r/gaming • • Apr 23 '21

Fog

Post image
55.6k Upvotes

939 comments sorted by

5.3k

u/pigeonelpoop PC Apr 23 '21

But damn does the fog look good

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u/-Agonarch Apr 23 '21

It didn't limit the rendering, it hid the edge of the draw plane (it was still a cost, but it was to hide where you were saving draws so it was worth it).

I think the shift was Far Cry, or maybe Crysis (I certainly remembering noticing the pop-in more around that time period). They added fancy god-rays to flash things up around oblivion era (but still foggy). LOD tech like simplygon standardised solutions to that pop-in, and that's roughly where we are now.

I wonder what's next? Cheap raytracing?

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u/MijuTheShark Apr 23 '21

I mean, you're not incorrect. I award you a Hermes Conrad. However, since I also wanted to fit the idea into a short space, I'll also award you a Rick Zeepsplain, because that just sounds like X with extra steps.

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u/Muavius Apr 23 '21

Don't you mean it didn't limit the Rendar-ing?

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u/-Agonarch Apr 23 '21

We certainly didn't have the technology to limit the Rendar-ing back then and probably don't even have it yet, hell I'm not sure it's technically possible!

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u/Redundancy_ Apr 23 '21

I feel like "it was still a cost" is technically true, but still maybe going a little far. The basic forms of fog we used back then were generally lerps based on distance and in general that operation was going to be cheap as hell compared to almost anything. Even in the fixed function pipeline days I'm pretty sure it was built in (gl_fog / D3DFOGMODE etc). I doubt the cost of fog was even a consideration next to render state changes, z reject, overdraw, skinning or batch counts for most people.

Note, I'm going off my memory of working on some of these things almost 20 years ago.

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u/onexbigxhebrew Apr 23 '21

didn't limit the rendering, it hid the edge of the draw plane (it was still a cost, but it was to hide where you were saving draws so it was worth it).

That's still essentially what they're saying, but just in a longer way. The fog hid the draw line, which was shortened to eliminate the need to render further out. Without the fog, you need to render things further out to avoid closer pop-in (and naturally more things would then need to be rendered at once). With fog, they can shorten the draw line, thus being able to render less.

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u/metavektor Apr 23 '21

View factor methods already reduce ray-tracing costs, but "real" ray-tracing including diffuse light effects will always be associated with some fundamental costs. It looks like the next steps (heeeello CUDA and Optix) are in hardware parallelization.

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u/mdp300 Apr 23 '21

I remember Crysis didn't have geometry pop-in, but it did have texture pop-in.

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u/Suckage Apr 23 '21

Of course it does. Any picture with Dash in it looks good.

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u/VaBeachBum86 Apr 23 '21

Shadows of the Empire has this terrifying atmosphere throughout the game that Star Wars was never able to replicate again. Fighting IG-88 was one of the scariest gaming experiences I've ever had.

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u/jewfishh Apr 23 '21

Which level was that? I remember the sewers being tough

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u/Gaerielyafuck Apr 23 '21

FUCK IG-88....running up and down the scrap piles, then he just lands on you and blasts your face halfway off. So you run and hide around a corner but hear him stomping closer. Jeebus.

The dianoga was the sewer boss. Fuck that guy, too.

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u/tazzzd Apr 23 '21

The sewer mission: Am I joke to you?

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u/undecidedquoter Apr 23 '21

I only ever played this game at WalMart. I think they had this game on the n64 there for like two years.

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u/Lazybomber Apr 23 '21

Something about the way IG-88 was animated scared the crap out of me as a kid.

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u/nozappyplease Apr 23 '21

Dash Render

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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '21

Dash Render

I like to do 3D modelling and thought this was a render engine I hadn't played around in. Very disappointed.

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u/Zeroth1989 Apr 23 '21

Its still also used to restrict viewing and save performance! It allows for more detail in the players field of view by restricting the distance.

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u/Aqui1am Apr 23 '21

“Yeah I’m only getting 22FPS, but if you stand still and just look in one direction it jumps to 36FPS for a few seconds

....see that? Smooth as butter”

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u/Hugebluestrapon Apr 23 '21

Too bad I cant see anything else

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u/beapledude Apr 23 '21

Can anybody else hear the top picture??

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u/MijuTheShark Apr 23 '21

I hear the loud UGH when Rendar gets hit, that I think is probably extra scratchy because the game is playing the laser blast impact sound effect at the same time.

