>This result could be less tight; for example, if you had a long corridor with many side rooms, and that long corridor was a single cell, then in Quake it would always try to render all the side rooms, whereas Thief would only try to render the entry cell to each of the side rooms (since those cells would always be adjacent to the corridor and visible), but Thief could cull the rooms themselves if they weren't currently visible.
Big if. You had screwed up if you left such a setup as one long vis chunk. Level designers would place vis boundaries strategically along a corridor to control this behavior. It was a bit of an art form but not exactly hidden knowledge, even the levels that shipped with quake SW had this kind of tuning built in.
Weird that at no point in this article is the engine overall referred to as what I and presumably most level/mod designers referred to it as - 'The Dark Engine'. Still, she's a classic. Tuned beautifully for the sneak/rpg gameplay of Thief and System Shock. Not at all suitable for the high speed multiplayer FPS gameplay of Quake. A comparison between the two is always interesting to see.
That's quite interesting. I wonder why visual culling on PC appears to have been much more primitive than culling on, say, the Nintendo 64. Some games there seem to dynamically cull every single polygon not in sight. For example, Banjo Kazooie: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=se6y5we3p2I
My wife and I were just telling my 13 year old about this game. It was incredibly immersive for the time, running on my Voodoo graphics card and soundblaster 3D audio card :) I would be sneaking around and my wife would try to talk to me (in real life) and I would shush her because I didn't want to be heard :) She also played the game, and both of us would commonly bonk our head on the monitor (old CRT style) as we were trying to look around a corner in the game :D
This was exactly me and my girlfriend at the time (still good friends today). We were obsessed with the game, we both beat it several times then explored the world of custom missions. I think our mutual favorite was "Hush Hush, Sweet Harlot".
Years after we broke up we remained friends, and one day she called me asking for help getting it to run on her then-new Windows Vista PC. I never could get it to work correctly so I cobbled together a working PIII era machine for her with Windows 2000 installed, and period correct GPU, and she was in sneaking heaven!
These days the GOG version plays perfectly well on modern hardware and OSes, no need for hacks or period hardware anymore.
The trick he mentions he used where he issues a floating-point divide for perspective correction followed by integer instructions allegedly killed Cyrix. Carmack figured out for Quake that the original Intel Pentium could execute a floating point divide in parallel with integer instructions and exploited it. Without that trick Quake produced a disappointing frame rate. The Cyrix 686 CPU was generally faster than the Pentium but the FPU didn't work like that which meant it couldn't play Quake very well.
Thief is one one of my all-time-favs. Surprised to hear it being notable for its tech; for me, it was all about the sneaking and creatively avoiding full-on confrontation.
About ten years or so ago, Drake: Uncharted (plus its sequels) on the kid's PS3 was recommended to me as a worthy game to play. But I found it boring, having to face a fistfight and primitive shooting only after 5 mins into the game, so I didn't bother.
This was genuinely immersive and terrifying as a 13-14 year old. I think this game seeded my interest in graphics technology. Delightful to read about it now.
Garret’s buddies at HandmadeCon gathered a group of devs from different games who all wrote some of the first software rasterization 3D games. The general theme was “We had no idea what we were doing. There were no references!”
The visuals were excellent, but the gameplay and game design were imo what made the game special.
I played it new. I really felt the sense of tension and attention to detail of being stealthy, and the corresponding consequences of failing to be stealthy.
Thief was a brilliant game for the era. The rendering of shadows etc was very well done and so also I believe it used 3D positional audio better than the contemporary games
We're the shadows actually rendered in real time or were they prerendered and baked into the textures along with the environment lighting? Genuinely curious.
I could be wrong but, AFAIK, Doom 3 was the first game with real time shadows and dinamic lighting and every game before that employed various tricks that simulated those instead.
[+] [-] FooHentai|4 years ago|reply
Big if. You had screwed up if you left such a setup as one long vis chunk. Level designers would place vis boundaries strategically along a corridor to control this behavior. It was a bit of an art form but not exactly hidden knowledge, even the levels that shipped with quake SW had this kind of tuning built in.
Weird that at no point in this article is the engine overall referred to as what I and presumably most level/mod designers referred to it as - 'The Dark Engine'. Still, she's a classic. Tuned beautifully for the sneak/rpg gameplay of Thief and System Shock. Not at all suitable for the high speed multiplayer FPS gameplay of Quake. A comparison between the two is always interesting to see.
[+] [-] causality0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gilbetron|4 years ago|reply
Good times - great game!
[+] [-] morganvachon|4 years ago|reply
Years after we broke up we remained friends, and one day she called me asking for help getting it to run on her then-new Windows Vista PC. I never could get it to work correctly so I cobbled together a working PIII era machine for her with Windows 2000 installed, and period correct GPU, and she was in sneaking heaven!
These days the GOG version plays perfectly well on modern hardware and OSes, no need for hacks or period hardware anymore.
[+] [-] IMSAI8080|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jccalhoun|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lanz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slothtrop|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jl6|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tannhaeuser|4 years ago|reply
About ten years or so ago, Drake: Uncharted (plus its sequels) on the kid's PS3 was recommended to me as a worthy game to play. But I found it boring, having to face a fistfight and primitive shooting only after 5 mins into the game, so I didn't bother.
[+] [-] hughes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corysama|4 years ago|reply
https://youtube.com/watch?v=xn76r0JxqNM
[+] [-] blunte|4 years ago|reply
I played it new. I really felt the sense of tension and attention to detail of being stealthy, and the corresponding consequences of failing to be stealthy.
[+] [-] pkphilip|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckNorris89|4 years ago|reply
I could be wrong but, AFAIK, Doom 3 was the first game with real time shadows and dinamic lighting and every game before that employed various tricks that simulated those instead.
[+] [-] brobinson|4 years ago|reply