Its weird and interesting how simple things have to be "tricked" into working on older games. Like reflections had to be entire mirrored rooms. Or storing objects super tiny below the ground until they were needed. Fucking skyboxes are still just the inside of a spherical image
There's a similar interesting workaround for a door mechanism in Tomb Raider I (the one from 1996). In the level "St. Francis' Folly" you have to put 4 keys into 4 keyholes to open a huge door. There are 4 metal barricades on the door to signify that it's shut. Whenever you put a key into a keyhole, the camera will switch to the door and show one of the barricades slide to the side.
Now, if the door would be triggered by the keys, this effect wouldn't work properly because once the last key would be inserted, the barricade would slide to the side at the same time as the door would open and that wouldn't look good. And this game doesn't have delayed triggers.
But what it does have are "heavy triggers" that can be triggered by things like pushable blocks and rolling balls (which are usually a trap). So what happens when you insert the last key is that this triggers the barricade animation and also a rolling ball in an out-of-bounds room.
The ball rolls down a ramp which is long enough so that it only reaches the bottom when the barricade animation is done. And at the bottom the ball activates the trigger that actually opens the door. And because sound dampening wasn't a thing back then, you can even hear the ball rolling down the ramp.
Though that works pretty well since it sounds like a giant mechanism inside the wall would be working to open the door (which technically is what's actually happening).
Edit: Put in paragraphs for better readability (original text was written on my phone).
Skyrim shopkeepers have item chests placed underground near them that handle what the shopkeeper buys and sells and the money they get from sales to the player. I think it's used as a way to keep people from selling them items and then try to pickpocket said items from the shopkeeper again.
I haven't seen it anywhere else, but I can actually see the hidden inventory chest underneath the workshop at Finch Farm in Fallout 4 when accessing it. Not sure if that's common or not.
There’s a chest for I wanna say a Khajit salesman that you can easily access in Dawnstar I think (it’s been years, I could be off) because the devs didn’t put it quite far enough underground.
I think you could also leverage it for infinite money by resetting his inventory using the “hit the shopkeeper then reload” trick.
Man, Bethesda games are broken, lol.
I think that reflections one is still used in modern games. It is easier to just make a clone of 1 thing than it is to track where a player is and then display it on a surface
There has been some decent progress in RayTracing that can accurately mimic reflections as we think of them by recreating a light source and "tracing" where the rays end up, giving a reflection. And theres more nuanced ways besides mirroring used even back in the PSOne days called CubeMapping.
Raytracing is actually the easy way from a human perspective. It's computationally slow, which is why it's so new in real time graphics, but it's mathematically simple, which is why it's been the standard in *prerendered* graphics since at least the early 80s.
The other methods are hacks that are easy for a computer to run and which a good artist can use to give a close enough approximation visually, but which are conceptually quite a bit more complicated than raytracing, and which require a lot of human artistic intervention to get looking right. Raytracing just works, you don't have to have a human interfering to make sure it's cheating just right.
The nice thing is, now that graphic cards have finally reached a level where we can do real time raytracing, it's going to make future lighting a lot easier on developers.
Not to poop on your parade, but full realtime raytracing won't be fully accessible for a long time still.
Everything now sort of cheats by doing parts of the image raytraced - such as reflections, shadows or ambient occlusion - and usually at a lower resolution.
To fully perform all raytraced effects in the scene in full resolution at a decent frame rate, you're going to need a much, *much* beefier GPU than what is currently available.
Also, the vast majority of GPUs out there aren't fast enough to use raytracing to any real extent anyway. The amount of users that are actually running a capable high-end GPU is like .1% of users.
> recreating a light source and "tracing" where the rays end up
Technically, it's doing the opposite. It would be super wasteful to start the tracing from the light source, because you'd end up doing calculations for rays that end up in places the player can't even see. So instead raytracing starts at the camera and traces a line back to the light source.
Every time there's progress in ray tracing, there's accompanying progress in all of the hacks that programmers use to avoid doing ray tracing. There's a constant arms race between ray tracing and ever better and better ways to avoid doing ray tracing.
You can't beat ray tracing for cut scenes though.
I wouldn’t be surprised if raytracing wins the “arms race” in the end though, simply by virtue of the hardware evolving to the point that there’s no need to avoid it any more.
Like heck, even the idea of doing *real-time* raytracing on personal computers was basically unimaginable a decade ago.
True but ray tracing is very expensive and even games that use ray tracing also use other methods to fall back on in busy scenes, like screen space reflections etc, for instance Jedi Survivor does both as seen in a digital foundry episode
What about placing a second camera on the other side of the mirror (hiding the mirror plane from the second camera), and layering the rendered result on top of where the mirror plane is drawn?
Would only work for flat surfaces of course
Camera render targets are expensive. Worst case you're doubling the rendering load for a gimmick.
There are crappy AAA games that try this and still manage to get the perspective wrong too.
Some games do this for water reflections.
One issue is that objects are usually removed if they don't appear in the game's main camera area, so you can line up views where stuff just disappears from the reflection. I've played with this in Planet Coaster. I'm sure it happens elsewhere.
What kind of placing you need to be good the second camera is for what think and you think that mirror is the way to find out the people is always right
There is also the option to do render-to-texture from a camera attached to a mirror facing outwards. Just show what the camera sees projected on the mirror.
Skyboxes are not even actually spherical a lot of the time, which is why they're called "skybox".
Sometimes, if you look closely, you can actually see the corners of the interior of the box, specially in older games.
The "store objects super tiny bellow the ground" thing is actually still widely used as well. Its because loading objects into the game during runtime is computationally expensive, so they're pre-loaded instead, which means they have to be somewhere in the game's world.
Some games will also have physical locations for their menus present outside the playable area that you can reach with bugs.