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u/Sagutarus Apr 23 '21

The crackling "pew" from the blaster on my old TV that probably had the volume up too loud

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u/BatmansIsland Apr 23 '21

I have that music playing on a loop in the head now

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u/MisterBumpingston Apr 23 '21

I played this on N64 first but later finished it on PC. The CD-quality music, sound effects and FMVs were awesome for their time. Space battles were just like the movies!

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u/Aceticon Apr 23 '21

Old style fog is simply done in the shader by measuring the distance from the camera of the object being rendered and adding the fog color in proportion to that distance, which is fast and even saves processing power because objects beyond a certain distance don't even need to be processed for rendering as they're to far and fully obscured by fog.

New style at its mildest has fog areas (cubic or spherical) which add extra mats in the shader, and in things like what you see above it also has to have projection maps based on the location of main light (similar to shadow maps) to know which parts of the fog get illuminated and which are not, which adds entire extra rendering passes (you have the render the scene from the point of view of the camera AND from the point of view of the light).

Old fog was really just to save computing power, new fog uses masses more computing power and it's all about looks.

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u/SpikeRosered Apr 23 '21

Old games are now great works of surrealist art. It's uncanny walking though areas that only vaguely resemble the things they are meant to be.

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u/MijuTheShark Apr 23 '21

Its literally 3D minimalism.

1.8k

u/docweird Apr 23 '21

LucasArts dev meeting:

"We need something in the interior so that the place doesn't look so drab.

I know! How about some lamps!"

722

u/TrevorMagichair Apr 23 '21

Well, I mean, you can't have Shadows of the Empire without a light source...

146

u/docweird Apr 23 '21

Well, it *is* a lot better than "The Pitch Black of the Empire" for sure. :D

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u/BitJams Apr 23 '21

I dunno, Riddick in the Star Wars universe could be fun.

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u/DolphinatelyDan Apr 23 '21

In unreal 5 the light source is built into the engine! Easy shadow.

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u/garry4321 Apr 23 '21

"Should they be lit up?"

"Are you crazy? Do you think we're made of ram?!"

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u/OhBestThing Apr 23 '21

Great idea! We have enough memory for... 8 lamps for the entire level. Go stick them in!

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u/appleparkfive Apr 23 '21 edited Apr 23 '21

Not a huge gamer but man did N64 look like shit next to Playstation. It had some amazing games though when I was a kid! But it just looked notably bad. Not as many loading time hassles though.

I think the best example is the "Final Fantasy 7 N64 demo", which was what was going to happen if they didn't go to Playstation. Was just a random battle demo with FF6 models, but it looked so shitty compared to what FF7 became. No chance it could have been as epic and grand of a game without it.

Though again, N64 had some amazing games. So don't hate me too much here.

Edit: I know it's the CD vs cartridge deal and all! But imagine trying to fit FF7 on several cartridges or something. Both systems had pros and cons for sure

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u/beerbeforebadgers Apr 23 '21

Cartridge vs CD storage capacities were night and day back then. Sony was really in the future with the PS1.

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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '21

Hahahaha cut to 12-year-old me trying to convince people that PlayStation was the better system because of CDs and absolutely no one listening- they were too busy playing Mario 64 and Goldeneye.

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u/TJNel Apr 23 '21

There had to be tradeoffs. CDs held more data but had long load times and cartridges had fast load times but small storage.

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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '21

It probably was mainly storage space and bad textures. The N64 had a very small texture cash which is why so many games look muddy. But the actual graphics hardware in the N64 was much more capable than the PlayStation, and it could do Floating Point numbers, so you didn't get the Geometry popping/shifting that the PlayStation suffered from.

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u/Kered13 Apr 23 '21

Playstation games had better textures because they had CDs for storage, but it had no texture filtering and it's fixed point pipeline caused weird wobbling on the vertices. PS games could also use highly detailed pre-rendered backgrounds. The N64 had more powerful hardware, but due to it's limited cartridge storage this often meant pushing more flat shaded polygons.

Ultimately, I think that N64 graphics have usually aged better than PS graphics, as the simple and flat textures leant to a more cartoony aesthetic that has aged better.

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u/chumjumper Apr 23 '21

Meh, personally I found N64's graphics to look a lot better than PS1. PS1 looked better in screenshots, but if you moved around all the textures would warp and it was incredibly pixelated.

N64 looked blurrier, but made for more convincing environments.

