Comment by cloverich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cloverich | Hacker News Reader

Brings back memories; so much nostalgia. I still remember clearly the first real graphics card (I think it was voodoo) I got and when I fired up TFC (which I'd played sans graphics card up to then), just staring at the water for a bit and being amazed by it. The funny thing too is when 3d graphics were first taking over, the games themselves didn't look as nice as the former 2d ones; I remember being a little confused at first that everything looked worse. But of course it enabled all kinds of new and more immersive experiences. It was funny to experience... how it felt. To look both crappy and amazing at the same time; to be its own "thing" really.

I also enjoyed introducing people to it, and watching them look at it the first time. You could tell who would get hooked. Some people would play the game a minute or two and be like wow yeah this is pretty neat, and then go about their life. Others would kind of just stop and almost watch themselves, and almost invariably just start laughing. It was so pleasing to watch it melt people's minds the way it had mine.

Anyways, a special time. Really fun seeing these projects.

'everything looked worse', I entirely know what you mean, coming from a tight, high fidelity Amiga background, but now all these years later it all looks so logical.

It was Comanche on my Dad's shitty office pc that allowed me to appreciate big pixel 'shit' graphics.

I played the Half Life Uplink demo on a Pentium II 450Mhz Gateway (with no 3D acceleration) and remember seeing Half-Life for the first time on the Voodoo 3 after it, thinking it looked "worse". There was something about the colors of the software rendering that were different and felt "warmer". That being said, the framerate of the Voodoo 3 did blow me away.

I desperately wanted a voodoo card (I was late to the pc party). I'd been playing lots of Goldeneye on the n64 and the gaming press had me convinced that real FPS shooters were on the pc not consoles. What a load of shite, I bought a voodoo 3 for my dad's pc, got quake 2 and was bitterly disappointed. Gameplay wise it was so limited compared to Goldeneye. The world was no were near as interactive. Recently I've seen gabe Newell talking about half life and the crowd bar hitting walls was their way of showing the player real world feedback. He's right, but that's nothing compared to the bullet holes in Goldeneye. To be fair, quake 3, unreal tournament 99 and Deus ex alone justified the voodoo card purchase, but it still felt like a let down.

Voodoo 1-3 couldn’t render 32-bit color, so maybe you were noticing the lower bit depth?

3dfx did design some tricks into the video pipeline on Voodoo 2 and 3 cards that allowed for what they called 22-but color, and it definitely looked better than other 3D accelerator cards’ 16-bit modes - but it was still not as clean looking as true 32-bit color. (Interestingly, the filtering they did was applied after the framebuffer, so screen captures would only ever show the lower quality original.)

Yessss...I got a friend who went on vacation to the US to bring back a Voodoo (2,I think?). I played a lot of Quake 1 and I remember playing online and seeing the water transparency and my rivals underwater...good times.

> The funny thing too is when 3d graphics were first taking over, the games themselves didn't look as nice as the former 2d ones

Duke3D -> Quake (software rendered of course) definitely fit that description

They where released just 6 months apart [0], [1]. I'll take the "lower" quality quake 3D models over Duke 3Ds 2D sprites any day :)

[0]: https://www.mobygames.com/game/365/duke-nukem-3d/ [1]: https://www.mobygames.com/game/374/quake/

WTF is TFC?

Probably Team Fortress Classic. Hi to all nade and rocket jumping fans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress_Classic

Never understood why it was "Classic"? Since it was the new version after the Quake mod.

Valve was working on TF2.. but it took years to be completed. It started as a more serious military shooter and became the lovely cartoon version later.

Classic is the version that was ported to the Goldsrc engine (which, itself, is a descendant of the Quake 1 engine) as a stand alone game.

TF2 is the same concept as TF/TFC, but turned into a full fledged game with its own soul.

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