Game technology - Ain't it great! Celebrating gaming technology

Shifty Geezer said:
Okay, Portal 1 then for seeing through cascaded portals and warped spacial coordinates. I wouldn't say Narbaculare drop because, firstly, I'd never heard of it :)p), and secondly that's basically a prototype from the same people created as a university project, so it's effectively the same technology from the same people getting the same credit.
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3D Realms demoed dynamic portals (Prey) in 1997.
 
L. Scofield said:
I don't think he meant tesselation per se, but something more abstract, like a more advanced LOD system for particles with benefits akin to those that tesselation gives for geometry.
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Yes, thats more along the lines of what i meant.
Say you have a big lake rendered with full physics+particles, the areas where no one is interacting with the lake could be rendered down to a small amounf of particles, while the areas where there is interactivity like a player jumping in the lake or shooting at it automaticaly scale up the resolution of the particles to have a more realistic denser effect going on.
I guess it would be like a dynamic LOD system for particles heh kinda how tesselation
seems like its not possible though o_O
 
ct03 said:
I have to post one of my all-time favorite games. It's hard to believe that this came out in summer 1999, 12 years ago.

Combining voxel based landscapes with polygonal models, realtime shadows, depth of field and realistic water reflections, Outcast looked spectacular, and I think it's a beautfiul game to this very day. What an achievement.
outcast-18orf.jpg


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I sooo, totally, agree. I think Outcast would still rank as my overall nr.1 game so far. When I started playing it, the softness/organic feeling of the environment, all the smooth hills, unflat surfaces and OMG that water and its reflections, it was just out of this world.

Everything was not good of course, you had to disregard the low res textures on the characters and stuff and I my self played it on a 14" screen so I missed a lot of the imperfections but still, it was for sure an achievement.

That it had an amazing music score and that the gameplay was really really good of course did help a lot as well. There where ton of missions and you did not feel like a fetchboy or something when completing them.

Did't know there was a hires patch for it, should give it a try...
 
homerdog said:
Have you seen Infinity?
http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infinity/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12&Itemid=33

Procedurally generated universe including planetary surfaces. Something I found interesting, they aren't able to generate rivers on planet surfaces because rivers have to flow from high ground to low, and the algorithm (obviously) has no information about geography that hasn't been generated.
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Looks very impressive.
Theoretically you can generate rivers on a separate process, can't you?
Just get the planetary surface generated procedurally, and then have some river "seeds". From there you can simulate where the flow should go in real time (a la From Dust).
This can be CPU heavy in conjunction with a procedurally generating world, but it should be possible.
 
"From Dust" seems more like a next-gen Populous rather than anything close to what Chahi did before (he was in cryogenic sleep for 10+ years?)
 
I was most impressed with R* games this gen,especially how natural their night/day cycles look and feel.Always thought that GTA IV and RDR were just packed with technology and features, and their "lifelike" feel was something that I never experienced in any other game this gen.It probably has to go down with the physics and animations of those games because they are just top notch.Car driving physics are also something that turn me of in other games after playing GTA IV because they feel like driving a cartoon box instead of that weighty feeling of cars in GTA IV.

Oh here are DF timelapse videos :cool:

GTA IV timelapse

RDR timelaps
 
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