[HN Gopher] Don't starve, Diablo - Parallax 7 (2016)
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Don't starve, Diablo - Parallax 7 (2016)
Author : homarp
Score : 314 points
Date : 2021-08-21 20:15 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (simonschreibt.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (simonschreibt.de)
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Ah yes, such great tricks to fool the eye. Like programming
| tricks to fit into small memory footprints I suspect the "how" of
| these things will get lost over time.
|
| Contemporary with these game developments was an excellent series
| called "Graphics GEMS" which highlighted different ways to
| achieve various cool effects. Back in those days I felt a real
| sense of accomplishment when I got something to both work and
| "look right" (your eye is a very harsh critic!) and its a bit sad
| for me that you just call the right Unity of Vulcan API and
| voila, effect you were looking for on your scene appears.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > its a bit sad for me that you just call the right Unity of
| Vulcan API and voila, effect you were looking for on your scene
| appears.
|
| You are free to not call those APIs. You could constrain
| yourself. I did this and I am having way more fun than if I
| tried to use the full capabilities of a modern GPU+software
| stack.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| True, there are always interesting ways to create challenges
| to enhance the experience.
| resonious wrote:
| Yeah it does feel like this kind of clever graphics trickery is
| becoming a lost artform. Of course, niche circles can continue
| it. Retro console/PC programming circles, demoscene, etc. But
| I'm not sure how long those circles will last once the
| generations that grew up with that hardware die out.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > you just call the right Unity of Vulcan API and voila, effect
| you were looking for on your scene appears.
|
| Nitpick:
|
| Vulkan (with a K) is a low-level graphics API, operating on a
| level that's comparable to OpenGL or DirectX, or perhaps even a
| bit lower. It's not going to implement any kind of interesting,
| nontrivial graphical effects for you -- doing that is going to
| take work, just like it would with older graphics APIs.
|
| With a higher-level framework like Unity, on the other hand...
| that's a fair comment.
| gmueckl wrote:
| In fact, when you look at the progression from OpenGL 1.1 to
| 3.0 Core to Vulkan (and the parallel evolution of Direct3D),
| you'll see that with every step along the way, the APIs
| became more and more flexible by providing less and less
| convenience. Just look at the code it takes to render one
| triangle using each one of these APIs. The difference is that
| by the time you manage to render a triangle using Vulkan,
| you're also mostly set up to do very advanced rendering
| tricks that would be plain impossible with OpenGL 1.1 and
| would require some contortions to get working on OpenGL 3.0.
| WalterSobchak wrote:
| I wonder why they enforce a redirect from HTTP to HTTPS.
|
| https://simonschreibt.de/gat/dont-starve-diablo-parallax-7/
| nextaccountic wrote:
| I thought this was considered a best practice. Years ago people
| cited performance reasons but I think this doesn't make sense
| anymore.
|
| Relevant thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13301280
| (but from 2017, can't find a 2021 discussion)
| npteljes wrote:
| Indeed it is, since browsers now mark http pages as
| "insecure". Let's Encrypt's certbot, for one, explicitly asks
| upon installation if you'd like to redirect http to https.
| anthk wrote:
| Fake 3D racing games with did it worse, as you just had a trig
| shifting road and some background scrolling right and left. When
| I played Road Rash 3D on the PSX the change was like night and
| day.
|
| Altough some of them did it really well, like Lotus Turbo
| Challenge I and II for the Mega Drive.
| wyldfire wrote:
| "Moon Patrol" seemed like such an entertaining game at the time.
| But it grew stale very quickly. The parallax effect was really
| popular in home consoles like NES games just a few years later.
|
| This article is all about rendering but gameplay is what makes
| "Don't Starve" standout IMO.
| wincy wrote:
| I really love the idea of Don't Starve, but I felt like I had
| to read a guide to get better at it, so I lost interest. I
| adore the artwork, especially.
|
| At the same time, the main game loop of Don't Starve seems like
| you have to memorize a bunch of survival tips and constantly
| read the wiki to survive, or you're doomed after the first week
| for sure, and probably before.
| imtringued wrote:
| The problem with that game is that the rules of the game
| completely defy common sense.
|
| 99% of first time players who survive winter will die from
| freezing because the first thing they make to fend the cold
| of is insulating clothing. The game doesn't work that way.
| No, instead you must use a very specific item that only works
| in this magic video game world called a thermal stone. The
| stone is hot? You don't freeze. How stupid is that?
