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Comment by flipgimble | Hacker News Reader

Let me throw in an anecdote that may amuse some: I was working for a now defunct large game company when Epic and Tim Sweeny came in to demo Unreal Engine 3 very early before the PS3 and XBox360 were launched. This was about 2004. Their demo blew away executives in particular. They showed multicolored lights casting multicolored shadows on a single high detail character. One of the lights was behind a stained glass window, projecting beautiful patterns. Soon after a deal was signed to use the engine throughout the entire studio. In retrospect that was a good decision and I have a lot of respect for Unreal Engine and Epic in general.

Edit: found the video of the demo levels that shipped with very early UE3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m7T5ay_8DI

However UE3-generation games that finally shipped had none of the visual effects from the early demos. The multicolored shadows could only be rendered with multiple passes, at least one per light, which proved to be too expensive for larger dynamic game scenes. It took years of work from the demo to shipped games, and an army of unnamed engineers to wrestle the technology into a product.

UE4 had a great early demo of dynamic global illumination using something like voxel cone tracing if I remember correctly. To my knowledge that tech demo was never incorporated into the engine and never shipped.

Epic is famous for their demos, and I love them for it... at least now that I no longer work professionally in that field. If anything it charts a long term technical direction for interactive entertainment.

View on HN

That video's amazing because the part of the UE5 demo I can't wrap my head around is where Nanite magically turns 1 billion triangles of source art to 20 million triangles of rendered art, per frame.

And then I get a minute into the UE3 video from 2004 and what do I hear?

"The scene you're seeing here is about 1 million polygons of in-game assets, which came from about 200 million polygons of source art."

Then, deja vu, right into a realtime lighting demo.

So... UE5 is Malibu Stacy with a new hat?

> And then I get a minute into the UE3 video from 2004 and what do I hear? "The scene you're seeing here is about 1 million polygons of in-game assets, which came from about 200 million polygons of source art."

I know little about game development so might be wrong, but I think what that 2004 demo means is they had a 200M art asset geometry which was pre-rendered/transformed into a 1M in-game asset. This kind of reduction has been the standard for decades.

What they are indicating in this UE5 demo is that the engine dynamically adjusts the LoD of the source geometry so the engine can render it, the engine directly uses the art asset.

+1 I also think they have multiple levels of detail and render the appropriate one based on distance/view. Should have said so though, as is, it's full of misleading statements (often by omission).

That video's amazing because the part of the UE5 demo I can't wrap my head around is where Nanite magically turns 1 billion triangles of source art to 20 million triangles of rendered art, per frame.

I was wondering about that too. My best guess is that they put the heavy geometry items in an acceleration data structure and then ray trace / cone trace these in a first pass to get the points where the camera rays intersect the geometry. Then generate triangles on the fly from these points in every frame. This would be quite similar in flavor to GigaVoxels [1] or the (IMO unjustly much hated) "Unlimited Detail" engine [2], except that instead of shading / visualising the intersections directly they just use it to generate triangles as another input to their overall pipeline.

If you look at the video closely all the heavy geometry items are static, i.e. they don't deform. This matches with a classic limitation of ray tracing as deformations invalidate the acceleration data structures used for making ray tracing efficient.

[1] http://gigavoxels.inrialpes.fr/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM6QkPsA2ds

If you're already tracing camera rays, you have everything you need, so why generate triangles? (GigaVoxels doesn't generate triangles)

Because not everything in the scene is static and the entire rest of the pipeline works with triangles.

I'm not convinced, because mixing ray-marched and triangulated geometry is quite doable. If you've already computed a ray intersection, generating a triangle and putting a burden on vertex processing makes little sense if the geometry is static. If you wanted it to be deformable, then yes you may want to use a vertex shader. But in this demo, none of the high resolution geometries are deformable AFAICT.

In the video they mention that the "heavy geometry" you are talking about is 100s of billions of triangles. Storing 1 billion triangles using 32-bit floats takes ~12 Gb, so we are talking about N * 12 Tbs only in triangle storage for this demo. Building an acceleration data-structure on top of this would also take up a lot of storage, so I don't think how you can make this approach successful on a PS5 with limited GPU memory.

