/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.1861607]

I have a question about something I've always wondered, but I'm really not sure how to phrase this properly as I know fuckall about the technical aspects of games so bear with me.

Why is it that in a lot of retro games with polygon modeled characters, during instances when they are positioned completely still (such as in a cutscene) the character model still seems to shift and wobble slightly? Pic related looks like the effect I'm trying to describe, although I know in that GIF specifically the characters ARE moving due to breathing.

[Anonymous No.1861612]

>>1861607
It's something to do with the PS1 tech.

[Anonymous No.1861616]

Because if they stood 100% rigid they wouldn't look human. People don't stand perfectly still, they move and sway slightly.

[Anonymous No.1861623]

>>1861616
No but the effect I'm talking about clearly isn't intentional. You can tell the character model IS positioned completely still IE it's not being animated but it appears to shift slightly anyway. I really wish I had a good GIF to illustrate what I mean.

[Anonymous No.1861631]

>>1861623
PSX had no z-buffer, so shit wobbled due to insane variable rounding.

[Anonymous No.1861635]

Quake 2 had lots of wobble. We called it jiggly nuts.

[Anonymous No.1861637]

>>1861607
It's a combination of fixed precision mathematics (which causes screen elements to snap awkwardly to changing coordinates) and a lack of z-buffering which would otherwise prevent polygons from fighting about which is in front and which is behind

All pre-N64 systems had this problem (even PC)

[Anonymous No.1861645]

>>1861607

PS1 tech. Made worse via emulation.

http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/PlayStation_emulators#Emulation_issues

For this specific instance, check the PC version of RE2. It's fixed. No wobbling.

PC version of Re3 DOES have wobbling.

[Anonymous No.1861657]

>>1861607
because playstation a shit

[Anonymous No.1861948]

>>1861616
>sony devs using this as an excuse for their lame tech.

[Anonymous No.1861970]

>>1861607
PS1: The wobbly triangle system that conquered the world

[Anonymous No.1861975]

>>1861637
Lots of PC games sealed with this just fine. Never saw this in flight Sims or test drive 3. I think 4d boxing might have actually... Its a coding/technology issue. Since PC was software rendering up to this point it depended on how it was coded.

[Anonymous No.1862007]

They're breathing

[Anonymous No.1862019]

>>1861970
And just think that Sony controls the videogame market with an iron fist.

[Anonymous No.1862021]

>>1861607
I thought they were breathing.

[Anonymous No.1862039]

>>1861975
True, but without real 3D acceleration you can't get rid of it completely. Software rendering has its practical limits.

[Anonymous No.1862091]

>>1861607
>retro games with polygon modeled characters
Just say early polygonal games. :p

[Anonymous No.1862182]

>>1861645

that's a sweet ass

[Anonymous No.1862264]

>>1862021
>>1862007

This.

How is this not common sense to you?

[Anonymous No.1862352]

>>1862264
>Anons provide actual technical reasons to why this happens
>C'MON GUYS THAT'S JUST THEIR BREATHING ANIMATIONS USE YOUR COMMON SENSE
No, anon. YOU use your common sense.

[Anonymous No.1862375]

>>1862352
Have you ever played Resident Evil Games ? At all?

They breathe, and when they are hurt, they limp. The game has realistic animation you dumb ass.

[Anonymous No.1862390]

>>1861607
>>1861623
>Completly still.
You do realize they are breathing right? This isn't even troll, they still animation in RE games on the PS1 where they sway is them breathing, look at her hair its even moving forward and back. Same for the girl.

[Anonymous No.1862413]

Breahting is a thing, and jittering is one too. There is both in OP's gif. You guys can't really be that retarded? Or are your eyes so shitty you can't even notice jittering?

[Anonymous No.1862415]

>>1862007
>>1862021
>>1862264
>>1862375
OP specifically said he knows they're breathing in that example dummies. He's probably talking about when it renders the polygons inconsistently or unstable polygons. I can't find any examples but you know when something is perfectly still but the outlines/edges get all fucked up and move around a bit, I remember a lot of games doing this when you pause the game during certain animations if they had transparent pause screens, not just on the PSX either.

[Anonymous No.1862426]

>>1862375
>>1862390

Read the OP

>>1861607
>Pic related looks like the effect I'm trying to describe, although I know in that GIF specifically the characters ARE moving due to breathing.

Yes they're breathing in the RE gif, a better example would be the gif in >>1861645

He wanted to know why the models shifted when the characters were obviously NOT breathing or moving around, which does happen

[Anonymous No.1862427]

Fixed point math. Polygons pretty much snap to positions instead of smoothly moving between them (as would be the case with floating point math).

>>1862390
You didn't even read the OP, he acknowledged breathing. This is a known issue with the PS1's 3D rendering ability.

