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Yeah I remember Prey doing a lot of loving with players with the portals. Does the level design style of Turok have anything to do with saving storage space, ie is it easier on memory requirements to have a level multiple stories (though obfuscated through things like fog) than it is to have a sprawling "real world" layout? SilentW & Zaphod42: In terms of level design, what does 5d mean (if easily explainable)? site fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Feb 18, 2015 |
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Feb 18, 2015 23:13
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SelenicMartian posted:Madspace. A late '90s Russian shooter about a dual-wielding dude infiltrating an alien spaceship. It starts with a rail shooter intro but then switches to an fps. It uses portal engine design to put larger rooms "inside" smaller ones, make hallways entangle in weird ways, and have a single door connect three rooms.  Yes. This is what I'm loving talking about. I have to look that up...
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Feb 18, 2015 23:16
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"5D space" was what Bungie called spatial inconsistencies and overlap in Marathon maps back in the day.
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Feb 18, 2015 23:16
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Dog Fat Man Chaser posted:Not even just cutscenes, often there were just straight up portals you'd walk into to get around.  That texture tiling. N64 era was truly a growing period for 3D graphics.haveblue posted:"5D space" was what Bungie called spatial inconsistencies and overlap in Marathon maps back in the day. Its really more like "4D" space but its not really important at that point anyways, but yeah. Thing is even Marathon only had like a handful of non-euclidean maps at best. I've heard that editing the "5D" Maps in marathon with their editor was a colossal pain in the rear end, which I can imagine if the tools don't go out of their way to help you. You'd need an engine really built around it to realy push things.
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Feb 18, 2015 23:18
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SelenicMartian posted:Madspace. A late '90s Russian shooter about a dual-wielding dude infiltrating an alien spaceship. It starts with a rail shooter intro but then switches to an fps. It uses portal engine design to put larger rooms "inside" smaller ones, make hallways entangle in weird ways, and have a single door connect three rooms. Oh, someone remembers Madspace! I remember it being released nearly simultaneous with ZAR from the same dev, and the latter was way more popular.
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Feb 18, 2015 23:21
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Yeah, I was gonna mention both Madspace and Z.A.R. (Zone of Artificial Resources). Mind you, I've never played either of them for long enough to get to any of the alleged non-euclidean stuff due to them being horribly unfun to play or just to get running, but I'm sure it's there.
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Feb 18, 2015 23:24
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Zaphod42 posted:
It's completely a pain. Doing room-over-room is irritating enough. The editor they packaged with Infinity, Forge, had sliders so you could hide polygons within certain elevation ranges, but the editor they used to make Marathon 2 did not have that feature (so the map "The Hard Stuff Rules" was a notoriously fickle mistress for them, and it's so named for how annoying it was to make). When you're trying to do two polygons at the same elevation it starts to get extremely annoying and difficult, and it's really not worth the effort to make a map that extensively abuses the effect. It also tends to leads to lots of minor engine glitches, so abusing it can make maps nearly impossible to play.
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Feb 18, 2015 23:25
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Zaphod42 posted:
It's really not any worse/more overt than you get with some of the worse-designed Doom textures over similar sizes of wall.
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Feb 18, 2015 23:29
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haveblue posted:This is pretty common. In the Unreal games you could noclip into the skybox, spawn an enemy there, and go back to the normal map to watch it wander around in the distance, towering over mountains and sticking its head into clouds. This was used in a ZDoom mod too, Zort 8. site posted:SilentW & Zaphod42: In terms of level design, what does 5d mean (if easily explainable)? The engines at the time were not fully 3D (but 2D + elevation) so they were dubbed 2.5D. When the engine allows you to pull non-Euclidian tricks so that two different 2.5D spaces are superposed, you have 2.5Dx2=5D.
