[HN Gopher] Duke Nukem 3D Mirror Universe
___________________________________________________________________
Duke Nukem 3D Mirror Universe
Author : tosh
Score : 777 points
Date : 2021-03-19 14:42 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| choeger wrote:
| I remember fondly that I was toying around with the level editor
| of Duke Nukem 3D as a kid. Now I understand why it wouldn't
| really work out the way I assumed it would. Not only did I not
| understand much of english back then, but it was actually
| confined to 2.5D ...
| dangets wrote:
| There were a few other places in the first level that had "room
| above room" hacks that only work if you can't see overlapping
| areas of both rooms at the same time.
|
| In the movie theatre there is a projector room up high, and the
| theatre exit below BUT the theatre exit has a wall centered in
| the middle where the overlap would be. There is also a spiral
| staircase going up to the projector room which has 2 or 3
| levels of overlap, but as it is enclosed you don't view 2
| levels at the same time.
|
| Interesting stuff - and like many others have commented, I
| remember playing around with the Build editor and learning
| about these random hacks.
|
| EDIT: and just now I'm remembering that submerging in water was
| another hack - you would actually teleport to another room on
| the map. In Duke3d the water was opaque, but in the later
| Shadow Warrior i remember it having some transparency (I assume
| probably using similar mirror hacks as D3d)
| theunamedguy wrote:
| This runs on the clickwheel iPod nano, by the way:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV8etSGH86M
| imbnwa wrote:
| I had Duke Nukem for Mac back then, so a bit after the PC
| release, but my grammar school had a Mac computer lab, an
| afterschool program, and a lab teacher who let me and my peers
| install Duke on the school computers and stick around after
| school for an hour and half
| endgame wrote:
| https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1372794367329542149
|
| > The following media includes potentially sensitive content
|
| What the hell is going on at twitter?
| [deleted]
| temp0826 wrote:
| <Duke voice> _Shake it baby_
| endgame wrote:
| I would understand if it was that part of E1M2, but it's not.
| It's Duke going for a swim.
| murbard2 wrote:
| I have fond memories of torturing this level editor. I made a
| spiral staircase between two levels, and a building with a
| rooftop swimming pool with glass walls that let you see through
| to the top floor. I have less fond memory that the editor would
| tend to crash as soon as you got a little too cute with the
| overlapping rooms.
| spiritplumber wrote:
| duke was thinking with portals before it was cool
| notjustanymike wrote:
| I remember taking the "How to make a mirror in the Build engine"
| tutorial many many moons ago. Also fun, if you wanted to create a
| shadow cast onto the walls you'd just create the 3D geometry for
| the shadow and paint it darker.
|
| Also also fun: building in the 3D engine involved walking around
| in 3D, drawing bounding boxes, and using page up / page down to
| change the height.
| k__ wrote:
| I played DN3D fendlessly as a kid.
|
| Also played around with the level editor and later with the Half-
| Life level editor.
|
| Many tricks and hacks were done. Good times.
|
| Turns out programming is just the generalization of what I did
| there, so I became a coder later, haha.
| jandrese wrote:
| I made several Doom2 maps as a college student. The tools were
| quite good so there were tons of them online.
|
| I remember when Quake came out a lot of the scene died because
| nobody had computers powerful enough to render Quake levels. It
| could take literally hours of rendering to discover that you
| made an error and had to start over again. But the same people
| didn't want to go back to Doom because Quake was obviously the
| future.
| matthewaveryusa wrote:
| I think we had the same childhood :D
| iso1631 wrote:
| We had great fun building and "testing" the school in DN3D as a
| "project" for parents evening
|
| Many many huors/days/weeks were spent playing multiplayer DN3D
| over a null-modem serial cable too
| k__ wrote:
| Somehow I never shared my maps with anyone.
|
| But we played Quake after computer science class in shool.
| holoduke wrote:
| Same thing for water. You had to create 2 different rooms. When
| you passed the water you essentially got teleported to the other
| room. If I remember correctly the programmer was like 14 years
| old when he created the build engine.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| He mentions this later in the thread:
|
| https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1372793765115490310
| bluedino wrote:
| He was 20 when Duke3D was released, on leave from Brown
| University
| fullstop wrote:
| Yes, his name is Ken Silverman.
| avian wrote:
| > it turns out those are more explosive-barrel sprites, just
| squished down real thin. It turns out the Build engine was
| designed so that if you make sprites super thin, they just don't
| render.
|
| A small correction. If I remember correctly, this was a special
| property of that specific sprite - possibly hard coded in the
| engine, not sure.
|
| But only those specific gas bottles were rendered invisible if
| you reduced their width. Most likely specifically to make it
| possible to do effects like the exploding fan.
|
| Other sprites could be thin and render just fine - you can see
| that with palm stalks, traffic sign poles and things like that.
| Those are often just very elongated sprites.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I remember learning that Build didn't support structures on top
| of other structures. You could go up a staircase, but you
| couldn't end up on top of other level geometry. The level design
| in that game was so good I never noticed, and would have sworn it
| wasn't true.
| moonbug wrote:
| hence the "2.5 dimensional" categorisation
| Iv wrote:
| As someone who played a lot with DN3D level editor, yes, the
| mirrors were a huge hack. But then came Shadow Warrior, a fun
| game, a bit less successful, that re-used most of DN3D game
| engine and added yet another layer of hacks: They had a level
| with reflective floor... AND A MIRROR ON A WALL!
|
| Looking at it with the editor was an unholy mess of sprites and
| scripts.
| TorKlingberg wrote:
| For background Duke Nukem 3D came out the same year as Quake.
| Quake had a far better engine that absolutely revolutionized
| shooters. It could do so much more than the 2.5D engines. Duke
| Nukem competed by having lot of character in the level design,
| enabled by a pile of hacks like these.
| Mister_Snuggles wrote:
| One thing that I love about the "worse" engines is the neat
| tricks you can do which can't be done in the "better" engines.
|
| Tier Drops[0], for example, could not exist in the Quake
| engine. It relied heavily on the tricks that simply didn't
| exist in Quake. And it was loads of fun!
|
| [0] https://dukenukem.fandom.com/wiki/Tier_Drops
| [deleted]
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Yeah, but you could play Duke on a 486, while Quake really
| needed a Pentium to get playable framerates.
|
| It blows my mind how well those games ran on such primitive
| hardware. DOOM ran at 320x200, which is 64K pixels. On a 66 Mhz
| 486, that means you only got 34 clock cycles to render each
| pixel to maintain 30 fps, and that doesn't even include time
| for dealing with game logic!
