How the creator of Alone in the Dark came back to games | Hacker News Reader

How the creator of Alone in the Dark came back to games

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182 pointsecliptik58 comments

I remember Alone in the Dark (1992) as having a totally crazy rendering engine. Looking at footage on YouTube [1], I now see that a lot of the more complex background rendering was probably done offline.

The Sierra adventures at that time (Kings Quest V and the like) had painted backgrounds where the actionable items would stand out because they looked like crap.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsGaVrMr9N8

Many games of that time had prerendered backgrounds with basic realtime graphics on top.

True, but only a few combined flat shading, Gouraud shading, texture mapping, and vector balls :)

Estatica was a cool game for its time. https://youtu.be/9SsR5fPjGu4?si=Eu6RmO-vlsC8Fps5

Yes! Had a fun time with this one as well.

Many? In 92? I don’t think so. AitD was the first in my (admittedly non-comprehensive) experience. 92 was full of sprite-based pixel art adventures, to be sure.

Relentless/Twinsens was 94. RE and FF7 were years after that

Spaceship Warlock did it in 1991 but was a Mac game so it went deeply under-appreciated. Admittedly this might fall outside your definition depending on if the focus is “3D scenes rendered to 2D” or “pretending they’re full 3D with a handful of actual 3D characters on top.”

Made in Macromedia Director I believe

Another World also fits the bill (the 20th Anniversary edition a bit more than the original as it has a hand-painted background).

Another world was 2d vectors. Very different from AITD

It is, but the category was "games [using] prerendered backgrounds with basic realtime graphics on top".

LBA1 uses Gouraud shaded polygonal characters on top of tile-based 2D backgrounds. LBA2 does the same for indoor areas. For outdoor areas it uses a technique I don't recall seeing in any other game: every time the camera changes position it renders detailed and fully textured 3D scenes to a static background buffer (possibly taking a few hundred milliseconds), then renders the characters on top of that background. The camera changed position automatically, and you could also press a key to force it to re-render the background if you wanted a different camera position. It's a good compromise between real-time and pre-rendered IMO.

The thing that really kinda bewildered me is when I learned that so many games like that: Final Fantasy 7, Baldur’s Gate, had full 3D scenes created and then rendered individual frames for backgrounds. I had thought it would have been easier to just draw and paint scenes instead.

Feels like so much work. You fully realize an entire scene and then capture a couple angles at most.

Of course I should have known better given the handful of times a scene comes to live via an FMV cutscene.

There are a bunch of considerations. As resolution and color depth goes up it becomes harder to throw a lot of graphical detail on the screen through traditional illustration, so games that went down that route increasingly became flat and cartoonish, while 3D games could be filled with textures, lights and "greeble" architecture. It was also a way to enforce style consistency. Lucasarts didn't have "art direction" as a role until DOTT, and their earlier games show a lot of style drift between assets. Early 3D enforced a style through the constraints - often not a good one, but definitely something that could look consistent just through the model/texture/light process separation.

The biggest one is actually animation. Animation gets expensive as you add more detail, and when you add resolution, you discover a need to add more frames of animation to make it still look smooth, so your art costs can explode. The use of 3D here is motivated by having camera-independent animation, and being able to use it for every minor environmental effect: think of every Myst-style game where you pull levers and push buttons and open doors. Character animation in early 3D was bad, but it was also "enough" to look representative, so it ended up beating traditional or live action approaches.

The Banner Saga or Cuphead are examples of the amount of time and care it takes to do high resolution 2D artwork properly. Those games are absolutely breathtaking because of it, but their development cycles took a very long time for relatively short games because of it. You just can’t keep up with a 3D asset pipeline.

As I understand it, the prerendered backgrounds in these games were rendered as video clips. This was an efficient way to superimpose 3D on a 2D backdrop. But I imagine it may have affected how crisp the backgrounds could look.

Use of video clips for backgrounds was possible but rare. The opening of Final Fantasy VII is a good example, where it blends seamlessly from the opening FMV to control of the characters. You are correct that it affected the quality. You could easily see the video compression artifacts. The more common non-video backgrounds looked better.

