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my bony fealty posted:What's the deal with the Sith engine that powered Jedi Knight? I find it strange that it was developed in-house and not really used for anything other than JK and MotS (and a few other Lucasarts 3D games, apparently). It certainly seemed like a technically impressive game when it came out.
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Dec 14, 2014 18:31
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Jehde posted:Kinda telling that your first complaint about an early FPS is the graphics. It's not because it's old, it's because the graphics really are pretty ugly.
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Dec 14, 2014 18:34
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yeah even as a kid when I thought half of Jedi Knight looked really great, I thought half of it was just ugly as sin* and at times harder to interpret than any 2.5d game * = not SiN
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Dec 14, 2014 18:37
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I enjoyed the original Dark Forces way more then JK1/MotS which felt like a clunky mess.
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Dec 14, 2014 18:39
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revisiting Jedi Knight was rough because that was, like, my favorite game as a kid 
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Dec 14, 2014 18:42
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I wish I could revisit it, but it refuses to work on my computer. 
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Dec 14, 2014 18:47
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GENDERWEIRD GREEDO posted:It's not because it's old, it's because the graphics really are pretty ugly. So are Quake's? Quake is still one of my favourites though.  I've never associated early FPS with "pretty graphics", except maybe Unreal back in the day I guess.I think Jedi Knight does a great job with what it's capable of regarding graphics. The textures are only 8bit (16bit if you had a 3D acceleration!  ) but they do a good job with creating textures that fit. They're low res so they're repeated everywhere but they all look Star Wars as hell and that's great.I also don't really get the jank complaint since the engine is obviously reverse engineered from the Quake 1 engine, which in my opinion is the best early FPS engine. Is it using the F keys for force powers? Saber combat has never been good in any Jedi Knight game, it always comes down to just running around and hoping you time your swing right. This is the case in Jedi Academy too, which makes the saber dueling community pretty hilarious. Lightsabers aren't the point of Jedi Knight, just a part of it. Kyle Katarn being a bad rear end is the point of Jedi Knight.
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Dec 14, 2014 18:53
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With Quake the ugliness kinda works for it, though. Its like its all one big surrealist horror painting or something. Like it was intended to be ugly, it all fits the theme. Its weird but somehow brown jaggies on brown jaggies just kinda works in Quake. Where otherwise it would look lovely.
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Dec 14, 2014 20:04
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It was great back in the day because at the time Quake's graphics were jaw dropping on the early Pentium systems of the time. It wasn't until people got 3D accelerators in a few years, like the early Voodoo cards, that we realized how crappy stock Quake's visuals really were. I still have a soft spot for Quake's software rendering.
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Dec 14, 2014 20:24
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Doom and Quake's software modes do have a particular charm about them. I always try to run on those modes if I can. I'm weird.
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Dec 14, 2014 20:44
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I think that Doom especially loses a great deal from being run in a hardware port. Even if you turn off texture filtering and such, the lighting still seems wrong without the software colormap that makes things fall off to darkness in a very particular way.
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Dec 14, 2014 20:56
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GZDoom has a shader that is supposed to replicate the software renderer (it's the "software" light more). Though it is still in truecolor and without color banding. You can actually get color banding back by editing it to change the floats to ints. Palettization would require more work though.
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Dec 14, 2014 21:00
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The main reason I use GZdoom over Zdoom is mostly because I play with mouselook and the software mode mouselook makes me feel sick.
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Dec 14, 2014 21:02
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Quake's aged massively better than games like Blood 2 or any of the early lithtech games...I just played some 90s shooters and they are actively hideous compared to Quake. The levels still feel solid and not like you'll fall through the geometry at any moment.
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Dec 14, 2014 22:04
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Elliotw2 posted:The main reason I use GZdoom over Zdoom is mostly because I play with mouselook and the software mode mouselook makes me feel sick. Same here, then I just try to make it look the closest to software mode I can, unless I play a mod like Project MSX where I turn on all the hardware stuff and go wild. Also as Jblade said, Quake aged surprisingly well for me compared to lets say Half-Life, Blood 2 or others. The whole dark/dirty/gothic feel of the levels and ugly monsters have a charm other games don't have. Unreal is other game that aged really well in my opinion.
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Dec 14, 2014 22:07
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All this talk of being super impressed by early 3D reminded me of an anecdote from my youth: back in 1997 or so, I got my mom to get me a subscription to PC Games magazine. It was super awesome for a kid like me because I loved to read about new and upcoming games (it was this magazine that got me on the hype train for Daikatana) and, more importantly, it had a cover CD with every issue that was loaded with demos. Well, one day, the family computer needed upgrading or repairs of some kind, so we took it to my older cousin who worked for Microsoft driving the old Microsoft Bus around. While he was showing off some of the games and stuff he was also hooking me up with, I mentioned off-hand that I had gotten a demo of Quake 2. Note that I'm not talking like a shareware demo, but something more akin to Qtest was for Quake--it didn't even have all the weapons implemented IIRC. My cousin flipped his poo poo, made me leave the room, and invited a bunch of his friends over to check it out. I could hear them freaking out over how amazing it was through the door. Ahhh, memories... 
