/vr/ - Retro Games

>>4804154
>The rendering techniques in Rogue Squadron/Naboo/Indiana Jones are light years beyond what Rare were doing in terms of draw distance, performance, and visual complexity.
Nah, I'd put it squarely at Rare quality visuals, technically speaking. Less detail than Rare games but at a higher resolution with a comparable framerate. They were not wizard coders.

Battle for Naboo uses Spyro-like gouraud shading stage LOD, while Conker uses the superior mipmap technique. Further, Naboo uses few directional light sources, leaning instead heavily on computationally simple lightmaps, while Conker uses up to 4 simultaneous light sources.

As for texturing, Conker can display a wide variety of textures in any one scene with multitexturing blending different types over each other to produce unique texel combinations, while Naboo just tiles the same goddamn texture over and over. Conker also has a sophisticated shadowing system which correctly projects onto walls depending on angles, while Naboo just uses a simple heightmap based one. Granted, Naboo is showing larger draw distances than Conker and more 3D models on screen, being a arcade-style flight sim, but on balance it's hardly showing a technical edge. They matched Rare but they didn't go beyond.

>The particle system they wrote for Naboo/Indy is a triumph of engineering. There's nothing else like it in any other 5th gen game.
You really need to stop drinking the Factor 5 kool aid. They look good but are nothing mindblowing compared to Conker, which has particles which are direction dependent rather than the mostly ambient 'snow' particle effects in Naboo/Indy.