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Feb 18, 2015 23:40
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Edit: ^^^ Hahaha, that is some bullshit math right there. Zaphod42 posted:I have no idea how Turok was programmed but that's not such a crazy idea. Half-Life's "skyboxes" were a scale model of the city elsewhere in the level that you could never get to, which would be rendered and then copied to the real skybox. Vampire Bloodlines had similar looking hallways which would teleport you around to make you feel like it was infinitely long. Hell, Doom even does some poo poo like that. I would love to hear more about Doom levels that are screwy, though I'm familiar with Build's room-over-room technique. Also, the game you're looking for is Antichamber. Rupert Buttermilk fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Feb 18, 2015 |
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Feb 18, 2015 23:41
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Zaphod42 posted:
 It's actually a rendering bug in the Turok engine on N64 emulators. On real hardware, textures are stretched a little more and don't look nearly as tiled.
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Feb 18, 2015 23:44
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JerryLee posted:It's really not any worse/more overt than you get with some of the worse-designed Doom textures over similar sizes of wall. Yeah but Doom came out first so...?  Doom was '93 and was one of the first true 3D games, so I can totally forgive some awful tiling textures. I mean, of course! Nobody even knew what tiling textures were back then. poo poo was mostly flat-shaded before that. N64 was released in '96 and Turok in '97. That's a whole 4 years after Doom, plenty of time to learn from their effort/mistakes.
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Feb 18, 2015 23:52
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site posted:SilentW & Zaphod42: In terms of level design, what does 5d mean (if easily explainable)? You know the TARDIS from Dr.WHO? Bigger on the inside than it is on the outside? That. In "Euclidean Geometry" we have rules about how equally spaced objects have to be equally spaced from other objects, based on your dimensions. With non-euclidean geometry you're saying "gently caress the rules, I do what I want". In real life two objects can't occupy the same space. In a videogame they absolutely can. Most games try to emulate reality because it makes more sense, it allows you to get immerse and not totally loving confused. But there's no reason we can't break the rules of reality more. I'm surprised by how little videogames do poo poo like let you just fly around. Its a videogame! Give me superpowers, let me do crazy poo poo. Then again things like bunny-hopping aren't exactly realistic either. Mak0rz posted:
Whoa, really? Do you have some screenshots to compare? That's really interesting. I love how little idiosyncrasies in emulators can add up to game effects. Contra on NES used some really loving weird poo poo for its RNG, so as such almost every emulator plays Contra slightly different than the NES did. Its mostly the same and totally playable, but certain enemies spawn in different numbers and if you try to watch the attract mode / demo replay it totally fucks up. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Feb 18, 2015 |
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Feb 18, 2015 23:54
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Can you guys please post videos of crazy 4D and skybox shenanigans?
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Feb 18, 2015 23:56
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Here's a video I absolutely love, for talking about crazy surreal rendering techniques and stuff: (Warning its minecraft) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpksyojwqzE The really fun part about this video is that the level data isn't doing anything. You're still playing normal minecraft, in a normal minecraft world, with normal minecraft euclidean physics. But everything is being rendered through a shader which processes everything as a function of a sine wave (among other things) so the results are  I want some loving FPS to do poo poo like this alllllll the time. Inception: The Game. And here's some footage of what happens if you spawn a metrocop in the 'skybox' area of Half-Life 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyc8Teesl18 The metrocop isn't actually any taller than the player character, its just how the skybox is rendered. Nothing in videogames says the game state has to actually reflect whats being rendered, which is pretty cool. You could do some seriously screwey poo poo. Here's some footage of that game Madspace, seems pretty killer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBBBg5dOLyk You can see he goes down hallways and then turns around into the room he was in a minute ago, but now its an entirely different room. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Feb 19, 2015 |
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Feb 18, 2015 23:59
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Anyone even remotely interested in this stuff should read Mark Z Danielewsky's fantastic book House of Leaves. I apologize for getting into book chat here, but it's relevant. What if your house was haunted, not in a conventional way, but in a way where it measured a quarter inch larger on the inside than it did on the outside? Or if a closet joining two bedrooms just appeared one night while you were out? Or if one morning you came downstairs to find a door (on an outside wall) that, when opened, showed you a black, cold, echo-killing hallway that changed dimensions at random? And what if you heard a growl from somewhere beyond that, or a knock of "S O S" from another wall in your house? poo poo is masterfully creepy, and is one of my favourite books.