|
| You had direct access to video memory back then. Now,
| everything is abstracted away. I'm not even sure you could
| create an engine that rendered individual pixels while still
| maintaining solid framerates.
| conradfr wrote:
| After all Quake was the demo tech wow factor for your spoiled
| friend and his 3dfx :)
|
| Yeah Duke3d was running fine on any computer and most of all,
| it was FUN, both as a single and multiplayer game.
|
| The map editor was amazing. I remember using all the tricks
| highlighted in this Twitter thread, following tutorials from
| PC magazines and having the docs printed in a folder I may
| still have somewhere... You could also quite easily break
| your maps with too much trickery.
| redisman wrote:
| Quake also had multiplayer on par with anything out today
| thanks to the great net code. I remember people playing at
| the university on some kinda fiber or cable and 10-20ms
| pings. I was jealous but able to play with my dial up
| jalbertoni wrote:
| Didn't Quake require the 487 because it absolutely needed
| floating point operations, or did it just have horrible
| framerates without the 487 co-cpu?
| joakleaf wrote:
| Quake's perspective correct texture mapping used the
| pentium's floating point math for every 16th pixel.
|
| Most games at the time did perspective correct flat floors
| and walls, which can be done mostly with affine texture
| mapping. Sloped floors, which Quake had a lot of, must be
| done with more accurate Perspective correct texture
| mapping.
|
| Perspective correct texture mapping technically requires a
| distance division at every pixel. Since it was too slow to
| do this at every pixel while rasterizing, Quake did the
| distance division at every 16th pixel, and used affine
| texture mapping between (linear interpolation).
|
| On the Pentium you had fast floating point division which
| could run in parallel with the cpu doing the integer math.
| So they actually utilized both the floating point unit (for
| distance division) and integer unit (for affine texturing)
| concurrently, and in that way got rendering of each pixel
| down to <10 cycles.
|
| Unfortunately, the 486s floating point math was not fast
| enough. So this trick makes everything worse on the 486,
| which is one of the reasons Quake didn't run well on the
| 486 -- the texture mapper was optimized for the fpu on the
| Pentium.
|
| Mike Abrash wrote about this in his series of articles
| about Quake development which I highly recommend! I
| remember reading them during development of Quake in
| 1995-96 and implementing a lot of it myself (Bsp trees,
| shadow maps, texture mapping, sorted edge rasterize).
|
| I actually implemented perspective correct texture mapping
| with integer division myself, and it was a bit slower on
| the Pentium, but a lot faster on the 486.
|
| Funny, how just a few years later all of this became
| obsolete when GPUs arrived.
| anthk wrote:
| It required FP but for realistic gaming you needed a
| Pentium.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Starting with the Intel 80486 (With the exception of the
| cheaper 486SX), the FPU was built into the CPU and you no
| longer needed a separate FPU chip.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80486
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| DooM run at a aceptable frame rate on a 386 at 40 MHZ
| jerome-jh wrote:
| Duke Nukem had this particular ambiance that IMO Quake lacked.
| And I sharply remember that mirror: what an excitement at the
| time! A mirror! Which we can break!
|
| And in total honesty, my machine could not run Quake and I only
| caught up with the true 3D era with Unreal.
| Igelau wrote:
| The character wasn't just in the level design. It had Duke's
| goofy monologue, toilet humor, hookers, and some semblance of
| plot. It had an attitude factor that played well to a lot of
| people in the time of No Fear t-shirts, eXtreme sports, and the
| WWF/WWE Attitude Era.
|
| Quake was more of a technical marvel, but was aimed at a more
| alternative aesthetic that saw it use vague murky levels, Nine
| Inch Nails collab, and a Lovecraftian end boss.
| freeflight wrote:
| _> Quake was more of a technical marvel, but was aimed at a
| more alternative aesthetic that saw it use vague murky
| levels, Nine Inch Nails collab, and a Lovecraftian end boss._
|
| That was pretty much the whole genre back then, which is what
| gave Duke 3D's level design the aforementioned "character",
| as it was one of the very few examples trying to depict more
| realistic environments vs the usual Doom mazes with very
| fictionalized settings/visuals.
| anthk wrote:
| Yeah, I find Quake boring, as an European Quake's environment
| is something not to far from a Iberian village, or the old
| town from any major city. It looks like a "slice of life" in
| Summer holydays plus monsters.
|
| OFC not so "bricky" and "stoney", but Roman/Gothic walls,
| gates, doors and such architecture items can be found
| everywhere, in any remote village, town or the old part of
| cities, so it was, indeed, mundane. And yes, for Americans
| these oldish environments are astounding and marvellous, I
| agree.
|
| To me, the American urban environment was more exotic and
| "alive", something like a Hollywood movie with cops, cars,
| buildings and so on. That's why I loved every bit of DN3D,
| and most of highly detailled and interactive urban games.
| [deleted]
| bluedino wrote:
| Ken Silverman started working on the Build engine in 1993...seems
| like forever ago.
|
| http://advsys.net/ken/build.htm
| jaimex2 wrote:
| Awesome guy. I emailed him back in the day asking advice about
| becoming a developer while I was in high school and what he
| recommended learning.
|
| He answered everything and even gave me some tips/hacks about
| using the 3D level editor.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| So crazy this is trending. I was just talking about how great and
| silly this game was with a complete stranger I had met yesterday!
| Synchronicity also came up as a topic...
| danaos wrote:
| I have seen the same method applied to Call of Duty 4 Modern
| Warfare (2007) to achieve a ground reflection effect.
|
| IIRC it's on that room [1].
|
| https://youtu.be/wvuJNNpx1-8?t=547
| cable2600 wrote:
| eDuke32 uses the DOS data files to run on Windows, Linux, and
| MacOS: https://www.eduke32.com/
| markus_zhang wrote:
| The BUILD trio (DN3D, Blood and SW) are all excellent games. I
| recommend anyone who has tried to at least try out Blood (IMO the
| best of the trio).
|
| Other than that, if you are a FPS fan but haven't touched the 90s
| scene, please give yourself a favor by purchasing DOOM 1/DOOM
| 2/BUILD trio/QUAKE 1/QUAKE 2/UNREAL GOLD and more importantly
| download modern engine improvements, play the games and even more
| important, find communities and download the top quality
| mods/mappacks and play all of them.
|
| Seriously I think it will take one years to go through the whole
| process, even limited to top quality mods/mappacks.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| Why is redneck rampage not part of the build trio?
| ficklepickle wrote:
| Oh wow, I forgot about that game.
| trollied wrote:
| He's enjoying comments like yours:
| https://twitter.com/foone/status/1372945848485605378?s=21
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Let's stay on topic please. This is tedious, and worse, it's
| always the same, which is not interesting.