To me this tech sounds more like they finally figured out all the quirks around how to properly construct "seamless geometry atlasses" (geometry images) and reconstruct geometry from them, and managed to bring that to production. It required quite a bit of compute, and there were also a lot of quirks about how to automatically "cut" an input geometry so that you can put it in a 2D image, how to compress and decompress the image or parts of it without artifacts (such that you don't get jumps across triangles), etc.

That approach doesn't store any triangles, but a 2D xyz (rgb) image that you can use to reconstruct the original geometry from, and to which you can apply all usual image compression algorithms, use all GPU texture features (but for geometry), etc.

That's ~15 year old tech, and they mention they have been working on this for over 10 years, so timeline-wise it would fit (search for geometry images, texture atlasses, etc. there was a siggraph talk from ~2005 about wavelet compression of geometry images).

It's quite possible that they make heavy use of instancing, which might reduce the memory footprint by a lot. Not every pebble or rock needs an individual geometry.

From the video it sounded to me that the 100s billions of triangles were from single instance geometry. The models they mention in the video are in the ball park of >1 billion triangles each (that's 12 Gb per model). So if they have 100 models of that resolution, that's 12 Tbs, and whether they instance each model 1 or 100 times doesn't matter much because the problem of having to fit those 12 Tb in triangles somewhere still remains.

That's why it seems much more plausible to me that they are not storing triangles anywhere, and instead just storing geometry images.

The statue instances do not require additional storage or RAM usage per instance. That's the whole point of instancing.

A moment earlier in the video, the poly count of a single statue mesh was given: "more than 33 million triangles."

If one mesh is 1 billion triangles, and you have 100 different meshes, you need to store 100 billion tringles, unless you do something radically differently.

If you have 1 triangle mesh, and instance it 100 billion times, you don't need to do that.

> "more than 33 million triangles."

The assets the company they mention makes have 100s of millions of triangles, and billions as well. So I wonder if they are not using those original assets after all.

IIUC they are, but they are only rendering at lower triangle counts and the LOD happens automatically.

This doesn't really seem volumetric in nature to me.

Firstly, UE4 has broad-phase that I understand they are quite happy with, I doubt they would add in a ray-trace, since not only would that not really improve anything, it would also not integrate well with any non-nanite techniques of rendering geometry, and my understanding is at least for now, nanite can only handle (mostrly)static geometry, and I doubt they would want to give up the ability to work with other rendering techniques.

If I had to take a wild guess, I would guess they have a somewhat standard process to generate a low detail mesh, which is what get's dispatched to the GPU, then, atop of that mesh they may build triangles acceleration structures parameterized across the surface perhaps similar to this paper [1] From there, you could do similar to what you suggest, and just generate additional triangles such as is in that paper.

However, given how poorly GPUs handle pixel-sized polygons, that may not be the best approach. so I wouldn't be surprised if tessellation is used to around a quad level and then from there, the rest is either done using compute-style rasterization in the pixel shader, or some outputs are written and additional rasterization is actually deferred for a compute job.

I'm sure there are all sorts of exceptions and edge-cases, but I wouldn't be surprised if it looks something like that general workflow. On the other hand, I'd be very surprised if there was anything that looked like ray-tracing on the scene level, perhaps traversing the surface-space data structures looks a bit like ray-tracing.

[1] https://graphics.stanford.edu/~niessner/papers/2016/4subdiv/...

Not in the industry, so pure speculation.

Unreal Engine's old business model were exactly that, get you excited with demos and sign up ( paid ) for their engine. And it was the same with UE 3 and UE 4. But in 2015 all that changed. It was open sourced on Github, it has a very sustainable revenue model due to the explosion of Mobile Gaming, the Gaming industry as a whole is now bigger than Movies and Music industry combined.

I think it is fair to say EPYC no longer has the incentive to do that with UE 5. And because it is / will be open source, they can now actively work with many different partners ( Hardware such as Sony and Microsoft and other publishers ) to make sure those technology works as intended.

FYI though, It's not open source. Open source has a meaning and Unreal doesn't fit that meaning.

https://www.google.com/search?q=open+soruce+definition

It would technically be "source available", no?