The important thing and this applies to movie VFX as well is that you’d don’t actually build the parts that can’t be seen.

Inadvertent githyanki genital exposure would present at least one contrary example.

The corollary is that if you already have the thing built you can kitbash with it to sometimes unfortunate results. It’s all about taking shortcuts.

Given the direction this was going, I was hesitant to look up "kitbash", expecting it to be a niche anime fetish.

Turns out it is quite innocent, but it's still adults having fun with models: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitbashing

I think a lot of the small detail required for a close up 3D model can be omitted for large scenes viewed from a specific angle at a distance like that, so it maybe ends up being easier in the long run, especially when you start being able to reuse assets (which again, from a distance is easier to do without variation to still have it look good). Almost everything that would require complicating a simple shape for detail purposes could be done through a texture without almost no quality loss, and that's without bump mapping.

The thing is, the characters need to be in the screen using the correct perspective. So making a simple 3d model, that’s basically only looked at from one or two perspectives that then allows to have a correctly rendered character, is perhaps less work than making an illustration and then creating a 3d mapping and occlusion model for the character.

In the game, many of the scenes do use illustrated backgrounds. For example towards the end of the game, the caves. Here the calculation may have been the other way round (easier to do illustration).

No, that’s not true in 1992. The only other game in that time I can think of is Out of this World for the Amiga.

Alone in the Dark was notable at the time for using Gouraud shading [1]. You can see the effect on some of the polygons here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsGaVrMr9N8&t=480s

The reason I remember this is that it inspired me to spend ages implementing Gouraud shading in my own graphics library (written in assembly language), only to discover that flat polygons look better most of the time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gouraud_shading

Unless you mean pre-rendered backgrounds, there was no Gouraud shading in that game. It does seem to have a little texturing on some parts of the model, most likely ramp lighting and pretty expensive as they could not texture the whole character. E.g. here you can see each triangle in the model in whole untextured flat-shaded glory :) https://www.mobygames.com/game/325/alone-in-the-dark/screens... except the textured collar lit by recomputing the palette colors.

Some items in the inventory, such as the knife, and the book appear to have some kind of "metal shading", which was typically implemented as a modified Gouraud shader. It could all be texture mapping of course, but somehow I doubt that.

And what about these fancy ballroom dresses? https://www.mobygames.com/game/325/alone-in-the-dark/screens...

We can only do two things now: contact the original author, or reverse engineer the binaries! Does anyone know if there is a DOS emulator that allows you to visualize and override RAM access easily?

Yeah, it had different algorithm to render inventory and also could add/remove some objects to the background (those figures in dresses do not move if I recall, only toggle in and out). The inventory was not free camera with only controls to zoom, so you could do a lot of tricks with pre-computed shading. The general purpose rendering of the animated character and items they held was flat shading though.

Could it be that Little Big Adventure had this shading? I remember it looking rather “plastic” just like the examples you shared.

Note that both Little Big Adventure (also called Twinsen's Adventure) and Alone in the Dark were created by the same person, Frédérick Raynal!

There is a very nice presentation [1] in which Raynal shows some of the old tools that were used to create Alone in the Dark. I'm still not entirely sure what kind of rendering is being used, but the editor sure looks nice (in 640x350 EGA). Perhaps there is some more background information on LBA out there as well?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2lgEyNaop4

> Perhaps there is some more background information on LBA out there as well?

Better than that. LBA 1 and 2 engine has been opensourced some time ago.

https://github.com/2point21/lba1-classic

And indeed in the glorious mess of an ASM renderer with ASCII art for section headers, there's a reference to gouraud shading: https://github.com/2point21/lba1-classic/blob/f73f457317f0b7...

I LOVED these games that had painted backgrounds and actionable stuff popping out like crap...

I have a small nitpick with the video you shared: unfortunately that one and most others on YouTube are “talkie” CD versions which replaced the amazing MIDI music with rather uninspired symphonized CD tracks. Here’s a different longplay with the MIDI soundtrack:

https://youtu.be/iSwYY2eoKhQ

Alone in the Dark is one of my most cherished childhood experiences. I almost see the Vagabond in the library when I close my eyes. Thanks to the author!

