The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 1: Three Dimensions in Software

https://www.filfre.net/2023/04/the-next-generation-in-graphics-part-1-three-dimensions-in-software-or-quake-and-its-discontents/

by myth_drannon • 3 years ago

134 71 3 years ago

filfre.net

hypertele-Xii2• 3 years ago

Historic "next generation", not future prediction, as one might expect from the title. Detailing the evolution of 3D graphics 1984-1996 from Elite up to Quake.

sillysaurusx• 3 years ago

Thank you. I showed up ready to argue that graphics plateau’d some time ago, and that unless you intend to use ML to make it look more real, it’s only going to look more detailed.

beebeepka• 3 years ago

Nah, it's lighting because that's the most important thing. When the hardware is ready (at least 10 years).

Games have been adding more detailed textures and more geometry because that's all they could do. Textures just require RAM

jl6• 3 years ago

An incredible 12 years of progress. Looking back 12 years at 3D graphics from 2011, and… they’re kind of the same as we have now.

twelvechairs• 3 years ago

One reason is that up to quake almost every game had its own engine, hard coded by experts in pure graphics programming.

After halflife and unreal the game engines became standardised (later of course came unity etc.) and the focus of selling games turned to graphic style and storyline (and often multiplayer gameplay) over the pure mechanics.

eis• 3 years ago

As with most things in the beginning a lot of low hanging fruit allow for rapid innovation and progress. As things become more developed, progress tends to slow. At that time both hardware and software made rapid progress.

I think currently the big change that is happening is path based ray tracing. In the next couple years a lot of mainstream hardware should be able to do it and it makes a big impact on how games look.

Apart from that it's just more triangles I guess. We are approaching photorealistic looks and further development will try to run what huge desktop graphics cards can do, on smartphone GPUs. There we have seen actually significant developments in the past 10 years.

sigmoid10• 3 years ago

This is mostly due to the last console generation getting dragged out for so long. The PS4 came out in 2013, but thanks to a small intermediate upgrade and extended supply chain issues for the follow-up generation, by late 2022 you still had absolute high end games being made with decade old hardware in mind.

DeathArrow3• 3 years ago

But what would you think will be the next big step after some of the current hyper-realistic visuals made possible by modern game engines?

tuyiown• 3 years ago

Yes, turns out the things that greatly improves graphics rendering within non-exponential algorithmic where discovered quite fast. Either someone comes with a unconventional breakthrough, or we're stuck with heuristics optimizations and FSR/DSSL.

d_tr• 3 years ago

Are you referring to progress in rendering techniques or in the final visual result? At least in terms of the latter, games from 2011 look much cruder to me compared to games released today or even a few years ago.

dahart2• 3 years ago

Both real time ray tracing introduced in 2018, and real-time denoising with super-sampling / up-scaling / frame-interpolation, both of these have made meaningful visual quality improvements in the last 12 years. If you do a Google image search for “best games with ray tracing” and compare to “best looking games from 2011”, there is an obvious and sizeable gap in quality.

cubefox• 3 years ago

I think there does in fact exist a recent major breakthrough in real time rendering: Virtualized geometry.

https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2021/Karis_Nanite_SI...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=eviSykqSUUw

It was invented by Brian Karis at Epic. Virtualized geometry allows for unbounded geometric detail while retaining the conventional rasterization approach with polygons and textures. It works like a dynamic LOD, where the game engine dynamically adapts the rendered geometric detail based on visibility and screen resolution. Essentially the maximum rendering cost only depends on resolution and frame rate, not on the detail of the underlying meshes.

However, the solution by Epic, dubbed Nanite, does not yet work for animated meshes. So virtualized geometry is not possible e.g. for game characters. Brian Karis says this is a solvable problem though.

s1mon• 3 years ago

It’s in the comments on the original post, but Battlezone, Star Wars and other arcade games had 3D vector graphics well before Elite. There’s also stuff like Zaxxon, Q*bert or Marble Madness which simulated 3D with isometric 2D.

smcameron• 3 years ago

I don't think the article claimed Elite was first. Funny enough, I just spent the last three days implementing a remake of Battlezone on rp2040 with just fixed point math. That was a lot of fun. Still a few tweaks left to do, but it's mostly done. Edit: Battlezone's 3D is very limited, the camera, and object rotations are limited to only rotations about the y-axis (vertical axis). i.e. only yaw, no pitch, no roll. Given the hardware involved, this is understandable.

