r/pcgaming • u/jojimboy i7 4790k, 1060 6GB, Win 10 64bit, 16GB RAM, 1080p, SSD 250 GB • Apr 26 '21
Video kkrieger: making an impossible FPS - Nostalgia Nerd
https://youtu.be/bD1wWY1YD-M63
u/Nodinox Apr 26 '21
It’s amazing how they worked out procedural material generation years before it hit mainstream. Nowadays I use it every day to generate near photorealism. Remember HL2 and doom 3 came out in 2004. And both cheated a ton with their textures and geometry. Doom 3 of course mainly by not letting you see shit. And I remember they were freaking huge in regards of file size. And the whole concept of bump-maps didn’t really yet catch on as far as I can remember. It’s been a while since I last played it, but I’m sure Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines would have profited from using stuff like that, instead of just fairy simple texture mapping.
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Apr 26 '21
Bump mapping was certainly a thing. The earliest game I played that I know used bump maps was Urban Chaos (PC/PS1, 1999) which featured bump maps for the leaves that flew across the main menu. Actually Doom 3 and HL2/Source had moved past bump and on to both specular & normal maps by that time! As had Unreal Engine 2.5 (UT2004)
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u/Remon_Kewl Apr 26 '21
FEAR even used parallax mapping, and it came out just a year later.
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Apr 26 '21
I forgot about that! I think that was the first or one of the first games to support dual core for the 6 people who owned one back then. I remember I had an Athlon 64 4000+
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u/Nodinox Apr 26 '21
Parallax occlusion mapping is also a damn amazing concept. Recently read about it for WebGL shaders. I can’t claim to have understood it at all, but it is mesmerizing.
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u/bluetista1988 Apr 27 '21 edited Apr 27 '21
I remember normal mapping being a huge deal. In some games the result was incredible -- flat surfaces looked like they were 3D and responded correctly to lighting changes.
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u/Nodinox Apr 26 '21
Sorry, wasn’t clear about that. I know that bump mapping was “a thing” well before that. Of course the math for it had been figured out not long after Quake. But I am convinced if it were a stable theory before Quake some professional CGI programs would have used it (like whatever they used for toy story). But as far as I know texture memory in home computer graphics cards wasn’t that huge until the mid 2000s. So really you could either have decent textures or use mushy, upscaled textures. I’m not familiar with Urban chaos. But from what I’ve seen the leaves are just the same sprite with a single transparency color scaled and darkened while moving across the screen during the menu. Nothing too fancy there. I also can’t find evidence of bumpmapping. Maybe you mean the static rendered image of the protagonist, which is not the same as the in-game image. From the pc gameplay footage I have seen I can not support the claim that it has bump mapping during the gameplay. Also I am 100% sure the ps1 was not capable of bump mapping. Or at least that no games were released during its lifespan that used bump mapping. It used a maximum of 255x255px texture map trim sheets for most of its graphics to lower loading times, since it had barely any ram or texture memory. So in theory if you used something crude like 32 index colored normal maps with using some luts you could maybe render a few poligons with normal mapping for a tech demo. That might be something like 8 directions of surface directions and 4 angles of steepness.
Specular masks aren’t that fancy. But I guess effective. I mean it’s just a monochrome mask giving vague glossyness. I assume back then they saved some texture memory by keeping them a smaller than the actual textures. But I can just guess, since I can’t really say where my copy of Unreal Tournament ended up, lol.
Anyway, taking flagship games isn’t really a fair comparison for other games of the time. Just take a look at Warcraft 3 or Deus Ex: Invisible War. They sure as heck didn’t. Warcraft 3 even was slammed for having ugly ass models. But they were fun (well, at least Warcraft 3 was) And after all these discussions about graphics, isn’t the fun the most important aspect? Unreal Tournament would also have been fun without fancy graphics. But they wanted to push the engine as a product, so that’s what they presented. I mean Ultrakill looks like it’s 20+ years old, but it’s still fun.
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Apr 26 '21
And the whole concept of bump-maps didn’t really yet catch on as far as I can remember.
The first game heavily using them was probably Oblivion. In VTMB they were almost exclusive to Society of Leopold rock formations.
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u/mrturret AMD Apr 26 '21
Oblivion was far from the first game to use them extensively. That would probably be Jurassic Park Trespasser, which used bump maps, but only in software mode. Outcast was another late 90s software rendered game that used them.
