Gaming

I still remember the first time a character's feet lined up when they walked up stairs. Couldn't believe it lol. I wish I could remember what game it was but it was SO long ago. I do remember later being similarly impressed by MGS2 stairs

You know everyone was scanning your comment hard to see if you made any grammar mistakes.

I have never in my life seen someone refer to CRT TVs as crtvs and it's really fucking with my head lmao

Emulators have filters for that, though.

Btw, is there something similiar for wine? Not vkbasalt, because dxvk can create issues with too big address space in older games.

I had Quake running with software 3D, got a 3DFX board and patched Quake to run with hardware 3D and the results just blew my mind...

Hah I get that but it was for half life 1 and I thought the graphics were amazing. Rainbow 6 rogue spear was my first PC game and I thought that was the pinacle of graphics... fuck I'm old.

Man for me it was playing Halo CE on the original Xbox, you could see the individual blades of glass on the ground texture! I was absolutely blown away haha

Honestly, a good CRT shader is a real game changer for emulation. Many emulators have the ability to add a mesh grid over the top of the image, but this is just about the worst way to try to emulate a CRT; It doesn’t actually emulate CRT pixels, and the black grid laid on top of everything simply reduces the overall image brightness.

For an example of a good CRT shader, consider looking into CRT Royale. The benefit to a shader is that it’s actually running each frame through a calculation before it reaches your screen. So it is actually able to emulate a CRT properly. Shaders can actually emulate the individual red/green/blue pixels of CRTs, emulate the bloom around white text, emulate the smearing that occurs with large color differences, etc… It really does make old games much more pleasant to look at.

We hit diminishing returns a while ago. It will be much harder to find improvements, both in terms of techniques and computation.

Consider that there is ten years between Atari Pitfall and Wolfenstein 3D, ten years between that and Metroid Prime, and ten years between that and Mass Effect 3, and then about ten years between that and now. There's definitely improvement between all those, but once past Metroid Prime, it becomes far less obvious.

We've hit the point where artistic style is more important than taking advantage of every clock cycle of the GPU.

This is even earlier, the 80s, but I remember getting a not especially good game called The Halley Project for my Apple II, but I would load the game over and over again because the intro had a song with real vocals and guitar, something basically unheard of on an Apple II, or virtually any other computer at the time.

So I loaded it. Over and over.

And this is no different.

And even then it was amazing. Honestly, some games of the era just never lost relevancy, and I play a few myself to this day.

(Picture - Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, 2003, the best lightsaber fighting game of all times)

Curious to hear more about your stance on view distance because you felt it needed to be mentioned twice.

I can't imagine anything about increased potential being inherently bad in an of itself, but it does present more opportunities for level designers to fall short by under-utilizing the spaces.

There is a level of charm that came from the compromise forced by technical limitations which pushed a lot of detail into sky boxes and other 2D workarounds to simulate a 3D space. Even so, it was always frustrating when you became aware that those details would only ever be unavailable to explore up close.

TBF it hasn't gotten much better than that in the 22 years since. Beowolf was cool, though.

Some did and some didn't. I'm pretty salty as the FF7 remake because, to me, it feels like it's missing the heart of the original game. And the chocobo shit which I loved. I just wish they'd stop cheapening things when they remade them ffs. They just make them look nice and it feels like they put no other effort into it. Which is idiotic because they already have the whole game mapped out. Just remake it how it fucking was goddammit >:(

Meanwhile, BG3, the new Spiderman games, and the new Zelda games were (to me) fantastic. The perfect mixes of gorgeous graphics and actually solid gameplay that felt like they had some love and soul put into them.

So it's a mixed bag and at the end of the day pretty graphics can't trick people into liking games that should have been better. We complain about Skyrim being ported all over the damn place but at least they don't drop half the original content every time. That's such a sad low bar but there it is.

PS2 graphics were pretty on point. Upscale to a modern resolution, many of them still look decent now.

Xbox 360 era we got a lot of normal maps added (so models looked a lot more complex than they were).

PS4 added physically based rendering (ability to make parts of models look shiny without needing to separate them).

And the new shit is ray tracing, which PS5 isn't really powerful enough to do, but honestly neither are most affordable PCs. We get nicer lighting at least, but we'll still be on the old render paths for a while yet.

You still get improvements over time, but nothing is really going to compare to PS1 to PS2.

They looked better than in HD, but no one in their right mind thought that was peak performance. It was just better than anything we'd seen so far.

That's because it's actually an N64 screenshot, which was more powerful than the PS1.

It's Castlevania 64.