David AmadorSkyrim small tables are actually shelves buried. If you can't see it ...
(Recreating my list of #gamedev tricks thread)
(Recreating my list of #gamedev tricks thread)
In Jak and Daxter if by any chance the Area/assets ahead aren't fully loaded the game will make you trip to give it more time to fully load. #gamedev
In Super Mario 64 to achieve the infinite stairs effect, Mario gets teleported back. Also the reason why Speedrunners can glitch and skip it using the backwards jump trick. #gamedev
There was a memory exception in Wing Commander on exit, because of the deadline they left it but change the error message to "Thank you for playing Wing Commander!" #gamedev
This #gamedev trick is from Undertale, to prevent NPCs to walk on pits, Magic glass.
In Fallout 3 the Trains are actually a character wearing a train model as a hat. Engine didn't allow for vehicles, so this way they could reuse NPC movement code. #gamedev
In Super Mario Bros. because of memory limitations clouds and bushes are the same sprite but using a different tint color. #GameDev
In Kirby's Dream Land for GameBoy, to save memory some enemies have the same "back" part of the sprite and only change the face. #GameDev
Here's one of my fav, in Zelda: A Link Between Worlds because a true top-down view in 3D would have perspective issues, they purposely tilt the objects, so the perspective looks good to the player from top. #GameDev
Duke Nukem 3D mirrors reflection were achieved by duplicating the room on the other side. If you deactivate clipping you can go to the other side. True reflections are computational intensive even today #GameDev
In NBA Jam: T.E. for Genesis/Mega Drive developers only found out after making the 250k cartridges, that there was a save bug. But playing the game in a certain order fixed it, so it got a day one "patch" in the manual saying how to initialize memory. #GameDev
In Super Mario Galaxy when Mario drowns in a swap his hand reaches out, but because of the size of the head devs had to shrink it so only the hand is visible to the player #GameDev
World of Warcraft rest bonus was made to encourage breaks, half XP gained after a few hours. Players hated, so they made everything take 2x as much XP to achieve but you start at 200% XP and gradually back to 100%. Same thing & players are happy. #GameDev
In Resident Evil 4 during the radio chat cutscenes it's actually a 2D panel with the 3D models behind. Many other games do this too.#GameDev
In Duck Hunt the NES Zapper worked by blacking out screen & drawing white blocks around targets when you fire, for a couple frames. The diode in the Zapper detects the change in light intensity and tells the computer if it’s pointed at a lit target. #gamedev #retrogaming
In Metal Gear Solid 1, another reflection trick. Water puddles are just a transparent texture with the geometry of ceiling and walls duplicated and inverted below the ground. That's why we can't see Snake reflection in puddles. #gamedev
Sega Saturn used Quads instead of triangles (the industry norm) for rendering, which is good for 2D but not as practical for 3D, devs had to work around that, so games like Tomb Raider had to be built to support quads on Saturn and triangles on PlayStation #gamedev
Paper Mario uses a transparent mesh to simulate door shadows instead of relying on heavy shadow calculations. #gamedev
In Dead Space menus and UI is all made with particle systems so it can sort during render, glow so that they could place it in-game and be more immersive. #gamedev
Katamari Damacy only has support for closed circular paths, so to handle spawn and despawn of falling boulders, they make them travel beneath ground to start point! Also memory efficient. #gamedev https://twitter.com/JasperRLZ/status/1289960052250435584
This is easily one of the best, on OG Xbox, Elder Scrolls III would occasionally reboot the Xbox if they ran out of memory. The user would just see a longer then usual loading screen. #gamedev
Lord of the Rings game needed large areas with a sort of goal at the end, so developers grabbed the Tiger Woods golf game and turned it into LOTR game. #gamedev
Journey has no automatic shadows. All shadows were painted by hand in a low res texture. To get the iconic sunset columns to cast sharp shadows, they aligned the pixel grid of the texture (3rd picture). #gamedev source: https://twitter.com/matt_nava/status/1503152810078052355/
Matt Nava on Twitter
“Funny story: #Journey had no automatic shadows. I painted them all by hand. The shadow texture was not hi res. To get the iconic sunset columns to cast sharp shadows, I made sure that they aligned with the pixel grid of the texture. Here you can see the shadow map I painted.”
Kirby and the Forgotten Land might fake hit collisions in certain angles for better game feel, as long as in camera it "looks" like it hits. #gamedev
Skyrim handles NPCs inventories by hiding chests under the map. Most are impossible to get unless clipping is used, but sometimes you can find them. #gamedev
Metroid Prime full screen static effect texture would require too much memory and GameCube only had 24MB. solution?
texture is generated using the current RAM data which is the game running itself, and it looks like noise. #gamedev
texture is generated using the current RAM data which is the game running itself, and it looks like noise. #gamedev
Doom 3 fakes volumetric glow by folding vertexes with camera movement https://simonschreibt.de/gat/doom-3-volumetric-glow/ #gamedev
Mike Goatly@djlink That's genius
Eric Zarowny@djlink this is quite neat! @jairtrejo I feel like you would find this interesting.
jairtrejo
Thomas Griebel@djlink I wonder if this is actually a view aligned particle ribbon?
