Posted by sklopec 6 days ago
What I don't like is to see claims like "no AI slop"
And yet it's riddled with emdashes and language "by hand"
Seeing the skills of the writer, he definitely should be able to, but then I don't understand the claim.
> If this sounds unreasonable to you, that is because it is.
Those listed, are tame. I don't understand this kind of faux modesty.
> My goal was to build a complete, shippable first-person shooter using techniques that were common in the early 90s
Goes on to explain how they used 3D blender...which wasn't available until 1998.
A vanity cat project being tailored and submitted for nostalgia clickbait. I don't think there's anything useful to take away from this other than some color shade selection ideas.
In the early 90s, there was enough money in this kind of software that you could have hired a specialist 3D artist to use the software that was available at the time, e.g. LightWave 3D. When it's only a single-person project, I think it's reasonable to stick with what you know.
You conveniently left out the second part of that sentence:
> … modern compiler and a platform abstraction layer.
The author very explicitly laid out their constraints in a bulleted list right below; I think calling this nostalgia clickbait is infelicitous at best.
I think I'm gonna have to do it anyway, because some players claim they get nausea when playing at such low resolution (320x240), and the only way to give them higher resolutions that perform reasonably is to have it hardware accelerated.
Renderer is abstracted away already, but the real difference would probably be occlusion culling... With raycasting, I get it for free, but if I'd go down the hardware accelerated path I'd have to pick something more clever.
Raycasting and software rendering in general tends to scale poorly with resolution, even with vectorization and all the bells and whistles of modern CPUs.
As an example this[0] video shows the benchmark from Post Apocalyptic Petra running on my previous GPU (RX 5700 XT) which all it does is build a per-frame (client-side) vertex-buffer in OpenGL 1.1 (the engine was made for actual retro PCs running DOS and Win9x so it does some rudimentary occlusion culling but that mainly affects 90s hardware, not anything released since 2000 or so). If anything, the rendering has so little overhead that half of the framerate is "eaten" by the FPS counter overlay :-P.
Thinking about modern games, a single character model probably has more vertices than my entire level (and yours probably), so it's definitely reasonable to expect occlusion culling for such simple geometry might actually reduce performance rather than increase it.
Meanwhile more current games have much higher polycounts, easily going above 100K triangles - e.g. Dante from DMC5, a ~7 year old game, apparently has ~190K triangles and that had to run on the more anemic PS4/XBone hardware :-P (though i'm not sure if it used the full 190K model there or some cut down version).
[0] http://runtimeterror.com/pages/iv/images/1073c7062db40837240...
But ignoring the GPU you have on your system is boring