[Anonymous No.1862441]

>>1862415
To add to this I'm going to give a shitty analogy for the OP based on my technical speculation; imagine someone drawing the frame by hand, they have to do so X frames per second, even if they are perfectly still and the frame is the same they have to redraw it anyway and may do so with errors/inconsistencies, it will look close but not exactly the same. This is easy to explain for a human but I don't know how this technically happens with hardware/software. Again though this is my speculation on it so it could be nonsense.

[Anonymous No.1862442]

>>1862426
>Yes they're breathing in the RE gif,

Yeah, what is happening is that they're breathing and as such are supposed to move a little. But since it's PS1 3D and emulated x3 they're also jittering x3 more than they should.

[Anonymous No.1862449]

>>1862375
>>1862264

They're breathing, but that is only supposed to mean tiny movements. But PS1 tech when emulated also means 4 pixels of jittering on top of that.

Native resolution is the only solution to reduce it. It reduces it to 1 pixel, which is either not noticeable or is hidden behind blur, etc.

[Anonymous No.1862459]

>>1862449
>>1862442
>>1862441
>>1862427
>>1862427
>>1862426
>>1862415

ALRIGHT.

[Anonymous No.1862474]

>>1862459
I didn't read your post but let me tell you that they're breathing.

[Anonymous No.1862489]

>>1862459
Embrace it.

[Anonymous No.1863094]

>>1862007
Yeah, my legs and shoulders twitch when i breathe too....

[Anonymous No.1863103]

>>1861607
In the PSX's case it was because of some imprecise fixed mathematics relating to how it renders polygons. You might notice it in some other games too like Quake when you interpolate the animation but that's a similar effect caused by the limitations of vertex animation

[Anonymous No.1863104]

>>1862449
Seems like there should be a way to fix or reduce it on emulators, but I don't really know how hard (or possible) that would be.

[Anonymous No.1863109]

>>1863104
GTE hack in PCSX-R

[Anonymous No.1863247]

>PSX literally incapable of accurate 3D
>ITT: "It's not a fault, it's a feature!"

Oh you Sonyfriends are so funny.

[Anonymous No.1863257]

>>1863247
>"accurate" 3D
>1994

[Anonymous No.1863302]

>>1863247
>ITT: "It's not a fault, it's a feature!"

/vr/ in a nutshell

[Anonymous No.1863312]

>>1863302
Not really. Git gud or go back to /v/ you faggot.

[Anonymous No.1863313]

>>1863257
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKlbx5niBu8

[Anonymous No.1863330]

>>1863313
>"Trilinear bitmap interpolation"
>Nice way of saying blurred-ass low resolution texture viewed through the fog of Nintendo's primitive, forced anti-ailiasing
>"accurate 3D"

[Anonymous No.1863332]

>>1863312
Git gud at z-buffering issues?

What is reading comprehension?

[Anonymous No.1863335]

>>1862039
You can have a software z-buffer and other tricks. You can get rid of it fine with a modern CPU and software rendering. at the time tricks were the name of the game. The PSX used a really cheap one to keep costs down... so it looks like this shit.

[Anonymous No.1863336]

>>1863330
It still is accurate. Too accurate if anything.

[Anonymous No.1863343]

>>1863313
>dat '80s/'90s geetar rock music
bring it back pls

[Anonymous No.1863347]

>>1863330
You realize that neither texture resolution nor anti-aliasing have anything to do with the actual rendering of 3D polygons, right?

[Anonymous No.1863348]

>>1863332
I was referring to when fags complain about games being 'broken' when in fact they're too shit to play them. You often get fags claiming a game is bad because they die in it. 9 times out of 10 the player just sucks at the game.

[Anonymous No.1863350]

>>1863336
>too accurate for sand people

[Anonymous No.1863352]

>>1863330
Trilinea bitmap interpolation (texture filtering)
is not forced anti-aliasing. It was hardly ever used on the n64 because it eats video ram.

Trilinear filtering is common in retro and early 2000s, now it's anisotropic.
http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/48912/whats-the-difference-between-bilinear-trilinear-and-anisotropic-texture-filte

I mean, I'm all for nintendo trolling, but at least make sense and use the right words man

[Anonymous No.1863365]

>>1863347
I'm just laying it all out, Man.

The N64 focused on its rendering
The PSX focused on its texture mapping

Guess which one won

PSX was also easy as fuck to develop for. No Silicon Graphics workstations required.

[Anonymous No.1863369]

>>1863365
psx focused on having a fucking cd drive to have textures on. (And development) N64's 3d capability is far superior in every way.

