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Posted by ivmoreau 5 days ago

Noclip.website – A digital museum of video game levels(noclip.website)
483 points | 57 comments
nness 5 days ago|
Every time I stumble upon this I end up losing an hour.

The Rare era Nintendo 64 games are particularly interesting from a graphical stand-point, as Rare really got the most out of the N64's limited texture cache by blending textures with vertex colours.

In Banjo-Kazooie its mostly for used as a primitive baked-lighting (Mad Monster Mansion being a great example of this.) But by the time you get to DK64, they're really working overtime to leverage vertex colours to add variety to the textures and help blend texture edges.

People refer to N64's blurry textures as its signature look, but I think what Rare did with vertex colours is really what most people think when they remember back to the N64.

(Would love to see GoldenEye or Perfect Dark maps added to this site.)

ctippett 4 days ago||
I'm glad I came back to this on desktop, I initially tried visiting the site on mobile and of course nothing loaded, so I dismissed it and moved on. Seeing now what the site is actually about, holy shit it's impressive.

FYI I saw some references to Goldeneye in the GitHub repo, so we might see it up on the site (hopefully) soon.

ToucanLoucan 5 days ago||
I also enjoy how WELL most Nintendo games' levels render in browser, because unlike the other two (Sony and Microsoft), their render pipelines are incredibly simple. This of course isn't a complete win, you obviously miss a lot of features of bigger/beefier GPU's like advanced shaders, but at the same time it really draws attention to how the artists developing for those platforms, at least first party, are continuing those traditions of covering a lack of technical ability to, for example, render real caustics in real time, and instead simply make water textures that are so evocative of water that they appear as good as, if not better, then technically superior water effects.

I say this as a slight graphics nerd who loves this shit and plays some games solely to see the visuals they can pull off: I mad respect artists who go the complete other direction, who barely use any "real" graphics tech, to make absolutely beautiful things.

nsilvestri 5 days ago||
In a similar vein, but for Old School RuneScape, is https://osrs.world/

This one is kept up-to-date with the state of the game world. Even includes full NPC locations and animations.

nelsonfigueroa 5 days ago||
This is so sick. I've been playing OSRS on and off for a while but for some reason never heard of this.
Peacefulz 5 days ago|||
One of us! That site is dope. Super useful for creating b-roll footage for videos.
sph 5 days ago||
There's also https://old.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1lof9k2/creators... to animate scenes in-game.
stackghost 4 days ago||
>200MB cache

Wow, mobile users beware

simonw 4 days ago||
Doesn't seem to work in Mobile Safari - anyone know the intended status of mobile support? I found one relevant ticket but it was closed in 2020: https://github.com/magcius/noclip.website/issues/10
Jasper_ 4 days ago||
I don't make any efforts to make mobile devices work, since usually their GPUs and drivers are not good enough for this, but PRs and patches are welcome. At one point Mobile Safari was working.
op7 4 days ago||
I don’t buy the argument the GPUs aren’t powerful enough. They are orders of magnitude stronger than the original hardware.
best_answer 4 days ago|||
It doesn't work on Windows Chrome 143, either: "Your browser does not appear to have WebGPU support."
stronglikedan 4 days ago||
I'm on Chrome 143.0.7499.110 on Windows, and it worked for me, but it also got my fans awhirlin' and locked up my rig for a bit.
6031769 4 days ago||
Nor in Pale Moon: "CompileError: wasm validation error: at offset 35: too many returns in signature"

Firefox seems happy enough, though.

twostorytower 5 days ago||
This is actually wild. I have no idea how this works. Does it somehow emulate the rendering engine of each of these games to render the map? The water in Half-Life 2: Lost Coast is just how I remember it. Very cool.
xyzzy_plugh 5 days ago||
It's open source: https://github.com/magcius/noclip.website

I wouldn't say it emulates so much as implements a renderer for each game. It's totally nuts.

rezmason 5 days ago|||
I contributed one earlier this year! The community's a great bunch and I learned a lot.

Always remember, folks: the best feature request is a pull request ;)

svelle 4 days ago|||
Yes! I loved the thread on twitter back in the day where Jasper explained how he implemented the Half-Life 2 water shader using the two camera method.

I can wholeheartedly recommend going through his account there and on bsky, lot's of interesting stuff.

pengaru 5 days ago||
If you're lucky you might hear from the author - his handle is Jasper_ here on HN.
ChrisArchitect 5 days ago||
Some previous discussions:

2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37043934

2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27902949

2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19232022

mwkaufma 5 days ago||
Noclip's creator Jasper has some great deep-dive video essays on game deconstructions over on their yt channel, as well: https://www.youtube.com/@JasperRLZ
therobots927 4 days ago||
This is cool. I recently bought a GameCube and a few games, it’s just as fun and engaging as I remember it being as a kid. The graphics aren’t as “good” as modern games but if a game was fun 20 years ago it’s still fun now… nothing about the game changed. Just our expectations. And the modern game industry is beyond saving at this point outside of a few independent studios.
darknavi 4 days ago|
> And the modern game industry is beyond saving at this point outside of a few independent studios.

I totally disagree. There are are a ton of fun indie games these days from all sorts of folks and studios.

Look beyond the billion or trillion dollar companies and there is still a ton of fun, new games coming out.

alias_neo 5 days ago||
I started learning Blender recently to have a play with throwing something on my blog with Three.js (we're a long way from that), but I appreciate now how you want to remove as much geometry as possible that isn't visible to the user to give the impression it's all very much there and solid, but presents the actual bare minimum to look right[0].

Anyone got example of levels with cool stuff hidden outside of the player area that can't be accessed while clipping is enabled? I remember some stone tablet with credits, in some game, in an "Aztec" area/level many, many years ago, don't remember which game though.

[0]https://noclip.website/#mkwii/beginner_course;ShareData=APu}e9y:oa8[qXpUFsE~WAK4bQ!l|bUooMfUPaItV]lVR9GC@bT{ZRK936MkWP

jakebasile 4 days ago||
What a lovely hit of nostalgia on this cold winter morning. Thanks for sharing this, and thanks to the people who made it. Cruising through Besaid Village and Ironforge brought back some strong memories. I could hear the music in my head even though the room was silent.
cheald 4 days ago|
Wow, I did not expect to feel the things I did flying through Ironforge.
reedlaw 4 days ago|
This even has a way to make flyover animations: https://github.com/magcius/noclip.website/wiki/Studio
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