|
| The entire game is like that. Instead of having a continuous
| learning curve the game has a discontinuous learning curve.
| I.e. most items in the game feel like they shouldn't even be
| in the game. If there was a beginner mode that simply
| restricted access to all the useless items the game would be
| significantly easier.
|
| Once you get into summer you run into the heat problem.
| Either your stuff is burning or plants aren't growing. The
| solution? An Ice Flingomatic. It doesn't even need ice to
| run... If you played the game with a cheetsheet it would be
| pathetically easy because 90% of the game is intentionally
| meant to be a red herring that wastes your time.
|
| I say this as a player who survived 300+ days at which point
| the risk of death was 0%.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > At the same time, the main game loop of Don't Starve seems
| like you have to memorize a bunch of survival tips and
| constantly read the wiki to survive, or you're doomed after
| the first week for sure, and probably before.
|
| In truth, I gave up after failing to thrive through four or
| five attempts. In other games, I hate the nagging tutorials
| and compulsory/free savepoints. But it seems like DS could've
| benefitted from some compromises here.
|
| So, I 'cheated'. After telling a friend who was excited about
| the game that I'd given up, they told me about the cues the
| game was giving me and how to mitigate them. The dynamics of
| the game are somewhat open world (not quite Dwarf-Fortess
| level but lots of great flexibility in interactions/systems).
| After getting past some initial hiccups and knowing what the
| threats are (beyond starvation) and potential solutions means
| you can have a lot more fun. And it's a drag when you die but
| going from a clean start to a workable place is easily doable
| after you know the basics.
|
| "Don't Starve Together" is a much easier way to be introduced
| to DS, especially when entering after the team has made some
| basic progress.
| fifilura wrote:
| I genuinely recommend Don't starve together as a remote co-
| op game.
|
| I played it with my son and his friend. In the beginning we
| got stuck pretty quickly but the 12-13 years old guys had
| all the patience to look at the videos and figure it out.
|
| The confused faces of the moms when hearing the loud (non
| american friendly) curses and shouts from two different
| corners of the house for "We need more meatballs, deerclops
| is coming in two days" or "oh no not a tree guard again".
| It will be an important memory of my oldest son's teens.
| Hopefully his too.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Don't Starve lets you tweak many of the details of the
| world so you can remove threats you find too hard (or
| unfun) and make a "safe" game. Conversely this means you
| lose some resources, for example enemy drops or that are
| the result of weather phenomena. In turn that means that
| some items can't be creafted (in Don't Starve - Shipwrecked
| a rain of meteors comes in the dry season and some hatch
| into Dragoons that you can harvest Dragoon Hearts from to
| make items in the Volcanic tab that you can't make
| otherwise). But on the plus side it lets you create a
| relatively peaceful game that can be enjoyed for a long
| time (especially in a large world) and that gives you the
| chance to learn the basics without having to constantly
| struggle against sudden calamity. In a sense, you can make
| an Easy mode that you can play for ever until you get bored
| and want some challenge.
|
| Personally, that's how I always play (except to unlock
| characters which requires surviving a certain number of
| days in the standard game). I just like to build stuff and
| survive and the constant attacks (e.g. by Hounds) end up
| annoying me after a while. I appreciate that the game's
| designers had a vision for the world but I appreciate it
| even more that they gave the player the tools to craft his
| or her own vision in turn. Like the menu item where you can
| choose your own simulation options says "Your world, your
| rules". Very often I've played games where the designers
| seem hell-bent on imposing their own, personal idea of fun
| on the player and it pisses me off (my worst example is in
| Underground Sea where apparently the designer thought it's
| great fun watching a slow moving boat treading water
| without anything happening for real-world minutes on end).
|
| Don't Starve still takes a lot of wiki reading though. I
| think it appeals more to old-school strategy or city
| building game players, who would have expected to have to
| read a manual and playing a tutorial campaign before even
| playing (like Cesar III for example).
| INTPenis wrote:
| I never figured out those cues. I also gave up after a
| while because the only way to progress was to cheat.
|
| I think if I re-played it today I'd check one of the many
| gameplay videos on youtube to understand how to get started
| and then take it from there.
| [deleted]
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| "Fake perspective" was problematic in early flight simulators as
| well where texture-mapping was used. The classic example being a
| long runway.
