there's already a bunch of "other" fan made models of Dva out there, so a low poly one doesn't seem too crazy

@@garbaj uhhhhhh

@@garbaj please no you brought back an awful memory

@@NicknamingName Sure, "awful".

@@NicknamingName omg!!! Lewd content1!1!1!1!1! How shocking!!!

agreed

'Should of just use 'breast' but ok.

@@GoofierClock or “chest”

Garbaj is no normie

2:04

lots of small developers are making retro inspired games that take advantage of modern tech and the results are really cool

@@garbaj Vampire survivors is a good example. That game is so good/addictive that most of the achievements (even one's that take quite some time) are around 70-90% done by all players). You won't see anything flashy, the game looks pretty garbage tbh, but holy hel is it fun. It does use newer ideas, technology and peformance of modern day hardware under the hood.

I agree, many developers try to look janky on purpose. Especially artificial texture warping, it never looks like psx's lack of z-buffer effect.

"they should probably more look about how they tried to make dated games look good" - Like old 2D console devs using the effects of CRT TVs and monitors to dither the sprites.

Don't forget the aspect ratio!

just brought this up in another comment, love you for knowing about this

In some cases, Goraud was still too expensive, there were many debates of pros of higher poly flat shading (vector games come to mind vs lower poly Goraud. Sometimes it was all done in prebaked textures. When Phong was introduced, most of the hardware at the time was unable to process that much data smoothly (if I remember correctly it quadrupled memory bandwidth requirements for shading, while looking only marginally better, especially on low poly models). Introduction of shaders and explosive growth of computational capability of GPUs that came with it was truly refreshing!

@@Vatharian Yea, I grew up on voodoo2's and as a kid playe with glidegl. You had limited light sources and I don't think hardware shadows. Its funny how thats now unlimited all dependent on raw gpu resources.

@@Vatharian so using today's modern hardware do you think goraud would be a better approach some cases

@@warlockd at 13 I got my first PC, some HP Pavilion in like 1998, which wasn't exactly for gaming. One of the things my friend and I upgraded it with was a Voodoo3 (i remember it being the fancy version of the voodoo3 card, but not what it was called). The card alone was super expensive, and I'm pretty sure the PC was like $3,000. That thing kept me playing PC games and emulation for a while. There were some interesting ways that games were working back then. Shadows were becoming a more common in 3d pc gaming, but they could really tax the system.

And most often - including in 3D platformers on the N64 like Mario, DK64 and Banjo - the collectibles that lie around on the 3D map are flat pre-rendered pixels themselves.

Yeah back then there was not much choice to add detail in a scene, also round objects could just use sprite instead of a 3d mesh.

Your not wrong. Humm I bet you can get ps1's compresson effect though a well programed shader and do a "high poly" cgi render of a cutsceen.

This. This drives me craycray in games like that. I still make building sprites for SimCity4, and in order to do that I need to reate the buildings in 3D Studio Max, and then make a sprite from each corner perspective. I also nearly the same process to get any other sprite that I use in the game. Always pre-rendered in 3DSM. I used to prefer to use Blender, but it doesn't play nice with the old software for creating SimCity4 content. But I love getting these pre-rendered sprites, as well as the process of making them.

the prerendered backgrounds in final fantasy are incredible and I agree, it's something I feel that gets over looked when doing the PS1 aesthetic.

this is true, but it can be mitigated by using smooth shading which would hide these effects pretty well even on low poly models. that said, it wouldn't help selling the retro style so it's not really relevant

like h0ppip mentioned, smooth shading fixes that issue very easily. Directional lighting WAS used back then, just not as often as it it used now, and smooth shading was required to avoid that exact issue you mentioned

To me, it kind of looks like he had left the model with flat shading too instead of smooth shade, making those edges stand out more.

Great post, it kind of reminds me of how you can pre-render 3d models as sprites, but instead, the flat lighting lets you "pre-render" lighting as textures.

@@garbaj Smooth shading is also cheaper to render - sharp edges require duplication of vertex data when sending it to the GPU.

That's more specific stuff you do to make stuff look more authentic, this video covered the biggest factors to make it look retro, just paying attention to the low poly models and fake lighting makes it look pretty good already, like an insane hd remaster or something, but stuff like mip-maps and Z buffer are a must if you don't want to settle for just an HD general retro esthetic, and want a game that actually looks straight out of the PS1.

