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Ha. Yeah, there was not a lot of memory. The toolchain we built at the the time automatically packed all individual game texture maps into a single 256x256 text
by Dave_Rosenthal 5y ago
Ha. Yeah, there was not a lot of memory. The toolchain we built at the the time automatically packed all individual game texture maps into a single 256x256 texture (IIRC). If the artists made too many textures, everything started to look bad because everything got downsampled too much.
Any yeah, the design of the game content was absolutely affected by things like polygon count concerns: "Say, wouldn't it be cool to have a ship that shaped like a torus with a bunch of fins sticking out? Actually, on second thought... How about one that looks like a big spike? :)"
- lostgame 5y agoA fantastic early example of memory limitations in games are that the clouds and bushes in Mario 1 are the same sprite with a different palette. Those were certainly different times. :) It was so much cooler to see what developers and artists did within those limitations than what we are doing today. The entire game dev community was like a demoscene in a way.
- kqr 5y ago> If the artists made too many textures, everything started to look bad because everything got downsampled too much. That's really clever. On the surface of it, it's "just" about dynamically adapting fidelity to fit in the available memory. But really, it's a deeper organisational solution: it pushes the breadth vs fidelity of assets trade-off back to the designers, who are the ones that should decide along that curve anyway. It provides a cheap way for them to visually evaluate various points on that trade-off curve. Very clever.
- lupire 5y agowhy would you assume the designer would choose the optimal graphics config, instead of the artists who are the visual experts?