It is open source in the sense the source code is available for you to see. But probably not on the usage part.

It is not open source in any sense.

You can see it so that part is shared but if you try to use it you fall under a very different licease. If you try to modify and sell you can't. Modify and use you must pay. Use you must pay.

Bait open source might be a better term.

This isn’t true, they encourage you to run source builds instead of the editor and you are free to modify the engine for your projects as needed. In fact they’re even generous enough to allow you to post up to 30 lines of engine code in public forums.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/publishing

that in no way makes it "open source" in the common use of the term.

Hmm, rereading my comment...nope didn’t say anything about it being open source....said something entirely different...

In the sense of you can see the source, it is open source. Not everyone will agree with your definition of open source.

I'm not sure where people get the idea that they can assert something as a counterpoint on no basis. "That's just your opinion," is not a rational basis to disagree, especially when your counterpoint requires the implied basis (semantic) to be equally relevant to the original argument's basis (law).

"Open source" isn't based on the semantic that the source code is public, its definition comes exclusively from a set of guidelines that limit the rights of the original creator to enforce a specific range of IP protections guaranteed to them by domestic and international laws. There are various types of public licenses, also known as GNU, that are considered "true open source" in that the original creator can only enforce some provisions like a source attribution credit in a modified distribution. And there are permission licenses, like the MIT License, which don't necessarily meet every guideline for FOSS, but do meet most of them.

When it comes to IP, the only basis that matters is legal, as its the only basis that's universally enforceable. Laypersons can define "open source" however they please, but when engineers, devs, business, and legal discuss it, it has one definition, and that definition is well-established as exemptions from current IP law.

The rationale is people can have different opinion, preference, thinking. People do not always agree with a single definition. No entity has sole authority of a meaning open source.

You're applying some general definition of "open", when the term "open source" has had a well understood definition for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software#Dist...

http://hyperlogos.org/article/Who-Invented-Term-Open-Source

O... k? But what does open source mean today? What has it meant for approximately the last twenty years? Did Epic claim their software is open source? Did Microsoft claim their source-available software was open source? I wonder why not, it would've been a good marketing term, what with all the developers who want open source.

The answer is that pretty much everyone agreed that open source means something roughly equivalent to the OSI definition, and even big companies agreed with that... until a year ago or so when somebody decided that they wanted all the benefits of claiming to contribute to open source without actually doing so, and a bunch of people who never actually cared about the FOSS ecosystem aided them in doing so.

at some point in the nineties open source initiative emerged as the bastion of what's open source and what not and put strict guideline to the usage of the term, which for whatever reason people around the tech community elected to follow even if OSI doesn't own the open source trademark.

guess it helps the discussion and to defend agains marketing-speak appropriation to have a single uniform definition. but it's confusing as heck if someone is unknowing or resisting the OSI coup to position themselves as the open source regent.

Lots of people arguing schematics. Everyone knows exactly what the guy meant.

I don't see why continuing to argue it makes any sense here. All this type of behavior does is drive people away from further discussions on sites like this, reddit, etc.

The word meaning can always evolve, at another point for whatever reason the open source may not be the same as what you prefer. No one own the sole authority of the word usage.

There won't be single uniform definition.

Sorry for the confusion and late reply. I didn't catch this part of the comment. I cant edit it now. I should not have use the term "Open Source" which I agree meant something different. May be source available would be better. But the point of my argument still stand.

Please accept my sincere apology. And no offence intended.

Let hope we continue to focus and amaze at the technical marvel that is UE5.

UE5 is not open source, it is shared source or "source available". Assuming it follows the model of UE4.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

Good point, but OP's point is that they can't hide behind demos. Anyone who requests the source will most likely get it and be able to see what's going on.

Indeed, that part is accurate. It would be technically interesting if the tech demo was a part of UE5 source release. I'm not familiar if they've done that in the past.

Demos are sometimes released in the Unreal Marketplace. Unity often does the same in their own store.

Possibly a typo, but EPYC is a processor brand. EPIC makes Unreal (and Fortnite).

Haha yes been writing too much about AMD and EPYC. Didn't realise until you point it out.

