/vr/ - Retro Games

>>1044610
science... or something

i dunno but it also had the best vidya soundtrack ever orchestrated, by the drummer of the police at that

>>1044610
Game is adding polygons when you move forward
or something like that

>>1044610
It was a universally known fact in those times that Sony had stolen Sega's blast processing technologies (how they got their hands on it I don't think we'll ever know), but Spyro was really one of the games to really tap into it. Notice how there is never any lag in the game, yet it manages to portray such a beautiful seamless world with such large view distances? That's blast processing being pushed on the Sony Playstation. It's a shame that not many other games really utilised the technology as much as Spyro did, but even so, Sony did what Nintendidn't.

>>1044610
There are not many levels without big blobs blocking your view. Take a look at Colossus, it is a huge level with wide open areas, but it's divided into parts by huge buildings. The Hub worlds use detail scaling and the same trick (hence the wall in Winter Tundra).
It's fine tech, but it's not nearly on the level of Naughty Dog basically hacking into the PSone devkit to be able to render some levels in the first Crash Bandicoot.

>>1044637
Not really, in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Bj_9SlCnQY you can see at the end that the entire world is loaded the whole time.

>>1044637
elaborate on crash please, sounds interesting

>>1044637
>but it's not nearly on the level of Naughty Dog basically hacking into the PSone devkit to be able to render some levels in the first Crash Bandicoot.

Holy shit, did they really do that?
What a couple of badasses.

pretty much the trick was that they had things gain polygons/textures as you approached, so they could actually load the entire level at once while still providing a huge world since only everything about 5 feet in front of spyro is properly detailed.

You can see a lot of this if you upscale spyro 1 in epsxe, the texture/polygons are moving all the time, it's very clever programming

>>1044610
The impressive draw distance is mainly due to textures only being drawn on objects near to you: after a certain point, they are Gouraud Shaded instead. Under emulation at high resolutions it's very noticeable, but on a real PS1 it's almost seamless.

>>1044637
please elaborate on crash

>>1044651
>>1044696
>Andy and Dave broke a lot of rules. First and foremost, they didn’t follow PlayStation’s library restrictions. Other developers often complained that Crash was using some sort of secret Sony library. That is the exact opposite of the truth. The truth is that Crash used as little as it could of Sony’s library and the programmers basically hacked everything right to the hardware.

It's from a series of very awesome blog posts by Andy Gavin about the creation of Crash 1:
http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot-part-1/

>>1044703
Aww shit! I was thinking about visiting that site the other day.

>>1044703

I love reading about development stuff like this, where the developers had to really think outside the box to get their game to work.

>>1044687

It's proof that HLE high res graphics are an abomination for PSX games and that the games were meant to be played in their 240p native resolution.

>>1044610
the models become significantly less complex when nt within a certain distance of you

>>1044703
Naughty Dog are masters of making games look amazing. Period.

>>1044731
Same. Are there any other posts similar to this? Isn't Okami's filter technically impossible on the PS2?

>>1044631

This is true. Sony did steal the original plans for the Saturn which would've had Blast Processing.

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2009/04/21/ign-presents-the-history-of-sega?page=7

>>1044703

God damn, son. These Naughty Dog dudes are freaking nuts. I know Crash looks fucking brilliant, especially compared to other early PSX titles, but the stuff these guys did to pull it off? Dudes got balls.

>>1044859
Path of Neo for PS2 is the only PS2 game I know of that has normal mapping, which people thought was impossible

>>1044658
Naughty Dog have done amazing shit to optimize the game. Just take a look
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_Bandicoot_(video_game)

>>1044610
That pic is from Spyro II. Same system, but it's worth mentioning.

>>1044859
Didnt SotC and MGS3 use some weird programming techniques to get certain unsupported effects into the ps2 (like bloom)?
Another example is Pitfall 2. I do not know how they did it, but look at it. It is mind blowing stuff.

>>1045671
> That Crash Bandicoot 3 water

Still looks great even today

Jason and Andy were absolute brilliant developers, specifically Andy. I remember Jason said in an interview years later that when they showed Sony execs early builds of Crash, Sony didnt believe they were running it on a PS1 but on a high end computer, and they were so shocked that in somewhat of a panic they tried to develop a game that could compete with Crash's graphic capabilities but had to shelf the project because no one was able to program that well.

In other words, an internal team at Sony tried to develop a game to compete with Crash and failed.

Soul Reaver had its share of that too.

>>1045743
Also Hennig left in the original ending to the game and bullshitted to the publishers.

>>1045742
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhmYENdFZc8

Jason also has some pretty interesting thoughts about gaming as an industry.

>>1045696
it's from the third Spyro, actually.

>>1045704
I believe so. SotC could load the whole big map while keeping 16 giant colossi also loaded into the open world, wit no loading screens whatsoever.
For PS2 era, I don't think the PS2 could handle that alone.

>>1045836
SotC just did a lot of streaming. Not really that different technologically to a game like GTA: San Andreas on PS2.

The game's real technical feat was pseudo-HDR lighting on PS2 hardware.

>>1044610
This game practically invented draw distance

>>1045842
SA had terrible pop-up issues though.

>>1045845
It was certainly impressive for the PS1.

>>1045846
SA had a lot more data to stream. SotC just has...

>Terrain.
>Some grass.
>Rocks.
>More rocks.
>Enemies.
>Trees.

>>1045886
>SotC just has...
>Enemies

That's the one thing people didn't like about the game; the lack of enemies apart from the colossi.

>>1046020
Honestly, I thought the game was virtually unplayable when it came out because of the framerate. I thought they should've just waited to port it to the PS3 like they did with porting Ico to the PS2. Thank god for the PS3 remaster, anyway.

>>1046020

I don't recall anyone criticizing the game for that. That's one of the games good points.

What purpose would enemies have even served? You might fight a few enemies the first time you encounter them, but then you'd realize you can just gallop right by them.

Plus, having random enemies would have killed the atmosphere of the game.

>>1046050
A lot of people found the long, empty roads that you'd have to travel to get to each colossus to be too boring because of the lack of enemies, apparently. I for one didn't mind, because it was a pretty looking landscape.

>>1044637
>>1044851
Probably helped Spyro that Naughty Dog and Insomniac became fast friends. Not sure I've ever seen a more bro-tier relationship between developers making competing games in a genre that's mostly the same (both being platformers, but with Spyro having more of an emphasis on collecting).