/vr/ - Retro Games

>>1361674
doesn't look great with high level emulation, but it can provide visuals better than what the console is usually capable of.
for RPGS and adventure games its a great idea, as you can combine CGI with hand-done art
the square ones were done in a somewhat primitive with good results, I'd imagine all you need today is to render a scene and export with it a Z-Buffer
for the mobile market it might make sense, I seem to recall some DS games using the technique

i remember this topic came up ages ago.
good times.
also Baten Kaitos and resident evil on gamecube pretty much perfected this art.

>>1361674
It's neither lost nor obsolete, it's just evolved into "baking", ie mapping the prerendered data on meshes rather than just the background, that way you can prerender and get none of the camera limitations. You'll be hard pressed to find a 3D game that doesn't do it

>>1361674

This was fucking GENIUS at the time.

When I first saw Silpheed it blew my fucking mind to pieces.

>>1361674
> Lost art, or obsolete practice?
Little of A and B.

The trick is where you'd want to use it and the scope of the game. It's really only useful for RPG/Adventure games. These days it's easier to get a 3D engine going and even really small less capable developers can do it. So it's often easier to do full 3D than rewrite for intermixing 3D onto 2D with proper collision etc... Full 3D also works better for people who are less artistic inclined, so if you've got a rag tag team, you can make it look better with less effort than you otherwise would.

Larger teams would have no issue with either really but there's really no sense in not just using 3D when you get scaling out of it and various other benefits. For example, lighting is pretty much free in comparison once the engine supports it. Changing a light position or color just works and hits everything as expected. With 2D backgrounds you have to redo the scene with the changing lighting etc unless you develop alternate technique like depth mapping for lights and it still won't be as accurate or easy to do. The quickest way is to apply multiply color to the light, but it's very incorrect.
Complete 3D removes a lot of work you really don't need and the only significant reason to do otherwise is if you have to deal with hard performance constraints.

>>1362040
So, obsolete art, lost practice.

>>1361732
>baten kaitos
they did it so prefectly sometimes I forgot the background was 2d

>>1361732
>also Baten Kaitos and resident evil on gamecube pretty much perfected this art.

Came here to say this. It's a shame it's a dead art, both games proved it could still be gorgeous and effective in modern games.

The practice was created by Frédérick Raynal in Alone In The Dark (early 1992).

>On March 13, 2006, Raynal along with Shigeru Miyamoto and Michel Ancel were knighted by French Minister of Culture and Communication, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, as Knights of Arts and Literature. It was the first time that video game developers were honored this distinction.[10]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9rick_Raynal

So, we pretty call it a lost art as it is OFFICIALLY art.

>>1362158
Crazy to think how mindblowing this must have been at the time.

>>1362178

I love it. Lost art.

>>1362158
Too bad nobody cares about French knighthoods.

>>1363906
because britbong knighthoods are much better

>half of the bankers who fucked up the economy are 'sirs'

Still looks good

>>1361674
Bravely Default did it recently, right?

It is marginal today, but not completely dead.

There will probably never be a big budget game with 3D models on prerendered backgrounds. Which is a shame because it can look great when done right.

>>1362178
It's kind of useful in that game too. Any object in the world that could be moved or picked up was rendered in flat shaded low poly, while the background was painted.
Made it much easier to understand what parts of each room were involved in the puzzles and what were just decoration.

>>1363957
Yeah they wouldn't be very "big budget" if they had prerendered shit in them.

>>1363957
Modern games already look better, so there's no point.

>>1362178
I remember being absolutely blown away by it.

>>1363974
Not specifically, but they do look good and have more versatility. They have nowhere near the same polycount or occlusion/radiosity lighting etc...

Pre-rendered backgrounds look as real as you want them to be, you could even use photographs and nothing we produce in 3D is on that level.

But interestingly megatextures could really help out in a limited camera angle 3D adventure game since that removes their primary negative, in that getting close to things looks like shit unless you jack up the filesize. The baked lighting in Rage was kind of shit though. You could do baked lighting decently. AA and more polys would be needed for the scenes, but it could work.

Ive always loved it. I like low res 3D and 2D backgrounds. Just has a really beautiful, mysterious quality. I loved Hyrule Market in OoT and being outside the Temple of Time. Dont really get why everyone hates it.