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26514848.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| I live in one of the regions of the world where Twitter has
| never been popular. According to surveys, only 11% of Quebecers
| are on Twitter (compared to 77% for Facebook).
|
| I have never created an account and, for me, the format of the
| threads is strange.
|
| So I always have a thread reader application in my bookmarks
| bar for when I need to explore the platform. I even put that
| link through the application in order to read it so the jokes
| fell flat. Even what I understand to be one letter per tweet
| came across well.
|
| I don't understand why they complain. They enjoy the platform
| because it allows them to write quick messages. I enjoy the
| platform because I can easily read it using third-party
| software. Everyone is winning here.
|
| Sharing the threadreaderapp link to my local friends who are
| not on twitter means I am sure they read it all. Otherwise,
| most people just read the first message.
|
| Edit: This comment was written when this thread was under my
| parent comment.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Doesn't look enjoyable to me. Looks like he's getting angry.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| Unclear why he's complaining about the non-existent
| complaining. No comment here is whining about the format except
| in jest. The comment you replied to is doing exactly what he
| suggests: using software to make it readable as a blog for
| those who prefer it.
| crysin wrote:
| The complaining may not be present in this thread, but
| historically there's at least 5 or so upvoted comments
| complaining about the format the content is posted in or
| complaining about the website used to host the content.
|
| I think his tweets are fair given how absolutely toxic some
| posters on here can be.
| kbenson wrote:
| Are they though? I mean if it was just the first couple, I
| would agree, but that's basically a forty tweet rant about
| something that's _not_ happening.
| SamBam wrote:
| I think he's just having fun with it. No one is requiring
| you to read that thread.
| NobodyNada wrote:
| Note that Foone's rant didn't specifically reference any
| comments on _this_ submission, but rather as a general
| occurrence whenever their content gets posted to HN.
| Which is definitely a valid observation: from what I've
| seen, nearly every Twitter thread that hits the front
| page gets the tedious "I don't like Twitter" and "this
| should be a blog post" comments (whether or not the
| thread is from Foone).
|
| In fact, in the time since Foone posted that followup,
| several people did in fact post comments complaining
| about Twitter:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26515506
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26515604
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26516435
| Judgmentality wrote:
| He mentions getting pinged by multiple HN scraping bots, and
| he's unable to block his content from being uploaded to HN.
| It sounds like he's just kind of annoyed and prefers a
| different communication medium.
|
| I think it's funny.
| shmageggy wrote:
| If this were a blog post instead of a pile of tweets, we wouldn't
| have to expand multiple replies to see all of the content
| dang wrote:
| Please don't go there. The number of off-topic threads that
| argument has generated is ridiculous and has even spawned an
| entire pointless metadrama. There are a bunch of collapsed
| subthreads at the bottom of this page if anyone really wants
| details.
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26516818.
| thewakalix wrote:
| If it were a blog post, it wouldn't exist.
|
| https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1372954852431515649
| SquareWheel wrote:
| Just to go further down this rabbit hole, this is how that
| page looks to me without any further interaction:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/Y4argxH.png
|
| They omit all the relevant parts (which you were trying to
| highlight), and instead show a rant about morse code.
|
| Twitter is truly unintelligible.
| Koshkin wrote:
| 90's shooters have such a special air about them. I liked DN3D
| enough to have created a custom level with the office building
| and the surrounding area - complete with moving street car you
| could ride in. (Remember putting an especially gruesome monster
| in the boss' office.)
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| That's one of the things I loved most about games in the 90s.
| Everything is a pile of hacks and tricks.
|
| I remember doing "reverse engineering" on a bunch of those as a
| kid and I can definitely attribute my passion for software to
| those experiences.
|
| I was actually feeling a bit disconnected from my career at the
| moment and reading this thread awakened some of the excitement
| that was sleeping inside me! The 90's are a huge source of
| nostalgia for me.
|
| Edit: It reads better in a thread reader such as
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1372766463556083715.html
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| > That's one of the things I loved most about games in the 90s.
| Everything is a pile of hacks and tricks.
|
| It still is, e.g. how shadows are done with shadow maps.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| I agree. But it does raise an interesting philosophical
| question: At what level of advancement does a _hack_ stop
| being a _hack_.
|
| Like most would agree that Ray-Tracing is the "real deal"
| relative to shadow mapping, but with how far shadow mapping
| has come can it really be considered a "hack" still?
| seanwilson wrote:
| > Like most would agree that Ray-Tracing is the "real deal"
| relative to shadow mapping, but with how far shadow mapping
| has come can it really be considered a "hack" still?
|
| Even ray tracing isn't the real deal and isn't trying to
| closely simulate reality. You need to use hacks in ray
| tracing for soft vs sharp shadows, for light patterns on
| glass objects like wine glasses (caustics), to get
| illuminated surfaces to spread their colour to other
| objects (colour bleeding) and more.
|
| Phonton mapping gets closer but is even more expensive:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_mapping
|
| Phonton mapping is trying to model the path of all photons
| being emitted from light sources back to the camera vs ray
| tracing that works backwards by tracing rays out of the
| camera back to the light sources i.e. ray tracing is an
| optimisation.
| gmueckl wrote:
| This post deserves a long reply.
|
| You seem to think that ray tracing as a very limited
| thing. I guess it stems from the fact that the
| nomenclature has become a bit murky in recent years. Ray
| tracing often is used to refer to the initial algorithm
| developed by Whitted. This has pretty much all these
| limitations you mention, but it is an obsolete method.
| What usually gets mixed in with ray tracing in marketing
| and non-expert discussions is also path tracing and its
| various variations. These methods are capable of solving
| the rendering equation exactly for a huge range of
| scenarios. Unfortunately, some variants deal with certain
| situations better than with others and there is no
| overall best algorithm. But you can most certainly trace
| absolutely perfect soft shadows or complex caustics with
| these methods. Color spills are a walk in the park even
| for simple unidirectional path tracing. The main limiting
| factor right now is that these are all Monte Carlo
| methods and need to draw high numbers of samples for each
| pixel to converge. This is why fast and accurate
| denoisers are such a huge deal at the moment. They are
| another hack, a last one that ideally fades away as the
| number of rays per second increases. Beyond that, it
| "just" comes down to modelling surfaces and materials
| accurately enough to get a photorealistic image.