@thomas_griebel I don't know
@djlink Looks like one coiled around a quad. Not sure if they existed in idTech4 or not though, but this could be more of art effect rather than a specifically programmed feature
Alex@djlink
These are the little, often unappreciated, things devs add or develop for games that really take it to the next level. Love to see people’s hard work on something they obviously cared about.
These are the little, often unappreciated, things devs add or develop for games that really take it to the next level. Love to see people’s hard work on something they obviously cared about.
Count Regal Inkwell@djlink I have thoroughly appreciated this entire thread, thank you.
@vinesnfluff thanks for reading
JamesTDG@djlink that's honestly genius
Green Fox@djlink This looks like an incredibly efficient and also slow to code version of this.
I've done something similar with 2d shadows, but not to this level of sophistication.
I've done something similar with 2d shadows, but not to this level of sophistication.
Sparrows@djlink Okay, that is cool, and fascinating to watch. Thanks for sharing.
Gabbo the wafrn dev guy
Pig On The Wing 🐖@djlink just like they did in Yar's Revenge on the Atari 2600! 128 bytes ram!
lorddimwit is now @
Diego Floor@djlink similar to how space invaders used sprite data to make explosion sounds
alarmingly large glaceon girl 🍓@djlink most of these threads have a bunch of the same old tricks that, don't get me wrong, are genius, but i've read about them a million times
these are incredible
@monorail I found them too, the ones I haven't heard about as much I decide to make a thread
Primo@djlink the more I learn about this game the more amazed I am.
Ben Combee@djlink They must have borrowed that technique from the #Atari2600 game Yar's Revenge, where the neutral zone is drawn using the program code as the graphical bits (see http://www.digitpress.com/library/interviews/interview_howard_scott_warshaw.html).
AyotoCorp@djlink Isn't that one of the ones Sakurai made a video about? It's real goofy when you're able to peek behind the curtain like that but it also makes total sense in terms of game feel.
@AyotoCorp I think so, I had the video on my pc from my birdsite tweets backup xD
Sofia "Soficious" 🎮🏳️🌈
Russ Morris@djlink oh wow. As a big fan of both those games, this makes me smile a lot!
Justin 🐘
pinecones@djlink lmao wow.
@djlink
Todd please 
Todd "It just works" Howard.
David Gavilan@djlink Amazing soundtrack, btw. My favorite is the “Lonely rolling star” cover by the 8-bit Big Band 🎼
vactro
Chuck Jordan@djlink Well we can add that to the extremely clever ideas I’d never think of in a million years.
@SasquatcherGeneral me neither
Fox Chaotica@djlink that's absolutely genius
ima@djlink I love seeing all the tricks that come out of gamedevs getting the most out of less powerful hardware! I feel like many games these days just take advantage of the more powerful hardware and don't optimize much at all.
@ima I think as games get incredibly more complex there is less time for issues that hardware can power through sometimes. A cool thing from before is that sometimes limitations led to very creative solutions in also gameplay things.
🚩 Green Hill Autonomous Zone
NIGHTEͶ ∆@djlink That's so interesting! Wasn't Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter 3D engine also based on quad? That may be a SEGA thing, I wonder what other game or system also worked the same way
Sebas van den Brink@djlink That's crazy! How cool a workaround. Thank you for sharing
walter4096@djlink right this refers more to the texture mapping technique which really did distort an alighned quad in texture space into a quad in screenspace. more pleasing perspective aproximation in some cases but awful for clipping. both "1st 32bit 3D gen" machines had problems with perspective texture really. grouping 2 tris as a quad can be nice generally. artists try to make clean quad meshes for anim/tetxure control
@djlink its called "forward texture mapping".. i think 3DO did the same, as did one of the very early nvidia 3d cards, with added quadratic curves (very unusual).https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/how-does-forward-texture-map-work.7254/
@djlink found the saturn interesting in many ways.. kind of regret not actually getting around to doing anything on it (and it would be a great retro dev target - lowpoly 3d+pixel art) - but "triangle machines" were clearly going further .. wasn't worth the effort
PJ Perez 
@djlink I've read somewhoere that basically Saturn had no native 3D capabilities whatsoever?
4ScarrsGaming(Jon Scarr)🇨🇦🎮@djlink I knew that the Saturn was a 2D powerhouse and not so much on 3D but never knew that it used quads instead of triangles, pretty interesting.
xNASAdev@4ScarrsGaming I didn't know that either. I knew they wanted the 2d, but if memory is correct the 3d was slapped on in response to playstation doing 3d.
Retrostage@4ScarrsGaming @djlink also, the 1st nVidia graphics card, the NV1 experimented with this technique:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NV1
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NV1