It's not open source..

Irrelevant for the point he is making.

Just looking at demoscene, it is possible to create amazing results with very little resources if you have right people and infinite time and resources to polish couple of seconds of it.

This rarely transfers to a product that has a lot of content to be built, an actual budget, good but not star developers and conflicting requirements.

Is Unreal Engine at all related to Future Crew's Unreal in 1992?

Who knows, they had a hard time coming up with the name.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010814190955/http://www.gamesp...

No. However, the original Unreal game had some well known demosceners providing the music.

- Andrew Sega in particular was a particularly famous scene musician who went under the name "Necros" and is about as legendary as you can get for people who weren't part of the Future Crew team who made Unreal.

- Alexander Brandon (Siren) is still in the game industry and has done soundtracks for a ton of really well known games such as Jazz Jackrabbit.

- Daniel Gardopée went by Basehead and was part of FM and the KFMF demo groups (both big deals at the time) and I think is still in gaming.

- Michiel van den Bos (MCA) is the only non-American scener (Dutch) who provided music and is also still in gaming.

At the time it was kind of funny and completely cool to fire up Unreal and hear some well known Necros, Basehead, and Siren songs in the game which had been circulating in BBS and early demoscene ftp sites for a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_(1998_video_game)#Audio

Wow, that was a memory jog. I remember watching that in my dorm room on my 486, downloaded from some BBS.

https://youtu.be/VjYQeMExIwk

The reason behind demos looking so good is the fact that there is no input, no gameplay and no need for a toolset for designers and artists.

That doesn't seem fair in this case.

The demo has input. The video shows them modifying the world at several points, it's not on rails. It's more like a mini game (except maybe at the end).

UE's game creation tools are very good. The toolset is a huge part of their value prop. And this demo is very explicit in focusing on the fact that artists can now use movie-level tools instead of needing to spend a lot of time on optimisation and game-custom art assets. That's one of the two big leaps they're promoting here - it's partly about an increase in graphics quality, but clearly what they feel most proud of is the increase in tooling and asset flexibility the new capabilities give content creators.

No, it is fair in my view.

The person that shows the demo can for example choose to move and look and perform actions that are known to not cause performance trouble.

In a game a lot of unpredictable stuff can happen (for example, a bunch of people can cast a spell or drop a grenade at exactly same time). Or you may decide to quickly turn around causing a bunch of texture and geometry data to be loaded.

Game must take it into account and make sure the performance is acceptable with whatever input is allowed and lots of action around and not only when the guy walks slowly in a straight path and slowly pans around.

It doesn't mean it happens in this case but AFAIK it is fair to say that most engine demoes are put together to highlight strengths and hid weaknesses of the engine.

The GP was talking about the demoscene, not the UE5 demo.

Isn’t this like saying movie makers all have access to the same tools but not all movies are great?

> To my knowledge that tech demo was never incorporated into the engine and never shipped.

I'm not sure when it shipped (it certainly may have not launched with the first version of the engine), but it is currently called "Light Propagation Volumes."

> I'm not sure when it shipped (it certainly may have not launched with the first version of the engine), but it is currently called "Light Propagation Volumes."

That's actually a different things. Light Propagation Volumes (LPV) is real-time global illumination first used in Cryengine 3 in 2009. http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2009/Light_Propagatio...

SVOGI (Sparse Voxel Octree Global Illumination) which is first demoed by Unreal 4, yet it never shipped due performances problems. Meanwhile Cryengine manage to get it working with minimal performances penalty (only 10%) and have shipped games with it (Kingdom Come: Deliverance) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEfqtOYjolE

You're right, I got my wires crossed.

Their early demos are usually really good, but the early versions rarely ship with all of them, over time though to their credit they do arrive, and often exceed the demonstrations.

Some of the new lighting features in UE5 are interesting and should be cheaper than RTX overall, but will be interesting to see the mix and match which developers will achieve. Looking forward to having a play around with it.

Remember the PS1 dinosaur demo? Yeah the whole industry is famous for this.

Games are more than tech demos.

I always wondered if that dinosaur was using the 2MB of memory in the final retail unit, or 4MB often seen in arcade boards using the the PS1's technology.