|
| As you mention photon mapping: it has pretty severe
| limitations, notably around the handling of specular
| paths and the biased artifacts created by the filter
| kernel (loght leaks, certain SDS-type paths aren't
| covered). There are some improvements like (A)PPM which
| converge to unbiased solutions with infinite runtime. At
| that point, path tracing based methods become more
| attractive w.r.t. runtime, memory requirements and
| implementation complexity.
| seanwilson wrote:
| > You seem to think that ray tracing as a very limited
| thing.
|
| My point was mainly that ray tracing is still a hack like
| polygon based rasterization is, that's a combination of
| clever tricks to get something to look good enough with
| modest resources.
| gmueckl wrote:
| I'd advise you to be more precise in your wording. The
| terminology is a bit tricky. Path tracing (which I assume
| you're actually referring to) as a an algorithm isn't a
| hack _at all_. It 's a direct Monte Carlo solution to the
| rendering equation which has a pretty straight, albeit
| long, derivation from Maxwell's equations. Ray tracing
| _hardware_ (that is, hardware accelerated ray-geometry
| intersection computation) is still quite constrained
| computationally. That 's why we see little actual path
| tracing in real time renderers at this time and more of
| the slightly more correct rasterization based hacks that
| include ray intersection queries instead of screen
| space/cubemap based guestimates. Calling them ray tracing
| is technically somewhat misleading in my opinion.
| core-questions wrote:
| Is anyone doing realtime photon mapping, maybe using some
| of that RTX stuff?
| mike_d wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GckOkpeJ3BY
| _jal wrote:
| This starts drifting way off topic, but hacks are typically
| characterized by being "clever". Which is hard to define,
| but is usually surprising in some way.
|
| I think it stops being a hack when the surprise is gone -
| when you've explored the mechanism, understand the
| tradeoffs, where it does make sense and doesn't, etc.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _At what level of advancement does a hack stop being a
| hack._
|
| Maybe when it becomes documented or otherwise supported?
| Frost1x wrote:
| Here's where it gets tricky. I do a lot of modeling and
| simulation work that is often incorporated in interactive
| 3D environments and the conversation I have over and over
| where people fail to realize is that you're always taking
| shortcuts to simulate some aspect of reality.
|
| The point of games is to get as close to reality that
| people suspend disbelief and can immerse themselves into
| the virtual reality you've created. Sometimes enough
| realism and immersion can be had at cheaper computational
| costs so these hacks (gross simplifications) are the way to
| go. Sometimes though, you realize if you can better model
| aspects of reality more accurately, you can get even better
| immersion a d suspension of disbelief.
|
| In the world where more sophisticated computational models
| are utilized in these environments because the results are
| important, used beyond suspension of disbelief and actually
| need to map reality because the simulation is trying to
| accurately represent some aspect of reality for a real
| world decision to be made, you _still_ have to take clever
| computational shortcuts. As far as we know that will always
| be true unless you build a simulation environment that can
| fully represent our reality which might never be possible
| from an engineering or even scientific standpoint.
|
| So the discussion I often have is: what deviations from
| reality are we willing to tuck into our models and
| simulations? We already can't do all of existing science
| and we can't do what's beyond existing science so what
| tradeoffs can we accept in the subset of science for our
| simulation.
|
| Even raytracing doesn't go far enough because it takes a
| lot of shortcuts with reality. Pretty much none of these
| engines take into account relativistic distortions of light
| (some work has been done) and they frankly don't need to
| for almost every application outside of visualizing
| gravitational lensing and black holes accurately. In sure
| some bright physicist reading this is aware of even more
| faults in light and photon models and simulation approaches
| I'm completely unaware of. The onion peels quite far. The
| most obvious missing aspect for all environments is that we
| always simplify the actual geometry of the space because we
| have to.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| Missing features in most game engines include spectral
| rendering (supported in some programs) and diffraction
| effects/Fourier optics (I think only really supported in
| radar design programs, not visual renderers).
| gmueckl wrote:
| Well, there is a very obvious limit to the fidelity of
| your simulation if presence is your goal: human
| perception. You don't need to crank up any details beyond
| what you can possibly perceive when using the simulation.
| Gravitational space distortions are the least worrisome
| effects in that regard. Light diffraction and
| polarization play a much larger role in our environment,
| although not often and if it happens, the untrained eye
| tends not to notice. I am talking about things like
| birefringent materials (quartz crystals) and diffraction
| effects like light reflected off of a CD or shining
| through a thin piece of cloth.
|
| You can repeat the same process with each kind of sensory
| input a human can perceive and get to pretty hard limits
| on the requirements to get "perfect" realism. Human
| perception hasn't been researched in enough detail yet to
| give accurate bounds in all cases, but this is actively
| being worked on. The known bounds are mostly really
| conservative ones.
| schoen wrote:
| I wonder if there's a problem where, in a realistic
| enough simulation, people could find or build objects
| that should be equivalent to instruments like telescopes
| and microscopes, and then expect them to work properly!
| (Or more generally, instruments that enhance their
| senses, like an ear trumpet or parabolic microphone.)
| meheleventyone wrote:
| I'd say a hack is a technique with caveats that let's you
| work around a limitation. Ray tracing is still too
| computationally expensive so the current raster pipeline is
| all a hack to work around that fact. It's also an
| incredibly well established and close to ground truth hack
| but there are lots of caveats where things go astray. Off
| the top of my head transparency is still largely
| problematic.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I think when we talk about something being a hack, we have
| a context in mind and a goal in mind, and the "hack" is
| just the way we achieved this goal that wasn't immediately
| obvious within this context. Of course, once this non-
| obvious solution becomes well-known, it's incorporated
| _into_ the context and thus is no longer thought of as a
| "hack."
| schnevets wrote:
| There is a possibility that software engineers 50 years from
| now will continue to appreciate "shrinkwrapped" products from
| the late 20th century. There are less hacks and tricks these
| days because codebases are perpetually changing.
|
| If a company releases a tomorrow, and one week later a player
| discovers an exploit, it will likely get patched, repaired, and
| redeployed. So which version is "gold": the day 1 sale, or
| patch 1.01a? Obviously, it's a classic thought experiment, but
| games are a form of art where such revisionism is so prevalent.