Same! My early childhood computer / tech introductions, all ran on a 286

Playing Alone In The Dark in the dark of my uni room is one of of the few thing sI vividly remember from that time.

I remember is vividly also because my girlfriend came once into my room and patted me on the back while I was playing with headphones on and I almost jumped off the window. The neighbor student came to see what was going on because I yelled that loud.

I never played Alone in the Dark, but I loved Twinsen’s Little Big Adventure.

The ending where you see everyone one more time is so sweet.

LBA was also amazing. So surreal.

AitD was the scariest game I've ever played.

Frédérick's career started even earlier, with 8088 PC and CGA: He is also behind PopCorn, the very best CGA bricks-breaker. All done with his friend Christophe Lacaze in assembly with great graphics, transitions, smoothness, gameplay... A great fun with the mouse.

Worth a try if you still have a DOS machine (the original version has proper speed on XT 4.77 MHz; a later version - very similar - can run on any DOS machine at the original speed).

Damn, he wrote PopCorn? I wasted too much time on that.

I thought I wouldn't need a pkaydate even though I like the concept because it can only render at 30 FPS.

Turns out that 50 FPS is the limit: https://sdk.play.date/2.0.3/Designing%20for%20Playdate.html#...

That is more acceptable to me!

I love mine. The refresh rate is absolutely not an issue at all IMO.

Alone in the Dark from Infogrames (?) in early 90s was the bomb!

Equal parts scary and fun. I still shudder when I remember the ballroom scene’s soundtrack and avoiding to disturb the guests otherwise the instakill skybeam would come for you no matter how fast you ran anywhere in the world, you had to load a previous save.

Good times!

The PlayStation 1/N64 and Saturn era had a lot of Resident Evil clones that followed in the vein of Alone in the Dark. It was a combination of factors. 1 stick meant Tank Controls had the best of both worlds for aiming and shooting but serving double duty. Silent Hill/Turok Fog meant you didn't need to render things that were far away on the most rudimentary of 3D Hardware.

I had won a copy of the game through a contest on Kazibao (a now defunct platform for children to chat with each other when the internet was new) and never received it. Instead I had the poster hanging in my room.

I should have pushed harder to get my copy but I was a kid and didn’t know any better at the time. Now I regret never playing it!

Whoa! This guy created Toy Commander? That was one of my favorite Sega Dreamcast games!

On the topic of the Dreamcast: the writer of the article, Jörg Tittel, appeared in the Dreamcast comedy horror game, Illbleed.

https://illbleed.fandom.com/wiki/Jorg_S_Baker

He came back and made a first person flappy bird.

AitD 1 was great. I didn't care for 2 and 3 at all. The modern ones also don't interest me.

Glad to know Frédérick is doing cool stuff.

I remember pissing in my pants going thru the first scene at the mansion

this was a pretty good article. im going to get a playdate console to play around with it and have fun playing games for it.

Toy Commander was incredible

Loved this game as a 10yo

I watched a let's play of all Alone in the Dark games recently (on supergreatfriend's YT channel) and I am sad to say that after the first, which was already very janky but with a cool atmosphere, they all went downhill from there. Especially with the original trilogy, I felt that the game creator and the players had two different visions for Alone in the Dark: players wanted more (cosmic?) horror, the creator wanted obtuse horror comedy, so we got the pirate tree ending, zombies with machine guns and zombie pirates in 2 and zombie cowboys in 3. All the reboots over the years didn't do the franchise any favour either.

Maybe the new game that's in development will give what the players wanted all along.

I remember trying to play AITD on a 386. It was unplayable, super slow framerate and unresponsive controls. My friend had a 486 and it played so smoothly in comparison.

Also, sad personal story about the Play Date. For a 40th birthday present to myself, I got on the waiting list for a year but ended up cancelling the order a month away from my ship date because of some income issues. I thought it was more prudent to feed my kids than get a new video game. Ah well, such is life.

I love the Playdate but without a backlight it is so hard to play

Maybe this is ridiculous but I kinda like the lack of a backlight: it forces me to find nice bright places to play in, and discourages hanging out in the kind of dimly lit areas that tend to sap my energy and mood.

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