I recall seeing it live in a devkit but I can't for the life of me remember the devkit specs. Note that that demo catered very expertly to the strengths of the PS1 hardware, it should run jut fine in a retail unit.

Yeah, the sort of things pictured in the dinosaur demo don't always match what's seen in retail PS1 games. I'd love to see a dissection of it.

Some things I can think of:

- Dinos were so in vogue and so suggesting of technological innovation. Jurassic Park came out what, 2-3 years earlier?

- Very limited z-sorting requirements, could likely be done with a simple bsp if sorting individual polys proved too taxing.

- Polys of fairly regular dimensions, not overly long in one direction. Helps with less visible sorting and clipping artifacts.

- No problem with lack of perspective correction, because textures are already shimmering due to the organic skin animation.

- That black fog has always been very effective. We love terrifying things emerging from the dark, which Doom3 tech proved again, and more recently VR.

I could swear I “played” it when I was a kid off a PlayStation magazine or Pizza Hut demo disk on a retail (well modded) unit

I think it came out on a demo disk at some point. You got to move the dino about and maybe the light source? It's been a long time!

Yes, I distinctly remember rotating this model around on an original PS1 many (many) years ago.

For me it came on a disk caled Demo 1 which shipped with the first issue of the Playstation.

Same here, it came with a demo disk attached to the PS1. G-Police was on there too and Abe's Oddyssee I believe.

Yep, I remember this too.

It was on a demo disk. I had it.

Yep, had it too!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7Lk7idveeU

It looks like PS2 graphics.

I guess they go completely to the limit in their demos, so in actual games you will see it only after the next version of their engine has been released.

Tell that to the VR scene.

To be fair, Epic wanted to have real-time global illumination for UE4. They even had a lot of the work done, but it just never quite made it. The performance impact was too great. I imagine several years later they've been able to deal with most of the issues, especially since we have a lot more computational power available.

Look up E3 game demo's and their launched comparison on YouTube. You'll learn all the game trailers with 'real game play footage' are all fake. The whole industry is filled this.

i don't think this is fake https://youtu.be/QiinO9JPUGw

I'm playing through Doom 2016 at the moment, and if anything, it looks even better than that. Could be Youtube compression, or they've added in graphical tweaks with the Vulkan update.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/09/12

What a classic :) I was working at EA Tiburon when this came out (not on the Madden team). Good times.

A classic: https://youtu.be/4KxRp8jeliQ

CIG's customizations to the Lumberyard engine have been pretty impressive - believe they're working on SDF now

Yeah it looks nice but the price is that it's broken everywhere else and will probably be overtaken by newer engines until it reaches a release. That is...if it ever does.

Otherwise, not many games made it to release on that engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Lumberyard

Lumberyard is a fork of the CryEngine, and quite a few games have shipped on either CryEngine or one of its forks (particularly Dunia, which Ubisoft uses extensively).

So what is the reason the Lumberyard fork is so "unpopular"?

Because it’s new?

I wouldn't say unpopular, just relatively new. The only games I can think of running that engine haven't released yet -- RSI's Star Citizen and Amazon's Crucible. Star Citizen's long development cycle and various funding sources have been well-documented, and it still lacks a concrete release date; on the other hand, Crucible comes out next week.

It’s a pretty new engine (it’s still beta) and is being used by Amazon Game Studios mostly:

https://amazongames.com/games/index.html

Lumberyard is targeted by MMO's due to Amazon's content delivery network abilities... and MMO's are the biggest genre to fail before during and after release, purely because of their scope and difficulty to pull it off "right".

It's say current UE4 games don't match the details of the UE4 demos they showed on release.

FF 7 remake comes extremely close though. That's the best looking UE4 game I know. It's expected that real games do not have demo levels of visual fidelity.

I will say its Gears 5. Coalition has been incredible with their usage of Unreal since the original Gears of War back in Xbox360 days. They peaked with Gears 5.

The original Gears was developed by Epic and was a very good showcase (and probably a driver and validator as well) for the Unreal Engine tech Epic developed in parallel.