| gagege wrote:
| I've been working on a game and I've realized it's still all
| just a bunch of tricks. I think any art where you're trying to
| recreate/honor something in the real world in some way is all
| tricks and techniques. Everything from brushstrokes on a
| painting to plots in novels to special effects in movies and
| acting in movies is all just a bunch of tricks to make
| something look real. The better the trick, the less suspension
| of disbelief is required.
| GordonS wrote:
| Ah, I remember decompiling Quake mods, and learning about how
| the AI worked, A* search etc. At that time I was still on
| dialup, and there was a fraction of what's available now on the
| Internet available - it was really useful for learning, and
| game mods was a big part of keeping me interested in computing.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > That's one of the things I loved most about games in the 90s.
| Everything is a pile of hacks and tricks.
|
| Command and Conquer: Red Alert had a rules.ini file you could
| tweak pretty much anything on. You could give an infantry unit
| rapid-firing cruiser artillery cannons that'd lay waste to
| anything within a couple screens in seconds. Much fun was had.
| m_myers wrote:
| One of Red Alert's hacks was making dogs (the unit) distinct
| from dogs (the projectile). That is, a dog was a dog until it
| began its attack. At that point it transitioned into a dog
| projectile, which looked like a leaping dog but wasn't
| targetable. Then when it collided with the enemy (infantry
| only), the enemy was insta-killed and the dog transitioned
| back into an interactible unit.
|
| What this meant is that you could use rules.ini to make an
| anti-infantry submarine that launched dogs, if you so
| desired. Or a dog artillery. Or a dog man that used his dog
| gun to shoot dogs at men.
| spiritplumber wrote:
| You could also make a dog that would turn into a bolt of
| lightning (and then back into a dog)
| schoen wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raij%C5%AB ?
| edbob wrote:
| Or a fireball.
| reitzensteinm wrote:
| I wonder if this means that if a dog is the last unit
| alive, it can't attack without triggering the loss
| condition.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Deep man. Deep.
|
| Should be quite easy to test in a multiplayer game.
| Nition wrote:
| That's the sort of bug you suddenly wake up and think of
| a week after the game has shipped.
| bradbot wrote:
| But what does a dog attach if it's the last unit alive?
| Nition wrote:
| The parent comment meant your last unit alive. If the
| enemy had no units, you would have already won.
| ACow_Adonis wrote:
| I took advantage of that to defeat a hacker in an online
| game once.
|
| the hacker had changed his infantry so they were very
| cheap, and fired different weapons. he planned to win by
| building a barracks and spamming out his super soldiers.
| but there's one thing he hadn't counted on: dogs.
|
| not only did they have the dog projectile behaviour, but
| infantry also had a behaviour where they had a few seconds
| when emerging from a barracks where they had a running
| animation, we're targets, but couldn't fire.
|
| by spamming dogs, and sitting one directly outside each
| barracks he built, I effectively plugged each inflow of
| super soldier, as the dog would turn into a projectile and
| instantly kill all emerging infantry.
|
| good times. and that was a particularly satisfying rage
| quit...
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| So which rules.ini does the game follow? Whoever hosts I
| would think? Were you hosting the hacker?
| NickNameNick wrote:
| As I remember, for direct-dial-up games, both players had
| to have an identical rules.ini file or the game would
| instantly announce a desync error when the second player
| joined the game.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I would have thought the multiplayer code would assume
| deterministic consistent calculations on all clients, and
| only share human inputs with a cycle delay to mask the
| network delays. If that were the case, though, then
| things would get weird very quickly, and likely end with
| a failed assertion somewhere and the game erroring out.
|
| Perhaps instead all calculations are performed on one
| client, and the full game state is transfered to the
| rest, perhaps with some sort of delta encoding? That
| seems like a fairly high bandwidth approach for the 90s,
| but I suppose it depends on how clever they were with the
| state representations.
|
| Explicitly sharing one client's rules.ini would of course
| be a reasonable hypothesis. Maybe there was a good reason
| for that during development, perhaps so that gameplay
| designers could quickly iterate without having to copy
| files back and forth with coworkers?
| ACow_Adonis wrote:
| sorry, was what, 20 years ago now? can't remember the
| details (or how the multiplayer aspect/engine worked back
| in the day) other than the story. I do remember I
| probably wasn't hosting, but I also didn't have insight
| into what the hacker was doing except what could be
| observed in-game :(
| spiritplumber wrote:
| If it was the DOS version of Red Alert 1, it used the
| host rules
| tomduncalf wrote:
| Wow I'd forgotten all about hacking rules.ini! That and
| hacking around with QuakeC and Quake level editors are fond
| memories of the earlier days of gaming :)
| spiritplumber wrote:
| I was one of the contributors to That One Grenade Mod. Much
| fun, much desync when there were too many nail grenades
| around...
| walexander wrote:
| You could do a similar style of hacking in Dark Forces 2,
| which had "cog files" that were controlled client side and
| let you change the projectile of any weapon. At first it was
| fun to replace your pistol bullets with rockets, or have your
| rocket launcher shoot light sabers.
|
| Eventually we realized you could actually make structures
| like bridges and stairs shoot out of your weapon, so it
| created this minecraft/gary's mod meta game of building
| platforms and structures out of your weapons, a decade before
| those came out. Fun times and definitely helped me on my
| career towards software.
| allan-a wrote:
| This was my main gateway drug into programming. I would
| love disclose some of the best hacks that I came up with
| someday! This game was one of the best FPS games ever.
| teamonkey wrote:
| More than just config files, Cog was a powerful event-based
| scripting language
|
| https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131641/adding_langua
| g...