|
| If the runway was a long polygon and you had a long texture map
| (with a dashed centerline for example) the standard code to map
| the bitmap to the projected runway polygon would not in fact
| apply perspective to the bitmap -- the intervals between the
| dashes would be a fixed not perspective distance.
|
| The solution was to break up the runway into a whole bunch of
| shorter polygons -- each with a bitmap of perhaps one
| stripe/dash.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| The PlayStation didn't have perspective-correct texture mapping
| despite having a real 3D rendering pipeline:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8TO-nrUtSI
| malkia wrote:
| for that reason some games (on PS1) would subdivide on the
| fly, and have special code to avoid t-junctions (extend by
| pixel, such that there is no gap), also there were no sub-
| pixel coordinates hence the "shimmering" - still though some
| games brought quite impressive graphics for what the chip
| offered.
| malkia wrote:
| Another difference was using small 4-bit textures with own
| palette applied on different parts of the character body,
| instead of one huge skin (like done in Quake), not only
| this allowed for better sampling - e.g. no blurries around
| shoulders, but also better and more optimal use - for
| example most of your hands, or legs often are with the same
| texture,hence two (or more) different 4-bit textures might
| server better than one huge 8-bit one (and the pallette for
| it would be smaller too).
|
| But then there were also tricks of reusing textures
| (mapping) directly from what was drawn on screen (for
| blurring, etc).
| sshumaker wrote:
| Yes, which is why games that really took advantage of the
| hardware like Crash Bandicoot just used tons of small
| triangles.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| To be fair, the best N64 games did that too, though for
| different reasons (pitiful amount of RAM for storing
| textures).
| bitwize wrote:
| A lot of this has to do with the fact that many Japanese
| manufacturers of the era basically got to 3D hardware by
| improving 2D sprite chips so they could scale and do affine
| transforms. This is why the PlayStation couldn't do
| perspective correct nor filtered textures and lacked a Z
| buffer, and why the Saturn drew with quads instead of tris.
|
| Nintendo partnered with the most advanced Western 3D hardware
| manufacturer -- SGI. The N64 was kind of a cut down Indigo.
| mbank wrote:
| I love You mentioning moon patrol. It was one of my first games
| back in the days on Atari 1024St. Spend hours in front of it,
| just a me a friend and a joystick...
| quadcore wrote:
| Nowdays, I make the distinction between maintainable programs and
| hackable ones, the later of course being, imo, way better. What I
| mean by that is essentially that the ratio # by-design features
| over simplicity of code of the hackable program is considerably
| higher than the maintainable program (but there is no method to
| write a hackable program, you either have the sensibility for
| that or you dont, from my own observation - I'll be happy to
| discuss the nuances of that statement).
|
| I don't know today but blizzard used to write its game in the
| hackable way - which is both a feat and rare. Take WoW for
| example, do you know how the 3d engine basically work? It's so
| simple and so powerful, you are not going to believe it. WoW is
| made of levels that are connected by portals. That's it. A level
| will have portals that will get you to other levels which in turn
| will have portals which lead to other levels. For example, when
| you are "outdoor" (with quotes because the engine doesn't know
| _outdoor_ actually, it knows levels!), you may find a portal that
| leads you into a tavern for example. Once you are in the tavern,
| the program can ignore the rest of the world and focus the whole
| computer resources on the tavern, just like that, by-design. So
| you 'll have taverns as detailed as all of what you can see in
| the exteriors. Better, you can have landscape in each and every
| level. (note when the player is in the air, say on a gryphon,
| some portals are ignored.)
|
| This is both incredible simple and powerful. Remember the game
| run on early-2000 PCs. Imagine what you can do with that. Caves?
| Done. Houses that leads into catacombs? Done. Incredibly detailed
| cities? Add walls and portals, done. Texture streaming? Well,
| d-o-n-e. Buildings that leads to indoor landscape? Done.
|
| I wouldnt make a game engine differently today.
|
| As a comparison, I'm working on one of the most played game in
| the world atm which is a maintainable program. You have no idea
| the pain in the ass in comparison just to add simple features. Oh
| yeah the code is readable. You can fix bugs. But features, just
| forget it, it takes a shit load of money to get one done.
| bombcar wrote:
| 2D games had so many tricks that they often looked better than
| their 3D replacements for quite some time. If you were able to do
| every pixel by hand for a few views you often ended up with more
| detail than you could in the low amount of polygons available
| early on.