@@ginogatash4030 I still think those are pretty obvious things to disable.

Which-whats?

@@lrgogo1517 Mipmaps. Lower-res textures used when something is too small on the screen (far away) to avoid aliasing.

Aliasing... like, the opposite of "anti-aliasing"? Not sure what that means outside of the context of digital drawings... @@kimapr3817

What did you think of BBPSX?

Yeah they don't get it perfect, probably because game engines like unity & unreal don't allow them complete control over the rendering pipeline. If they developed their own game engine they could get it to look exactly the same. Especially when it comes to the ps1. You could probably do n64 graphics in modern game engines.

They all miss the dithering which is the most important part

​@@IrvineTheHunternot even close to what an actual PS1 game would look like

Its because of cathode ray tubes and scan lines.

@@jacobwhite7106 megadie?

great, exactly what we need: more crappy faux low poly garbage clogging Steam and other platforms

Pseudoregalia dev did.

GBA on Wii U Virtual Console. Those games were never meant to be seen on a 70 inch oled 1080P display.

Dithering. PS1 used it alot

@@uhhh_adam Kind of, but crt tv's are really their own beast, not only do they have a natural dither effect, but they also have district black scan lines and "cells" that really help sell texture and distance in a way that's hard to do even in a photo on high definition screens.

I have heard about this, always tho it's like "was your old favorite game always this ugly?" and always the person is like "ya look how blocky it is" but only a few actually bring up that the games were made for the technology of the time and played into screens looking the way they did.. modern screens are just showing retro games how they weren't meant to be shown

Yup, that specific kind of blur and pixels that aren't proper rectangles but dots that blend into each other.

Same

Same, I don't know why I found it so funny

it's a funny word

The way he said it like lmao

Sa.e

It's very funny that simulating this look requires adding in dithering and then applying a complex CRT filter on top of that so the dithering looks "correct." Essentially adding it in and then hiding it!

F.E.A.R i feel had some of the best graphics of that era. The lighting and shadows in that game were truly next level and brought my machine to a crippling halt at max settings.

Or look at Manhunt 1 or GTA 3, they are basically doing the samething many PS1 games did, but doesn't look like shit, unlike Manhunt 2

I disagree, I would say Half Life 2 and the Source Engine ended that era. In my opinion HL2 is the first "modern" game. I remember being so blown away by the textures and physics when it came out. I know this is a cliche, but it looked real. I think what also separates HL2 from the other games you mentioned is that it still holds up almost 20 years later. Honestly, who's playing Doom 3 or Crysis 1 in 2022? They were glorified tech demos whereas Valve managed to apply their groundbreaking tech and build a classic game out of it.

@@eXiLe824 I agree Half Life 2 had beautiful physics, but the world is actually extremely low poly and actually quite empty.

In godot it seems like you can have your cake and eat it too when it comes it comes to vertex lighting, you can paint on or render on the static lighting then in game you can use dynamic vertex lighting for specific areas that need it

you also need to crank the bilinear filtering on textures for the n64 look, and no rigging, each body part is it's own model

@@eduardopupucon The rigging is not exacly correct. You do still need to create rigs. While some early games had mainly segmented body parts, it was not exclusive. They ocasionally combined both deformations and segments even in the same model.

@@eduardopupucon Some N64 games did have rigged models though

I've been doing the same research in UE4 for Oculus Quest VR development research. I ported over ocarina of time 3ds and majoras mask 3ds and have a really REALLY good look out of it. Vertex lighting is possible, just need to vertex interpolate the data so it doesn't go through pixel shader. Also, the vertex colors channels don't properly convert to srgb color space, so you need to do some additional math to extract it properly. Then you need to multiply the result by 2 before adding it on top of your diffuse. I use the dot product of a fake directional light vector against the direction of the mesh faces to determine the brightness of the colors. This lets me have a full day night cycle and even do dynamic fake point and spotlights. It's such a great addition to the original art style. Adds a ton of depth to the original look and doesn't detract from the style. Planning on making a video about it at some point. would love to compare notes with you :) I have lots of pictures and video of the project here discord.gg/5vsuBkj

I imagine aiming to make your thing look good for a CRT display would probably be good for getting the feel down of that both for CRT users and for what someone using an LCD would see playing a game designed for a CRT. Kinda like how pixel art made to take advantage of composite blurring or not-square-pixel pixel aspect ratios is gonna have different vibes than pixel art designed for LCDs (like handheld games) or just to hit that "pixel art" aesthetic.

