[HN Gopher] Max Payne - two decades later - Graphics Critique (2...
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Max Payne - two decades later - Graphics Critique (2021)
Author : davikr
Score : 147 points
Date : 2026-01-11 03:43 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (darkcephas.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (darkcephas.blogspot.com)
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| What books does one read to get this level of graphics
| programming knowledge?
| fhd2 wrote:
| As an amateur game programmer, I found nothing too advanced in
| there. A classic book series would be Game/Programming/GPU
| Gems, about as old as Max Payne. But frankly, you'd run into
| most of these concepts attempting to make a 3D game with Godot
| or something. That's the nice thing to take away from TFA in my
| opinion: They made a very nice looking game (for the time) with
| largely pretty simple techniques used cleverly.
| sho_hn wrote:
| A lot of what is shown here comes down to the people in the
| art asset and level pipeline.
|
| The real story to tell would be what tooling was used to pre-
| bake the lighing in the textures, e.g. if they used a
| seperate rendering package or mostly painted by hand, or in
| what mix.
|
| Also what guidelines they used to make sure the baked-in
| reflections would match the use and environmental lighing of
| objects in the scene, e.g. just general constraints or how
| much customization there was for important unique
| arrangements. Is it done by the same person in a tight loop
| or did it involve hand-ofs, etc.
|
| The excellence of the result is down to a lot of tasteful
| choices in how to blend these techniques, achieved either
| from experience or iteration.
|
| As programmers we tend to focus a lot on the raw rendering
| techniques, but there's a whole systematic practice around
| art direction and how to achieve and maintain quality in it
| that feels I guess softer and less deterministic but is still
| worth talking at length about.
|
| This especially struck me when the reviewer here recommended
| using multiple stacked texture planes and parallax mapping to
| improve things. I know a handful of games that have done
| this, and unless used exceedingly sparingly (e.g. mesh fence
| over pipes or something, where the foreground isn't expected
| to have a lot of depth) in my experience it very quickly
| gives away the illusion and looks very hokey. Humans are good
| at telling it's planes sliding over each other and doesn't
| correspond to their experience with depth perception. It also
| makes a scene a lot busier as the camera is moved, firing
| "something is changing here!" perceptual sinals all over the
| screen (note how all the lavish particle effects are about
| _feedback_ instead), and is not the atmosphere Max Payne was
| trying to achieve.
|
| In other words, sometimes it's about knowing what possible
| thing not to do, too. And a lot of magic happens when
| disciplines meet.
| gary_0 wrote:
| > e.g. if they used a seperate rendering package or mostly
| painted by hand
|
| IIRC Max Payne was one of the earlier games to rely heavily
| on photo-reference textures (instead of hand drawing or
| computer generating them). Keep in mind that in 2001
| digital cameras were rare, expensive, and low-res, so
| people often just used film cameras and scanned in the
| physical photo with a flatbed scanner. Max Payne was far
| from the first, though; even 1998's Half-Life used some
| photo-ref textures.
|
| The lighting in Max Payne's textures was probably mostly
| just the lighting from the original photo. Every texture
| had to be hand-manipulated to make it usable on 3D models,
| so changing the lighting would have added even more work
| and would have looked less realistic.
| fsloth wrote:
| Graphics is not an academic body of knowledge as such. It's a
| bag of tricks developed over 50 years, going hand in hand with
| industrial hardware development.
|
| There _is_ deep and rich academic framework around the subject,
| but I think to understand "why this" you need to program to
| understand the problem space since it's not really anything you
| could derive from first principles. I mean you get the
| rendering equation and so on, but the graphics knowledge
| portrayed in the article comes from understanding the three
| pillars of real time rendering.
|
| It's about delicate interaction between human visual system
| (how to fool it), algorithms, and the hardware capabilities.
|
| In general you need to program graphics, not read it. I mean
| I'm in the "reading" category myself and the people who've
| focused on programming are much better than myself.
|
| Real time rendering by Akenine-Moller, Haines et all is the
| standard entry reference. Now in it's fourth edition. It's
| really good and dense.
|
| If someone wants a simple recipe how to learn real time
| graphics alone in their cellar, nowadays I would recommend
| getting Real Time Rendering and going through
| https://learnopengl.com/.
|
| After that you just continue... continue ... continue.
|
| There are some people who understand everything about the topic
| instantly intuitively apparently but that's very, very unique.
| For the rest of us it's a life long adventure facing our own
| limitations and trying to get better, one program after
| another.
|
| Speaking as graphics/geometry dev for 20 years now.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| The GTA VC screenshots are actually GTA III
| petermcneeley wrote:
| Ah yes these are mislabled. But GTA III is indeed 2001 so the
| comparison is still correct.