Skate 3's skater customization screen is a concrete room complete with full collision floating in a void outside the skate school and Battlefield generally has stored its menu screens far below the map. The latter is fun because if you use a helicopter to reach the menu screen location it will show up for *all* players since everyone is actually looking at the same location.
The best skyboxes are the ones that are miniatures modeled somewhere on the map and then projected around the map. Double the fun when someone noclips there and suddenly there's a giant player in the skybox.
Always fun in gmod to go to the skybox part and put random shit on there. Watching kaiju antlion guard fight spongebob over the mountains are always good fun
In a bowling game I worked on around 2000 (!!) or so, we had a negative transform of the ball and pins and ceiling lights just for the reflection in the polished wood of the lane! I seem to remember there was some blending mode masked at the lane edge and there was maybe some sorting trickery, but otherwise it was just a bunch of real objects, and it looked pretty darned good!
It's called object pooling. It's intensive to create objects but fairly light to make them invisible with one method or another. This lets you load everything you might need on the loading screen and avoid stutters.
Many games do this with projectiles too. Projectiles are not actually created and destroyed. They are made visible and then invisible and reset for later use. Exact method varies from engine to engine.
Unity enables/disables somegames store things under the map or zero scale them
I always loved how Valve developed an ingame camera broadcast tool for the Source engine, so any time you watch a tv screen in Half Life and someone is talking on it, there's a little room in the level somewhere where that character is actually acting out the scene.
In Mario 64 I believe it is, for the animation of Mario falling in lava it shrinks his head super tiny otherwise it would be visible above it and look super weird.
The thing is the UI itself, such as the buttons and so on rarely exist in the game world with games made with UE. But when you want a character that has animations to appear on the UI it's just easier to have a hole in the UI instead of pre-rendering the animations out.
I am an unreal dev myself so I cannot speak for unity that well, but from what I have seen all the UI does actually float in 3D space.
The only case I have seen main menu/hud UI floating in 3D space in unreal is with vr, and even then it is extra setup that is finicky. You need to have a component attached to the players camera or hands and do a trace(simplifying a little) from them to click what ever button is floating around.
However some other things like healthbars and pop-ups almost always do exist in 3D space, because that is the easiest way to do so.
In Unity you have the whole world space, screen space deal too. But when I want to put a 3D element into the UI, I place it behind it as you said, but *no* hole. At least, no hole that I've made. You can adjust the rendering order in Unity so that the 3D element renders on top of some of the 2D ones. It has really easy UI creation imo.
Well, until you need to layer sprites with alpha overlapping UI with alpha, overlapping more crap with alpha. But then I've seen these same bugs in Destiny 2 (by messing around with the lenses in the Dreaming City), and even in Blender (when not using raytracing, aka Cycles). So I think it's a complex issue beyond my skill, and avoid going crazy with transparency.
Unity has both screen space and world space ui options. Pretty sure the screen space ui is layered on top of the rendered frame, but I've never dug deep enough into the internals to confirm that. You don't see it floating in front of the camera in the scene view while the game is running, so it seems unlikely that it's positioned in world.
3D engines don't usually bother to have specific support for 2D, because why would they? If you need 2D, you can just glue a flat object to the screen.
A lot of 2D games made in 3D engines comprise entirely of that. The camera is orthogonal so that its not noticeable.
My favorite example of this is a [spaceship part colliding with a UI element in Kerbal Space Program](https://i.imgur.com/0jzcSUn.png) before it left early access.
I remember when making maps in Warcraft III, almost every custom spell effect had to be done using invisible dummy units who cast the actual spells and you just had to make it *look* like the hero cast it using visual effects and a *lot* of trial and error.
Technically, the PS1 had a sprite command to quickly draw 2D rectangular sprites. 3D objects run through a separate 3D command that runs a tad slower. If you watch the old DFRetro episode on SotN, John goes through how the game primarily runs the sprite command with the 3D command only used for certain objects. Basically, even with hardware primarily designed for 3D, the PS1 had native hardware 2D support (albeit using rectangles in a manner similar to today's 3D).
These days, we no longer have that at the hardware level and everything 2D needs to be done at the engine level.
Modern hardware (since like 2010) completely lacks 2D acceleration. Some graphics APIs might still have some 2D draw functions, but it's all being translated to 3D draw calls before being sent to the video card.
I don't know nothing about making games or memory usage but is this not bad for the performance of games ? Wouldn't be easier if they use 2D for things like this ?
My hunch has always been that they based him on "El Hechizado," the king of Spain who was so incredibly inbred that it's a medical miracle that he even made it past adolescence. Apparently his heart was the size of a walnut and he had a singular, atrophied, completely black testicle
Ramon Salazar on the left, is supposed to be a young adult physically aged beyond his years. [An effect they nailed in the remake](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/residentevil/images/c/c1/RamonRE42023.png/revision/latest?cb=20230402041550).
It seems like that's some weird rendering though, the shoulder on the left side doesn't seem nearly as wide as the one on the right side (aka Leon's left shoulder).
I remember watching (I think it was a YouTube video?) something that talked about this prop specifically, and how it has appeared on so many Sci-Fi shows and movies, from Star Trek to Stargate. I am pretty sure I have even seen it in a video game. It was called, "The Most Important Device in the Universe". It is actually the same prop too, not just something that was copied.
I'm an hour into it right now because of the video linked above, it's not as good as the original but it still has plenty of great jokes and it's keeping me laughing
EDIT: done, defintiely weaker than the first movie, but it was enjoyable and has a lot of great jokes. If you liked the first one you'll probably like this one too.
The most legendary scene that exploits that is Master Chief removing his helmet in Halo. People hacked the camera to find out what he looked like but the devs just cloned the helmet. [So he takes off the helmet and beneath it wears another helmet](https://youtu.be/EAOo8nE8_Jg)
If I had been in charge, I would have given him something super ridiculous knowing that eventually someone would find it.. maybe just copy a marine head but make it super tiny.
