4 ms·

> how much further we may be from what we wan The timescale you are describing for 3D graphics is 4 years from the 1997 cover you posted to the release of Hal

> how much further we may be from what we wan The timescale you are describing for 3D graphics is 4 years from the 1997 cover you posted to the release of Halo which you are saying plateaued excitement because it got advanced enough. An almost infinitesimally small amount of time in terms of history human development and you are mocking the magazine being excited for the advancement because it was... 4 years yearly?

ben_w 2y ago
No, the timescale is "the 90s", the the specific example is from 1997, and chosen because of how badly it aged. Nobody looks at the original single-player Unreal graphics today and thinks "this is amazing!", but we all did at the time — Reflections! Dynamic lighting! It was amazing for the era — but it was also a long way from photorealism. ChatGPT is amazing… but how far is it from Brent Spiner's Data? The era was people getting wowed from Wolfenstein (1992) to "about Halo or Half Life 2" (2001 or 2004). And I'm not saying the flattening of excitement was for any specific reason, just that this was roughly when it stopped getting exciting — it might have been because the engines were good enough for 3D art styles beyond "as realistic as we can make it", but for all I know it was the War On Terror which changed the tone of press releases and how much the news in general cared. Or perhaps it was a culture shift which came with more people getting online and less media being printed on glossy paper and sold in newsagents. Whatever the cause, it happened around that time.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  I'm still holding on to my hypothesis in that the excitement was sustained in large part because this progress was something a regular person could partake in. Most didn't, but they likely known some kid who was. And some of those kids run the gaming magazines. This was a time where, for 3D graphics, barriers to entry got low (math got figured out, hardware was good enough, knowledge spread), but the commercial market didn't yet capture everything. Hell, a bulk of those excited kids I remember, trying to do a better Unreal Tournament after school instead of homework (and almost succeeding!), they went on create and staff the next generation of commercial gamedev. (Which is maybe why this period lasted for about as long as it takes for a schoolkid to grow up, graduate, and spend few years in the workforce doing the stuff they were so excited about.)
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Could be. I was one of those kids, my focus was Marathon 2 even before I saw Unreal. I managed to figure out enough maths from scratch to end up with the basics of ray casting, but not enough at the time to realise the tricks needed to make that real time on a 75 MHz CPU… and then we all got OpenGL and I went through university where they explained the algorithms.

ben_w 2y ago

No, the timescale is "the 90s", the the specific example is from 1997, and chosen because of how badly it aged. Nobody looks at the original single-player Unreal graphics today and thinks "this is amazing!", but we all did at the time — Reflections! Dynamic lighting! It was amazing for the era — but it was also a long way from photorealism. ChatGPT is amazing… but how far is it from Brent Spiner's Data? The era was people getting wowed from Wolfenstein (1992) to "about Halo or Half Life 2" (2001 or 2004). And I'm not saying the flattening of excitement was for any specific reason, just that this was roughly when it stopped getting exciting — it might have been because the engines were good enough for 3D art styles beyond "as realistic as we can make it", but for all I know it was the War On Terror which changed the tone of press releases and how much the news in general cared. Or perhaps it was a culture shift which came with more people getting online and less media being printed on glossy paper and sold in newsagents. Whatever the cause, it happened around that time.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
I'm still holding on to my hypothesis in that the excitement was sustained in large part because this progress was something a regular person could partake in. Most didn't, but they likely known some kid who was. And some of those kids run the gaming magazines. This was a time where, for 3D graphics, barriers to entry got low (math got figured out, hardware was good enough, knowledge spread), but the commercial market didn't yet capture everything. Hell, a bulk of those excited kids I remember, trying to do a better Unreal Tournament after school instead of homework (and almost succeeding!), they went on create and staff the next generation of commercial gamedev. (Which is maybe why this period lasted for about as long as it takes for a schoolkid to grow up, graduate, and spend few years in the workforce doing the stuff they were so excited about.)
- ben_w 2y ago
  Could be. I was one of those kids, my focus was Marathon 2 even before I saw Unreal. I managed to figure out enough maths from scratch to end up with the basics of ray casting, but not enough at the time to realise the tricks needed to make that real time on a 75 MHz CPU… and then we all got OpenGL and I went through university where they explained the algorithms.