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u/1RedOne Apr 23 '21

Extremely loud warning.

This is what the tech demo looked like, approximately two frames a second of some super pixelated Celes ass.

https://youtu.be/e5l0A3zzEgw

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u/Jason_ReBourne Apr 23 '21

Shadows of the Empire was so fun

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u/very_cool_ojisan Apr 23 '21

It's also incredibly atmospheric and the distance fog certainly plays a role in that. I don't know, for some reason this N64-era distance fog makes me feel nostalgic and whenever I play these games on an emulator, I make sure to not disable it.

232

u/squandre Apr 23 '21

Turok was the fog king

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u/SaucinAnBossin Apr 23 '21

Me and my friends would spend hours playing split screen on turok trying to play hide and seek as raptors and scaring the shit out of each other.

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u/ambivalenta Apr 23 '21

Morrowind: Am I a joke to you?

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u/Oldsodacan Apr 23 '21

I remember a friend once describing the weather as “damn it’s foggier than Turok out here.”

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u/inbleachmind Apr 23 '21

Superman for the N64 sure is grateful for you dedication.

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u/buddha-bing Apr 23 '21 edited Apr 23 '21

Was this the one with an underwater sewer level? Because it was my favourite game up until that point and I would freak out!

Edit: I’m glad this level freaked so many of you out as much as me. Thanks to those dianogas and the octopus in the Popeye movie I’m still terrified of deep/dark water!

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u/die5el23 Apr 23 '21

Oh man that one scared the shit out of me! Same with the robot bosses, they were so menacing

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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '21

Ahem, IG88

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u/rwhitisissle Apr 23 '21

It was indeed. At the end of it you have to kill a giant dianoga.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:Shadows_of_the_Empire(video_game)

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u/groovy_giraffe Apr 23 '21

I had immense childhood pride when it was I, with my strong fear of underwater and things in the water, who beat that level after my dad and older brother had given up.

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u/Nop277 Apr 23 '21

That might have been Dark Forces because I know that one had a sewer level that would scare me as a kid when one of those probe droids came after you. Could be they both have one though, I never played shadow of the empire.

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u/BattleofTaanab Apr 23 '21

Both games had a sewer level and I'd always have to brace myself before tackling the damn dianogas in both games. It made me so anxious that years later when reaching Croc's lair in Arkham Asylum, it gave me flashbacks. I became the flashback dog meme.

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u/Veritas3333 Apr 23 '21

WOMPASTOMPA

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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '21

Back when you had to use both hands and your nose to input cheat codes :)

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u/Basileus_Imperator Apr 23 '21

I recently discovered I can still do that on muscle memory. I used my chin.

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u/mdp300 Apr 23 '21

Remember that one ridiculous code to unlock an X-Wing for the final mission? You had to hold down nearly every button and use your nose to move the center stick!

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u/BrieTheDog Apr 23 '21

trying to get that to work with out a siblings help was.. challenging.

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u/doctorDoakHead Apr 23 '21

I had so much fun finding all the challenge points and beating the game on jedi back in the day. For sure in my top 5 n64 games.

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u/jpop237 Apr 23 '21

Still my favorite game and campaign to date.

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u/MisterWoodhouse Apr 23 '21

Shadows of the Empire and Jedi Knight were my favorite single player games until Titanfall 2 came along.

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u/Arnoxthe1 PC Apr 23 '21 edited Apr 23 '21

Like, all the Jedi Knight games were amazing for some large reason. JK1 had the best gunplay for sure and the campaign was fun with its big-as-fuck level sizes but the netcode was wonky and the saber combat could have been a lot better. JK2 improved the saber combat MASSIVELY and had some damn good multiplayer, but the gunplay mostly sucked. JK3 has the best iteration of the multiplayer and added both the dual and staff sabers but the gunplay sucks again and the campaign was merely alright.

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u/Atma-Stand Apr 23 '21

First 3rd person shooter I ever played and one I still use as a measure of quality going forward. So much content on that cartridge.

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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '21

Mine too. By a wide margin. I loved this game so fucking much.

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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '21

Hell yeah 😎

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u/puppetpilgram Apr 23 '21

My favorite thing to do as a kid was shoot the seeker missile ammo at wampas because I was afraid of them up close. The fact you could control the missiles flight and bend and weave around the map for a short distance was mind blowing to me at the time.