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| Doom was configurable like that with a tool called Dehacked.
| I remember mod packs for the tool, doing things like "mine
| layer", which set the rocket speed to 0 and made it cloaked,
| so that you could lay a minefield and then make the monsters
| walk into it. Or make the rocket launcher shoot lost souls,
| make chaingunners fly and many many more.
| globular-toast wrote:
| > Everything is a pile of hacks and tricks.
|
| It still is. Everything is. If an individual or company is
| working at a level that feels comfortable then what they're
| doing is easy now and anyone can do it. Everyone has to work at
| the level where it all feels like a hack because if you don't,
| someone else will.
| elihu wrote:
| One of the things I miss about those days is that the graphics
| and physics was done in software. That meant that the features
| weren't determined by industry standard APIs and what sort of
| hardware accelerators your customer had, they were just
| something you make up as you go along. Resolution and/or
| framerate were usually abysmal, but on the other hand you might
| try out some new game and it would do something weird and
| surprising that you didn't even know was possible.
|
| There's something satisfying about knowing that someone could
| just start with a blank editor and create a whole world from
| first principles, and that's how a lot of games were made.
| tomaskafka wrote:
| I still remember 1999's Outcast with its software-rendered
| voxel engine, and level of detail absolutely outclassing
| every other game of that era:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QgVGBqsJMA
| Shivetya wrote:
| oh I think it was far earlier, I remember disk doctor days and
| editors letting you change values if not finding hidden
| commands to give you more power.
|
| Heck even yanking a floppy out to avoid a death was not
| uncommon with some games.
| arendtio wrote:
| Actually, I hate it: Once you have discovered the hacks, there
| is no way back and those carefully designed illusions are lost
| for you, forever ;-)
|
| But yeah, the ideas some people come up to make something work
| are pretty amazing.
| bschne wrote:
| I figure to a certain kind of player the appreciation for how
| it was done is just as, if not more beautiful than the
| illusion ever was.
| rob74 wrote:
| To be honest implementing a mirror in a raycasting engine is not
| really that much of a technical feat - I bet the id guys thought
| "why didn't _we_ think of _that_?! " when they saw it. But nice
| attention to detail though that walking through a mirror sent you
| back to where you came from instead of to the other side of the
| wall...
| NobodyNada wrote:
| That's not how it works at all. Foone explains quite clearly
| that the "mirror" is actually just a duplicate copy of the room
| on the other side of the wall, and walking through the mirror
| sends you to that glitchy duplicate room, _not_ back where you
| came from.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Duke Nukem 3D did not use raycasting.
|
| Wolfeinstein 3D was the last major FPS to use raycasting.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| The first Rise of the Triads was also a raycaster. Now there
| was plenty of tech transfer between id and apogee, so it
| might be they just heavily modified the wolf3d engine
| hinkley wrote:
| As different as the mirror universe was, my favorite part of Duke
| Nukem 3D will always be the laser triggered mines.
|
| Why? You could stick them to anything. Including other players.
| Sneak up behind someone, put a mine on their back, the next time
| someone walks directly behind them they explode.
| mam2 wrote:
| What ? Not on monsters. Multiplayer then
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Shadow Warrior used a further iteration of the same Build engine.
| It came with a huge map that had all the map effects demoed, and
| there were a lot of them, something like fifty (so if you were
| building a map, you could copy an effect).
|
| For example, there was a room above a room, and a moving hole in
| the floor/ceiling between them.
| OOPMan wrote:
| TL;DR: someone discovered the Build engine again
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Played this a lot with my friends in 1997-98. That Hollywood
| holocaust is the best map the game has to offer. It has a TON of
| secrets and small places with valuable stuff, especially in
| deathmatch. One could be accessed by jumping on a light pole and
| then walking along the ledge.
| quadcore wrote:
| Duke was particularly good in multiplayer because all the guns
| were useful and balanced. For example, the starting gun was
| deadly at distance. The shrinker would give you an instant frag
| if you could catch the little guy. The rocket launcher was quite
| slow. etc.
|
| _Alley_ anyone?
| dingaling wrote:
| I can remember staying after hours to edit the .ini file on
| each lab computer to give overwhelming power to the pistol and
| weakening the rocket launcher. So that during multiplayer my
| opponents would be rushing to upgrade to the launcher and then
| were confounded by its lack of effect...
| marcodiego wrote:
| So, they were one step to implement portal?
| throwanem wrote:
| No, not really. The engine needed a lot of help from the map
| designer to make mirrors work at all, and those weren't even
| traversable without cheat codes, nor were they more than the
| flex foone describes them as - that's the reason you see one
| early on in the first level, and very rarely thereafter.
|
| Arbitrarily placed, see-through, traversable, Portal-style
| portals probably would not have been beyond the skill of the
| engine implementers. But to make them work smoothly, along with
| everything else in the game, under the constraints of the
| hardware on which the game had to run? I find it hard to
| imagine anyone being able to pull _that_ off, tbh.
| eatingCake wrote:
| To your point, I think that you could generate the duplicate
| geometry pretty easily but the issue would be making sure no
| overlapping sectors were visible at the same time, as that
| would cause glitches in the Build engine.
|
| You might be able to subdivide the build engine's sectors
| into visleaves (borrowing terminology from Source) and clip
| all sectors in the mirror-verse according to the aperture +
| view-frustrum. To work correctly you'd need to do this every
| frame, probably an unthinkably huge task for the hardware at
| the time.
| djmips wrote:
| As a 3D engine programmer from the era, I feel like portals
| could have been pulled off with relative ease. It's more a
| matter of wanting to do it. Someone today could demake Portal
| to a nineties era engine I'm sure.
| fl0wenol wrote:
| I think the trick would be to realize that the texture on
| the mirror or portal represents the same screen height and
| position, just at the virtual screen location of the
| mirror/portal player behind it. So you render the screen
| space column as the flipped/mirror column but move the
| camera, avoiding overdraw, and use the fact that back faces
| on the wall/mirror texture are invisible from out-of-
| bounds. Something like that.
|
| If you can lie to the engine and say that the
| flipped/portal camera is still inside the sector that the
| player is in (even if that's clearly wrong by the camera
| coords) then maybe your engine culls walls/floors/sprites
| not visible and you don't need to reserve an empty void for
| the mirror/portal camera to render from, so that level
| geometry can occupy the back side and make the illusion
| convincing.
| desi_ninja wrote:
| the original Prey was demoed in 1996 and had portals.
| portal has a lot of inspiration from that game
| throwanem wrote:
| You'd certainly know better than I!
| hgs3 wrote:
| Dark Forces (a Star Wars 2.5D FPS from the 90's) used
| portal rendering. This let you create impossible geometry,
| like making a doorway that appeared to be for a small room
| on the outside was actually a portal to a larger room on
| the inside (think the Tardis from Doctor Who).
| marcodiego wrote:
| Doom with the portal gun would be fun.
