Post dev trickery and behind the scene shenanigans in games. Bethesda couldn't make a proper tram ride without it breaking the game or looking decent so they made the tram a "helmet" that the player model "put" on to make it seem like he riding on a tram
Dev trickery/behind the scenes
Joseph Brooks
Other urls found in this thread:
spriters-resource.com
youtu.be
twitter.com
Zachary Lopez
The most common example are flowers that always face the player. Not sure why they feel the need to do this but I guess it helps with resource management or something.
John Barnes
Look at that shit and try to tell me bethesda coders aren't enlightened
Ian Lewis
It's a billboard effect on sprites and at a glance it looks okay.
Source Engine games use VVIS, a program that automatically calculates the visibility of one area from another and it originally came from Quake's code IIRC. It only works with brush-based geometry because there's no easy way to determine visibility with a mesh-based system, the leaves have to be placed manually.
Jaxson Morris
Ars Technia has a lot of videos about stuff like this. I recall Crash Bandicoot did some really neat stuff on PS1
Adam Watson
Think about a flower represented as a 3D object made out of polygons. To do it justice, you would need at least a hundred or so to represent the proper shape, and thousands to make it look really detailed. Now imagine you have to have hundreds of these flowers scattered around as small scene detail geometry. It would nuke your performance.
Instead they paint a flower in a 2D texture (think MS Paint) and slap that on a flat polygon. This rectangular plane always faces you (the camera) so it doesn't appear flat, but this means that if you pay attention you'll notice it rotating to stay facing you. Most casual retards would never notice this so that's why it's still done to this day.
This is just one example of the hacks and tricks we still have to use to this day with our insanely powerful hardware to keep framerates from turning into a slideshow. Pretty shitty huh?
Liam Baker
Bullshit. Instead of spending ages on the tram they just slapped that stupid hat together and it worked perfectly fine. It's called being efficient.
Colton Johnson
All character dialogue in Half-Life 2 comes from character entities so in the room before highway 17, Alyx is actually in the map but the TV image is just an animation.
There is a functional mirror in TF2's source engine but it doesn't render the skybox or your character if you're in first person.
Bentley Thomas
Can't wait to see how they make the flying ships in Starfield.
Owen Diaz
similar shit for Darktide trailer
>"We had a similar problem with the train model at the start and in the tunnel."
>"So I remembered the FO3 hack"
>"Thing is it actually makes sense from a resource perspective, more rigs = more resources. You save some processing power by just attaching it to a rig that's already loaded into memory."
Justin Rivera
Alexander White
Lincoln Fisher
yandev's toothbrush strikes again
Charles Turner
kek
Aaron Campbell
kinda fits with the game's humor
Jaxon Rogers
I heard somewhere that the best scenario for game development is when the artists and the programmers are both mad at eachother, this perfectly illustrates that.
Austin Bennett
To save on resources all NSMBU enemies in Super Mario Maker are actually sprites, which is why they don't dance to the "bah"s.
Carson Rogers
Just make them sunflowers and say that you are the sun.
Josiah Johnson
in San Andreas the planes would kamikaze directly into the player sometimes due to a bug, the devs thought it was funny so they left it in as a feature, that's why sometimes they'll kamikaze into you and sometimes you'll be walking down the street and see a plane do 9/11 near you
Adam Lee
mario64 "mirror" is actually a second mario that moves with inverted controls.
Many other games used that trick back in the day, and it's why you had working mirrors in small toilets places, but not in the glasses on biggger buildings
Brody Nguyen
I think Cubemapping is a neat trickery to create reflections on objects and the environment.
Aaron Long
Didn't Bethesda reset the xbox constantly to refresh it's RAM for Morrowind?
Camden Barnes
haven't kept up with it for a long time, what's up with the toothbrush
don't tell me he used a toothbrush model with polys for every single bristle
Dominic Lopez
yep, the console actually got turned off for loading screens for a split second
Josiah Campbell
Does anyone has a link to that site that used to collect this kind of developer bullshit like Chris Roberts hacking DOS4GW to delete an error message or the Oblivion conversation system being originally a bug?
Austin Walker
ok we won't tell
Adam Lewis
This is what happens when you rip all the models off CGtrader.com with no thought as to poly counts or artistic cohesion.
Caleb Rivera
fucking christ lmao
John Jackson
Fallout related, in NV the ending "cutscene" was actually your character in front of a projection screen watching it, and behind the screen there's a character that's actually the narrator.
youtu.be
Carson Cruz
Mirror reflections in older games are just a copy of the room backwards with a character model clone of the player running around in them. Kinda prefer this to RTX if I'm being honest with you. Runs on toasters and even looks better.
Also, as someone who's worked in map SDKs (won't say for what), Triggerboxes are fucking magic and the closest thing to technomancy that exists outside of the code itself that runs the map builder SDK; If you understand how magic tricks work on a fundamental level they will let you do shit with an engine that it's not designed to do, for example, say your engine doesn't have a proper audio fade out function, as in you can't have an audio file be loud then gradually fade in volume while the player is standing still, you can have a triggerbox the player walks through that triggers the movement of a mesh or object out of the player's sight that pushes said mesh/object/entity through a bunch of other triggerboxes that each lower the volume parameter by a percentage for every one hit till it hits 0 volume, and get the same effect. Is this a pain in the ass? Yes. Is it optimized? Probably not and I would fix this if it was possible. Did it feel fucking amazing to overcome as an engine limitation? Absolutely.
Oh, and you can make moving clouds by parenting a texture far away from a rotating item/mesh somewhere on your map.
Luke Watson
In the original Wing commander if you clicked on exit the game actually crashed, they didn't know how to fix the problem so they just changed the crash report message to "Thank you for playing Wing Commander!"
Hunter Diaz
Evan Baker
very cute post
Aaron Phillips
>don't tell me he used a toothbrush model with polys for every single bristle
:^)
Oliver Rogers
>Did it feel fucking amazing to overcome as an engine limitation? Absolutely.
Life with the Source Engine
Luke Hughes
The engine I was working with in the example was source, actually
Lucas Johnson
the reason many unity game collision sucks is because from scratch, the tutorial praise the use of "one frame projectiles" to create hitboxes, and while it's enough for simple, blocky artstyles, it just doesn't feel right for more detailed models and complex gameplay loops