4 ms·
It blows my mind how genius these game engineers were. They dealt with so many limitations and created such imaginative and brilliant solutions.
by typeofhuman 1y ago
It blows my mind how genius these game engineers were. They dealt with so many limitations and created such imaginative and brilliant solutions.
- Dwedit 1y agoThis is new stuff, not stuff done during the reign of the N64.
- bob1029 1y agoOnly recently did we figure out how to make Mario64 run at 30fps. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31075622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31075622
- corysama 1y agoAround the end of the PS2’s lifetime, some engine dev friends of mine figure out to do palletized spherical harmonic lighting on the PS2. That was pretty straightforward. What was tricky was a separate technique to get real cubemaps working on the PS2. Unfortunately, these came too late to actually ship in any PS2 games. The SH trick might have been used in the GameCube game “The Conduit”. Same team.
- OCASMv2 1y ago> What was tricky was a separate technique to get real cubemaps working on the PS2. Any details on that?
- corysama 1y agoIf you lay out a cubemap as a 2d texture that looks literally like https://www.turais.de/content/images/size/w1000/2021/05/StandardCubeMap-2.jpg https://www.turais.de/content/images/size/w1000/2021/05/Stan... it's not hard, given the VU1-based triangle processing (like proto-mesh-shaders 25 years ago), to set the UVs of triangles independently to use the correct square even in the case of dynamic reflections. This doesn't do per-pixel spherical UV normalization. But, with a dense enough mesh, a linear approximation looks good enough. Except... The triangle UVs will often cross over between multiple squares. With the above texture, it will cross over into the white area and make the white visible on the mesh. So, you fill the white area with a duplicate of the texels from the square that is adjacent on the cube. That won't work for huge triangles that span more than 1.5 squares. But, it's good enough given an appropriate mesh. Probably would have been better to just use a lat-long projection texture like https://www.turais.de/content/images/size/w1600/2021/05/spruit_sunrise_4k_8bit_panorama.jpeg https://www.turais.de/content/images/size/w1600/2021/05/spru... Or, maybe store the cubemap as independent squares and subdivide any triangles that cross square boundaries.
- OCASMv2 1y agoInteresting, thanks!
- msk-lywenn 1y agoI always thought triace had shipped sh lighting on ps2 but maybe it was just a demo? http://research.tri-ace.com/Data/Practical%20Implementation%20of%20SH%20Lighting%20and%20HDR%20Rendering%20Full-Length.ppt http://research.tri-ace.com/Data/Practical%20Implementation%...
- corysama 1y agoThey were doing per-vertex SH. That was a much more practical approach :)
- 90s_dev 1y agoLimitations demand and produce extraordinary creativity. That's the secret behind pico8 and Animal Well and so many amazing games. I wish I didn't think of a significantly better architecture for my 2d-pixel-art-game-maker-maker this weekend. Now it'll be another month before I can release it :(
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoLimitations, and, popularity
- 90s_dev 1y agoPopularity comes from utility. Utility comes from the right trade offs. Limitations demand careful trade offs.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoThe tradeoff was that the N64 was cheap and had Pokemon on it
- Sharlin 1y agoI'm sure they were but, as noted, this specifically is 2025 stuff, and demoscene, not gamedev.