Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7 (2016)
simonschreibt.de
simonschreibt.de
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Nintendo partnered with the most advanced Western 3D hardware manufacturer -- SGI. The N64 was kind of a cut down Indigo.
But then there were also tricks of reusing textures (mapping) directly from what was drawn on screen (for blurring, etc).
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.
I think I understand what you mean about the two. I know embarassingly little about electronics despite being interested in it for a long time, and have boggled at how much a circuit schematic can differ from PCB layout. On a schematic you can just go "and here are 48 data lines and we'll just draw some dots to illustrate that they yeet all the way over there" but on a PCB you not only have to route them (possibly across multiple PCB layers) but maybe some of the lines have to have squiggly messes in them so they're all exactly the same length and the electrical impulses arrive at the correct nanosecond. The good electronic engineers are the ones who've learned to fluently translate between schematic and PCB layout in their heads, in exactly the same way someone might fluently translate between languages to the point that they forget which language they heard something in, their memory just encodes the meaning directly because the neural routing is that deep/strong/integrated.
A good programmer has learned to understand/accept/integrate(/resign themselves to) the fact that the "focal point" of almost every program is in the programmer's head, not on the screen, and that whatever's onscreen is instead ultimately just a giant pile of little pinball-paddle nudges that hopefully prompt the reader to go "OH" and have the program structure "pop" into focus. Once you have that, you're good to go: that distinct mental model is detached from this class structure or that naming convention or whatever pattern, and thus not bound by the mnemonic/interpretative/structural limitations of the proverbial puzzle pieces that constitute the methodology; it's the superset of all of that and all the machinery that hasn't been set into stone yet.
It is so, so weird how programming slams right up against the edge of design/engineering/bigger-picture-greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts vs Management™.
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.
This article is all about rendering but gameplay is what makes "Don't Starve" standout IMO.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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%.
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.
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.
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.
Altough some of them did it really well, like Lotus Turbo Challenge I and II for the Mega Drive.
Relevant thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13301280 (but from 2017, can't find a 2021 discussion)