| bluedino wrote:
| Descent (1995) used portals
| jandrese wrote:
| I remember the Descent map where there was a very large room
| you could fly out of and into a corridor. The corridor looped
| around and went through the center of the big room, but the
| room in question didn't have a big column through the middle
| of it. So you were sort of in the room but also not when
| flying through the corridor. I seem to recall that while
| other players couldn't see or collide with you, they could
| shoot you if they somehow figured out where you were.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Portal rendering [1] was actually a well-known hidden-surface
| removal method long before the game Portal, right there with
| Quake-style BSP trees. It's actually somewhat surprising that
| it took so long for someone to turn them into an actual game
| mechanic rather than just an implementation detail, though I do
| believe some games used them to create non-Euclidean
| topologies...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_rendering
| fl0wenol wrote:
| The way Portal works was to render the world from two different
| camera angles, one at the portal exit, and the player view, and
| then combine them with a stencil buffer. This allows for
| recursion if desired. It also allows for moving portal
| entrance/exits without performance degradation.
|
| The way Build mirrors work is to copy the level geometry across
| the mirror plane. Recursion or moving the mirror would not be
| possible.
| puttycat wrote:
| This is remarkable, but Twitter is such an awful medium for this
| kind of text. I wish this was posted on a normal platform so I
| could easily share it.
| jader201 wrote:
| This was posted in a sibling comment:
|
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1372766463556083715.html
| whateveracct wrote:
| Off topic, but to this day I love that mix of sprites and 3D
| these classic shooters have. I bought Doom on my Switch for $2
| and it's been a joy.
|
| I wish people would still make them instead of going full 3D!
|
| EDIT: Thanks for the game recommendations everyone!
| anthk wrote:
| Get FreeDoom and PrBoomPlus for PC, it's a vanilla Doom/Doom2
| compatible Iwad which will allow you to play any Doom2 PWAD out
| there (and get an amazing shooter for free by itself, too).
| mysterydip wrote:
| There are some out there. I was working on a game using the
| original Rise of the Triad engine which did 2D sprites, but the
| idea evolved to larger than that engine could really support.
| I'm now making a modern engine but keeping some of the
| philosophy to target low spec machines, so some of my "models"
| are 2D sprites.
| modeless wrote:
| For something a little different, check out Sonic Robo Blast 2.
| It's a third person 3D Sonic the Hedgehog fan game based on the
| Doom Legacy engine, and it's surprisingly quite decent.
| Certainly better than some of Sonic Team's efforts.
| whateveracct wrote:
| I'll check this out. I love the look of sprites in 3D it
| seems. Further from uncanny valley -> more allowance for
| imagination?
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Other than games others recommend, maybe check out the mod
| community of those games you love. There are TONS of mods, and
| I mean top quality mods of classic FPS, enough to spend a whole
| year or more to play all of those through.
|
| I saved a few Youtube channel for these kinds of things:
|
| pagb666: (DOOM mods and wads)
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgYF9U_IDn77we6eSs-QYDw
|
| Sinatar: (General classic game channel)
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3_uzHYOPYZOyIYd6nGN3VA
|
| dumptruck_ds: (Quake mapping)
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF502yOYr_olPaw6xgnYmaQ
|
| tatsurdcacocaco: (DOOM wads and mods)
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBhdYANRJZiG6JmnqR7h3yw
| bozzcl wrote:
| There's quite a few retro shooters like that nowadays.
|
| Prodeus, Ion Fury, Amid Evil, Project Warlock, Project
| Downfall, Hedon, Viscerafest... and those are just the ones I
| know about. If you include retro 3D (think mid-90s style)
| there's even more!
|
| There's also a lot of mods and TCs for some classic games, like
| Doom or DN3D.
|
| You should follow some gaming channels on YouTube that focus on
| retro shooters, they're a good source of new ones to play. I'd
| recommend ICARUSLIV3S and GmanLives if you'd like to find more.
| mikewhy wrote:
| Aye, boomer shooters are pretty hot nowadays. And what I love
| about them is that they're able to just use the original
| engines* from decades ago:
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/562860/Ion_Fury/
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1000410/WRATH_Aeon_of_Rui.
| ..
|
| * well, sourceports of the engines.
| whateveracct wrote:
| The source ports of the engines seem to be GPL'd though, so
| I'd imagine an indie dev would have to open source their
| game as well?
| bozzcl wrote:
| I don't know if the engine licenses apply to game assets,
| though.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| don't apply to assets. if not, FreeDoom would not make
| any sense.
| stryan wrote:
| >And what I love about them is that they're able to just
| use the original engines* from decades ago
|
| DUSK is a great exception to that, where they actually used
| a very heavily modified version of Unity to get something
| similar to ioquake or the early DOOM engines. IIRC most of
| the graphics programming was actually done to stop Unity
| from making the game "look better" :)
|
| Amid Evil is another notable exception that I can think of
| of the top of my head: it uses Unreal4.
| bozzcl wrote:
| Oh man, Amid Evil is pretty crazy in that regard. All the
| game elements are sprites with depth mapping, so they
| react somewhat realistically to level illumination.
|
| Prodeus does something similar as well. In fact, you can
| switch between 2D sprites and 3D models on the fly.
| sitkack wrote:
| Amid Evil looks like an alternative universe where 3dfx
| was still on top
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBlTTW3RRtw
|
| Prodeus is more like an Amiga64
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUN7t2RyMSs
|
| This is really cool from a cultural evolution perspective
| to see fads and nostalgia fold back on itself.
|
| Are voxels the one piece jump suit of video games?
| wishinghand wrote:
| I love this renaissance the genre is having, combining older
| aesthetic with better art design and lighting. Valheim comes
| to mind. I hope janky looking games but that are as deep as
| Deus Ex aren't far behind.
| EliasWatson wrote:
| Check out Post Void. It's a newer game that uses that style.
| gh123man wrote:
| I actually designed and built a (modern?) game like this! If
| you have an iPhone you can check it out. It's sort of "Portal
| meets Doom" https://blog.sb1.io/gateescape/
|
| I used some screenspace shaders for the controls and color
| blending, but the engine itself is an oldschool raycaster.
| Building it posed a lot of interesting problems like how to
| recessively render sprites through portals and things like
| that.
|
| I also open sourced an early prototype of the engine:
| https://github.com/gh123man/Portal-Raycaster
| whateveracct wrote:
| I downloaded it and am gonna give it a try!
| musha68k wrote:
| The modding scene for these games is alive and well. FWIW
| Bethesda keeps updating even Switch Doom with some of the
| latest mods (Romero's Sigil, etc).
|
| Also check out Ion Fury if you haven't yet:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Fury
| jl6 wrote:
| Come get some, Jorge Luis Borges!