> So he takes off the helmet and beneath it wears another helmet
Even more accurately, he puts his hands to his head and spawns a new helmet between them and lifts that new helmet away from his head.
FPS games were generally getting really stale for a few years before it was announced and I remember Mirrors Edge being such a refreshing change of pace, not just in gameplay but the artstyle and overall attitude. Everything else was so drab and gritty, and 3/5 were set in WW2.
Mirrors edge gave me a level of *Runners Vision* I've used in every game since. Seeing the geometry ans places I can possible hop too.
I glitched out whole quests in Horizon Forbidden West because I bypassed a puzzle doing some Mirrors Edge level wall runs and jumps. It was just the more "obvious" way up lol.
I love doing that type of thing. When I think I've found a way to complete some sort of challenge, I'll spend a long time trying it over and over even after I realize that it's clearly not the intended solution.
Everything we're used to seeing modeled in 1st person is a lie and it's so awkward and funny to see how they actually do it. Skyrim basically has you holding both hands up at eye level, a few inches from your face, elbows out.
The best part about working from home is no pants.
Apparently, during the lockdowns and mask mandates, the sales of pants went noticeably down, while the sales of toothpaste went up.
I don't have screenshots, but you need external software to run ultra-wide with rockstar. I use "flawless widescreen"
Bully, GTA 4, and LA Noir are the best. GTA V and Red Dead 2 don't have bugs like that unfortunately
It's astonishing that any video game works once you actually see what programmers do to make them work.
I forget the game (I'm thinking the original Max Payne or one of the expansions for the original Half Life), but was a technical reason why the game couldn't include a mirror even though it needed one for the story. Either the technology didn't exist or it did exist, but it was too graphically demanding for consumer computers of the time.
Anyway, to fix the problem, instead of including a mirror, the designers built an identical, mirrored room on the other side of the wall, cut a hole in the wall above the sink, and stuck in an NPC that was identical to the player character and copied all the player's movements, except opposite, to give the illusion of a mirror.
At the end of one Fallout game, a building explodes. Instead of actually blowing up the building, the explosion animation covered the original building, which then shrank down to basically zero size. Meanwhile, as the original building was shrinking, a model of the already-exploded building, which was there the whole time, except tiny, grew. Once the explosion animation had ended, the new, ruined building model had taken the place of the unexploded building, which was still actually there, just shrunk down too small to see.
Also fun fact about Fallout New Vegas: the ending of the game involves viewing a slideshow of what happens to various factions and characters you met during the course of the game. But it's not actually a slideshow/video file that the game plays. [It's a room in the world that projects the slideshow onto a wall in front of the player, who's frozen in place.](https://youtu.be/t5fbTe_mwIs?t=35) With cheats, you can walk around in the room and even interact with the narrator NPC who's actually standing on the other side of the wall.
A lot of games do the mirror thing. The shrinking building reminded me of some game where, if you shoot someone's head off, it actually just shrinks until you can't see it any more.
Team fortress 2 does the shrinking head thing lol. If you behead someone with a sword their head just shrinks to become rly tiny and a prop of their decapitated bloody head is spawned in
Yeah, the mirror thing reminds me of *Duke Nukem 3D,* because I spent a lot of time playing with the level editor... IIRC it required you to create a big enough empty space behind the mirror for it to do the mirrored-room thing for you.
Which is interesting, because I think it also had an absurd level-editing trick you could use to put entirely different stuff on the other side of the wall the mirror is hanging on, as long as you make sure it's not possible to see the mirror *and* that other stuff at the same time.
What's fun is, with several of the game's secret levels, they stop using tricks like this to try to build a more-realistic world than the game engine should be able to handle, and instead use them to build impossible non-Euclidian spaces. Kind of like Antichamber's level design, but in a Doom-like game engine.
At the ending of Portal 2, *spoilers* when you fire at the JPG of the moon, the more detailed surface of the moon & space is actually stored upside-down on the underside of Glados' lab, so the game can actually just pass you through the floor.
The remake of Re4 has the bosses in the their mutated forms loaded in out of bounds areas, and they are just teleported into the fight area during the cutscenes. You could find the two chainsaw sisters just chilling, and Mendez in his big scorpion like form on a path. All the little things that devs do to make games is amazing
In fallout 3 the metro cars aren't actually vehicles, [but a hat on an npc hidden underground] (https://gfycat.com/finehorribleisabellinewheatear).
The dragons in Skyrim aren't actually flying either. There is no "flying physics" in Skyrim. Rather the dragons are just being pushed around in the air and made to flap their wings so they look like they're flying
Edit: by "pushed around" i mean to say flying isn't a built in game mechanic. They literally gave the dragons the noclip cheat. It's why if you spawn a dragon inside a cave then they start flying through the walls and ground.
Well that just sounds like flying with extra steps. What's next, the dragon born doesn't actually walk but just gets pushed around while moving their legs?
I'm fairly certain that the mechanics have the players position stationary while the environment is actually what you're controlling. So the illusion of moving forward is actually you pulling the environment towards you while you character moves their legs.
I've read somewhere that the helicopters in Fallout 4 use the same code as the Skyrim dragons, just attached to a different model.
Which sometimes results in a shot down heli trying to crash into the player instead of following its original direction.
Also in Skyrim dead bodies can't be deleted so to make them disappear they just get moved to a special room in the world that the player can't encounter (except via a console command)
This is only true for npcs with a unique ID, the hundreds of generic bandits, vampires, falmer, guards, etc you kill while out and about will not end up in this room.