IIAOPSW4• 3 years ago

Everything prior to VR was merely a simulation of 3D. Isometric projection is no worse or better than 1 pt perspective. Sure some of it was hard coded and didn't generalize to a full environment and physics model, but so what if they didn't build more than the set pieces that would be on screen.

hnlmorg4• 3 years ago

If you want to get pedantic then VR only simulates 3D as well since it is just two 2D images used to give the illusion of depth via stereoscopy (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscopy).

However in terms of gaming, 3D has different meaning from the physical world. And in terms of gaming, the vector games defined before are classed as 3D

Animats• 3 years ago

Tune into tomorrow for our next exciting episode of PC-platform video gaming history.

The useful lesson there is that responsiveness will make up for many visual problems.

Must-get-framerate-up.

nologic01• 3 years ago

Its interesting that while 3D in crude forms captured gamers imagination early on, it never really caught on in non-game contexts except where unavoidable (CAD etc).

We like to say that games are a metaphor for life, but that might not be quite true. It seems that for most uses, the accuracy of 2D trumps the realism illusion of 3D

coderedart• 3 years ago

aren't you talking about AR/VR when you say 3D? Then, the main hurdle until recently was the hardware constraints rather than the accuracy or realism stuff.

thanatropism2• 3 years ago

The Mac used to have a cube-turn animation for switching between screen-spaces. It was a-larming, like your computer was breaking down in a spectacular Hollywood fashion.

dusted2• 3 years ago

It is still remembered with warm nostalgia today by countless middle-aged men who would never want their own children to play a game like this.

What ? Why wouldn't you let your kid play Duke Nukem 3D ? It's an awesome game?

tmtvl• 3 years ago

It also has crude adolescent humour which humourless old men (like me) may deem inappropriate for children.

dusted2• 3 years ago

It's crude, surely, but it's mostly lost on the audience that's too young to understand it, and if they understand it, then they're obviously not too young?

Also, what's the problem with crude adolescent humor ?

thanatropism2• 3 years ago

That depends so radically on the child.

What their personality/psychology is like and what they've been exposed to already.

I wouldn't want DN3D to be my son's first exposure to the idea of female strippers. (What should it be? Now that TV channels no longer exists and you just don't catch inappropriate imagery by accident... I don't know! Something that explores the idea that he's starting to enjoy naked ladies, which is good bu under societal strictures; strippers are sometimes exploited so it's ethically fraught; OTOH men can be def exploited through their sex drive, the many traps. Also look that's a fake boob. Not some guy with a gun, godamnit.)

dahart2• 3 years ago

Now that TV channels no longer exists and you just don’t catch inappropriate imagery by accident...

What? Hehe, on the internet today kids are way way WAY more likely to see inappropriate imagery than when we had TV channels. My kids seem to have turned out okay, but we had multiple accidents where they search for something and got back stuff that was so much worse than what they asked for. They get a firehose of inappropriate content on TikTok and YouTube. I would kill to have the internet be as moderated and tame as TV was.

TrackerFF2• 3 years ago

While shopping in a mall with my dad, in 1997, I found Duke Nukem 3D in a bargain bin. I think it was something like $20, which was a steal back then - IIRC most games, especially consoles, retailed for three times that.

Anyway, I was under 18, and I begged - but no dice, he saw the PEGI 18 symbol and wouldn't budge. Not one bit. Instead he saw Civ II in the same bin, and thought that would be a good game for me. And it was!

hypertele-Xii2• 3 years ago

You definitely got the better deal :)

DeathArrow3• 3 years ago

“Mathematics,” wrote the historian of science Carl Benjamin Boyer many years ago, “is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.”

I have the opinion that Mathematics is a set of axioms, theorems based on those axioms and conjectures.

Yes, you follow some algorithms to prove something or to do some calculations, but those algorithms, no matter how interesting, are less important than the results.

To me, algorithms belong more to applied Mathematics than pure science, which Math is.

DeathArrow3• 3 years ago

and managed to do it in real time, even on a fairly plebeian consumer-grade computer. He did so first of all by being a genius programmer, able to squeeze every last drop out of the limited hardware at his disposal.