| roenxi wrote:
| Games in general suffer from the fact that more technology does
| not necessarily lead to better visual - or narrative -
| outcomes. There was a period of time where every game engine
| producer was very excited about their engine's ability to
| render hair and I dunno if there are many games where the
| quality of the hair rendering has been a factor in the
| graphics. "More realism" runs up against the hard truth that
| these games are being projected on a 2D screen and can't be
| realistic. And even if it was, there still needs to be a
| justification for why that is better - it isn't self evident
| that more realistic graphics is a batter outcome. The real
| world is pretty boring, that is why people are playing games.
| thom wrote:
| I think this is true beyond graphics as well. I remember when
| games started shipping with fully voice-acted dialogue, it
| felt like all the interesting interactive text based systems
| (however clunky) were immediately abandoned. This hurt
| immersion for me far more than text vs speech ever did. I'm
| excited by the progress in dynamically generated voices in
| games happening now, although in many cases that seems more
| like having better placeholders in your asset pipeline than
| using them as production-level dialogue.
| RobertKerans wrote:
| I'd posit that there's a general principle underpinning
| this that is true for most things (not games, or art, but
| everything).
|
| This is a bit half-formed in my head, but: Computer tech
| makes certain important classes of things cheaper and more
| convenient to create. Sometimes it makes those things
| feasible in the first place. But it's always via enabling
| of cheap duplication of an existing process.
|
| As tech evolves in power, it can do more. The high-speed
| duplicative properties of computers are the thing that
| makes them useful. For them them to be _generally_ useful
| [and critically, financially useful], crafted, stylised,
| personal aspects are stripped out. So much does not work as
| well or look as good or is as interesting as things from
| the previous evolution that were built or provided or
| staffed by knowledgable, skilled practitioners. But given
| that skilled practitioners are finite, on average what
| comes out is better _in some useful aspects_ than most of
| the efforts of the previous evolution. And on average it 's
| easier to produce/manage/handle at scale. So pick anything:
| Amazon, Uber, Google search, medical records, 3D games, etc
| etc, ad infinitum. Almost anything you can use computer
| tech for.
|
| What's being talked about in the comments: it's not
| _generalisable_ , so it gets chucked. It's too hard to do,
| so sand off the sharp edges, cut anything that can't be
| reduced to an algorithm, package the inferior but much more
| convenient version that can scale
|
| (I assume there is some body of thought with literature
| relating to this process that I should dig into, but I
| think people like Walter Benjamin and Milan Kundera have
| probably described it much better than I can w/r/t art [or
| maybe Ruskin or Morris, though their idea are all maybe a
| bit idealistic] this destruction of the personal to the
| service of the machine)
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Great example of this today is real-time raytracing. They
| look hideous.
| billfruit wrote:
| Hair I'm not sure, but I think the sort of 'dynamic' trees
| and foliage that move with wind and rain, should add more
| realism. I hear Witcher 3 had some kind of system that did
| that, not sure about any other games that do that.
| ajuc wrote:
| It was a little over the top. But yes it was nice.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzSS5oxKjUA
| oddity wrote:
| I'm not a professional artist or marketer, but I suspect the
| main reason we see the pursuit of realism in games is that
| it's easy to communicate and coordinate, so it reduces
| uncertainty across the board. Developing a style is hard and
| requires a lot of coordination across different teams to
| understand and internalize what approximations are being made
| where. At scale with hundreds of artists, it becomes very
| difficult. If, instead, the approximations are enforced by
| the tech and the goal the artists need to consider is just to
| create something realistic, then that's easy to get started
| with without needing a concept artist to dictate everything.
| There's probably a crossover point of team size where realism
| has lower risk and lower cost. In practice, I think what we
| see is that the more creatively-minded large studios shoot
| for 90% of assets being "realistic" with some strong
| stylistic choices for the last 10% that really defines the
| look.
|
| On the marketing side, there's something to be said for
| knowing that your visual style will be uncontroversial for
| the most critical time period for getting sales (launch).
| Looking horrible 10 years from now doesn't really matter if
| you're trying to recoup your investment today. It has slowed
| down now because a lot of the low hanging fruit has been
| done, but a decade or so ago, graphical features were one
| more reason marketing could point to for someone to buy a
| game. Some people really do buy games because they look
| pretty. Even today, there are games notable only for being
| benchmarks.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| reminds me of the outcry when windwaker was announced to
| use cellshading. Nowadays people love it but back in the
| day it was initially reviled by a lot of people before it
| eventually won them over
| yissp wrote:
| Agreed. Looking at
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-
| selling_video_g... only 2 of the top 10 (GTA V and PUBG) have
| what I would call a realistic aesthetic. Even looking at the
| entire list, games with a more stylized look are far more
| prevalent.