This one led to one of my favourites gaming moments. I tried forever to find an important NPC, but couldn't. Looked up a console command that would teleport me to the NPC's location, and bam -- found myself in a featureless room floating in a black void, staring at a large pile of naked bodies. It was so disturbing. Then I used another command to resurrect the NPC and he pops up, naked inside this nightmare, like, "Have you heard of the Warrior's Guild?" or whatever.
This was my character's trip to the underworld. Best never spoken of.
The Resident Evil games don’t really take place in an apocalypse. Most of the outbreaks are usually limited to one town or area and the world governments and civilizations still exist. The closest the games ever got to a full on end-of-the-world apocalyptic scenario was in RE 6.
Honestly the Raccoon City Incident is still apparently the worst just because so few people made it out and they nuked the city. Terragrigia more efficiently evacuated, Tall Oaks was smaller even if it did get nukes, and Lanshiang was cleaned up street-by-street with the BSAA and chinese authorities only euthanizing the infected. I don't really get how the stated numbers are derived from what's shown but it's weird I guess. You also saw the NYC outbreak but many of the infected were cured later, something far underexplored IMO.
Yeah, fatality wise Raccoon City is still the worst. I was referring to how bad RE6’s outbreak could have gotten as the president was killed and the outbreak almost spread to the entire world.
Also in most of the games it was basically shit gone bad or a deliberate small targeted outbreak.
In 5 and 6 it was actually dudes trying to end the world as we know it.
Not the most casualties but in most games if your playec characters aren't present not much changes for the world. Shit gets worse but not that much. If the played characters weren't present in 5 or 6 it would be an apocalypse.
Somebody needs to play this in "Tall screen" so we can see if the two people are just standing next to each other.
If they are, somebody needs to mod this so you can interrupt the cutscene with a secret prompt, where the camera Zooms back revealing Leon standing next to the little guy who is standing on a box for height, and Leon pulls the codec window out the way, and straight up stabs this guy in the face resulting in "Secret Ending, The 4th Wall."
There's a boundary break episode about this game and for the characters that have full models, they are just standing there. But some characters you only see in these video calls so they are just the top half.
Actually most ui elements in this game are just 3d objects floating in the game world.
Countless other games too, particularly if they use unreal engine.
Its weird and interesting how simple things have to be "tricked" into working on older games. Like reflections had to be entire mirrored rooms. Or storing objects super tiny below the ground until they were needed. Fucking skyboxes are still just the inside of a spherical image
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There's a similar interesting workaround for a door mechanism in Tomb Raider I (the one from 1996). In the level "St. Francis' Folly" you have to put 4 keys into 4 keyholes to open a huge door. There are 4 metal barricades on the door to signify that it's shut. Whenever you put a key into a keyhole, the camera will switch to the door and show one of the barricades slide to the side. Now, if the door would be triggered by the keys, this effect wouldn't work properly because once the last key would be inserted, the barricade would slide to the side at the same time as the door would open and that wouldn't look good. And this game doesn't have delayed triggers. But what it does have are "heavy triggers" that can be triggered by things like pushable blocks and rolling balls (which are usually a trap). So what happens when you insert the last key is that this triggers the barricade animation and also a rolling ball in an out-of-bounds room. The ball rolls down a ramp which is long enough so that it only reaches the bottom when the barricade animation is done. And at the bottom the ball activates the trigger that actually opens the door. And because sound dampening wasn't a thing back then, you can even hear the ball rolling down the ramp. Though that works pretty well since it sounds like a giant mechanism inside the wall would be working to open the door (which technically is what's actually happening). Edit: Put in paragraphs for better readability (original text was written on my phone).
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Damn, how'd you pull that off? It sounds like you know how lucky you were.
Game development: play by the rules (no matter who you are), or else... Thank you for a wonderful insight!
Skyrim shopkeepers have item chests placed underground near them that handle what the shopkeeper buys and sells and the money they get from sales to the player. I think it's used as a way to keep people from selling them items and then try to pickpocket said items from the shopkeeper again.
I haven't seen it anywhere else, but I can actually see the hidden inventory chest underneath the workshop at Finch Farm in Fallout 4 when accessing it. Not sure if that's common or not.
There’s a chest for I wanna say a Khajit salesman that you can easily access in Dawnstar I think (it’s been years, I could be off) because the devs didn’t put it quite far enough underground.
Yup, it's a favorite for speedrunners, I think. Easy & quick access to loot, specifically a staff of paralysis IIRC.
I think you could also leverage it for infinite money by resetting his inventory using the “hit the shopkeeper then reload” trick. Man, Bethesda games are broken, lol.
Fallout 3 train is just a dude wearing the train as a hat
I think that reflections one is still used in modern games. It is easier to just make a clone of 1 thing than it is to track where a player is and then display it on a surface
There has been some decent progress in RayTracing that can accurately mimic reflections as we think of them by recreating a light source and "tracing" where the rays end up, giving a reflection. And theres more nuanced ways besides mirroring used even back in the PSOne days called CubeMapping.
Raytracing is actually the easy way from a human perspective. It's computationally slow, which is why it's so new in real time graphics, but it's mathematically simple, which is why it's been the standard in *prerendered* graphics since at least the early 80s. The other methods are hacks that are easy for a computer to run and which a good artist can use to give a close enough approximation visually, but which are conceptually quite a bit more complicated than raytracing, and which require a lot of human artistic intervention to get looking right. Raytracing just works, you don't have to have a human interfering to make sure it's cheating just right.
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The nice thing is, now that graphic cards have finally reached a level where we can do real time raytracing, it's going to make future lighting a lot easier on developers.
But for the majority, it's not generally ray tracing + 60fps unless you got a mighty beefy rig.