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Feb 19, 2015 00:05
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haveblue posted:"5D space" was what Bungie called spatial inconsistencies and overlap in Marathon maps back in the day. Aaaaand I've just dated myself. No game has truly done 4/5D space in maps, because players would have a difficult time understanding it. Nothing you use to orienting yourself or navigating in the real world would help you... and given how difficult people find simple teeter-totter physics puzzles in a game context, they'd be completely hosed from the word go. Which is a shame, because I delight in games where designers and architects unfetter themselves from convention and make something deeply self-referential and deliberately obscure.
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Feb 19, 2015 00:06
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I've never gotten more than halfway through that book without losing interest. The pages of footnotes inevitably kill my will to continue. If you're interested in weird Doom stuff, try to find some of gggmork's levels. I think there's a thread on doomworld where Time of Death collected a lot of it.
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Feb 19, 2015 00:07
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Wow, thanks for the quick replies everyone! Now for my next question, as someone who has no level designing experience whatsoever, is there maybe a good YouTube or general overview of the differences between, say doom's 2.5d, duke's build engine room over room, and today's 3d design capabilities? I understand the concept of just adding poo poo together in today's engines well enough, but I don't really "get" what you guys mean when comparing to the other two engines and I figure a visual would probably help lol. E: Rupert Buttermilk posted:Anyone even remotely interested in this stuff should read Mark Z Danielewsky's fantastic book House of Leaves. site fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Feb 19, 2015 |
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Feb 19, 2015 00:09
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Zaphod42 posted:
Yeah that's true, but those were the early days of 3D. The Playstation/Saturn/N64 were the first mainstream console generation to handle 3D as a standard feature. Upgrading from a Sega Genesis to play games like Tekken on PS1 or Mario 64 on the N64 was a huge leap. The 16-bit generation we left behind used late '80s technology.
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Feb 19, 2015 00:27
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Jordan7hm posted:I've never gotten more than halfway through that book without losing interest. The pages of footnotes inevitably kill my will to continue. Aw, that sucks, because the footnotes aren't entirely necessary; Maybe just Johnny's story, plus the letters from his mother, but other than that, it's just extra world-building.
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Feb 19, 2015 00:27
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site posted:Wow, thanks for the quick replies everyone! The shortest way to explain it is this - DOOM and other '2.5D' engines treat maps as a set of infinitely tall vertical planes (think of a bunch of fences) with defined 'top' and 'bottom' heights, which are where the engine draws the horizontal floors and ceilings. True 3D engines treat maps as sets of points in 3D space - every point has a X, Y, and Z coordinate, and is connected to some arbitrary other number of points to create polygons. EDIT: A physical way to think of it - DOOM maps are drawn on a sheet of paper and then the pen/pencil lines are extruded up or down out of the paper. Nothing can be on top of anything else because there isn't really a top or bottom to anything. 3D engines create levels by cutting out parts and gluing the pieces together, like a paper model. Any shape you can think of is valid. SilentW fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Feb 19, 2015 |
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Feb 19, 2015 00:31
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Zaphod42 posted:Whoa, really? Do you have some screenshots to compare? That's really interesting. No screenshots (the N64 emulation scene is insanely flakey), but I do have some video! Compare this video of correct textures with this video of bad textures (start at 5:05 if the link didn't work right). E: I made my own hackjob screenshots from the videos. Correct textures:  Incorrect textures:  The cliff textures are one thing, but the rock in that picture you quoted (and any other decorative objects such as pillars, etc) are especially wrong. The rock is supposed to be textured with just a single instance of that tile! You can see a correct one at about 4:35-ish in the correct video. Zaphod42 posted:I love how little idiosyncrasies in emulators can add up to game effects. Contra on NES used some really loving weird poo poo for its RNG, so as such almost every emulator plays Contra slightly different than the NES did. Its mostly the same and totally playable, but certain enemies spawn in different numbers and if you try to watch the attract mode / demo replay it totally fucks up. Nintendo 64 emulation is especially fickle. The short story is that the console was a massive pain in the rear end for third party developers so they had to make their own custom microcode/drivers/whatever into the games themselves. All of this has to be reverse-engineered in order to emulate some games correctly. Mak0rz fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Feb 19, 2015 |
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Feb 19, 2015 00:36
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SilentW posted:The shortest way to explain it is this - DOOM and other '2.5D' engines treat maps as a set of infinitely tall vertical planes (think of a bunch of fences) with defined 'top' and 'bottom' heights, which are where the engine draws the horizontal floors and ceilings. e: just saw your edit