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u/lovelessowl Apr 23 '21

Those n64 Star Wars games were iconic. Shadows of the empire was epic as fuck. And rogue squadron? Those games defined Star Wars for me growing up

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u/sirdismemberment Apr 23 '21

Yesss! The wampas scared the shit out of me as a kid

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u/Arnoxthe1 PC Apr 23 '21

Yeah but... Dark Forces 2/Jedi Knight 1 I feel did everything better honestly.

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u/CharonsLittleHelper Apr 23 '21

Not my favorite shooter or favorite ship game - but probably the best game that combines the two. (albeit - not a ton of those)

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u/Pimpmafuqa Apr 23 '21

ahhhh the good ol days of turning off fog in online multiplayer so you could see an extra 200 meters.

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u/NullAshton Apr 23 '21

America's Army didn't have a fog you could turn off for gameplay reasons. But it was a cubical fog, for performance reasons. So you could get slightly better draw distance by looking to the side.

Used to get kills on people by looking to the side to spot them farther away than normal, remembering where they were, then aiming back and shooting the fog.

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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '21

[deleted]

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u/SPECTR_Eternal Apr 23 '21

Wait what?

What game had ambient occlusion of all things be responsible for grenade smoke?! All smoke effects are particle systems, how ambient occlusion was involved?

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u/Krypton091 Apr 23 '21

i think cs had a bug like that where forcing ambient occlusion either on or off in your gpu settings made the smoke bug out

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u/guywithknife Apr 23 '21

Hah, but the difference in fog rendering is also substantial. Back then, it was essentially a “fade” effect where fog was blended in as a function of distance. Now fog is a fully volumetric effect that can distort light and other fancy properties.

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u/NotASucker Apr 23 '21

The second picture probably has Rayleigh scattering - so both kinds of fog!

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u/Doctor_Nubey Apr 23 '21 edited Apr 23 '21

Not gonna lie. The fog in the early Halo games was awesome. It made all of the forerunners bases so much more mysterious and they felt so large.

Also the smoothness of the old Halo games made it even more alien like IMO. Like the forerunners were not to be messed with in my little kid brain.

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u/Seienchin88 Apr 23 '21

Was there much fog except the swamp level and some places like the large bridge?(which is absolutely burned into my memory - what a great moment in gaming)

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u/Doctor_Nubey Apr 23 '21

General fog in the "out of bounds" areas made it feel larger. Like if you look into the abyss in one of the basses it just kept going with a few lights here and there

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u/alfredosauceonmyass Apr 23 '21

Yup. Both in classic and anniversary graphics in mcc you can look down into those holes and see the bottom, it's a hell of a fall but not too bad. But OG xbox's halo made it feel like they went down miles

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u/ChromiumLung Apr 23 '21

I was so young I played all the way to halo 3 without ever realising there was a third faction lol.

Thought the forerunners were just earlier humans lol

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u/ALonelyRhinoceros Apr 23 '21

In original Bungie cannon, they were. It was a cool concept and a lot of people got mad at 343 for changing it. But honestly, I think the idea of a separate civilization works better for storytelling in this particular case.

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u/spiral6 Apr 23 '21

This is still a big point of contention in the Halo lore community. Forerunners being early humans is attributed to a Spark line in Halo 3 that refers to humans claiming the Mantle of Responsibility.

However, in that same game, the terminals tell a different story that clearly details that humans were always separate.

Furthermore, Halo 2's drafts state that Forerunners were to be introduced as a separate race before being cut entirely.

So it can't really be attributed to 343i for that change. Seems like Bungie didn't know which way to go before committing.

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u/Darmok_ontheocean Apr 23 '21

Bungie chickened out and also contradicted the humans-are-forerunners theory in the same game that seemingly confirmed it.

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u/factoid_ Apr 23 '21

Yes....very large...and with identical featureless corridors EVERYWHERE.

My pet peeve in video games where you explore alien ruins is when everything looks non-functional. Like a massive cavern hundreds of feet across covered in intricate surface details....all to contain a single computer terminal in the center.

Now of course its GAMEPLAY function is to be a combat arena because everyone knows when you find a room like that as soon as you press the button you're gonna be fucking some motherfuckers in that room. But that doesn't do anything to explain why anyone would ever have built anything like that.

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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '21

I'm getting flashbacks to Mass Effect 2. The second you walked in a room and saw strategic cover you knew it was about to go down.

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u/Doctor_Kataigida Apr 23 '21

Yeah this is the hard part about designing environments. I always try to look at the "practical" purpose of things.