He did it in the '90s. Now we have Javascript frameworks, SOLID principles, clean coding, uncle Bob and AGILE methodology.

TrackerFF2• 3 years ago

Anyone remember the SNES port of Doom? By all accounts, it was a piece of sh!t compared to the PC version, but talk about wringing out what you could of the limited SNES hardware

qbasic_forever2• 3 years ago

SNES doom was a total labor of love by Randy Linden, the story behind it is very interesting: https://www.shacknews.com/article/117004/super-doom-how-id-s... He created it without even getting the rights to do so first and id was so impressed they had to publish it. It's arguably an even bigger programming achievement than regular Doom as the SNES has no business doing anything remotely close to Doom. A lot of the work to make it run on the SNES (simplifying some levels and such) went on to almost all the other console ports too. Yeah it wasn't the best Doom experience, but it was still pretty amazing for what was basically a souped up 6502 processor on the SNES.

ihateyouall123• 3 years ago

Why do you censor yourself?

JamesLeonis• 3 years ago

The SNES port was my first introduction to Doom. What a blast from the past.

coldtea• 3 years ago

And we're all the worse for it.

teddyh• 3 years ago

Now we have Javascript frameworks, SOLID principles, clean coding, uncle Bob and AGILE methodology.

Oh no, you’ve uncovered his secret plan!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_MkLfD0Ly4

keyle• 3 years ago

Wow, easy now. You're throwing a bunch of stuff together and acting like it's all the same evil.

Trust me, the way they wrote games back in the day was the most AGILE methodology you'll ever see.

Clean coding is such a loaded term, too. It can mean different things to different people, but I presume you're throwing shade at the book "clean code".

Finally, Javascript frameworks, well, there is no redeeming there, and to be frank, it started at Javascript.

pringk02• 3 years ago

Now we have Javascript frameworks, SOLID principles, clean coding, uncle Bob and AGILE methodology.

I see this sentiment here often, but I still fail to see what is inherintly bad in any of these?

JKCalhoun2• 3 years ago

Probably not bad, probably less fun though.

napkin• 3 years ago

I was 13 when I downloaded QTest, the ID Software tech demo, from a local BBS. My brother and I shared the computer- a 486 dx2-50, in our 'bedroom'- an unfinished basement. The antique desk our only furniture, a bare lightbulb hanging from the beams. Our mattresses sat on bare concrete, surrounded by cardboard boxes. My digital metabolism and BBS habit was pretty amped up by that point, but it's so hard to describe the feeling of running QTest. Doom was exhilerating... Quake was profound. Suddenly decades of future progress had crystalised.

Bless Carmack for including features such as scaling render output independently from screen resolution (+/- buttons by default?). It allowed us to share this vision of the future with our not-quite adequate DX2-50.

tuzemec• 3 years ago

The player movement in Quake (and the Quake derived engines like Source) still feels the "right one" for me.

Not sure if I can put it to words, but to this day, moving around in any other engine based FPS just "doesn't feels right".

Or maybe it's just nostalgia...

i_c_b• 3 years ago

Let me make the case that it's definitely not just nostalgia - or, at least, that Quake style movement didn't fade away because of any objective, rational process.

One of the exasperating consequences of the rise of game engines has been that you have games shipping that have more and more of their game design inherited from their game engines.

On some level this makes sense - games are just massively complicated, and so if you already have working, tested code, it's often quite tempting to just go with what already works (and not spend time really internalizing how working things work) and then focus on figuring out the particular things you are adding from that baseline.

As just such an example, when I was working on Activision's Soldier of Fortune, we largely inherited Quake 2's movement code, and most of it was left untouched by the time we shipped. At some point, midway through development, inspired by Thief, I stayed late one night with a co-worker, and I added in leaning around corners to the player controls. I don't remember the particulars of that process, but (obviously) I had to make tons of aesthetic choices while doing that, because I was writing it from scratch. But the base movement we could inherit.

If you go back and look at first person games from the late 90's, their aesthetic choices about basic player movement are all different in subtle ways. That makes sense, because most studios were writing their own bespoke engines at the time, and there was vastly less code sharing. So people were writing code because there was no particular alternative, and so they were making tons and tons of aesthetics choices whether they wanted to or not. Lots of those choices weren't always great, but they were often particular.