They describe how this is still their dynamic when they mention their goal to have Fortnite running on UE5 before they consider it ready for the masses.

FF7 Remake is such mixture of amazing graphics and not amazing graphics, but then the level of detail in scenes makes up for it (pretty much all of the midgar slums), I don't know what to think so I revert to "am I having fun?" which is a resounding YES!

I think the Decima engine would have worked better (Horizon Zero Dawn), because the bar for 'amazing' is so high. Final Fantasy 7 requires impressive visuals for its story to have impact in its original release, in all of its spinoffs, and that bar is so high now.

Final Fantasy 7's "cutscenes" are mostly rendered in real time. I wonder why the combat screens are not as good?

Someone's hack of the save files: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfZbFXSLLtk

I really don't agree with that. Current games look better than the UE4 demo.

See this for the original demo of UE4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD9CPqSKjTU

What game looks better than that demo?

Gears 5 is a UE4 game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkW_uD0PzIw&t=7m40s

If you want to see particle effects like the demo, skip ahead to 11 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkW_uD0PzIw&t=11m

You just described practically any game engine demo ever made.

Dude I spent a large portion of my early career as a web developer making rounded corners on divs using all sorts of kludges

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdqjcMmjeaA

Read the parent again with this playing in the background for peak webdev irony.

Rounded corners using tables and gifs?

That reminds me of the old trick of using a 1x1 pixel in an empty table cell to ensure that internet explorer would actually expand the table cell to whatever width you set it to (height still needed another trick if i recall correctly).   would work, too, but then the minimum height of the cell would be whatever the line height was set to, and the line-height property didn't behave the same across browsers.

It's funny how old tricks make a comeback. I see a lot of  's in React codebases to preserve whitespace around JSX tags.

And the old trick of a 2x2 pixel gif with one colour transparent, and the other a non-transparent colour which, when set as a background to the table cell, provided an illusion of colour transparency with the main background behind the table.

To invoke the old "rule 5" of explaining things:

Until surprisingly recently, there was no built-in way to make a rectangular element on a webpage have rounded corners. People had to use all sorts of dirty hacks to make a final product that "looked like" it was a native, built-in feature. Usually in the old days it basically amounted to various forms of "putting a picture of a rounded corner" (often a gif) in each of the corners of the element you were putting on the page.

There were a lot of different ways to do that, but one of them was to use "tables" - tables these days are usually only used for what their genuine, semantic intent is: for drawing a literally spreadsheet-like table of data. But back in the earliest days of the web, they were the only controllable way to visually lay things out on any kind of grid, so despite the fact that they were "supposed" to have nothing to do with visual layout, they'd get used all the time for that - often getting used to do visual borders and stuff.

So to do rounded corners, you'd basically make a table that was a 3x3 grid. In the corner elements of the grid, you'd have tiny pictures of rounded corners; in the side elements of the grid you'd basically have nothing (they'd be really skinny elements, either very wide or tall). Then the middle element in the grid would be gigantic, and would hold your actual content.

And for an authentic contemporaneous example of this technique, here's my website that I designed in 2002 when I was in high school: http://cydeweys.com/archive/

You won't know it from looking at it because you'll only see the rendered static HTML, but that entire site was actually written in C++. Using the AP C++ libraries (yes, that AP).

Shouts to Udephus!

Let’s also add the infamous sliding door div structure to making expandable dynamic height divs.

How about that layout with columns and a sticky footer --

I was about to weigh in on how 9-slicing is absolutely a valid strategy for UI components, and give you an example from my professional work, only to realize that I can't think of a single example that wasn't, "hack around some library that doesn't have border-radius".

I'll be glad for the day when 9-slice is a truly obscure technique.

Nine slice put a lot of food on the table but I started to question my purpose in life

Border-image came and changed the game in the early 2010's... Doing exactly that in essence

I haven't seen it on the web for literally a decade, but I think… Android might use it still?

What's rule 5?

Or by just using Flash.

I never did it myself. I know there are plenty of reasons to dislike flash. And I know plenty of people absolutely hated sites created solely using Flash.