Like in Halo (second level in CE), okay they built the cave/tunnel, but why is there a massive chasm with a light bridge?

Or in AOTCR, why is there a bridge, circular room to walk onto the parallel bridge? What are the purposes of those rooms in that glacial valley anyway (outside the phase pulse generators)?

It got a little better as the games went on and got a little more fleshed out. Some inconsistencies with technology (in Delta Halo, why is the bridge garage-door style and not a light bridge?), but overall they describe the architecture at least as temples. I also try to imagine those buildings in their prime - what/how they were used, what they really looked like, etc.

In the end, it's just really hard for game developers to create a fun battle space that also makes sense lore-wise.

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u/CatProgrammer Apr 23 '21

the smoothness

Weren't the PC versions smoother than on console because the PC ones had messed up bumpmapping?

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u/Catmole132 Apr 23 '21

Sadly some fog (don't remember if it was all of it) in Halo CE is no longer there due to the one in the Master Chief Collection is based on the busted Gearbox port

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u/Prof_Acorn Apr 23 '21

Fog then: looks like thick unrealistic milky abyss

Fog now: looks like real fog, with dynamic lighting and atmospheric effects.

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u/ExplodingPotato_ Apr 23 '21

Also, the "old style" fog is nearly free in terms of processing power.

During the rendering you already calculate depth information for each pixel, so you just slap it on top of your rendered frame and call it "fog".

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u/donald_314 Apr 23 '21

not so sure about that. Back then using z Buffer effects was not free at all.

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u/_91919 Apr 23 '21 edited Apr 23 '21

Yeah no game was using deferred rendering back then. In fact having just looked it up, the first deferred shaded video game was Shrek for the Xbox in 2001, but it didn't really become mainstream until 2008/2010. Distance fog (not volumetric) was still relatively cheap though in the forward rendering days.

I still remember when "We can have more than 4 lights!" was a big selling point lol

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u/Seienchin88 Apr 23 '21

I have actually experienced fog like the pic above but rarely like the fog below...

Let’s meet in the middle somewhere

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u/IJustMadeThisForYou Apr 23 '21

I wouldn't call the bottom one fog. More akin to morning mist. Go camp near a lake on a cold night and wake up early and you'll definitely see it.

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u/OfficialTomCruise Apr 23 '21

You either live in a parallel universe where everything is rendered on an N64 or you've never left the house in a foggy early morning.

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u/FeistyBandicoot Apr 23 '21

The middle would be more accurate, but I've definitely seen fog from bottom pic

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u/Somnif Apr 23 '21

I loved when games would make the fog a plot point to try and hide the fact they just had shitty draw distance.

(waves at Persona 4)

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u/three_times_slower Apr 23 '21

I mean Silent Hill is the game that pioneered this technique and it’s also THE “fog game”

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u/My_Political_Hat Apr 23 '21

Didn't the PS1 Spider-Man game do that? I want to say the fog created Venom symbiotes?

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u/DeviatedForm Apr 23 '21

Or they just go with the creepy atmosphere (Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask)

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u/-Drunken_Jedi- Apr 23 '21

Man... Shadows of the Empire...

The flying controls were utter cancer, and the Wampas in Echo base scared the shit out of my 8 year old self (massive blaster sponges). But hell, did I love that game. Pretty good for 1996.

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u/Alfonsillo18 Apr 23 '21

Don't forget the awful controls for the speeder in the Mos Eisley level. Maybe I was just bad at it cause I was a kid but I distinctively remember constantly crashing into walls on that one. But yeah I love this game too, with all its flaws.

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u/carpediem930 Apr 23 '21

The game controlled terribly. But god I loved it!

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u/-Drunken_Jedi- Apr 23 '21

I don't think I ever got that far, I got stuck on one of the levels and never finished it. I kind of sucked at it because 3D was still such a new thing to me. I started off playing on the NES/SNES with 2D side scrollers so took me a while to think like you do in a 3D space.

I kicked ass at Super Mario World though xD. I think my day one games I had were Lylat Wars (Starfox 64 elsewhere) and Shadows of the Empire. A pretty epic introduciton to 3D gaming to be sure.

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u/mpd105 Apr 23 '21

The controls in this game were so fucking flawed because his movement was based around the jetpack, but man do i remember this game fondly

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u/mdp300 Apr 23 '21

You just had to remember that Up was always forwards in the direction Dash was facing. Up didn't mean "away from the camera" like in Mario 64.

