/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5361278
Interesting technical readup on Outcast you might like OP: http://francksauer.com/index.php/games/test/15-games/published-games/47-outcast-pc

Since the developers went for software rendering, the graphical effects were not limited by which kind of graphics card card you had. A great example of this was the water. They custom programed lot of effects similar to what would later be achieved with programmable pixel and vertex shaders, which didn't come out until 2001 with the GeForce3 and DirectX 8.

>>5361278
isn't that the remaster?

>>5361557
The fact that you are asking that says something about how unbelievable it looks for its time. I see similar comments when I shill Riddick on /v/.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYbdHbdoqis

Silverload

>>5361470
didn't read your link but they used voxels, afaik which raped every cpu at that time, even the top of the line pentium 3s. the engine was highly scalable though, so the game even ran on a piece of shit pentium 2 266Mhz, albeit with atrocious "jaggies" aka voxels the size of 1/10th of a 17 inch monitor.

>>5361572
the art direction was just amazing. one can mask so many things, including technical limitations with terrific art dirction, it's not even funny.

Links 386 from 1992 was especially good when you consider most pc games 3 years earlier were around nes level

>>5361278
MDK still has the design and the technology. Hard to beat for '97
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LbIJdGNQfA

Ultima 9

>>5361616
i remeber playing this on my 386 lol the graphics were indeed quite impressive at the time

Shenmue

>>5361278
The 100 Years War. The level of detail there was incredible, especially the gore.

>>5361616
It could take its sweet time generating the landscape image, since you can't really move around

>>5361597
Oucast was using a much more limited (and thus much faster) offshoot of voxel rendering, based solely on heightmaps. Elimination of one axis allowed for greater optimisation, as well as much easier LOD-handling, but prevented placement of any sudo-voxels over the ground, so all that stuff had to be made of polygons, and couldn't have all the same voxel effects applied to them.

Also, it was not really scaleable resolution-wise unless you edited files. The resolutions were 320x200, 400x300 and 512x384.
P2-400 could run 512x384 with relative comfort, but even 320x200 looked beautiful

>>5362664
Hell no, while technically impressive, Shenmue looks ugly like most of the games that tried to go for realism when it was not even remotely feasible yet.

>>5362665
Link to the game? All I get from google are PS3 game and history.

>>5361278
Vagrant Story

Does Unreal (1998) count?
Or in terms of something more obscure - Severance - Blade of Darkness with it's crazy-ass volumeric fog , dynamic shadows, realtime reflections and blood splatters?

>>5362917
Unfortunately, Severance is of 2001, so it's not retro, or I would've said it prior :P
While not particularilytechnically impressive on the graphic front (aside from portal techniques that would later be used in Source Engine for Portal and Stanley Parable), it truly excells in visual design, with one of thebetter combinations of colored lighting and texturework for the time, lacking only in polycount.

Also multilayered detail textures.
Ironically modern HD texture packs are incompatible with them, which makes them to look worse when up-close than original textures.

It technically came out in 1999

>>5362942
Not technically, it came out than. First out is the real release date always

Commanche was impressive at the time, although my 486 couldn't handle it. It required Pentium Power.

>>5362942
I thought i was quite ugly

>>5363129
But you have such a great personality

>>5363140
You are so sweet.

>>5362814
Why no 640x480? I don't expect anything high for CPUs at the time, but 512x384 is an odd resolution that doesn't really fit any VGA standard, or a TV signal for that matter.

>>5362935
It's a shame that such a good use of detail texturing was barely seen outside of Unreal engine. I am not simply talking about an extra tiling texture layer lazily applied to everything, but multiple layers that progressively appear as you get closer, ensuring that there is always some detail. It should even scale well with general improvements, seeing as the proximity to a wall needed for the detail layer to become relevant decreases as the base texture improves (although higher display resolutions more or less cancel this out).

>>5361278
Test Drive III: The Passion. First-person polygonal racing circa 1990.

>>5364348
The Macintosh II had that as its display standard for some reason

>>5361470
>They custom programed lot of effects similar to what would later be achieved with programmable pixel and vertex shaders, which didn't come out until 2001 with the GeForce3 and DirectX 8.
It’s a myth that you could only do complex pixel shader effects starting with DirectX 8.

The whole “programmable” pixel shader thing mostly refers to the fact that these cards support an actual shader language style of programming, rather than their actual capabilities.

>>5364369
They also had different detail textures for each material, and some times for material+environment compilation.
Meanwhile many things in modern games (especially things like Fallout 4) still look blurry close-up.

>>5364810
This. GeForce 256 could do per pixel lighting and normal mapping, and TNT could arbitrarily mix different stages together

>>5365496
Except nobody did this before standardisation because game made to run on a single line of GPUs just won't sell.

>>5365509
It's not like using a feature means you cannot do without it. A bunch of 2000 games used it like Evolva and Citizen Kabuto. Even Doom 3 works with "all" features on GF/GF2