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Feb 19, 2015 00:38
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site posted:Okay, so for levels with room over room and/or big arena spaces you need to essentially hack the level editor by making the "fences" absurdly huge to get everything to fit? For Duke3d, which is what I have a bit of experience with, you drew your rooms first, so picture a U-shape, but at each end of the U, there's a room. Nothing is overlapping just yet. Now, click and drag to select all the corners of one of the rooms, and literally drag it so it's overlapping the other. For DN3D, the size of either room didn't really matter, just as long as A) the rooms were originally created in their own space, and B) You never saw both rooms at once, in-game. If B was violated, you'd get that weird graphical glitch where the edges of whatever you're looking at repeats, like your graphics card was about to melt, and ever window you were dragging around on your desktop was leaving a trail. I just pretended that it was Non-euclidean space loving with Duke's head, and he was going slightly insane.  Of course, if I'm wrong about any of this, please correct me, I genuinely love talking and hearing about this technique. I think it's why I love House of Leaves so much. I always thought a comedic subtitle for it would be "gently caress Euclid and Die!"
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Feb 19, 2015 01:13
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:If [you saw both rooms at once, in-game], you'd get that weird graphical glitch where the edges of whatever you're looking at repeats, like your graphics card was about to melt, and ever window you were dragging around on your desktop was leaving a trail. I'm not entirely sure why, since it has sod-all to do with reflections.
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Feb 19, 2015 01:17
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^^^^^^ Edit: It's because it often looks a lot the tunnel effect you get when two mirrors face each other. By the way, that effect is created because literally nothing is being drawn in that space, so the previous frame's content doesn't get erased. So if you for instance look at a wall, and then look at the "bad" area, it will still be showing the wall you looked at. But since you're moving the camera to get there, the wall is moving too, so it gives you that sort of Hall Of Mirrors effect. If that makes sense.
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Feb 19, 2015 01:22
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Mak0rz posted:Nintendo 64 emulation is especially fickle. The short story is that the console was a massive pain in the rear end for third party developers so they had to make their own custom microcode/drivers/whatever into the games themselves. All of this has to be reverse-engineered in order to emulate some games correctly. Conker's Bad Fur Day was PARTICULARLY egregious in this regard. Rare actually used a part of the circuit board on the N64 that no other game before or after ever used, and they did some wicked loving voodoo poo poo to make the GPU decode and pack audio on alternate frames or something. This added up to a MASSIVE headache for people trying to get the damm thing to emulate properly, as they were seeing system calls the referred to a part of the silicon that ... apparently didn't exist. (Citation for this is somewhere in the dev LP of BFD, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=channel?UCbRUl7dkRVPKlYiUq4TmEaQ)
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Feb 19, 2015 02:09
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Nition posted:^^^^^^
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Feb 19, 2015 07:37
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SilentW posted:Conker's Bad Fur Day was PARTICULARLY egregious in this regard. Rare actually used a part of the circuit board on the N64 that no other game before or after ever used, and they did some wicked loving voodoo poo poo to make the GPU decode and pack audio on alternate frames or something. This added up to a MASSIVE headache for people trying to get the damm thing to emulate properly, as they were seeing system calls the referred to a part of the silicon that ... apparently didn't exist. You didn't link the video correctly, friend
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Feb 19, 2015 10:11
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:Anyone even remotely interested in this stuff should read Mark Z Danielewsky's fantastic book House of Leaves. Its a great book that I've never finished  SilentW posted:Aaaaand I've just dated myself. That's definitely true, I mentioned it myself earlier. However games are getting far more realistic and detailed than ever before, and with VR right around the corner, I wonder if maybe we could create a game space where you had just enough consistency to understand what was happening while everything else goes haywire. Mak0rz posted:Nintendo 64 emulation is especially fickle. The short story is that the console was a massive pain in the rear end for third party developers so they had to make their own custom microcode/drivers/whatever into the games themselves. All of this has to be reverse-engineered in order to emulate some games correctly. Thanks for the screenshots, that illustrates it perfectly. Yeah lots of console developers have had to do some really crazy poo poo which then makes emulation extremely difficult. I think I remember reading about N64 devs using the game cartridge itself as external RAM to store texture data for better looking terrain, rather than just treating it as ROM. The worst is the PS2 generation. For backwards compatibility Sony just included a PS1 processor inside the PS2; late-generation games for PS2 managed to eek out more performance than early-generation games by running on both the PS2 and the PS1 simultaneously. This required all kinds of complicated timing code because they were entirely different architecture chips running at different speeds. Emulating that is a nightmare.