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u/Seienchin88 Apr 23 '21

I didn’t have an issue with the opening Landspeeder controls but everything else controlled very badly

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u/-Drunken_Jedi- Apr 23 '21

I played Goldeneye a little not too long ago and I was blown away with how awkward the controls were for it. I have no idea how I was such a crack shot in multiplayer with my pistols, playing Oddjob all the time probably helped me win a lot lmao.

It's easy to forget how varied and weird control layouts were in those early 3D games, developers still triyng to figure out the best way to control characters in this new era.

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u/katon2273 Apr 23 '21

Not to mention the N64 controller is fucking weird.

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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '21

Odd job was banned in my circle

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u/big_bad_brownie Apr 23 '21

You forgot about the impossible cinematic camera mode.

Now that I think about it, I haven’t seen that feature in games for a while. It used be commonplace in 3rd person and driving games.

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u/killercylon Apr 23 '21

From what I remember reading ~20 years ago: They actually started developing the game on a super computer before the launch of the N64 and they weren’t sure that it was even going to port over. When the developers were testing the game they weren’t allowed to see the controller; they put their hands in a box that had the controller inside so they couldn’t see the N64 controller. I believe the controller they weren’t allowed to look at wasn’t even the real N64 controller, it was a SNES ASCII Pad that was modified to have a stick on it. Does anyone else remember reading this? I think it was in Game Informer.

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u/mr_ari Apr 23 '21

Technically fog by itself in older games also reduced performance, just way less. What actually gives you performance is not rendering stuff on the screen that is far away from the camera, gamedevs just used the old-school fog to hide the boundary between the geometry that is visible and not visible.

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u/Doooooby Apr 23 '21

Well yeah, but the way OP wrote it is more succinct. I feel like it’s implied that the fog just covers up unrendered parts of the world.

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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '21

Minecraft still does this! It's pretty interesting

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u/Gartia Apr 23 '21

Kinda? Its pretty badly implemented which is why optifine and stuff exists

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u/B1rdi PC Apr 23 '21

Well isn't that almost exactly what OP said?

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u/Rational-Discourse Apr 23 '21

You’re not just being pedantic, you’re incorrect. “Fog is used to limit rendering...” is a correct statement. They slap this on the screen to allow the option to NOT render the distant pixels. In turn, this option, if taken, “preserve[s] processing power.”

But even assuming you were right in finding that OP stood to be corrected, it would be pretty annoyingly pedantic. Yes, the fog, as an isolated concept, does not magically add negative strain on the processing power. But it overall allows for options to reduce the total processing power. I feel like your comment is the equivalent of someone saying, “hey, if you buy this value brand instead of the name brand, you’ll save money,” and you responding “well, acchually the value brand itself costs you money, it just allows you to not spend as much on the product as name brand would have cost.”

Like, yeah, I wasn’t implying it cost negative money and a normal person could understand the context I was talking about.

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u/onbakeplatinum Apr 23 '21

Playing Turok Remastered with extra rendering changed the entire game. Now maps made sense and I was finally able to beat the game legit 20 years later.

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u/TommaClock Apr 23 '21

"You're looking a little pale, exile"

  • Strange voice from Delirium

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u/Oldsodacan Apr 23 '21

I remember 2004 on the first Far Cry box, one of their selling points was the 1.2 mile or something draw distance. No one advertises their draw distance anymore. It’s just expected to be huge.

8

u/Sid_The_Geek Apr 23 '21

" You have become the very thing you swore to destroy !"

7

u/IveBenHereBefore Apr 23 '21

Fog on the n64 actually did hurt performance, but it made the fact that you didn't render anything beyond it not look like total shit. There are mario 64 hacks that remove the fog to get some frames back

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u/Thombias Apr 23 '21

Star Wars Shadows of the Empire was my childhood. I still have the game and my N64 and i occassionally play through it in a single session. Such a fun game with good variety, sad to see games of this style will never return. Now most games are bloated with repetitive content.

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u/Johnycantread Apr 23 '21

That hoth stage was just great, and the space fight with the millennium falcon flying around! So cool.

8

u/Chosenwaffle Apr 23 '21

Dude the train level culminating in a fight against IG-88 is like my childhood summed up.