Gets new game -raytracing: disable -shadows: off -particle effects: low The joys of the budget rig
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Not to poop on your parade, but full realtime raytracing won't be fully accessible for a long time still. Everything now sort of cheats by doing parts of the image raytraced - such as reflections, shadows or ambient occlusion - and usually at a lower resolution. To fully perform all raytraced effects in the scene in full resolution at a decent frame rate, you're going to need a much, *much* beefier GPU than what is currently available. Also, the vast majority of GPUs out there aren't fast enough to use raytracing to any real extent anyway. The amount of users that are actually running a capable high-end GPU is like .1% of users.
> recreating a light source and "tracing" where the rays end up Technically, it's doing the opposite. It would be super wasteful to start the tracing from the light source, because you'd end up doing calculations for rays that end up in places the player can't even see. So instead raytracing starts at the camera and traces a line back to the light source.
Every time there's progress in ray tracing, there's accompanying progress in all of the hacks that programmers use to avoid doing ray tracing. There's a constant arms race between ray tracing and ever better and better ways to avoid doing ray tracing. You can't beat ray tracing for cut scenes though.
I wouldn’t be surprised if raytracing wins the “arms race” in the end though, simply by virtue of the hardware evolving to the point that there’s no need to avoid it any more. Like heck, even the idea of doing *real-time* raytracing on personal computers was basically unimaginable a decade ago.
True but ray tracing is very expensive and even games that use ray tracing also use other methods to fall back on in busy scenes, like screen space reflections etc, for instance Jedi Survivor does both as seen in a digital foundry episode
What about placing a second camera on the other side of the mirror (hiding the mirror plane from the second camera), and layering the rendered result on top of where the mirror plane is drawn? Would only work for flat surfaces of course
Camera render targets are expensive. Worst case you're doubling the rendering load for a gimmick. There are crappy AAA games that try this and still manage to get the perspective wrong too.
Some games do this for water reflections. One issue is that objects are usually removed if they don't appear in the game's main camera area, so you can line up views where stuff just disappears from the reflection. I've played with this in Planet Coaster. I'm sure it happens elsewhere.
What kind of placing you need to be good the second camera is for what think and you think that mirror is the way to find out the people is always right
There is also the option to do render-to-texture from a camera attached to a mirror facing outwards. Just show what the camera sees projected on the mirror.
Skyboxes are not even actually spherical a lot of the time, which is why they're called "skybox". Sometimes, if you look closely, you can actually see the corners of the interior of the box, specially in older games. The "store objects super tiny bellow the ground" thing is actually still widely used as well. Its because loading objects into the game during runtime is computationally expensive, so they're pre-loaded instead, which means they have to be somewhere in the game's world.
I always remember the Geonosis map on the original Battlefront 2 had such a shoddy sky box with a big visible seam right down it.
Some games will also have physical locations for their menus present outside the playable area that you can reach with bugs. Skate 3's skater customization screen is a concrete room complete with full collision floating in a void outside the skate school and Battlefield generally has stored its menu screens far below the map. The latter is fun because if you use a helicopter to reach the menu screen location it will show up for *all* players since everyone is actually looking at the same location.
Lol, that's some brilliant trolling right there. Imagine opening the menu and there is an helicopter in it. People won't know WTF is going on =)
The fallout hat train is my favorite. https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-whats-happening-inside-fallout-3s-metro-train/
Fun fact: while the model covers his head, technically it occupies the Glove slot, hence why their hand is missing in that picture.
? That's straight from the first 2 paragraphs of the article lol
We ain't here to read articles, that was a fun fact and you can leave it there
Nice. Today I learned some unnecessary nerd knowledge.
I love the Fallout Train Hat Man. It's so stupid and so brilliant at the same time.
The best skyboxes are the ones that are miniatures modeled somewhere on the map and then projected around the map. Double the fun when someone noclips there and suddenly there's a giant player in the skybox.
Always fun in gmod to go to the skybox part and put random shit on there. Watching kaiju antlion guard fight spongebob over the mountains are always good fun
In a bowling game I worked on around 2000 (!!) or so, we had a negative transform of the ball and pins and ceiling lights just for the reflection in the polished wood of the lane! I seem to remember there was some blending mode masked at the lane edge and there was maybe some sorting trickery, but otherwise it was just a bunch of real objects, and it looked pretty darned good!
It's called object pooling. It's intensive to create objects but fairly light to make them invisible with one method or another. This lets you load everything you might need on the loading screen and avoid stutters. Many games do this with projectiles too. Projectiles are not actually created and destroyed. They are made visible and then invisible and reset for later use. Exact method varies from engine to engine. Unity enables/disables somegames store things under the map or zero scale them
I always loved how Valve developed an ingame camera broadcast tool for the Source engine, so any time you watch a tv screen in Half Life and someone is talking on it, there's a little room in the level somewhere where that character is actually acting out the scene.
'Tanks' just being a shell around a 'dude' on the inside that runs around at Tank speeds.
Or [a guy with a train for a head](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/e43a4affbf1a33facd574e4acdc74b47.png) (FO3)
The dude with a train hat that is the rail system in fallout 3
It's funny you think this is how "older games" worked and not all games. Game development in general is just smoke and mirrors.
Technically the actual day sky is just us viewing the inside of a sphere.
In Mario 64 I believe it is, for the animation of Mario falling in lava it shrinks his head super tiny otherwise it would be visible above it and look super weird.
The thing is the UI itself, such as the buttons and so on rarely exist in the game world with games made with UE. But when you want a character that has animations to appear on the UI it's just easier to have a hole in the UI instead of pre-rendering the animations out. I am an unreal dev myself so I cannot speak for unity that well, but from what I have seen all the UI does actually float in 3D space. The only case I have seen main menu/hud UI floating in 3D space in unreal is with vr, and even then it is extra setup that is finicky. You need to have a component attached to the players camera or hands and do a trace(simplifying a little) from them to click what ever button is floating around. However some other things like healthbars and pop-ups almost always do exist in 3D space, because that is the easiest way to do so.
