Comment by error503 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by error503 | Hacker News Reader

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> What's odd to me, is that almost no one on the N64 chose to simply recreate 2D graphics from the SNES era with improved quality. A quality JRPG built with SNES-like graphics would have still sold just fine, but I think the belief back then was that everything had to be 3D and cutting edge to sell.

I'm pretty sure the hardware would have given developers a real run for their money to create a SNES-level JRPG experience with smooth, good quality sprite-based graphics. As far as I know it has no 2D acceleration like the SNES, and a very small texture buffer, which leaves slow software rendering directly to the framebuffer, or low quality texture-based sprites. The hardware was really not designed for this type of game, so few were made.

Not providing any hardware to handle those types of games was a function of 3D being all the rage, and the hardware being very clearly targeted at that, but it also meant that creating 2D games was not just out of fashion, but impractical.

You could easily just treat it like Unity does, where the 3d ness is an illusion and everything is actually in 3d space.... Super easy, barely an inconvenience...

The real impediment I believe was Nintendo themselves... Think about it for a moment. What was the process for publishing to N64? That's right, you had to work directly with Nintendo and effectively get thier stamp of approval (good luck getting enough carts otherwise).

Nintendo didn't want 2d games on thier precious 3d focused console. That simple.

This may be partly true, but they themselves did publish Yoshi's Story, a 2D game, in 1997, the second year of N64's existence. More likely explanation is that 3D was so novel and new in the mid 90s that it was difficult to argue for 2D games then from a business and marketing standpoint, even though 3D games usually required larger teams and the lack of mature tooling (a lot of devs would have to make their own physics engines from scratch back then) made it riskier. Today Nintendo puts a heavier focus on 2D gaming, with the New Super Mario Bros series and Mario Maker, etc.

Been ages but wasn't it rather paper Mario-esque with heavy use of the 3d to make the 2d more interesting?

I'd need to go look to recall correctly, but honestly it's 7:30am and I'm waaaay not into doing that rn....

N64 had several 2D games, it just wasn't common.

Yoshi's Story is prob best example. 2D platformer by Nintendo with gorgeous graphics. However, it was a lackluster, forgettable game. Still it proves the 64 was more than capable of exceeding 2D experiences from SNES.

Other examples are StarCraft 64, Bust-a-Move 2, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, SimCity 2000, Killer Instinct Gold (character models 2D), Magical Tetris Challenge, Rampage 2, Ogre Battle 64, MK Mythologies: Sub Zero, Clay Fighter 63 1/2 (2D character models), South Park: Chef's Love Shack, Mischief Makers, etc etc

It was more than capable of exceeding SNES quality graphics on every metric. The RDP on the N64 already had to render 2D rasters that were pre-transformed from 3D projections by the signal processor chip.

Remove that 3D transformation step and allocate some RAM for buffer and you had a perfectly capable 2D platform.

There's no question it was possible, but the previous generation consoles provided powerful hardware sprite/tile-based engines with layers, smooth parallax scrolling, '2.5D' transformations and more. N64 has none of that, and as far as I know the SDK didn't include anything like a software 2D engine either. If you wanted to make a 2D game, you'd have to implement your own 2D rendering pipeline more or less from scratch. I also think the N64's relatively low memory bandwidth and low amount of RAM would have been an issue to get past for a software compositor.

So yeah, it does provide access to the framebuffer, and has a reasonably capable CPU - more or less like PCs of the time did, so of course it's a 'perfectly capable 2D platform' but in this era I don't think we were quite at the point where brute-forcing the graphics pipeline in software was 'easy', and the 2D hardware capabilities were... let's say 'not exploited' by Nintendo's SDK.

It wasn't preventing anyone from producing 2D games, obviously good games could be made, it was just definitely not optimized for that, and that just put more pressure towards 3D, that already had a lot of cultural pressure towards it. If the culture was there, I'm sure developers would have hacked away at it and developed it into a strong 2D platform, but without that it was a barrier.

A 2D rendering pipeline is trivial. There are numerous hobbysist 2D rendering frameworks for every computer architecture in the past 40 years. It was far more difficult to program N64 in 3D than in 2D. The CPU was more than capable to exceed SNES in every dimension. It was not hard at all. 3D already requires 2D rendering.

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