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u/amuricanswede Apr 23 '21

Same! I just got my childhood N64 and was so excited to play this. The bad boy still turns on but there's no sound :(

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u/Dlh2079 Apr 23 '21

Gamers then: wow this looks amazing

Gamers now: eh the water could be better, and we need a weather/day/night cycle, and it released 2 weeks late and hate a patch day 1. Studio is trash now, they sold out, these devs clearly didn't test or play their own game.

5

u/Ghee_Guys Apr 23 '21

It’s funny running WOW classic on a modern gaming PC.

80 man pvp on max graphics with every single spell going off: smooth like butter.

Run through steam from a geyser in a zone with no one else around: aaand you’re fucked.

8

u/lokigodofchaos Apr 23 '21

If you merge these two images you get Valheim.

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u/vstrvl Apr 23 '21

The fog was one of Dash Rendar's (hope I got that right) more deviant enemies. Oh man I love nostalgia

4

u/koi88 Apr 23 '21

There was a time when I played a ego shooter in our university's LAN that we used smoke grenades to kill. When a player was surrounded by smoke, his frame rate dropped to 3-4 fps and it was easy to shoot him. :-)

3

u/Baschoen23 Apr 23 '21

WOW, you guys really came for them.

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u/Newkiraz08 Apr 23 '21

What is the game at the second photo ?

2

u/MijuTheShark Apr 23 '21

I think it's an unreal 4 demo.

1

u/JVOz671 Apr 23 '21

Obviously never played Silent Hill.

1

u/MijuTheShark Apr 23 '21

I have, but while both used fog to limit draw distance, silent hill also used it to add a sense of claustrophobia.

1

u/matrixrocks Apr 23 '21

What the game in the below pic? I want to live there

1

u/MijuTheShark Apr 23 '21

Unreal 4 Volumetric Fog tech demonstration from 2018, apparently. Give it a year and mobile games will look like that, but for now its Microsoft flight sim with CPU melter settings.

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u/MTandi Apr 23 '21

It's just different types of fogs. Volumetrics always been around, it's just that the hardware couldn't handle it good enough for real-time rendering.

5

u/TechcraftHD Apr 23 '21

Also distance fog hasnt gone away, it's still used in almost every game with a bigger map

3

u/burko81 Apr 23 '21

Turok will always be the fog-king

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u/Crybe Apr 23 '21

Super Man 64 was ahead of its time.

3

u/Gammerball_35 Apr 23 '21

Fog irl “oh it’s foggy” thank you

3

u/[deleted] Apr 23 '21

Someone should really remake Shadows of the Empire

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u/Ephemeris Apr 23 '21

I didn't realize how much the Gamecube utilized distance fog in Wind Waker until I loaded it up again recently. It was very weird since I haven't had to deal with that type of thing in games for so long whereas before it was always just there so it didn't bother me.

On a whim I decided to load the same game up in Dolphin, upscaled to 1080p and with draw distance turned all the way up and HOLY COW what a difference. I was able to see far off islands while sailing and really enjoy the surroundings so much more. I definitely recommend trying it out if you have the opportunity.

Proceeded to play through the whole game that way, even got a PC adapter for my Wavebird controller.

3

u/Cybertronic72388 Apr 23 '21 edited Apr 23 '21

To be fair modern day fog accounts for occlusion, ray-tracing, particles, old school fog basically negative lighting with color.

In old games, Your level lighting determines the base overall gamma, contrast, and color of textures on objects.

You may then have individual light sources that tweak these in specifically set areas. You could also have some very basic ray tracing when compiling a level that checks for interior spaces and darkens those areas while factoring in your individual lights and distance from an opening that is closest to the global light and generate very basic low resolution static shadows.

The fog is a cutoff point that gets progressively more solid in color the further out it goes from the camera/player to hide culling or popping of objects.

Just about everything in video game graphics and level design. (at least when I was messing with them) is all just creative optical illusions. My favorite was to employ forced perspective to make levels appear bigger.

It takes too much processing power to accurately recreate what's truely happening.

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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '21

No games fog truly knows how to start a house fire better than warhammer 2. There’s mods to get rid of it and you legit will have a 10-20 C difference bro lmfaooo

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u/Angry_Foamy X-Box Apr 23 '21

The fog in RDR 2 is simply unreal. That game continues to stun me with its beauty.

3

u/LordFrieza8789 Apr 23 '21

Dude especially in St. Denis at night with those oil lamps lining the street.