>>1364265
Part of it comes down to the fact that it's a bit hard to get things looking ok through emulation. Low-res 2D backgrounds typically do not scale very well. It becomes especially troublesome on PS1 and N64 games that use the style, because a lot of people tend to use emulators that render the 3D at high resolution, but that does nothing for 2D things. As such, you end up with shit like this, which does not look very good.

>>1364262
>megatextures could really help out in a limited camera angle 3D adventure game

damn I never thought of that, something like that would be perfect for the eventual FF7 remake

>>1364320
>it's a bit hard to get things looking ok through emulation
Playing at original resolutions is one solution that always works. Intricate fullscreen filter setups can in some situations be good, and CRTs are always a good way to play.

>>1361674
I hated it when I first saw it as an 8-year-old. I also hated mixing aliased graphics with anti-aliased fonts. These days I still hate it with passion; where the fuck is your consistency, designers.

>>1364481
Gotta agree with you. On HD ports of games it's really jarring.

>>1363951
That looks incredible. Sauce?

>>1365491
FF7.

>>1365491

What, you haven't heard of FFVII by now? Go play dat shit!

Man FFIX looks beautiful. Those backgrounds. I'm replaying it now and it's gorgeous. I just want to wander around and look at the world.

It's bad it is not used anymore, because with today's technology you wouldn't even have to have the 3D clash as much with the 2D as it did in earlier titles, plus you could have higher quality 2D backdrops.

2D on 3D > 3D on 2D

prove me wrong feggits

>>1365527
I think it looks cheaper, but it has its charm

>>1362202
My sides :D

>>1365527
Gives some good 90s vibes, but the blockyness of such games can be a bit off putting.

>>1365527
>those horribly scaling sprites in Xenogears and Dragon Quest VII

Maybe the sprites were just poorly drawn either way..

XG pulled it off pretty well in battle though, mixing giant-sized polygonal characters with normal sized characters being 2D.

>>1362021
Lowpoly artist master race

>>1365513

my dick

Mostly obsolete. The backdrops are almost always just pre-rendered. Modern systems can just render the same stuff.

did the update of the Oddworld games rerender the 2d render backgrounds at a higher resolution of just remake them entirely?

>>1364320
>>1364347

>not playing pre-rendered games in glorious 1080p resolution

>>1361674
technical limitations

>>1363954

Yep it did, but it's on a 3DS which uses 10 years old handheld technology so it was actually obligatory to achieve the stuff they wanted to.

>>1365527
I thought the 2D on 3D thing was gonna throw me off but it's fun as hell.

Lost art. It took an incredible amount of time to render those backgrounds (back in an interview RE2 developing team said that each background took around 2 weeks to render) I imagine that if you were to produce a pre rendered background with high resolution assets, it would take at least 10-12 hours of rendering, which might be too long.

Not future proof, the backgrounds are made with the resolution of the time in mind and that's it, they can't be quickly upscaled and look nice, they have to be redone and that takes a lot of time, which doesn't play nicely with today industry's mind to churn out remakes as quickly as possible. Why you think square skipped FF 7 8 and 9 remasters/HD remakes and went straight for X?

>>1366483
>RPG for ants

>>1367067
>the backgrounds are made with the resolution of the time in mind and that's it
>they have to be redone and that takes a lot of time, which doesn't play nicely with today industry's mind to churn out remakes as quickly as possible
This is one of the reasons why the original Timeshock was and its remake will be the best pinball simulator of all time.
Great looking 1600x1200 back then, and photorealistic 2200 x 2560 now.

>>1367098
God DAMN!

>>1367098
pinball game translate surprisingly well to pre rendered backgrounds. This was an amateur table for pinmame made by a guy who works at dreamworks and the result is mindblowing

>>1367045
ok legit question here

can you save in this game?

can't seem to find any option for it

>>1367540
No, but the game is short as all hell and has infinite continues anyway.

>>1367547
oh alright

makes sense.

It's disgusting and I hope we never have to see it again. If a game is going to play 2D then it should be -fully- 2D.

With a few exceptions (klonoa, einhander) I don't like 2.5D. They go for 2.5D because it's cheaper and faster than 2D art. That aside they give me the feeling of being slow, clunky, unresponsive, and just in general shoddy. Mega Man X7 and X8 are the best/worst examples of this (compare them to X4 through X6 in terms of controls and pacing).