| rightbyte wrote:
| One of the worst examples of a 2d to 3d transition is Europe
| Universalis 2 and 3. The 3d map got all messy and hard to see
| stuff on and it lagged alot even on fast computers.
|
| I tried to D2 open beta and surely the monster stood out way
| less. If 3d would be as clear each monster would have to have a
| thick 2d border.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Playing through Final Fantasy VII as a kid (albeit emulated)
| was a great introduction to that dichotomy. The game mixes both
| 2D and 3D art styles to varying degrees of success, but there's
| definitely a reason why the game's art direction is so iconic.
| Looking back on it, all I see is a watercolor, handpainted haze
| (as opposed to games from the system that haven't quite aged as
| well, like Metal Gear Solid)
| bombcar wrote:
| Which is interesting because the games that combined 2D and
| 3D (common on console) actually now can look much BETTER on
| the 3D side (emulators often allow upscaling etc) but the 2D
| painting remains the same.
| RuggedPineapple wrote:
| I actually think of FF VII as one of the PS1 games that have
| aged the most, and far more to my eye then MGS. The 3d battle
| models are fantastic, but the overworld models are, like,
| laughably bad. It wasn't a hardware limitation either,
| because FF VIII and IX both fixed this with character models
| that actually look like the character, but VII looks like
| polygons are in short supply. They just didnt know how to
| fully utilize the system yet.
| vlunkr wrote:
| How much things have aged is all subjective, but think FF7
| is charming with it's absurd hair spikes and fingerless
| cube hands. Other games that tried harder to look realistic
| don't feel like that.
| barneybooroo wrote:
| I think this was an art choice rather than technical
| inexperience.
|
| The proportions of the field models are more similar to the
| chibi sprites of the SNES games, so we're seeing the
| gradual evolution of FF's style with VII the first
| transition from 2D to 3D.
|
| That VIII and IX used more realistic proportions is just a
| later stage of that stylistic transition.
|
| Personally, I find them quite charming. There's a fair bit
| of slapstick in the game that IMO works better with the low
| poly models.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Hand-painted/drawn backgrounds were unfairly good back in the
| day. Something like Planescape: Torment looks better than its
| age because there's really very little to render in real-time.
| Conversely, something comparable like SimGolf looks much worse
| despite coming out later because it couldn't leverage anything
| pre-rendered.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Which SimGolf?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| On the other hand, the main thing I notice in the first Diablo
| 2 shots (having had my attention drawn to the rendering -- I'm
| not sure what the article means by "pay attention, how the
| pales (?) don't cover the same floor-pixels all the time") is
| how the torch appears to be casting shadows perpendicular to
| itself. And how as you walk by the torch, the direction of your
| shadow doesn't change at all.
| adventured wrote:
| By pales they mean the tall spikes (impalers). The spikes
| visually appear to tilt as you move left/right, seemingly
| revealing different texture underneath during the transition.
| Whereas the standard setting version is static, fixed
| texture, no tilt, no visual shift in the texture
| beneath/behind the impaler spikes.
| robocat wrote:
| I will also add to look for the effect as the background
| moves behind the top of the spikes (the bottoms are
| connected to the ground, correctly!)
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I remember the D2 perspective mode was a neat trick but it made
| the game kinda fuzzy and broke core graphics features such as my
| character wouldn't be green when poisoned.
| BearOso wrote:
| The green was a palette trick. The Direct3D mode used high-
| color mode, so that trick wasn't free. It did draw a green
| light halo around the character's feet instead, though.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It did. But it was very subtle.
| Tarsul wrote:
| sometimes I wonder how much green/blue is/was lost in media due
| to greenscreen/bluescreen. Anyone has any idea about this?
| egypturnash wrote:
| You can key on _any_ color; green is the most common mostly
| because it 's pretty far away from the range of human
| skin/hair.
|
| You also only need to worry about this when you're doing
| effects shots. If you're doing relatively naturalistic
| filmmaking where your set/location isn't gonna be replaced,
| there's no need for any of that.
| slmjkdbtl wrote:
| Ulillillia's Platform Master also has a lot of really interesting
| parallax / pseudo 3d effects: https://youtu.be/Tc4djuMvP2k?t=2117
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