It's clear at this point that lots and lots of FPS games just inherit Unreal Engines movement. Not because it's great, but because it comes with Unreal and it's a default. To me, there's something very specific about the way friction works with player movement in Unreal that feels very ... sticky? ... compared to Quake Engine games. Players come to a stop when input is released in a way that feels like being in glue - again, at least to me. There's more subtle gliding around in Quake. As far as I can tell, the difference rarely effects game play in most games. But it does change how it feels aesthetically to play moment by moment.

Anyway, this topic feels intensely path dependent to me. Unreal's movement is the default because Unreal is the default engine (in a lot of contexts), but it didn't become the default because of anything specific about its player movement code. Those aesthetic decisions were just along for the ride, so to speak. Or at least, that's my sense.

Interestingly, I found a github project a while ago that tried to reverse engineer Quake / Source's movement and put it into Unreal Engine 4. No idea how successful the project is, but I suspect it might be an interesting resource for seeing what's different between the two: https://github.com/ProjectBorealis/PBCharacterMovement

MichaelZuo3• 3 years ago

To me, there's something very specific about the way friction works with player movement in Unreal that feels very ... sticky? ... compared to Quake Engine games. Players come to a stop when input is released in a way that feels like being in glue - again, at least to me. There's more subtle gliding around in Quake.

UE movement is not physically correct. So it would make sense that it generates a nagging sense of uncanniness, especially when the rest of the game looks close to realistic.

WiggleWizard• 3 years ago

There are still people out there (such as myself) and very tiny amount of game studios who still care about these small details and will often rewrite movement from scratch in their respective engines. To me, fluidity of player movement should be very high on the priority of "features".

You are quite right though about devs just leaving UE movement...which is a huge shame because it's a such an important detail in a game; how the game feels. I don't blame devs who don't do this though because it's incredibly complex to write your own especially around what's already there (10x so if you're doing multiplayer); I've also come across whole studios while contracting who don't understand that having a game that looks good but feels bad can impact their sales/reviews.

pipes2• 3 years ago

I am the only one here who gave up reading this? There's something up with the writing that I can't put my finger on?

trinsic22• 3 years ago

Nope. To me it felt like a mess of the most overrated bullshit that mattered only to people who where on the outside of this movement.

JKCalhoun2• 3 years ago

I think I dislike the assumption that more-real game equals better game. But I am not sure that is coming from the author or from the portrait he paints of an industry that seems almost wholly obsessed with this one end-goal.

StrictDabbler• 3 years ago

This has been a problem people have with every filfre post lately.

The Digital Antiquarian is a blog but realistically it's actually a very long book. The first entry was published in 2011. It treats the entire history of interactive gaming.

Dropping in on chapter 217, or whatever this is, is a little confusing. Maher has spent a decade establishing a detailed context for discussing the nature of interactive experiences.

Part of the story is about the sad years from about 1995-2002 when interactivity was decreasing even as rendering technology improved. Maher is in the middle of that sad story right now and people are put off by the matter-of-fact way he discusses the flaws of these iconic games and by the pace of his narrative.

It is such a sad story that people think Maher "dislikes" or "mocks" these games. He does not. It was a real nadir for the industry.

Interactivity picked up again sometime around the release of Morrowind.

I love the blog. I would strongly recommend starting at the beginning and seeing if you don't love it a few entries in.

pipes2• 3 years ago

It's not that, it's the prose is somehow awkward. Well that's the best way I can describe it. I'll try it again. Interesting topic.

MichaelZuo3• 3 years ago

In a misguided attempt to fix the bad vibes, Carmack, whose understanding of human nature was as shallow as his understanding of computer graphics was deep, announced one day that he had ordered a construction crew in to knock down all of the walls, so that everybody could work together from a single “war room.” One for all and all for one, and all that. The offices of the most profitable games studio in the world were transformed into a dystopian setting perfect for a DOOM clone, as described by a wide-eyed reporter from Wired magazine who came for a visit: “a maze of drywall and plastic sheeting, with plaster dust everywhere, loose acoustic tiles, and cables dangling from the ceiling.”

It sounds like Carmack really took the dispute personally, and was making some unwise choices.

rasz2• 3 years ago

I remember reading about Romero playing multiplayer Doom whole day instead of working on Quake. Carmack could have been tired of his shit. No walls no way to hide, everyone can see everyone else working/slacking off.

trinsic22• 3 years ago

I appreciate the attempt of the author to record the history of 3D games (this is how I took it).