Needs dithering

@@RAFMnBgaming If you make it look good on an LCD screen with low resolution (very important), on a CRT display it will look phenomenal. I've been playing some newer games on an LG CRT display, and they look absolutely amazing. Ace Combat 7 for instance, looks like a fucking movie. I believe it's also the reason why old graphics (really anything from before the year 2000) don't really "hold up" on modern displays. They were meant from the ground up to look the best on a 640x480 (perhaps higher) CRT screen, with all the quirks of the technology.

I personally like the look of low res + ~high~ antialiasing for retro style low-poly games. I know it isn't authentic but I feel like it makes a nicer image than low-res without AA and helps hide the "origami" look you get with too high of res. Its similar to the way blurry CRTs smoothed out games back in the day, but with better detail.

I'm not sure about the PS1, but the N64 did support anti-aliasing alongside its strange trilinear texture filtering. So if you're going more for an N64 look there you go.

That's more the case for games with pixel art, less so 3d games. But yes, the bleeding between "pixels" and lines from CRTs could give the artists access to more apparent colors than you can see in emulators where they just slap the sprite on the screen.

You can get the same look with very sophisticated post processing effects like CRT Royale. The thing you CAN'T get is the motion clarity of a CRT.

@@KingBobXVI It's the biggest difference with the N64 IMO. The anti aliasing looks horrible on an LCD.

There goes my "Delusional Kojima Fan" alarm.

@@satsubatsu347 lol.

The time when bump mapping got big. I remember reading reviews of Doom 3 and was amazing over how good it was.

The PlayStation in general had no floating point math capability whatsoever. So everything was based on integers.

@@Berniebud Not just integers, the GTE used fixed point types.

That's right. It used 16bit fixed point words in all of the vector based math.

Yes - the biggest effect of which was that it didn't do something called perspective texture correction, which is why changing the orientation of a quad would seemingly warp the texture in weird ways.

@@Berniebud I thought it was just that 32 bit float wasn't precise enough, but good to know

We might've had something close to it if they went through with the original plan of releasing Shenmue on the Saturn instead of Dreamcast.

@@hppvitor I mean like Dying Light 2 but on PS1. Shenmue had a lot of neat world detail, but it's gameplay was still super limited. I wanna see animators make a block ass character move smoothly through a highly detailed environment.

Design sensibilities like holding a button instead of bumping into the wall to activate a door?

Project Zomboid kinda does that

Look at the Bloodborne Psx demake

First time I'm instantly subscribing :)

should make it vr compatible. would be perfect for oculus quest vr standalone. Can help you out with figuring that out if you want

@@lifeartstudios6207 hah, i have a VERY barebones demo that simply showcases a still work in progress level. unfortunately i'm not good with programming and scripting at all so i have this big jank mess that just happens to resemble Medal of Honor. but yes!! VR compatibility was planned because i want to feel the environment around me to relive the good old memories just as i remember them

@@lukabrasi001 what game engine are you using?

@@lifeartstudios6207 Godot, i figured it's still new and promising, being completely free and all of that. besides, it gives me a good foundation on retro looks for some reason. Unity has this "stock unity" look that is really standard, i didn't like it. and UE looks oversaturated with lots of post processing and i'm like... why all the horsepower for such a simple game?

@@lukabrasi001 you can disable all of that stuff with unreal. I find unity a lot harder to tune. Personally I would love to go to Godot but there's so many things missing from there that it would be very hard for me to learn and or do stuff from the ground up

it was so unexpected lol

@@sock7481 we were all thinking it but he just went and said it

he Isn't dirty minded and he thinks saying it is normal lmao

Alex K.

He stated he wanted to keep it simply "leaving" those out.

Admittedly, some people (I'm one of those people) are more interested in emulation of the raw output than the full experience. I'd love to make a game that would look identically to if someone plugged a PS1 into a modern-day monitor, vs. trying to look like what people remembered PS1s to look like on CRTs.

So including line doubling to make it even run on a modern screen?