| iammjm wrote:
| Max Payne 1 & 2 are some of my favorite games of all time. I love
| everything about them: their graphical style, the story, the
| general vibe, the gameplay. They are still very fun to play so I
| can recommend picking them up and doing a play through. They are
| easy to pick up, not long, and very rewarding at each moment
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| That goddamn baby level though. I could strangle the person who
| stuffed that messy labyrinthic pile of crap into my John Woo-
| esque shooter.
| dashzebra wrote:
| Oooh that level... I was young when I played that game, and
| did not see that one coming. I also fell by the side. Memory
| is a bit blurry thankfully, but I erred for a while trying to
| climb up. I think it was a bug. Caused a few nightmares...
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I thought that level was great. To me it really sold someone
| with a jumbled up mind trying to push on through.
|
| Without that level Max Payne wouldn't have been anywhere near
| as memorable for me.
| lukan wrote:
| "and very rewarding at each moment"
|
| Depends I would say, not the word I would use in the context of
| dead babies, but they were definitely great, intense games.
| holoduke wrote:
| You could try Alan wake. It really gets similar vibes.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Not entirely coincidentally, given that both are Remedy games
| and share some key creative staff, in particular Sam Lake [1]
| and Petri Jarvilehto.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Lake
| close04 wrote:
| Can you even buy Max Payne 1 from any store today? A while back
| I looked around and couldn't find a single legal source for the
| game.
| endominus wrote:
| It was available on Humble Bundle a few months ago as part of
| Remedy's full lineup, along with the sequel, the Alan Wake
| games, and Control.
| nness wrote:
| Both are available on Steam and GOG. (But you'll need
| community patches to run it on modern hardware.)
| nullify88 wrote:
| The game also had support for mods. After the first playthrough
| I've always played the game with the kongfu mod enabling
| wallrunning, kicks, additional weapons such as Sticks, and
| various other action orientated changes.
|
| Additionally, I believe Rockstar gave the go-ahead for work on
| a remake for 1 & 2. Hopefully they have James Perry McCaffrey's
| voice work in good enough quality. RIP.
| smusamashah wrote:
| I remember playing a matrix mod. It was awesome. There was
| this famous fight near stairs with so much bullet time and
| effects. Another was near an elevator with pillars.
| epolanski wrote:
| It was also a part of 3d mark 2001 back then, I've used it
| up until mid 2010s to see the evolution of graphic cards.
|
| https://youtu.be/VQql9LqczXI?si=zWNbTaGYOQTLWjZX
| nodesocket wrote:
| I remember as a kid playing the Police Quest series (mostly
| III) and thinking that games had insane graphics at the time.
| When Max Payne released it was absolutely mind blowing to me.
| The story is also very well done, something lacking today even
| in AAA games.
| kakacik wrote:
| 3 is good too, different environment but similar principle. And
| graphics look fine even by modern standards
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Bump maps and detail textures were a highly advanced and praised
| graphics technology in 1998, interesting to now see it explained
| as fake trickery from back in the day
|
| P.S. I still see polygonal instead of truly round barrels in
| modern games, when will we finally have quadratic surfaces or
| some other solution for that?
| IshKebab wrote:
| Well, it was also known to be fake trickery. But fake trickery
| that ran fast and looked good.
|
| IIRC Quake 3 levels had true curved surfaces, though presumably
| they were polygonised at some point in the rendering pipeline.
| Sharlin wrote:
| They were dynamically tessellated on the CPU. These days we
| can of course do the same thing on the GPU, using
| tessellation/geometry/mesh shaders or even compute shaders,
| depending.
| Sharlin wrote:
| > when will we finally have quadratic surfaces or some other
| solution for that?
|
| Truly quadratic? Not with any technology resembling current
| GPUs which are all about computing strictly linear (/affine)
| functions as fast as possible. Plausible approximate dynamic
| level-of-detail approach? That was first used by Quake III
| Arena in 1999, widely advertised as being able to render truly
| curved surfaces (which was of course not the case, it just
| tessellated Bezier patches/splines in real time).
|
| We've had tessellation shaders for a long time now, able to
| dynamically subdivide surfaces to approximate round shapes on
| the fly on the GPU. The fact that there are still polygonal
| barrels is likely mostly about what things to prioritize.
|
| The Holy Grail of real-time rendering is probably micropolygons
| - the ability to render the whole scene using polygons a
| fraction of the size of a single output pixel, something that
| off-line renderers like Pixar's RenderMan have done since the
| early 90s. There are reasons why GPUs are not very good at
| rendering a lot of extremely small polygons, leading to
| approaches such as Epic's Nanite virtualized geometry in Unreal
| Engine 5 which basically implements a _software renderer_
| running on GPU compute shaders.