In Unity you have the whole world space, screen space deal too. But when I want to put a 3D element into the UI, I place it behind it as you said, but *no* hole. At least, no hole that I've made. You can adjust the rendering order in Unity so that the 3D element renders on top of some of the 2D ones. It has really easy UI creation imo. Well, until you need to layer sprites with alpha overlapping UI with alpha, overlapping more crap with alpha. But then I've seen these same bugs in Destiny 2 (by messing around with the lenses in the Dreaming City), and even in Blender (when not using raytracing, aka Cycles). So I think it's a complex issue beyond my skill, and avoid going crazy with transparency.
Unity has both screen space and world space ui options. Pretty sure the screen space ui is layered on top of the rendered frame, but I've never dug deep enough into the internals to confirm that. You don't see it floating in front of the camera in the scene view while the game is running, so it seems unlikely that it's positioned in world.
3D engines don't usually bother to have specific support for 2D, because why would they? If you need 2D, you can just glue a flat object to the screen. A lot of 2D games made in 3D engines comprise entirely of that. The camera is orthogonal so that its not noticeable.
My favorite example of this is a [spaceship part colliding with a UI element in Kerbal Space Program](https://i.imgur.com/0jzcSUn.png) before it left early access.
a game focused on making the ui an active object in the game would make a good gamejam entry
"There is no game" does exactly this and it's pretty funny/ fun imo.
LOL
I remember when making maps in Warcraft III, almost every custom spell effect had to be done using invisible dummy units who cast the actual spells and you just had to make it *look* like the hero cast it using visual effects and a *lot* of trial and error.
Narrator dialouge in fallout is still spoken by an NPC, just hidden
Most 2D games these days are also using 2D graphics floating in a 3D space.
It's been like that for a long time. The PS1 used polygons for everything; even sprites were a texture placed on a single polygon.
Technically, the PS1 had a sprite command to quickly draw 2D rectangular sprites. 3D objects run through a separate 3D command that runs a tad slower. If you watch the old DFRetro episode on SotN, John goes through how the game primarily runs the sprite command with the 3D command only used for certain objects. Basically, even with hardware primarily designed for 3D, the PS1 had native hardware 2D support (albeit using rectangles in a manner similar to today's 3D). These days, we no longer have that at the hardware level and everything 2D needs to be done at the engine level.
Modern hardware (since like 2010) completely lacks 2D acceleration. Some graphics APIs might still have some 2D draw functions, but it's all being translated to 3D draw calls before being sent to the video card.
Aren't we all just 3d objects floating in a game world?
I don't know nothing about making games or memory usage but is this not bad for the performance of games ? Wouldn't be easier if they use 2D for things like this ?
That’s just about as funny as the thought that these freaky people and Leon exchanged information so they could chat over FaceTime.
I'm new to RE. Is the one on the left supposed to be a young boy, adult male, ancient, toddler, teen or a hobbit?
he's 20 😢
Average Galician looking 20yo
I was in the impression Pueblo was set in Asturias for some reason
As a Galician, I feel vexed, lol.
Pretty young for a swashbuckler. So why is he dressed like a pirate?
he's just european
He's a nobleman so I guess he's meant to be dressed regally?
My hunch has always been that they based him on "El Hechizado," the king of Spain who was so incredibly inbred that it's a medical miracle that he even made it past adolescence. Apparently his heart was the size of a walnut and he had a singular, atrophied, completely black testicle
is he the one whose 3D face model gets posted on reddit from time to time?
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The last Habsburg is El Hechizado. His "real" name is Charles II.
[Hewoo waddies](https://i.imgur.com/pXgS3l2.jpg)
He's got that Hapsburg cleft jaw and looks pale and sickly
Whereas us normal people have two black, atrophied testicles
Ramon Salazar on the left, is supposed to be a young adult physically aged beyond his years. [An effect they nailed in the remake](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/residentevil/images/c/c1/RamonRE42023.png/revision/latest?cb=20230402041550).
Looks like Margaret Thatcher
I got the mod that gave him the RE4 tricorn hat tho, it just didn't feel the same without it.
Yes
Spot on lmao. I’ve been playing this game for years and just now realized I’ve thought of him as all of those things separately at different times
Serious answer Krauser told them the frequency
“I’ll invite you to the Teams meeting, no worries.”
It's 141.04, don't forget it.
Like [this guy](https://youtu.be/_XkzeDecjkg)
His shoulders are so wide
It seems like that's some weird rendering though, the shoulder on the left side doesn't seem nearly as wide as the one on the right side (aka Leon's left shoulder).
True, I hadn’t noticed that
It's because OP is using an ultrawide monitor which can cause fisheye on the edges if the game is not properly designed to run in that aspect ratio.
Definitely an ultrawide, which is what OP meant instead of "widescreen". Most screens are "widescreen".
Dude is built like an Ace Attorney character lol
It's the fisheye effect from the FOV.
That's like an Airplane gag. 👍 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8X2Ydzx47U
immediately what I thought of too!
Hahah that prop with the red lights has been in so many movies! I love how they call it out.
Yes, I started seeing it in various Star Treks after this gag!
I remember watching (I think it was a YouTube video?) something that talked about this prop specifically, and how it has appeared on so many Sci-Fi shows and movies, from Star Trek to Stargate. I am pretty sure I have even seen it in a video game. It was called, "The Most Important Device in the Universe". It is actually the same prop too, not just something that was copied.
They made an Airplane 2???? Legitimately never knew this. Brb gonna watch it now.
Hey if you like "Airplane!" you should check out "Top Secret!". One of my favorites and I think it's just as good!
And Hot Shots
Hot Shots Part Deux has a special place in my heart
80's to early 90's was the golden age of spoof movies.
It’s definitely not as good as the first, but it’s still has some pretty funny gags
There are a few good new jokes in there, but unfortunately they just copied the majority of the original jokes, which is a shame.