| daveslash wrote:
| " _It 's a doorless unisex public bathroom with urinals. Weird._"
|
| And with Carpets, apparently ~ _Gross_.
| captainmuon wrote:
| And a _couch_ - gross but somehow fitting...
| OnionBlender wrote:
| It isn't a regular theater either. It is a porn theatre. Maybe
| that is why it is unisex.
|
| The book store in the next level isn't a regular book store
| either. I never noticed that as a kid.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I like how the theater went with the practice that _"Hey, you
| walked through the door so we just assume you're all in"_.
|
| What was the book store?
| OnionBlender wrote:
| E1L2: Red Light District
| https://dukenukem.fandom.com/wiki/Red_Light_District
|
| The wiki page calls it a porn store.
| gambiting wrote:
| I've been in a few British houses where the bathrooms had
| carpets. We even rented one as students.
|
| I can assure you it was the grossest thing ever, and clearly an
| idea of someone who doesn't pee while standing. But apparently
| in 80/90s Britain it was still considered "cozy"
| TheSkyHasEyes wrote:
| I had an apartment in east Canada with a carpeted bathroom.
| :D
| bigtones wrote:
| Same in New Zealand - super gross.
| daveslash wrote:
| In college, I rented a studio apartment in Utah that had 70's
| _shag_ carpet in the entire bathroom! My first week there I
| hadn 't gotten a bath map and it was super weird stepping out
| of the shower onto shag carpet.
| boringg wrote:
| Is there a way to play DN3D or Shadow Warrior multiplayer anymore
| (that isn't super janky)? Obviously touch of nostalgia reading
| this twitter thread...
| conradfr wrote:
| I remember using an IPX to TCP wrapper for Windows 7 that we
| used to play Warcraft II, so maybe.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I think https://github.com/jonof/jfduke3d supports multiplayer
| Narishma wrote:
| What's the difference between that and eduke32, which I think
| is more popular?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I've heard of one but not the other (and vice versa for you
| it seems).
| evan_ wrote:
| There's a remaster on Duke3D on Steam and console. It stays
| true to the original in a lot of ways but fixes a lot of the
| really annoying stuff you'd get if it were just a straight
| port. I haven't played multiplayer on it for a couple years but
| it was pretty fun.
| anthk wrote:
| Check Eduke32.
| captainmuon wrote:
| Really cool, I also remember poking around in the internals of
| Duke Nukem 3D and making levels a lot.
|
| One cool thing about die Build engine is portals, you can build
| two different rooms and identify a wall in one with another wall
| in the other and "glue" the rooms together, IIRC. I think that is
| what is behind most of the "teleportation". I always thought that
| the mirror was just a wall portaled to itself, I wonder why the
| "physical" mirror space is necessary?
|
| Edit: or maybe I'm misremembering what portals did? Here is a
| really detailed article by Fabien Sanglard about the engine:
| https://fabiensanglard.net/duke3d/build_engine_internals.php
| arbitrage wrote:
| I just remembered, because of what you wrote, that I thought
| mirrors worked the same way! That they were a portal glued to
| itself, or something.
|
| This made a lot of sense to my teenage brain : )
| jtnews wrote:
| I was always got a kick of out of the swimming sections simply
| being teleporters. Step on top of the water a get teleported to
| a room filled with water and then swim to the top of the room
| to get teleported back to the area around the pool.
| dividuum wrote:
| I'm fairly sure portals in that case only refers to how the
| Build engine determined potentially visible areas. As far as I
| know there was no mechanism to seamlessly connect far-away
| parts of a map in that way. If there was, I'd be pissed,
| because I never used that to built my own maps and it would
| allow neat non-euclidean geometry (like in Antichamber) :-)
| kodt wrote:
| Uh why isn't this a blog, or a youtube video?
|
| _specifically to annoy foone_
| Piskvorrr wrote:
| It's a micro web-logging platform.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That's what makes it so terrible for long form threads. I use
| Threadreaderapp but it's not ideal. Long heavily fragmented
| threads like this are literally headache inducing.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| I hate twitter.
|
| It's slowly ruining the internet.
| gambiting wrote:
| I'm just sad that once Twitter inevitably disappears in few
| years, all this cool content like this will be lost. I can
| still find and read HTML 1.0 pages from 25 years ago, but
| good luck ever finding this random Twitter thread unless
| somone specifically puts in the effort of preserving it.
| cordite wrote:
| All those NFTs, gone
| programd wrote:
| ...like tears in rain.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Twitter and Facebook have continued to exist well beyond
| the lifetime I would have expected for either platform.
|
| On the other hand I'm equally surprised by the number of
| weird little websites that just fail to die.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't do this here.
| hinkley wrote:
| Do you think it's working? Looks annoyed to me.
| jpm_sd wrote:
| Yes, long form Twitter is THE WORST. However foone is awesome,
| so maybe they cancel each other out?
| ehsankia wrote:
| At the very least if the link is a threadapp, it's kinda
| fine. The issue is when the twitter UI stops showing half the
| thread and you have to keep clicking. I don't mind the bite
| sized sections personally.
| olvy0 wrote:
| Nitter [0] makes twitter tolerable. I never browse Twitter
| directly, I find the UI atrocious, and most tweets self-
| aggrandize or worthless.
|
| There are some gems occasionally, like OP (Duke Nukem 3d
| was awesome).
|
| There are extensions to redirect from twitter to nitter
| sites [1]. For example, the main site is not very
| responsive right now, but the alternative instances [2] are
| very responsive.
|
| [0] https://nitter.net/
|
| [1] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Extensions
|
| [2] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances
| m45t3r wrote:
| Reference: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1372945388664066061
| spijdar wrote:
| I find it ironic that further down foone runs into the
| limitations of twitter as a platform and app and complains
| about it.
| webwielder2 wrote:
| Covered on DF Retro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__OQDj0YbAQ
| blt wrote:
| I implemented a minimal Build-style engine for fun once. Those
| glitch videos give me instant flashbacks.
| Koshkin wrote:
| _Depth Dwellers_ was my favorite shooter after Doom and DN3D.
| Very atmospheric, with nice music.
| high_byte wrote:
| this thread sent me into the mirror universe
| klmadfejno wrote:
| Off the top of my head, I recall looking into how this was done
| in the first bathroom of silent hill 2. Mirror universes were, I
| imagine, pretty common. This one is a lot more interesting though
| as it seems like the sprites in the mirror aren't actually on the
| other side?
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