| gary_0 wrote:
| I feel old because the post talks about these techniques as if
| they're surprising innovations or compromises for more accurate
| simulations, but most of these tricks were industry standard for
| 3D games in the early 2000's. Much of the science about lighting,
| physics, and rendering we take for granted today was mostly
| unknown; developers just did the best they could with the basic
| tech that was available. Back then, just the fact that we could
| put thousands of hardware accelerated textured polygons on the
| screen was a miracle to us.
|
| While Max Payne was cutting-edge, a lot of what made the visuals
| appear impressive was due to hand-tweaking by a team of highly
| skilled artists and designers, who were probably using
| ridiculously primitive tooling. Pretty much every realistic 3D
| game of this era had to make do with low-res diffuse textures,
| prebaked lighting, mostly fixed-function rendering, pre-scripted
| interactions, and particle dynamics that were basically just a
| few lines of C++. Other early-2000's games like Serious Sam,
| Halo, and Metroid Prime also managed to create immersive visuals
| with very limited tech, using the same techniques as Max Payne.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > While Max Payne was cutting-edge, a lot of what made the
| visuals appear impressive was due to hand-tweaking by a team of
| highly skilled artists and designers, who were probably using
| ridiculously primitive tooling
|
| And let's not forget what while the game was released in summer
| of 2001 - it was in a development for the almost five years,
| with the first demos at '98 E3. There is a lot of things what
| were not even available in 1997 (Voodoo _just_ released) and in
| 2001 there was already GeForce 3.
| Sharlin wrote:
| As someone who played the game back then, I didn't read the
| article as suggesting the techniques were surprising,
| particularly innovative, or unique to Max Payne. Just as a case
| study of one of the games that used those tricks to
| particularly great effect (as argued by the author).
| throwaway17_17 wrote:
| I certainly appreciate the shout-out to the artists and
| designers from the era, These techniques were bent, twisted,
| and pulled in every way a development team could to produce
| artistic results that in some case genuine "moments" worth
| remembering while playing a game.
|
| I remember being at a friends house while working on my masters
| thesis and him telling me to take a break and try out Halo. I
| had not had a console since the Nintendo 64 came out. I booted
| Halo and was literally mesmerized when I came out of a tunnel
| onto the Halo and saw the sky and the landmass. I can still
| remember that afternoon 20+ years later. Bought an Xbox the
| next morning.
|
| Current game devs, especially in the AAA space, spend a lot of
| time and effort looking for hyper realism and embracing new
| tech to achieve accurate PBR. I wonder whether the limitations
| of the older hardware force a more artistic stance on everyone,
| even down to technical artists, to embrace an art style and art
| direction and work to achieve attractiveness vs realism. Or I
| could just be seeing my early 20's through rose-tinted glasses.
| NoLinkToMe wrote:
| Absolutely agree, that's why Zelda BOTW hit so hard; artistic
| vision that spoke to me hard, even though it was released on
| specs that are 1-2 generations behind.
| throwaway17_17 wrote:
| BOTW hit me like a truck. I think that's the only game as
| an adult, with a job and family, that I have over 500 hours
| in. I think it is also illustrative to consider the next
| closest game in play time for me is Elden Ring at ~400
| hours. The similarities (and with FromSoft acknowledging
| world design inspiration from BOTW) to creating vast worlds
| with a clear and compelling 'style' absolutely carry the
| experience, even in spite of the less than technical
| cutting edge implementations and hardware.
| zokier wrote:
| > Current game devs, especially in the AAA space, spend a lot
| of time and effort looking for hyper realism and embracing
| new tech to achieve accurate PBR. I wonder whether the
| limitations of the older hardware force a more artistic
| stance on everyone, even down to technical artists, to
| embrace an art style and art direction and work to achieve
| attractiveness vs realism. Or I could just be seeing my early
| 20's through rose-tinted glasses
|
| I'd argue that during Max Paynes time (early to mid 00s)
| gaming was far more graphics tech driven than these days,
| especially on PC. It is far more common to see heavily
| stylized or non-photorealistic games these days than back
| then imho. When I think early 00's PC games, lot of it is
| shooter games pushing the tech envelope very heavily, stuff
| like HL2, Far Cry, Doom 3 etc, and I don't think we really
| see that sort of games often these days anymore.
