5 ms·
I remember Alone in the Dark (1992) as having a totally crazy rendering engine. Looking at footage on YouTube [1], I now see that a lot of the more complex bac
by smokel 3y ago
I remember Alone in the Dark (1992) as having a totally crazy rendering engine. Looking at footage on YouTube [1], I now see that a lot of the more complex background rendering was probably done offline.
The Sierra adventures at that time (Kings Quest V and the like) had painted backgrounds where the actionable items would stand out because they looked like crap.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsGaVrMr9N8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsGaVrMr9N8
- chpatrick 3y agoMany games of that time had prerendered backgrounds with basic realtime graphics on top.
- smokel 3y agoTrue, but only a few combined flat shading, Gouraud shading, texture mapping, and vector balls :)
- holoduke 3y agoEstatica was a cool game for its time. https://youtu.be/9SsR5fPjGu4?si=Eu6RmO-vlsC8Fps5 https://youtu.be/9SsR5fPjGu4?si=Eu6RmO-vlsC8Fps5
- block_dagger 3y agoYes! Had a fun time with this one as well.
- blueboo 3y agoMany? In 92? I don’t think so. AitD was the first in my (admittedly non-comprehensive) experience. 92 was full of sprite-based pixel art adventures, to be sure. Relentless/Twinsens was 94. RE and FF7 were years after that
- Waterluvian 3y agoSpaceship Warlock did it in 1991 but was a Mac game so it went deeply under-appreciated. Admittedly this might fall outside your definition depending on if the focus is “3D scenes rendered to 2D” or “pretending they’re full 3D with a handful of actual 3D characters on top.”
- fzzzy 3y agoMade in Macromedia Director I believe
- rzzzt 3y agoAnother World also fits the bill (the 20th Anniversary edition a bit more than the original as it has a hand-painted background).
- mrob 3y agoLBA1 uses Gouraud shaded polygonal characters on top of tile-based 2D backgrounds. LBA2 does the same for indoor areas. For outdoor areas it uses a technique I don't recall seeing in any other game: every time the camera changes position it renders detailed and fully textured 3D scenes to a static background buffer (possibly taking a few hundred milliseconds), then renders the characters on top of that background. The camera changed position automatically, and you could also press a key to force it to re-render the background if you wanted a different camera position. It's a good compromise between real-time and pre-rendered IMO.
- Waterluvian 3y agoThe thing that really kinda bewildered me is when I learned that so many games like that: Final Fantasy 7, Baldur’s Gate, had full 3D scenes created and then rendered individual frames for backgrounds. I had thought it would have been easier to just draw and paint scenes instead. Feels like so much work. You fully realize an entire scene and then capture a couple angles at most. Of course I should have known better given the handful of times a scene comes to live via an FMV cutscene.
- syntheweave 3y agoThere are a bunch of considerations. As resolution and color depth goes up it becomes harder to throw a lot of graphical detail on the screen through traditional illustration, so games that went down that route increasingly became flat and cartoonish, while 3D games could be filled with textures, lights and "greeble" architecture. It was also a way to enforce style consistency. Lucasarts didn't have "art direction" as a role until DOTT, and their earlier games show a lot of style drift between assets. Early 3D enforced a style through the constraints - often not a good one, but definitely something that could look consistent just through the model/texture/light process separation. The biggest one is actually animation. Animation gets expensive as you add more detail, and when you add resolution, you discover a need to add more frames of animation to make it still look smooth, so your art costs can explode. The use of 3D here is motivated by having camera-independent animation, and being able to use it for every minor environmental effect: think of every Myst-style game where you pull levers and push buttons and open doors. Character animation in early 3D was bad, but it was also "enough" to look representative, so it ended up beating traditional or live action approaches.
- wincy 3y agoThe Banner Saga or Cuphead are examples of the amount of time and care it takes to do high resolution 2D artwork properly. Those games are absolutely breathtaking because of it, but their development cycles took a very long time for relatively short games because of it. You just can’t keep up with a 3D asset pipeline.
- djur 3y ago
- bdhcuidbebe 3y agoNo, that’s not true in 1992. The only other game in that time I can think of is Out of this World for the Amiga.
- robert_tweed 3y agoAlone in the Dark was notable at the time for using Gouraud shading [1]. You can see the effect on some of the polygons here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsGaVrMr9N8&t=480s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsGaVrMr9N8&t=480s The reason I remember this is that it inspired me to spend ages implementing Gouraud shading in my own graphics library (written in assembly language), only to discover that flat polygons look better most of the time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gouraud_shading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gouraud_shading
- pandaman 3y agoUnless you mean pre-rendered backgrounds, there was no Gouraud shading in that game. It does seem to have a little texturing on some parts of the model, most likely ramp lighting and pretty expensive as they could not texture the whole character. E.g. here you can see each triangle in the model in whole untextured flat-shaded glory :) https://www.mobygames.com/game/325/alone-in-the-dark/screenshots/dos/698285/ https://www.mobygames.com/game/325/alone-in-the-dark/screens... except the textured collar lit by recomputing the palette colors.
- smokel 3y agoSome items in the inventory, such as the knife, and the book appear to have some kind of "metal shading", which was typically implemented as a modified Gouraud shader. It could all be texture mapping of course, but somehow I doubt that. And what about these fancy ballroom dresses? https://www.mobygames.com/game/325/alone-in-the-dark/screenshots/dos/530802/ https://www.mobygames.com/game/325/alone-in-the-dark/screens... We can only do two things now: contact the original author, or reverse engineer the binaries! Does anyone know if there is a DOS emulator that allows you to visualize and override RAM access easily?
- pandaman 3y agoYeah, it had different algorithm to render inventory and also could add/remove some objects to the background (those figures in dresses do not move if I recall, only toggle in and out). The inventory was not free camera with only controls to zoom, so you could do a lot of tricks with pre-computed shading. The general purpose rendering of the animated character and items they held was flat shading though.
- _kidlike 3y agoI LOVED these games that had painted backgrounds and actionable stuff popping out like crap...
- erkmene 3y agoI have a small nitpick with the video you shared: unfortunately that one and most others on YouTube are “talkie” CD versions which replaced the amazing MIDI music with rather uninspired symphonized CD tracks. Here’s a different longplay with the MIDI soundtrack: https://youtu.be/iSwYY2eoKhQ https://youtu.be/iSwYY2eoKhQ