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Feb 19, 2015 17:29
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Zaphod42 posted:I think I remember reading about N64 devs using the game cartridge itself as external RAM to store texture data for better looking terrain, rather than just treating it as ROM. Yup! Keeping with the thread theme: Turok 2 (and probably 3 and Rage Wars) and Perfect Dark (Rare seemed to have a knack for breaking that console in half) make use of this method. Texture streaming is one reason why those games perform so poorly. Cartridges have a lot of room for storage, but making GBS threads high-res textures through the cartridge slot on the fly was pretty slow compared to using the onboard memory. Edit: "As the Nintendo 64 reached the end of its lifecycle, hardware development chief Genyo Takeda referred to the programming challenges using the word hansei (Japanese: 反省 "reflective regret")." Mak0rz fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Feb 19, 2015 |
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Feb 19, 2015 17:42
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The success of portal proves that impossible spaces are an idea that can have mainstream appeal. The Dev commentary on portal is proof that many people still struggle with the concept. I think its like you said though, you need to maintain a base level of familiarity and have some rules to follow, you can't set out with the goal of confusing the player, things still need to make sense. Antichamber is really good at this. It does try to confuse you, but things are consistent and you can repeat something and get the same result. Like portal it also starts off slow and teaches you the rules of the world before letting you lose in it. It does a good job of that hidden tutorial thing.
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Feb 19, 2015 18:09
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Wadjamaloo posted:The success of portal proves that impossible spaces are an idea that can have mainstream appeal. The Dev commentary on portal is proof that many people still struggle with the concept. The dev commentary also reveals the huge amount of work put into ensuring that Portal's impossible spaces are easy to understand, navigate, and reason about, and that they function as expected when the player takes actions.
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Feb 19, 2015 18:14
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What are some great Wolfenstein 3D TC's? Currently playing through Spear: End of Destiny and it's pretty gut. Would have appreciated digital sound effects since they enhanced drat near everything else, though.
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Feb 20, 2015 00:13
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Al Cu Ad Solte posted:What are some great Wolfenstein 3D TC's? Currently playing through Spear: End of Destiny and it's pretty gut. Would have appreciated digital sound effects since they enhanced drat near everything else, though. Super 3D Noah's Ark, obviously. 
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Feb 20, 2015 00:16
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Did that goon that was working on that jungle themed Wolf3D TC ever finish? They were waiting on the music, I think.
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Feb 20, 2015 00:19
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Al Cu Ad Solte posted:What are some great Wolfenstein 3D TC's? Currently playing through Spear: End of Destiny and it's pretty gut. Would have appreciated digital sound effects since they enhanced drat near everything else, though. Eisenfaust: Legacy is pretty good. I watched Doomed Space Marine's playthrough of Origins, you might want to skip that, it looked like it dragged on a bit long. There were a couple others that he did, but I can't remember them off the top of my head.
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Feb 20, 2015 01:33
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haveblue posted:The dev commentary also reveals the huge amount of work put into ensuring that Portal's impossible spaces are easy to understand, navigate, and reason about, and that they function as expected when the player takes actions.
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Feb 20, 2015 01:37
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Portal is also a game that focuses primarily and almost exclusively on the portals, so they don't have to deal with the million other problems that would arise from trying to implement that stuff into a more traditional FPS.
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Feb 20, 2015 01:46
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