With that being said, from the title, I thought I was going to be reading a history of 3D graphics software. Instead it felt like I was reading a story about the 3d game industry, at least at the end... So, might want to think about that. It didn't feel like a cohesive whole, to me.

There seems also to be a lot of personal bias in this piece toward commercialism of software..

We can learn much about the tech zeitgeist from those algorithms the conventional wisdom thinks are most valuable. At the very beginning of the 1990s, when “multimedia” was the buzzword of the age and the future of games was believed to lie with “interactive movies” made out of video clips of real actors, the race was on to develop video codecs: libraries of code able to digitize footage from the analog world and compress it to a fraction of its natural size, thereby making it possible to fit a reasonable quantity of it on CDs and hard drives. This was a period when Apple’s QuickTime was regarded as a killer app in itself, when Philips’s ill-fated CD-i console could be delayed for years by the lack of a way to get video to its screen quickly and attractively.

I'm sorry, in my experience, Quick Time was a mainstream mess to be avoided it like the plague. There were way better solutions out at the time, that were not so well known.

Predictably enough, it all turned into a bit of a fiasco. Crackers quickly reverse-engineered the algorithms used for generating the unlocking codes, which were markedly less sophisticated than the ones used to generate the 3D graphics on the disc. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people were able to get the entirety of the most hotly anticipated game of the year for $10. Meanwhile even many of those unwilling or unable to crack their shareware copies decided that eight levels was enough for them, especially given that the unregistered version could be used for multiplayer deathmatches.
Carmack’s misplaced idealism cost id and GT Interactive millions, poisoning relations between them; the two companies soon parted ways.

Misplaced?, please... I feel like this really biased toward assuming games, and the people that make them, need to be commercially viable to be any good, its almost like this piece is coming from some PR guy.. People reversed-engineered games because that was their contribution to the technological movement of the time, it was, and is, just as important as making software.

Also, I don't think it had anything to do with poison relationships. Its more of a difference of perspective: There were people in the software industry only concerned about making money off of developing software, and there were people that were interested in changing the world from an idealistic perspective. Looking at where we are at now, I'd say the poisoning is done by the people who's only interest in software development is making money.

rasz2• 3 years ago

>this was a period when Apple’s QuickTime was regarded as a killer app
Quick Time was a mainstream mess to be avoided it like the plague

There was NOTHING like QuickTime before QuickTime. It enabled 1991 Adobe Premiere build by ex Quicktime engineer on Mac platform, 1991 Avid ported from Apollo $workstations$ to Mac thanks to QT. Microsoft and Intel got so scared of it they paid off third party Apple contractor to steal code. Microsoft shipped stolen code as part of Video for Windows update. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_...

"the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million."

"Intel gave this code to Microsoft as part of a joint development program called Display Control Interface."

"Canyon admitted that it had copied to Intel code developed for and assigned to Apple. In September 1994, Apple's software was distributed by Microsoft in its developer kits, and in Microsoft's Video for Windows version 1.1d."

jonathanlydall• 3 years ago

I was about 15 years old when Quake came out.

I had read an article in a magazine which said it was the first truly 3D game which I (naively) disregarded as hype as I had played loads of Duke Nukem 3D which seemed as to me to also meet the definition of 3D.

But I still vividly remember playing it for the first time and using mouselook to actually look around, only then did I actually understand it was mind blowingly more 3D than Duke or DOOM, especially when I saw a monster for the first time.

Another interesting fact which young gamers may not know: Mouselook wasn’t an option which you could turn on or off in the game settings, at most you could bind it to a key, when you let go of the key mouselook stopped.

It seemed to me it was conceived as an opt in keybindable option to merely “show off” the true 3D nature of the game. A lot of people just played the game with keyboard only and there was also joystick support.

However, it soon became common knowledge that you could put “mouselook+” in “autoexec.cfg” (if I recall correctly) and it would keep mouselook enabled permanently. Once you became practiced enough at playing with the mouse and keyboard in combination with each other you could run rings around slow keyboard turners in multiplayer who didn’t stand a chance.

The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 1: Three Dimensions in Software

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