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Dec 14, 2014 22:08
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My favorite 90s gaming memory is getting a new family computer with a whopping 8MB of RAM, just so my dad & I could play Warcraft 2. It also conveniently was able to run Quake the next year
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Dec 14, 2014 22:17
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Jblade posted:Quake's aged massively better than games like Blood 2 or any of the early lithtech games...I just played some 90s shooters and they are actively hideous compared to Quake. The levels still feel solid and not like you'll fall through the geometry at any moment. Tech-wise, having Carmack at the helm really helped in regard to the game's stability. Quake 1's gameplay holds up because it's simple, but very fast and frantic. I consider Q1 the apex of Romero-style fast FPS gameplay because it gets everything right; it's easy to go insanely fast, the weapons are fun and satisfying, there's a good amount of z-axis action, there aren't any bullshit decorations and props that make it hard to go extremely fast, and the maps are ridiculously exploitable with tricks. Plus, Q1 has some of the best sound design in a game. I still laugh when I gib enemies because of how goofy the gibbing sounds are. quote:I've never associated early FPS with "pretty graphics", except maybe Unreal back in the day I guess. You can do some pretty amazing stuff with U1 and UT99 if you know what you're doing and don't limit yourself to targeting weak machines. Hell, I still consider U1's skyboxes impressive, even today.
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Dec 14, 2014 22:48
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Unreal Engine has always exceptionally scale able, you can make some huge maps and it will gladly shove 4k textures into your graphic card if you really want that. It's kind of a bad example, but Duke Nukem Forever actually runs a Unreal Engine 1 with a custom rendering plugin.
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Dec 14, 2014 22:56
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Elliotw2 posted:I wish I could revisit it, but it refuses to work on my computer. There are guides for getting it to work on modern OSs. Having replayed all the games a few years ago, I would say that the tier list is something like JK = MOTS > JO > DF >>>>>> JA Jedi Academy I couldn't even bring myself to finish, it's one of the most slogging garbage FPSs I've ever played. JO is really fun with dismemberment, but JA is just... awful.
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Dec 14, 2014 22:57
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closeted republican posted:You can do some pretty amazing stuff with U1 and UT99 if you know what you're doing and don't limit yourself to targeting weak machines. Hell, I still consider U1's skyboxes impressive, even today. Yeah, some of the things UnrealEngine 1 is capable of, but which weren't particularly used in its heyday because the hardware wasn't up to it, is just mind-boggling, The (ab)uses of the portal technology has been mentioned numerous times in the thread already; the fun things you can do with the skybox (stick some movers or actors in there and create a completely new sense of scale); using volumetrics to create over-bright areas that can create prettier HDR-like effects than modern HDR rendering; and data-driven and programmable dynamic textures that preceded shaders by years… Yes, a lot of it was trickery and required some fancy engine abuse, but it worked and looked stunning. It was just a bit too computationally intensive for the machines to be put into proper gameplay levels. I think it's in Masters of Doom that it's described how even the iD guys had an “oh crap” moment when Unreal was released due to what the engine allowed you to do.
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Dec 14, 2014 23:00
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Elliotw2 posted:It's kind of a bad example, but Duke Nukem Forever actually runs a Unreal Engine 1 with a custom rendering plugin. A minor thing, but wasn't it actually U2 engine?
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Dec 14, 2014 23:04
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I got the impression DNF changed engines more than I changed my underpants.
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Dec 14, 2014 23:07
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Maybe? It's a bit conflicting about where in the game and which developer you ask. It's worth noting on the UE2 front that Ubisoft still uses a customized version of it for all the Splinter Cell games. edit: VV They did enough that none of the general Unreal unpacking tools that gildor makes can read any of the files! Karasu Tengu fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Dec 14, 2014 |
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Dec 14, 2014 23:07
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Elliotw2 posted:Maybe? It's a bit conflicting about where in the game and which developer you ask. While it was in 3D Realms hands, it was still effectively a branch of UE1 that, as they said was “branched off somewhere around the Unreal 2 time when they added static meshes. Since then [they had] redone the rendering 100%”. There's no telling what Gearbox and Prianha did with (or to) that engine once they got their hands on it.
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Dec 14, 2014 23:11
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Did anything interesting come out of the Jedi Whatever source codes that were, briefly, published in great celebration and then promptly swept under the carpet without a word? I'm sure some people have them saved and have worked on them a bit.
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Dec 14, 2014 23:20
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Cat Mattress posted:Did anything interesting come out of the Jedi Whatever source codes that were, briefly, published in great celebration and then promptly swept under the carpet without a word? I guess there's a multiplayer source port in the works right now? I asked a while ago and seem to remember something like that popping up.
