somewhat open world (not quite Dwarf-Fortess level but lots of great flexibility in interactions/systems). After getting past some initial hiccups and knowing what the threats are (beyond starvation) and potential solutions means you can have a lot more fun. And it's a drag when you die but going from a clean start to a workable place is easily doable after you know the basics. "Don't Starve Together" is a much easier way to be introduced to DS, especially when entering after the team has made some basic progress.
  - INTPenis 5y ago
    I never figured out those cues. I also gave up after a while because the only way to progress was to cheat. I think if I re-played it today I'd check one of the many gameplay videos on youtube to understand how to get started and then take it from there.

slmjkdbtl 5y ago

Ulillillia's Platform Master also has a lot of really interesting parallax / pseudo 3d effects: https://youtu.be/Tc4djuMvP2k?t=2117 https://youtu.be/Tc4djuMvP2k?t=2117

anthk 5y ago

Fake 3D racing games with did it worse, as you just had a trig shifting road and some background scrolling right and left. When I played Road Rash 3D on the PSX the change was like night and day. Altough some of them did it really well, like Lotus Turbo Challenge I and II for the Mega Drive.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mbank 5y ago

I love You mentioning moon patrol. It was one of my first games back in the days on Atari 1024St. Spend hours in front of it, just a me a friend and a joystick...

quadcore 5y ago

Nowdays, I make the distinction between maintainable programs and hackable ones, the later of course being, imo, way better. What I mean by that is essentially that the ratio # by-design features over simplicity of code of the hackable program is considerably higher than the maintainable program (but there is no method to write a hackable program, you either have the sensibility for that or you dont, from my own observation - I'll be happy to discuss the nuances of that statement). I don't know today but blizzard used to write its game in the hackable way - which is both a feat and rare. Take WoW for example, do you know how the 3d engine basically work? It's so simple and so powerful, you are not going to believe it. WoW is made of levels that are connected by portals. That's it. A level will have portals that will get you to other levels which in turn will have portals which lead to other levels. For example, when you are "outdoor" (with quotes because the engine doesn't know outdoor actually, it knows levels!), you may find a portal that leads you into a tavern for example. Once you are in the tavern, the program can ignore the rest of the world and focus the whole computer resources on the tavern, just like that, by-design. So you'll have taverns as detailed as all of what you can see in the exteriors. Better, you can have landscape in each and every level. (note when the player is in the air, say on a gryphon, some portals are ignored.) This is both incredible simple and powerful. Remember the game run on early-2000 PCs. Imagine what you can do with that. Caves? Done. Houses that leads into catacombs? Done. Incredibly detailed cities? Add walls and portals, done. Texture streaming? Well, d-o-n-e. Buildings that leads to indoor landscape? Done. I wouldnt make a game engine differently today. As a comparison, I'm working on one of the most played game in the world atm which is a maintainable program. You have no idea the pain in the ass in comparison just to add simple features. Oh yeah the code is readable. You can fix bugs. But features, just forget it, it takes a shit load of money to get one done.

exikyut 5y ago
If I may ask, I would love to hear your perspective about the fuzzy, squishy reasons why hackable turns into maintainable from a management perspective. I think I understand what you mean about the two. I know embarassingly little about electronics despite being interested in it for a long time, and have boggled at how much a circuit schematic can differ from PCB layout. On a schematic you can just go "and here are 48 data lines and we'll just draw some dots to illustrate that they yeet all the way over there" but on a PCB you not only have to route them (possibly across multiple PCB layers) but maybe some of the lines have to have squiggly messes in them so they're all exactly the same length and the electrical impulses arrive at the correct nanosecond. The good electronic engineers are the ones who've learned to fluently translate between schematic and PCB layout in their heads, in exactly the same way someone might fluently translate between languages to the point that they forget which language they heard something in, their memory just encodes the meaning directly because the neural routing is that deep/strong/integrated. A good programmer has learned to understand/accept/integrate(/resign themselves to) the fact that the "focal point" of almost every program is in the programmer's head, not on the screen, and that whatever's onscreen is instead ultimately just a giant pile of little pinball-paddle nudges that hopefully prompt the reader to go "OH" and have the program structure "pop" into focus. Once you have that, you're good to go: that distinct mental model is detached from this class structure or that naming convention or whatever pattern, and thus not bound by the mnemonic/interpretative/structural limitations of the proverbial puzzle pieces that constitute the methodology; it's the superset of all of that and all the machinery that hasn't been set into stone yet. It is so, so weird how programming slams right up against the edge of design/engineering/bigger-picture-greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts vs Management™.

lobocinza 5y ago

Return of the Obra Dinn is a real 3D space but rendered entirely in 1bit monochromatic using dithering.