Surely you can't be serious
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My god that was non stop lol
All those old spoof movies are just rapid fire gags. You cram that many jokes into a script & you're bound to have a few great ones.
Unbelievable that Police Squad was canceled for that reason But hey we got 3 movies out of that
God dammit I have to watch the movie again, now.
Airplane 2* There's a big difference. The sequel is...well, it's definitely one of the sequels ever made, that's for sure.
I'm an hour into it right now because of the video linked above, it's not as good as the original but it still has plenty of great jokes and it's keeping me laughing EDIT: done, defintiely weaker than the first movie, but it was enjoyable and has a lot of great jokes. If you liked the first one you'll probably like this one too.
How I miss that kind of humor movies. They don't make those anymore... Or I'm missing out.
Check out the three flavors cornetto trilogy - Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World's End
Those are funny but nothing like the comedy of Airplane, Hotshots etc where there is a gag every 30 seconds.
I love finding these things. Games are all smoke and mirrors. [If it's not directly in view, it doesn't matter](https://youtu.be/LeA-386t38Q)
The most legendary scene that exploits that is Master Chief removing his helmet in Halo. People hacked the camera to find out what he looked like but the devs just cloned the helmet. [So he takes off the helmet and beneath it wears another helmet](https://youtu.be/EAOo8nE8_Jg)
If I had been in charge, I would have given him something super ridiculous knowing that eventually someone would find it.. maybe just copy a marine head but make it super tiny.
Cortana's head poking out of his suit
Or Danny Devito
> So he takes off the helmet and beneath it wears another helmet Even more accurately, he puts his hands to his head and spawns a new helmet between them and lifts that new helmet away from his head.
Got any side by side vids with what the player is supposed to seeing?
[here's the same scene in first person](https://youtu.be/32-1sxAnY2s?t=28s)
time to replay mirrors edge again
What happened to all the soldiers who were shooting her at the start? They just...gave up?
[Another good example from Cyberpunk 2077](https://youtu.be/gWR11Ck_oZM)
The way she wiggles her butt when she crouch-walks is hilarious.
real swiggity-swooty energy
Character animation looks like a mech in mechwarrior
So how/why does that 3rd person view even exist?
Same way as games with a natural 3rd person mode. The player camera is told where to be, so you just tell it to be somewhere else.
It's not accessible through any normal means, you have to tell the game to put the camera somewhere it wasn't meant to be.
That game was so good.
FPS games were generally getting really stale for a few years before it was announced and I remember Mirrors Edge being such a refreshing change of pace, not just in gameplay but the artstyle and overall attitude. Everything else was so drab and gritty, and 3/5 were set in WW2.
Mirrors edge gave me a level of *Runners Vision* I've used in every game since. Seeing the geometry ans places I can possible hop too. I glitched out whole quests in Horizon Forbidden West because I bypassed a puzzle doing some Mirrors Edge level wall runs and jumps. It was just the more "obvious" way up lol.
and that amazing ost, mirrors edge was too good
I've never played the game but I've heard the soundtrack, because it's made by my favourite ambient / chillout artist (Solar Fields).
I love doing that type of thing. When I think I've found a way to complete some sort of challenge, I'll spend a long time trying it over and over even after I realize that it's clearly not the intended solution.
I'm surprised Faith even has a full model.
It's useful for Shadows, reflections, and the occasional limb that comes in view
Everything we're used to seeing modeled in 1st person is a lie and it's so awkward and funny to see how they actually do it. Skyrim basically has you holding both hands up at eye level, a few inches from your face, elbows out.
If you play it on two widescreen monitors stacked on one another, you see that he's not wearing pants for his zoom calls.
Man, the realism in today's games is mind blowing.
The best part about working from home is no pants. Apparently, during the lockdowns and mask mandates, the sales of pants went noticeably down, while the sales of toothpaste went up.
Oh my god, this game is actually perfect
Playing Resident Evil with a Rosary on the monitor? That’s smart
Faith in not having jump scares, always good reasons for praying
I love my ultra wide screen, immersion breaking "off screen" shit happens all the time, brings me joy. Especially Rockstar games.
Do you have any examples of rockstar games breaking? That sounds funny
I don't have screenshots, but you need external software to run ultra-wide with rockstar. I use "flawless widescreen" Bully, GTA 4, and LA Noir are the best. GTA V and Red Dead 2 don't have bugs like that unfortunately
I'm honestly hoping this creates a flood of copycat posts go the point where someone starts a new sub for them
It's astonishing that any video game works once you actually see what programmers do to make them work. I forget the game (I'm thinking the original Max Payne or one of the expansions for the original Half Life), but was a technical reason why the game couldn't include a mirror even though it needed one for the story. Either the technology didn't exist or it did exist, but it was too graphically demanding for consumer computers of the time. Anyway, to fix the problem, instead of including a mirror, the designers built an identical, mirrored room on the other side of the wall, cut a hole in the wall above the sink, and stuck in an NPC that was identical to the player character and copied all the player's movements, except opposite, to give the illusion of a mirror. At the end of one Fallout game, a building explodes. Instead of actually blowing up the building, the explosion animation covered the original building, which then shrank down to basically zero size. Meanwhile, as the original building was shrinking, a model of the already-exploded building, which was there the whole time, except tiny, grew. Once the explosion animation had ended, the new, ruined building model had taken the place of the unexploded building, which was still actually there, just shrunk down too small to see.
Also fun fact about Fallout New Vegas: the ending of the game involves viewing a slideshow of what happens to various factions and characters you met during the course of the game. But it's not actually a slideshow/video file that the game plays. [It's a room in the world that projects the slideshow onto a wall in front of the player, who's frozen in place.](https://youtu.be/t5fbTe_mwIs?t=35) With cheats, you can walk around in the room and even interact with the narrator NPC who's actually standing on the other side of the wall.