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Dec 14, 2014 23:30
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There's a few people on providing a more recent OpenGL renderer, and there's a heavily WIP coop branch being worked on right now. Besides that, there's not much going on because the original game still runs on everything.
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Dec 14, 2014 23:33
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K8.0 posted:Having replayed all the games a few years ago, I would say that the tier list is something like Yup. This guy knows what's up. Pretty much exactly the same as my tier list, except I'd probably put DF as congruent to JO, I liked DF's puzzly nature. JK and MotS are both great in their own ways, I definitely agree they're tied for top. JK has more of a grand cohesive story and setting, but MotS is more adventurous and does some neat things. Kinda like Ocarina of Time vs Majora's Mask. Jehde fucked around with this message at 00:26 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 14, 2014 23:58
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Tippis posted:Yeah, some of the things UnrealEngine 1 is capable of, but which weren't particularly used in its heyday because the hardware wasn't up to it, is just mind-boggling, Any links to articles/videos on this kind of UnrealEd 1 hacking? Always been fascinated with by the art of squeezing every last drop out of an engine or system.
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Dec 15, 2014 00:18
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That Jedi Knight speedrun is amazing. They lay so many sequence detonators on top of each other to oneshot bosses - not from the blast damage, but from the explosive force slamming them into a nearby solid object so hard that they die. 
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Dec 15, 2014 00:33
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closeted republican posted:Plus, Q1 has some of the best sound design in a game. I still laugh when I gib enemies because of how goofy the gibbing sounds are. I was playing a new custom Quake map a couple of days ago... one of the monster/architecture setups allowed me to poot grenades through windows from one hallway into a neighboring one, and gib unsuspecting zombies. That arrangement reminded me yet again of how the sound design and bounce physics for grenading zombies in Quake makes it one of my favorite little action-game activities ever.
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Dec 15, 2014 00:35
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Oh, I finally got Jedi Knight to run on my computer by completely ignoring every single guide out there. If I just leave it at 640x480 software mode and don't touch anything, I can play so long as I don't try and open the pause menu. edit: I do also get the FMV's playing, unless they're going to vanish come Disk 2. Karasu Tengu fucked around with this message at 01:13 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 00:54
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I feel pretty fortunate that I've never had a problem getting the sith engine games to run on modern machines. The steam versions always work whenever I want to revisit them, and I just get the FMVs or whatever from the discs. Runs at 1080p with 3D acceleration no problem, the menus are still stuck in a 640x480 window or whatever but no issues going back and forth between them and in game. Have a gushed about Jedi Knight's menu art yet? It's pretty great.
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Dec 15, 2014 01:11
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As far as early 3D graphics go, I think Descent is probably one of the games that's held up the best. They didn't try to do a high-poly style in a low-poly engine, nor did they just punt and go "welp, we can't get as much detail as Quake, might as well not even try" and go with sprites; instead they came up with a style that worked well with a budget of, say, 40 triangles per enemy and ended up with a jagged, menacing aesthetic that contributes greatly to the atmosphere of the game and still looks good today whether you're running it in a source-port or not. This may just be the nostalgia talking, but I do think Descent 1's graphics have aged better than most of its contemporaries and better than both of its sequels.
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Dec 15, 2014 01:25
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Elliotw2 posted:edit: I do also get the FMV's playing, unless they're going to vanish come Disk 2. If it's Steam they will, but you can find them on youtube easily enough. There's a really nicely-organized playlist that unfortunately has the light side ending muted from copyright claim, but there's another one that's just every FMV in one single video that you can use for that part. e: Was Jedi Outcast always this ugly?  Like, this looks worse than Jedi Knight. And there doesn't seem to be any proper widescreen resolutions? I must be missing something.
Geight fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 01:34
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Quake's just such a weird game. It's oppressive and grimy and the story barely makes any sense at all, with you hopping through "slipgates" to capture magical relics in a disjointed world inhabited by a bizarre zoo of nasty critters. The whole thing transcends Doom, Duke, or Wolfenstein's comparatively grounded settings and feels especially nightmarish and surreal. Even the weapons reflect the setting: Nailguns? Lighting guns? And a battle axe? I don't think I really appreciated it at the time when it was first released but, in hindsight, it was a really cool "world" to me.
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Dec 15, 2014 02:56
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Jedi Knight did one thing really well: sense of scale with some big-rear end environments. I think it was level 8 where you come out on top of that giant tower, with a Tie Bomber (!) doing bombing run flybys on the roof, and if you jumped off the edge you would fall for aaaaages. I did that lots, sometimes I would catch something on the way down and die, and watch my corpse make the rest of the trip. Don't think it was until Skyrim's mountains I saw something similar.
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Dec 15, 2014 03:03
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people joke about quake being all over the place but it pretty much rolled with being all over the place and did it really well
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Dec 15, 2014 03:09
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Which Quake 1 being "all over the place" isn't really much different from how Doom worked. It didn't have a plot, and each episode having a different tileset and theme is just a standard thing in high quality FPS's at the time.
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Dec 15, 2014 03:10
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