[Anonymous No.1863378]

>>1863369
>Implying the N64's texture cache isn't 4k
>Implying not having a CD drive was anything other than childish and ignorant

[Anonymous No.1863385]

>>1863378
Nintendo expected chip prices to continue their downward spiral. One of the earliest taiwan plant crashes happened just after N64 launched, so memory prices shot through the roof for most of its life. They were expecting to be able to get a 512 mb chip for only a few times the cost of a cd before the console was even halfway through its life. Instead prices went UP and didn't start going down until the console was pretty much dead already.

[Anonymous No.1863396]

>>1863365
>The N64 focused on its rendering
>The PSX focused on its texture mapping

Neither was focused on anything. It's the software that was focused that way.

PSX games more often had small areas where texture detail is important. N64 games more often were about large areas where you had to sacrifice texture detail for practical purposes. Think Mario 64 vs Crash Bandicoot.

>>1863369
>psx focused on having a fucking cd drive to have textures on
No, the reason N64 textures are USUALLY crap is because of the 4k texture cache, not cartridges. But not for the reasons most people think.

N64 3D is indisputably better in every way though. It actually has accelerated 3D.

>>1863378
Now here's the misconception about the 4k texture cache. It doesn't mean that textures have to be shit, but it does mean that developers have to put much more effort into proper texturing than on PSX.

The 4k texture cache limit means that no single texture can exceed 4 kilobytes in size. Bad developers would just stetch one shitty 4k texture over a large polygon and be done with it. Good developers will layer and blend multiple 4k textures together to produce high levels of texture detail.

PSX also has a texture cache (and it's only 2k) but...you don't HAVE to use it. If you want to load one big texture from the VRAM you can do it! It's easy.

tl;dr Hence the 4k issue is NOT a technical limitation of the N64. It doesn't mean that N64 can't do good textures, or even better texture than the PSX. However it IS a pain in the ass if you want good textures.

[Anonymous No.1863601]

>>1863352
The N64 didn't even use true bilinear filtering, let alone trilinear. Its implementation only used three points of reference for interpolation, as opposed to four. It's why textures in N64 games have a slight jagged look. A filtered circle sprite or texture will have jaggies on both the top right and bottom left corners. Squares will actually look like rupees from Zelda.

[Anonymous No.1863623]

>>1863601
Actually the console does have hardware support for real trilinear. It's just too expensive to use because 1) It uses a lot of extra fill which is at a premium on N64 2) The implementation requires mipmapping to be enabled for that texture (essentially making available texture cache 2KB since the other 2KB is used for the mipmaps).

Hence everybody just used the minimum, the economic version of bilinear (3 point), as you mentioned. I think more developers should have tactically deployed more point sampling for distant textures though. Perfect Dark did.

[Anonymous No.1863646]

>>1863601
I actually have a pic of what such filtering looks like if applied to an entire image.

Not pretty.

[Anonymous No.1863649]

>>1863646
FUCK, wrong pic. Oh well, it makes for a good comparison.

[Anonymous No.1863686]

>>1863646
>>1863649
Using texture filtering on a 2D game is a very bad idea if the game's art wasn't designed for it.

However, using texture filtering on a 3D game is excellent and superior to point sampling 99% of the time.

[Anonymous No.1863716]

>>1861623
The example you gave is absolutely intentional. This should be so obvious but to prove it open up an item from your inventory and view it. Leave it still. It doesn't move. See?

[Anonymous No.1863754]

>>1863649

You found a cheap solution for chromatic aberration. Patent that shit.

[Anonymous No.1863796]

>>1861645
I'm glad they fixed the wobbling in GC RE3.

[Anonymous No.1864836]

>>1863716
>exact same numbers each frame because its paused
>get rounded to the exact same numbers each frame because its paused
>same result
wow how conclusive, looks like the models dont wobble after all, right guys?

[Anonymous No.1864868]

>>1863247

Fuck off with your console ware bullshit right back to /v/.

[Anonymous No.1864994]

>>1861645
dataz

[Anonymous No.1865521]

>>1863343
>Not recognizing DANGER ZONE

[Anonymous No.1865526]

>>1865521
Not everyone is a space engineer, man.

[Anonymous No.1865650]

>>1864868
Hypersensitive

[Anonymous No.1865658]

>>1865526
Oh god, please tell me that first panel isn't shopped. Is that taken from Ami/Sailor mercury's introduction episode?

[Anonymous No.1865724]

>>1861607
The pre-N64 consoles, and pre-486 PC CPUs, lacked a floating point unit. This meant they were unable to handle precise changes in position. There were some clever workarounds, and floating point math can be (slowly) emulated without an FPU.

One reasonably common fix was to use the game's fixed resolution as a reference point, so that the models judder would be masked by the limited number of onscreen pixels.

Because it had an FPU, very few N64 games wobbled. Toy Story 2 is a notable exception, but it was a PS1 > N64 port.

[Anonymous No.1866914]

>>1865658
It's real, but not from Season 1. It is from one of the early episodes of Season 5, Sailor Stars.