Especially on a CRT with interlaced screen draw and color artifacts from using a composite connection. All kinds of stuff that turns dither and to gradients and transparency.

on the ps1 the point about duplication being slower isn't entirely true, since the GPU only takes in a list of 2d primitives (quads or triangles), that each contain a set of 3/4 vertices, so for the GPU to draw them the vertices have to be duplicated regardless. it's true that flat shading can be more expensive though. if the amount of vertices is less than the amount of faces, then smooth shading will naturally require less lighting calculations.

That general principle is true of a lot of things actually. The legit 'retro' way is actually harder in many ways. Progress was often about making it easier on the devs. I remember when games switched from sprites to 3D models and went from 5 or 6 CDs back down to 1 or 2, yet had substantially more game content.

What else is he supposed to say 😂😂😂

fr

You make a really good point. I work with an open-source derivative of older Game Maker versions and have dabbled a bit in the 3D side of things, using my own software to create the models. It seems like it would be fairly easy to create something with an N64 aesthetic given the lack of getting all those frills you mention out of the box, although I lean more towards a classic DOOM aesthetic. I have only used Unreal Engine briefly and never Unity. Now here's the crazy point I'm getting to: if there's a bunch of extra stuff you have to disable to develop low-poly in Unity and/or UE, does the lack of these features in Game Maker or at least older versions of it make it worthwhile to use over these newer and more advanced engines?

​@@lineriderrulz i'd say using unity or godot still makes sense, since the effort required to write a few custom shaders that emulate these old consoles' graphics is still far less than the effort required to essentially write your own 3d rendering code from scratch. although unreal engine would probably require you to reverse engineer the entire thing and swap out the renderer for a literal ps1 emulator, so at that point you might aswell write your own game engine. as a side note, what's this open-source derivative of game maker you mentioned? sounds interesting.

@@henkle1610 Thanks so much for your opinion on the matter. I think what you say makes a lot of sense. Game Maker does have 3D support out of the box, and even shader support, but the features to make the most out of it at least in the versions I know of are limited. If you want a perfect 3D collision detection, resolution, wall sliding system, you would have to roll your own or reuse someone else's work, and then you lose the benefits of rolling your own. I've faced such a challenge for a while, and as someone that sucks at matrices, trigonometry and honestly just maths in general, it's a nightmare. There's plenty of literature out there on how games have achieved it, but all of it is too complex and mathy for my little brain. The open-source derivative of Game Maker I'm using is called ENIGMA, it stands for Extensible Non-Interpreted Game Maker Augmentation. It converts code written in its own language to C++, then compiles it. The performance gain is great, while keeping most of the simplicity of GML (it's supposed to be backwards-compatible). A couple of warnings if you do want to try it: first the syntax is based on old Game Maker versions from before GMS 2, and second it can get a pain to get from nothing to running a game if you're using Windows - you may have to mess around a lot with installing and uninstalling different Java and MSYS2 versions as well as checking out different branches and revisions to find one that will actually work in Windows.

@@lineriderrulz yeah I've done a bit of 3D in GMS2 (which doesn't sound much different from the version you're using) and the thing is that you basically lose out on all the engine's features. there's no 3D scene preview, no LODs or frustum/occlusion culling, so complex scenes are a no-go, no collision detection or physics like you mentioned. at that point all the engine provides is the scripting language, a window to render your 3D objects in, and a way to get user input. if you're making a 3d retro style game and you *really* want maximum authenticity in both gameplay and graphics, it might actually be a good thing since you can create the stuff like collision detection and rendering optimizations from scratch to closely match how they did it on the original consoles. but if you're making something that just looks retro minus the gameplay jank of the time, or just any other type of 3D game i can recommend Godot. it's got a steeper initial learning curve than something like game maker, but it makes up for it by just giving you so many tools and features so you can focus entirely on making your game without having to create your own physics or UI or pathfinding or whatever systems. it has its own python-inspired scripting language called GDScript, but it also supports C# and has a C api meaning any language that can interface with C can (and probably will) have bindings available for it. that also means that if you're felling particularly unhinged you could probably jerry rig the ENIGMA language & compiler to be compatible with godot. also, it's free and open source and runs well on every platform