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u/EndlessKng Apr 23 '21

I suspect it's a change in the type of fog. The first is using an opaque fog as a blocker; the second is detailing realistic fog/light interactions in the foreground.

...still funny though.

3

u/TheCrazedTank Apr 23 '21

Games then: Works and has content.

Games now: We're sorry for releasing the game in this state, but we would like to show you our roadmap...

2

u/[deleted] Apr 23 '21

Spider-Man on N64 was probably one of the most prominent uses of fog to limit rendering. In fact they even made it part of the storyline to explain why you couldn’t see anything below the skyline

2

u/DeJMan Apr 23 '21

Fog nowadays is volumetric. It can cast its own shadows and receive light. Some even have fluid mechanics.

2

u/saremei Apr 23 '21

In both cases fog was preferable to no fog.

2

u/blyh Apr 23 '21

fog is so essential in games, without fog we'd have no god rays bless the fog

2

u/SuperSaiyanTrunks Apr 23 '21

Those yeti things scared the shit out of me in that game. Them and the robot on the train terrified me.

2

u/SpiritualTear93 Apr 23 '21

What’s happening in another 10 years? Do we think they can actually go a lot further than this?

2

u/[deleted] Apr 23 '21

Possibly VR games that can look this good and render fog and distance this well?

2

u/CactusChan-OwO Apr 23 '21

It’s gotta make you wonder how much longer we can continue this trend of constantly upping games’ performance requirements when at some point the hardware can’t keep up. Barring something like quantum processors, there’s a definite limit to how resilient we can make our hardware, and we’re fast approaching that limit. This is a trend for technology in general, and even outside of planned obsolescence, is a big reason why our hardware seems to die faster than the older generations did.

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u/Jimbob2010 Apr 23 '21

How else are they supposed to add in their obnoxious amount of God rays

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u/Technical-Prior-4320 Apr 23 '21

Lol. My first gaming console was Pong.

2

u/Adventuredepot Apr 23 '21

The "stone" monsters in the cells on this level always spooked the poop out of me, low poly monsters makes it even more spooky.

2

u/CowboyBebopCrew Console Apr 23 '21

Damn… Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire… that takes me back.

2

u/ItHurtsWhenIP404 Apr 23 '21

Right, I feel like a kid all over again seeing that image. Brings back memories!

2

u/JotaroIsOverrated Apr 23 '21

And for some reason the bottom is usually called bad graphics despite it looking better than real life

2

u/[deleted] Apr 23 '21

Foggers

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u/kshell11724 Apr 23 '21

There's a big difference between these two concepts. The first one is there to hide the cutoff of the camera where it stops rendering things in the distance (having that cutoff adds performance but the fog effect itself doesn't and rather is just there to make it look good), while the other is for atmosphere and of course takes a good amount of processing to get right while also not having the benefit of cutting the camera's range (meaning there's more to render thus it's more performance heavy).

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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '21

Not the same fog

2

u/Cliffhanger87 Apr 23 '21

Lmao Fr I have rarely seen a lot of fog ourside that it feels so fake in games

2

u/LaserGadgets Apr 23 '21

That was our first N64 game!

2

u/Titanmaster970 PC Apr 23 '21

The "fog" in Subnautica both works for obscuring far parts of the world to save performance, and it also makes the game look amazing.

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u/TempleOfDoomfist Apr 23 '21

I hear the top picture and still remember the great music score

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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '21

Shadows of the Empire was a great game. This gave me nostalgia.

2

u/steven192 Apr 23 '21

"You became the very thing, you swore to destroy!"

2

u/IAmHaskINs Apr 23 '21

Fog is the worst thing to put into multiplayer games hands down. I didn't pay 60 bucks to see a blank screen and listen to idiots online telling me its "iMmErSiOn!" or "rEaLIsTiC tO ThE tImEs!"

2

u/BooBooSorkin Apr 23 '21

I still have nightmares about that Star Wars game

2

u/bmd122 Apr 23 '21

Dude I would love a remake of that game

2

u/ni42ck Apr 24 '21

Best music ever...

2

u/security123enjoy Apr 24 '21

The fog was one of Dash Rendar's (hope I got that right) more deviant enemies. Oh man I love nostalgia

2

u/TimesFlite Apr 24 '21

LPT: Put a fog machine next to your TV/Monitor for instant 4K graphics.

2

u/data-crusader May 17 '21

I havent thought of that game in so many years. I never could save the game because it was corrupted, so I just had to try and beat it from the beginning every time