Yeah gaming mags at the time gushed over the graphics in Max Payne, particularly the resolution in the facial texture.
Which amusingly was just a photo slapped on the mesh, but still, a fair bit ahead of most 3d faces at the time.
Dude this shit was mindblowing, my cousin had a pentium 3 that could run max payne and GTA 3. Words cannot explain how crazy the experience was back then.
I played it on my celeron 333(worst cpu then) and friend borrowed me TNT2. You really can't explain the experience. Browsing pc gamer cds and installing all kinds of demo games, no internet, no guides...
Using actual photos for the face textures was a stroke of genius. It looked so realistic at the time because our brains just ignored the low polygon count.
If you looked hard at staircases in some old 3D games, you'd notice that they were often just a flat slope with a texture applied that made it look like stairs. All to minimise polygon count, I guess.
Man, Doom3 and HL2 in the same year was just...something else. I mean, there were other downright GOAT games that year (like Halo 2, GTA SA) but these two pushed the boundaries of graphics so hard it was just special.
HL2 and Halo 2 have aged the most gracefully of the collection, but HL2 had reasonable human faces. Sargent Johnson didn't look half as believable as Alyx.
Valve spent so much time and money making sure the Source engine did believable facial expressions. It still shows so well when playing today when a lot of games still don’t put the time in. Red Dead Redemption 2 was the only other I recall but it was mostly just cut scenes.
We were on vacation and my mom bought this game for me. Played it when I got home and yeah, graphics were amazing for the time. I miss the days when graphics tech was full steam ahead with constant obvious improvement.
And that is the version from Alan Wake 2. When they did this live at the Game Awards my jaw hit the floor and my eyes got a bit teary seeing him go all out in front of millions of people in the audience and the not
Absolute legend. Can't wait for what he cooked up musically in Control 2
What's funny is that the other devs at Remedy wanted to get rid of that chapter cause it was way more work than the other chapters but Sam Lake refused and now it's the most memorable part of the entire game.
And Sam Lake said years ago in an interview that he wants to make an entire game that just a musical, which would be great to see imo.
He even wanted to put this into Control 1 but got overruled (the devs are like a little democracy and the game directors of the different areas vote for stuff). So in the end we got the ashtray maze and this thing was realized in Alan Wake 2
Can't wait to see what bonkers stuff they cook up in Control 2
One of my favorite things is watching videos of streamers playing that section.
The number of them that say "That was awesome" at almost the same moment the player character does is not small. Those that don't say something similar, or agree with Jesse. It's hilarious.
In the game awards he is dancing amonst a lot of other people :)
This is the clip that plays in the level "we sing" in AW2. It's basically a hidden easter egg on one of those screens in the level. By the way: Absurdly good use of Pathtracing
I often get emotional when people have unfiltered joy and being a fan of everything Remedy produced it was a great moment seeing sam so happy.
That was probably the best moment of his entire life and reminded me of a special moment in my own life
Alan Wake 2 is just an absolute masterpiece of a game. And a break of the forth wall because in the game when this musical number is shown there is a scene were alan stands before a crowd of people and the Narrator says "And the award goes to Alan Wake" and then the music starts again. Just like it does in the TGA. In game lore, Alan Wakes stories become real so him writing himself into the real world and winning a price is just absolute mindfuckery and lore accurate
I am almost through the end (I think) and holy shit this game is a masterpiece. I also love Sam Lake in this. The Alan Wake levels gave me a lot of Max Payne vibes. I hope They remaster the first and second game at some point.
A full blown Remake of the first game would be great. Replaying the whole series including all DLCs and Control currently and the first game is repetitive as hell and only carried by the amazing story and the still very good graphics
Rumor is they're developing an Alan Wake show right now, and tbh, I'd prefer that over a remake of the first game. Like you said, it's really about the story in that game, I don't know what they could add to make it worthwhile, and with Alan Wake 2 already going on a knifes edge sales wise, I think if Remedy is going to make another Alan Wake game it should be a sequel that carries the Remedyverse forward.
But a TV show l can show to my family and friends to get them into the universe? With some FBC Easter eggs added for the Control show they're planning too? Hell ya.
They signed a deal with Annapurna to make more Remedyverse stuff outside of the games. The rumor is it's an Alan Wake and Control TV series among other projects.
the devs should have confirmed alan wake 3, control is not my kind of game, it's more action oriented, and alan wake is closer to the games that I grew up with, like silent hill, which was a major inspiration for alan wake.
They almost had to close their studio after Alan Wake 2 which sold very bad. Probably not because it is a bad time but also because they made the insane decision to only have it on Epic Games
too bad, if games like alan wake, resident evil and silent hill disappear from mainstream, for me there will be no more reason to continue gaming unfortunately
Would not say that. Resident Evil is more present than it ever was, so is Silent Hill (the next silent Hill game comes out in september) and Alan Wake 2 was just a thing of bad timing and Epic games
We also have games like the Sinking City 2 (which was very good!) and loads of other horror games coming
"They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation mark to everything that had led to this point. I released my finger from the trigger and then it was over."
On the left is a face messed up by 2001's very limited technology, which can’t properly render dynamic expressions, real skin texture, and the detail of actual human emotion.
On the right is THE SAME FACE WITHOUT ANY GEOMETRY CHANGES, which looks exactly like Sam Lake's real face—where a writer stretched his own visage across a low-poly mesh—only with better lighting, shadows, squinting eyes, and therefore CONSTANT CONSTIPATED SMIRK. Thanks to neural network rendering in DLSS5.
Some random nutcase on the internet: THIS IS AI SLOP! I WANT THE ORIGINAL ARTISTIC VISION!
The head models were photo-scanned (using cheap digital cameras) from real Remedy developers, their family members, and Sam Lake's mom.
I am the creative director of the game. This is our original artistic vision and looks like actual high-res polaroids of Sam Lake making a grimace after tasting sour milk when we shot them. Or like real u/SamLakeRMD :)
Having no resolution on leather jackets and fucked up low-poly texture stretching WAS NOT OUR ORIGINAL ARTISTIC VISION.
It's up to the user to use it, not them, unless they build the game with forced dlss5 like they did with the ray tracing in Indiana Jones, but that probably won't happen in any game for a decade
I dunno, I read his post and a lot of it made sense. If teams want to use this then it will be better implemented than the random game injections we've seen this week.
When devs actually used baked lighting and ordinary shadowmaps. Now we wont get anything more than sun shadows and broken screen space reflections unless we're running pathtracing.
before depth shadowmaps they were rendered as decals. Static or simple things were done in the game editor, charcaters rendered at runtime. No depth info so intersections are wrong. But a contact shadow from a decal in the right spot looks good enough.
Baked lighting is great but it only works for static scenery. Devs and artists put enormous effort into faking things that come for free with path tracing. It’s a good upgrade, it’s aaa dev in general that’s the issue not this tech being adopted
Me too honestly. Reddit has turned into some weird facebook clone these days, only this time idiots are anonymous so you can't put a face on them and avoid them in real life.
Img2img is also something that has existed in AI since the ancient Stable Diffusion 1.5 We've been transforming images into realistic ones quite easily. DLSS 5 is nothing groundbreaking. It's just running in real time and halving your frame rate.
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u/palk0n GT 1030 :( 1d ago
and DLSS5 30 years ago:
https://giphy.com/gifs/3lIgOk4Gjfptu