But I have to admit I enjoyed the creativity I saw on many Flash sites. There a generic sameness to much of the modern web. I know Flash sites were useless for SEO, and probably for accessibility too. So I don't think things are necessarily worse now. Just more generic.

Of course, you can create a Flash-like site using web-native technologies, but it's probably more work.

Wasn't the problem with "Flash sites" that it was way way worse than any regular website... as a website? Kinda like SPAs today. You had to reinvent stuff the browser already did perfectly. But as long as you made Flash APPS to be run embedded on websites, it was pretty awesome. Animation, video, etc. No competition, hands down just great tech... until HTML5 caught up.

I was going to say something similar. A lot of the drawbacks from flash sites also apply to current SPAs. I know you can get usable and SEO friendly SPAs, but it's so much work compared to plain HTML files or templating in the backend.

YES BABY!!! I use to do it all the time. =)

https://web.archive.org/web/20040204003135/http://www.realid...

Rico Suave!

You know it. 9 cells tables, slicing your pixel-perfect corners in Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop, exporting as a gif with transparent color.

That also reminds of the transparent 1px gif "hack".

I'm not that nostalgic about that. Once in a while all that knowledge comes in handy for troubleshooting an email template...

> in Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop

That's a weird way of spelling Macromedia Dreamweaver...

Ah. I remember using Dreamweaver 4 a bit, and Fireworks (alpha channel transparency in png ? What is this sorcery?).

Yea and applying a JS fix to allow transparent PNG

here is another kludge: border-radius

Yea man! Border-radius changed the game and made nine-slices method legit

I remember using a JS poly fill with modernizr to get it to work like as soon as it came out and making pixel perfect images to use with it!

Better or worse kludges than this one? http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/roundy.html

Thanks for the flashbacks! I had blacked out any memories of the world before 'border-radius' before seeing that!

And now that it's easy people try to avoid using rounded corners...

Well, I just found people still love rounded corners in LaTeX templates of books nowadays...

We shall not speak of those dark times!

The only thing darker were the accompanying drop shadows

Well I just discovered this 11 year old Firefox bug due to that page

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477157

Make the change easy -- then make the easy change

They're probably waiting until it goes away on its own as all epic bugs do

Check color box with rounded corner in LaTeX, people are still living with it nowadays...

This made my day dude, thanks for that. Imma dropping everything now and going to make rounded corners button with WebGL canvas, using signed distance function in a fragment shader.

All Steve Jobs’ fault: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_...

That was really great! Thanks!

Really great! This reminds me of how epic and iconic this company truly was -- I lived in a constant state of delight as a child using their software and software developed on their platforms starting with the old BRUN command on apple ][

Oh god, that reminds me of all the times I claim something is technically impossible only to find out there’s a really easy way to do it.

Except using a phased array to locate RFID tags using backscatter. That was just plain hard.

Bet it pays more, too.

Almost definitely, but it isn't even nearly as mindblowing to a casual outside observer as a cool UE demo.

For a few years around 2001, rounded corners were a big part of hp's branding. I was in a dev shop that maintained part of hp.com, and we had to have them everywhere. I didn't work on their site very often myself, but I think that team must have been experts at rounded rectangles. :-) At the time it was still sort of a cool effect on the web.

Wow, you weren't kidding!

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/uploaded/timeline/hewlett-pa...

Yep, fun times!

I also spent an inordinate amount of time getting rounded corners on a fan site blog I ran. I forgot about this.

Not to detract from the original discussion but we're always bridging the gap between expectation and reality that's what we do!

No coincidence it's called 'Unreal' Engine heh

You want kludgy, try my madness https://github.com/Keloran/oldjs/blob/master/roundit.js

Is this code adding successive divs to simulate rounded corners? Looks incredible -- invariably someone would need animation on these too would this work?

I told my wife it wasn't possible for her website since I didn't want to do it with images to coddle IE, which was apparently the state of the art at the time. She still brings it up 10 years later!

wow they've been convincing 3D artists that they could use handpainted imported models for 15 years

one more time ya'll

you can use hand painted, imported models. Painting has to do with texturing which is different than poly count. This allows you to import directly from zbrush and not have to prebuild the LODs. This tech is already in a more basic form in UE4

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