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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 ti

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.
- gmueckl 5y ago
  In fact, when you look at the progression from OpenGL 1.1 to 3.0 Core to Vulkan (and the parallel evolution of Direct3D), you'll see that with every step along the way, the APIs became more and more flexible by providing less and less convenience. Just look at the code it takes to render one triangle using each one of these APIs. The difference is that by the time you manage to render a triangle using Vulkan, you're also mostly set up to do very advanced rendering tricks that would be plain impossible with OpenGL 1.1 and would require some contortions to get working on OpenGL 3.0.

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.

gmueckl 5y ago
In fact, when you look at the progression from OpenGL 1.1 to 3.0 Core to Vulkan (and the parallel evolution of Direct3D), you'll see that with every step along the way, the APIs became more and more flexible by providing less and less convenience. Just look at the code it takes to render one triangle using each one of these APIs. The difference is that by the time you manage to render a triangle using Vulkan, you're also mostly set up to do very advanced rendering tricks that would be plain impossible with OpenGL 1.1 and would require some contortions to get working on OpenGL 3.0.