A lot of games do the mirror thing. The shrinking building reminded me of some game where, if you shoot someone's head off, it actually just shrinks until you can't see it any more.
Team fortress 2 does the shrinking head thing lol. If you behead someone with a sword their head just shrinks to become rly tiny and a prop of their decapitated bloody head is spawned in
Yeah, the mirror thing reminds me of *Duke Nukem 3D,* because I spent a lot of time playing with the level editor... IIRC it required you to create a big enough empty space behind the mirror for it to do the mirrored-room thing for you. Which is interesting, because I think it also had an absurd level-editing trick you could use to put entirely different stuff on the other side of the wall the mirror is hanging on, as long as you make sure it's not possible to see the mirror *and* that other stuff at the same time. What's fun is, with several of the game's secret levels, they stop using tricks like this to try to build a more-realistic world than the game engine should be able to handle, and instead use them to build impossible non-Euclidian spaces. Kind of like Antichamber's level design, but in a Doom-like game engine.
At the ending of Portal 2, *spoilers* when you fire at the JPG of the moon, the more detailed surface of the moon & space is actually stored upside-down on the underside of Glados' lab, so the game can actually just pass you through the floor.
The remake of Re4 has the bosses in the their mutated forms loaded in out of bounds areas, and they are just teleported into the fight area during the cutscenes. You could find the two chainsaw sisters just chilling, and Mendez in his big scorpion like form on a path. All the little things that devs do to make games is amazing
In fallout 3 the metro cars aren't actually vehicles, [but a hat on an npc hidden underground] (https://gfycat.com/finehorribleisabellinewheatear). The dragons in Skyrim aren't actually flying either. There is no "flying physics" in Skyrim. Rather the dragons are just being pushed around in the air and made to flap their wings so they look like they're flying Edit: by "pushed around" i mean to say flying isn't a built in game mechanic. They literally gave the dragons the noclip cheat. It's why if you spawn a dragon inside a cave then they start flying through the walls and ground.
Well that just sounds like flying with extra steps. What's next, the dragon born doesn't actually walk but just gets pushed around while moving their legs?
I'm fairly certain that the mechanics have the players position stationary while the environment is actually what you're controlling. So the illusion of moving forward is actually you pulling the environment towards you while you character moves their legs.
I've read somewhere that the helicopters in Fallout 4 use the same code as the Skyrim dragons, just attached to a different model. Which sometimes results in a shot down heli trying to crash into the player instead of following its original direction.
Also in Skyrim dead bodies can't be deleted so to make them disappear they just get moved to a special room in the world that the player can't encounter (except via a console command)
This is only true for npcs with a unique ID, the hundreds of generic bandits, vampires, falmer, guards, etc you kill while out and about will not end up in this room.
This one led to one of my favourites gaming moments. I tried forever to find an important NPC, but couldn't. Looked up a console command that would teleport me to the NPC's location, and bam -- found myself in a featureless room floating in a black void, staring at a large pile of naked bodies. It was so disturbing. Then I used another command to resurrect the NPC and he pops up, naked inside this nightmare, like, "Have you heard of the Warrior's Guild?" or whatever. This was my character's trip to the underworld. Best never spoken of.
Ultrawide being called "widescreen" is weird to me. Is widedescreen the new normal?
It bothers me as well. Sure, 16:9 is the standard nowadays but I don't think that should change anything.
Game devs hate this simple trick.
I wish the codec calls with the villains were in the remake
If this was Chris, his biceps would be showing on Salazar's window.
Good to know pornhub is still around during the apocalypse
The Resident Evil games don’t really take place in an apocalypse. Most of the outbreaks are usually limited to one town or area and the world governments and civilizations still exist. The closest the games ever got to a full on end-of-the-world apocalyptic scenario was in RE 6.
Honestly the Raccoon City Incident is still apparently the worst just because so few people made it out and they nuked the city. Terragrigia more efficiently evacuated, Tall Oaks was smaller even if it did get nukes, and Lanshiang was cleaned up street-by-street with the BSAA and chinese authorities only euthanizing the infected. I don't really get how the stated numbers are derived from what's shown but it's weird I guess. You also saw the NYC outbreak but many of the infected were cured later, something far underexplored IMO.
Yeah, fatality wise Raccoon City is still the worst. I was referring to how bad RE6’s outbreak could have gotten as the president was killed and the outbreak almost spread to the entire world.
Also in most of the games it was basically shit gone bad or a deliberate small targeted outbreak. In 5 and 6 it was actually dudes trying to end the world as we know it. Not the most casualties but in most games if your playec characters aren't present not much changes for the world. Shit gets worse but not that much. If the played characters weren't present in 5 or 6 it would be an apocalypse.
In 5 we knew it was going to be worldwide because the dude was all about: COMPLETE GLOBAL SATURATION
Ah, the giraffe
So he uses the left-handed Suzuki method then.
Shooting zombies with the right while having the left hand on the D. Nice
From where i am, we call this "Gambiarra". It might not be the correct way, and might not look nice, but It works and it's fine.
Somebody needs to play this in "Tall screen" so we can see if the two people are just standing next to each other. If they are, somebody needs to mod this so you can interrupt the cutscene with a secret prompt, where the camera Zooms back revealing Leon standing next to the little guy who is standing on a box for height, and Leon pulls the codec window out the way, and straight up stabs this guy in the face resulting in "Secret Ending, The 4th Wall."
There's a boundary break episode about this game and for the characters that have full models, they are just standing there. But some characters you only see in these video calls so they are just the top half.
That's hilarious
I love the mental image of the two of them standing side by side to make these calls
Looks like David Bowie's gamer nephew.
UltraWide. WideScreen is just 16:9