| gary_0 wrote:
| Early to mid 00's was peak Moore's Law. Every year left
| last year's computers on the curb. Graphics hardware
| acceleration and programmable shaders were expanding their
| capabilities in ungainly leaps and bounds. Every new piece
| of popular hardware wasn't just the marketing number going
| up, it was Christmas for software. You didn't need 100+
| devs to compete in the big leagues. And yeah there were a
| lot of moody FPS games, but I can't describe the delight of
| first seeing a Katamari Damacy or a Portal. It was a time
| of untilled earth and unplucked fruit.
| jesse__ wrote:
| There's a great deal to be said for setting an aesthetic
| expectation.
|
| Take Minecraft, for example. The most successful game of all
| time along many axies, and it looks .. a certain way. It's
| definitely not realistic. It's not even pretty in a lot of
| cases. But it's consistent, and people have pushed it to the
| limit and created some truly beautiful artwork.
|
| I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think visual
| fidelity can be a selling feature, but art-style and
| consistency is much more important.
| anthk wrote:
| The most successful and ported game of all time it's one
| even more reduced in graphics than MC. It's Tetris. But, as
| a middle example, there's Pokemon for the GB(C), from RBY
| to GSC.
| andybak wrote:
| > Much of the science about lighting, physics, and rendering we
| take for granted today was mostly unknown;
|
| I'm not so sure. I grew up playing with offline 3d rendering
| rather than real-time game stuff - and game dev was merely
| reusing the same smoke and mirrors that people used to keep
| rendering time under a week a decade earlier. People always
| knew the "correct" way to do things but it was just out of
| reach given the hardware constraints. GI, radiosity, path-
| tracing etc already existed well before this - but nobody could
| do it on consumer hardware
| naiv wrote:
| One of the lead developers is a friend of mine. In the mid 90s he
| was part of the Dust demo group, eg
| https://demozoo.org/groups/360/ so I guess then a lot of the
| algorithms were used for Max Payne then as well
|
| Also interesting how his life changed after the game, he went a
| totally different route and left programming for good.
| leetrout wrote:
| What's he doing?
|
| Tech is an exhausting treadmill for me at this point. Hard to
| find somewhere I can work where my high empathy is a positive
| power and not a stressor.
| naiv wrote:
| Focusing on chinese medicine, meditation, mindfulness.
|
| He had a burn out. He mentioned to me in the mid 2000s after
| Max Payne 2 that he could not touch or see a keyboard
| anymore.
|
| I just saw him last year, he is in good spirits, programming
| a bit again iirc but we did not talk that much about it.
| Still one of the smartest people I ever met.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Remedy was heavy with Future Crew too. It was demo scene crew
| all the way down.
|
| I came out of the demo scene into pro game dev, and there was a
| lot of useful overlap, especially at the time (mid 90s) when
| you were really trying to get anything 3D on the screen.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| That's what struck me immediately - these are all typical
| tricks from the 90s. I remember demos ( I think complex/dope
| in 95) where the awesome 'real time reflections' where
| actually an animated texture. I was quite impressed when
| someone explained the trick.
| anthk wrote:
| It's still amazing. Crisp textures did a far better job than
| current shaders and a full-polygon bloated geometry. Max Payne 2
| perfected it.
| hcs wrote:
| Speaking of Max Payne and graphics, there's an amusing hidden
| sketch with references to engine development in the game:
| https://youtu.be/Ca04hCF9FL4
| retinaros wrote:
| max payne 1 is what triple AAA(-?) gaming should always be.
| reactordev wrote:
| What I loved the most about Max Payne's graphics at the time was
| the textures. There was just enough dirt and grit to make it look
| real. They did just enough softening of the light map that static
| shadows looked real (albeit static). The artwork was phenomenal.
| Best environment artists at the time. Contrast to GTA3 and you
| can see just the level of love that went into each wall texture,
| each couch, each tile on the tiled wall.
| Igor_Wiwi wrote:
| I am really intrigued by the fact that this person blogged
| occasionally and then stopped in 2021. What happened to him? Is
| he ok and become a game designer or just got tired of game
| industry and quit?
| Kon5ole wrote:
| Max Payne 1 is a fun playthrough during xmas, kinda like watching
| Die Hard. Takes place during a blizzard.
|
| A remake/remaster of Max Payne 1&2 is in the works by the
| original developer (Remedy). Stated to be financed by Rockstar
| (who own the IP) to normal Rockstar AAA levels.
| jesse__ wrote:
| What a fantastic read. I loved this game when I was a kid.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| Looks like typical demo scene tricks applied to gaming
| andybak wrote:
| By coincidence this was released a few weeks ago:
| https://hothardware.com/news/max-payne-rtx-remix-mod
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