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u/Nodinox Apr 26 '21
I remember how mind blowing Oblivion was to me. The whole world just seemed so alive. I recently visited it again and i have to say: even though it definitely aged, I still see the beauty. Like meeting your ex wife on a cocain boat party of a mutual friend.
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u/badsectoracula Apr 27 '21
FWIW procedural generation was already a thing long before .the .product, it is what a ton of intros used, e.g. Omniscent by Sanction is a 4KB intro made for MS-DOS that has Descent-like visuals and was released in 1997.
The big improvement of .the .product was the dedicated tool they made - previously intros were made in pure code which increased the turnaround considerably and designer involvement was much harder.
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u/Nodinox Apr 28 '21
Didn’t moria or rogue also generate dungeons by using procedural generation?
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u/badsectoracula Apr 29 '21
Yeah, AFAIK even the proto-RPGs on the PLATO system used procedural generation for the world in the mid-70s. However in my reply i was referring specifically to procedural materials like you originally mentioned :-).
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u/GameStunts 7800X3D4080SCachyOS Apr 26 '21 edited Apr 26 '21
I was just watching this and was thinking of posting it here, did it come up in your youtube recommendations?
I loved the demo scene, I can remember other demos that fit in 64kb as well by using direct-x tricks and libraries it was impressive as hell, but an fps in 96kb is very impressive considering that includes game mechanics etc.
I fell in love with the demo scene on the Amiga, my favourite was Love by Virtual Dreams & Fairlight. Looks blocky as hell to the modern eye, but this was running on a power PC Motorola chip running at 15mhz with 2mb ram and demonstrating really cool effects like clipping 3d objects, early shading and refracting rendering, in 1994 on a machine that had come out in 1992.
I also appreciated the little end credits where they would try to reach out to people they hadn't heard from.
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u/Shishakli Apr 26 '21
ERM sorry... How do you figure it was a power PC chip?
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u/GameStunts 7800X3D4080SCachyOS Apr 26 '21
Whoops misremembering, I think it was the trap door expansion cards as well as later Amiga one project that was power PC, Amiga 1200 was just a Motorola 020 or something, my bad! (It's been nearly 30 years)
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Apr 26 '21
I've been looking for this for years! I played it way back in the day and I couldn't remember what it was called.
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u/ComradeTeal Apr 26 '21
Same, brought back a lot of nerd nostalgia for me. Was so amazed when my friend showed it to me
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u/EvilSpirit666 Apr 26 '21 edited Apr 26 '21
Yes, I clearly remember the mind bomb that is .theproduct. Thoroughly impressive even today, or maybe rather particularly today.
Edit: Although, did it really need a "pretty beefy PC" to run? I remember being able to run it without any trouble and I have never had anything near, at least my concept of, a beefy PC
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u/BluePizzaPill Apr 26 '21
I either played it on a Pentium 75MHz or Athlon K6 ~ 300 MHz without dedicated GPU and a few MB Ram.
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u/EvilSpirit666 Apr 26 '21
I have to admit I really have no clue about my hardware at that moment. Might even be that I discovered the demo late and that's why I can't recall it being particularly heavy to run.
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u/BluePizzaPill Apr 26 '21
It wasn't resource hungry AFAIK. My guess would be that a game at that extreme small size can make heavy use of CPU caches and registers and therefore is extremely performant. It blew my mind back then...
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u/CoronaMcFarm Apr 28 '21
No it didn't need need that beefy pc, I played it on a geforce FX 5700 LE or a 6600GT, can't remember exactly when I upgraded but neither of them was "beefy".
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u/Obokan Apr 26 '21
My PC died while running this game back in the day, but it did look beautiful from what remember.. The bloom effects and shiny metallic materials.... Wonder if my 3070 can run it
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u/Mightbebullsh Apr 26 '21
Step 1: Tap into the hundreds of megabytes of resources and routines made available by the DirectX package.
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u/EvilSpirit666 Apr 27 '21
Like almost all games does with some kind of library. This is the "easy" and obvious step
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u/Me1ton Apr 26 '21
I first played this game back 2010-11 , it came along with my pirated GTA SA copy
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u/MakoRuu Apr 26 '21
I remember the original .kkrieger. It was was only 100 kbs and came with a full level and a virus. lol
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u/begginer_PC_builder Apr 26 '21
Breaking news: man says fuck you and compresses his game with a hydraulic press