I liked your social credits video

Agreed, either that or OG Xbox or Gamecube would be cool to have explained

​@Facepalm Full O' Napalm it's harder to emulate the ps2 style because there's no "magic bullet" for it like the ps1. ps2 games basically just look like crappier versions of modern games, while the ps1 has such a distinct style that anyone can turn off texture filtering and toss on the first google result for "funny vertex jitter shader" and everyone will immediately cream their pants and scream "PLAY STATION 1!!!!!" even though an actual ps1 would just evaporate if you tried to run those graphics on it. information about the ps2's limitations is all you need. if you design your graphics from the ground up to fit within those limtations it'll look like something from that era. if you exceed them though it'll quickly just become "haha game with bad graphic"

​@@henkle1610 Yeah, no. This is just plain ignorance. PS2 games have a very distinct look. If you see a picture of one you know it is (unless it's the 2008 later half type.) Even people who never played those games know it's from that era. Think of Shadow of the Collussus, Silent Hill 2-4, Resident Evil 4, Bully, Metal Gear Solid 3, Psychonauts, God of War, list goes on. They all have that look that screams early 2000. To call them crappier versions of modern games is a disservice because all of these games I mentioned still hold up beautifully today (especially Shadow of the Collussus). The distinct look is Phong Shading, Grey or brown color filters, mid poly models, low resolutions, lots of bloom, fog, mostly pre-baked lighting, vertex lighting. It all comes down to the texturing work though. Textures make or break the PS2 aesthetic. Mostly Photobashed with handpainting over it, especially shadows.

@@dylanroemmele906 by "worse" i meant worse fidelity, not worse "look." you're right that games from that era look very distinct (my comment initially mentioned that but i cut out some parts cause it was becoming a novel whoops), but.. variations of phong shading are still used today. grey or brown color filters are still used today. lots of bloom is still used today. pre-baked lighting is still used today. vertex lighting is still used today (probably not in the big budget photorealistic AAA games, but still). what i meant by "crappier versions of modern games" is just that that generation of consoles was really where a lot of the technologies & effects games still use to this day began. my whole point was that for people to recognize your game as emulating the ps2 look, you need to actually emulate the ps2 look, because there's no single effect the ps2 did that immediately makes people go "yeah that's ps2 alright," you need the whole package. meanwhile most "ps1 style" games really only turn off texture filtering and add a funky vertex jitter shader (bonus points if they actually get *that* right). if they're feeling real fancy they may turn off perspective correction on textures, without implementing the techniques used at the time to prevent excessive warping. everything else the ps1 did can just be ignored and people will still recognize the style. you can't get away with that for ps2 style graphics.

@@henkle1610 Ok I understand what you mean now sorry for the misunderstanding. Just want to point out though, an engine like UE4 and Unity don’t come with Phong shading and vertex lighting right out the box. I forgot to mention that NPC player models not being affected by lighting (Unlit) hence why you never see those dark shadows on their face you would otherwise see in a modern game.

IIRC it was still baked, even up to UT3. In the editor you were moving lights around and they'd update in realtime, but you'd bake everything before you test the map, it wasn't generating shadows in real-time during play. A benefit is that it would simulate bounce lighting while baking so you could get much nicer lighting than why dynamic could offer at the time, the downside is that often the preview lighting you'd see before baking wouldn't match perfectly. Characters and first person models were lit by light probes I think, so sort of dynamic, I don't full understand light probes but it's some witchcraft again. Used to map for UT99/2004/3 so baking lighting is embedded in my brain, alongside having to make a second set of UV's for the lightmap bake. I don't miss that part

Many games for ps1 never hit 60 out of over ambition. Hard to rec-create, essential for authenticity if you create very busy scenes.

I feel the need to point out that 60fps only ever really happened with interlaced video at full res, meaning half the resolution updates, then the other half. which today we might interpret as being 30fps with full resolution, or 60fps with the half resolution, which was tiny. Interlacing breaks the modern conception of "frames" Also, many PS1 games did still hit that 60FPS mark, including FF7, and anything that had pre-rendered environments with 3d models, or anything with fixed camera angles (to hide what was and wasn't pre-rendered.) At least, that's my understanding of it

320x240(or 224), not 256, that's SNES resolution

@@SisterRose tell that to wikipedia

@@therealquade "displays resolutions from 256×224 to 640×480" that's from, not either or. in practice very few games would have been 256x224 unless they were again, SNES ports or really trying to save frames. there are several "In between" resolutions as well. 320x240 was the most common resolution. Some of the 2D games like fighter ran in one of the inbetween resolutions.

the fixed point integers is why the poly's wobbled too isn't it? from bouncing between those rounded numbers?