One thing I’ve noticed that’s missing in a lot of PS1-styled games is the lack of pre-rendered CGI sprites and billboards. Of course the low-poly environments and characters are a major part of the iconography of the 5th generation of gaming, but I feel like people seriously overlook the amount of pre-rendered CGI that was shoved into literally every game of the era. From Crash’s Wumpa Fruit, to Resident Evil’s backgrounds, pre-rendered CGI through billboards or sprites are an integral part of the PS1 aesthetic, and I feel a lot of games stray away from authenticity when there’s absolutely 0 pre-rendered CGI to be found. Something as simple as pre-rendered item icons or character heads for the HUD would do so much to immerse yourself into believing the game was made when developers were desperate to make their games look as 3D as possible.
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.
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 other thing you didn't mention is that directional lighting makes low polygons count more noticeable, by highlighting the hard edges of the models where light reflects at different angles of incidence. It's particularly noticeable at 2:35 where you can see how D.Va's face looks like an origami, whereas as soon as you switch to flat lighting, the angles suddenly vanish into a much more uniform and smooth shape. Directional lighting doesn't only hurt a retro game's aesthetic because it looks more graphically demanding, it also actively hurts the illusion of low-poly models from looking more detailed than they actually are. Low poly models rely entirely on a flat lighting in order to work, whereas directional lighting needs a higher polygon count to round up hard edges in order to not look ugly.
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
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.
Also, an important thing to mention was the resolution we were using back then. On something like the Crash Bandicoot clip you showed in the beginning, there's a noticeable low resolution, and also a lot of the things I feel a lot of developers get wrong is that they're focused on making things look "crappy" and not really thinking like a 90's, early 2000's developer trying to push the limits of what was available back then. Instead of trying to make a the game look dated, they should probably more look about how they tried to make dated games look good despite the limitations at the time.
@@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.
"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.
I wanted to add something that was used in most ps1 games : Dithering. The console stored 24 bits textures but rendered them on the screen in 15 bits. It was meant to give the illusion of increasing the the amount of colors with a shading effect, once again for Old crt tvs. It was smoothed because of the way our old analog signals worked : Basically it blurred and softened the picture. It prevented you from noticing the image flickering too. The final output was nice and smooth, you could not notice anything.
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!
The other factor, is that oldschool video games were designed for CRT screens - and used shortcuts to make use of the blurring effect on CRT to make the image better. It's why ports of say Sonic & Knuckles look blocky on modern screens. Because on a CRT, the TVs natural limitations actually added a smoothing effect
@@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
I spent countless days on PS1 games while growing up and almost all of it has been burned into my brain. As a result, I can't help but notice 90% or more of these "demakes" fall short of really hitting the mark. Your video is a good step along those dev's journey to accuracy, thank you.
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.
Turning off anti aliasing also helps, as well as taking down the resolution. I still think that's not enough because the displays we had back then (CRT TVs) worked very differently than the monitors we use today, so some people apply post processing shaders that try to replicate some side effects of CRT TVs.
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.
@@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.
There's also the fact that these games were played on CRT monitors with much lower resolution which not only was made it easier to get away with worse graphics it was often intentionally used and games were specifically made with those kinds of screens in mind, so when you take it onto a much higher resolution monitor it's not having those same kind of filters applied and is going to look different.
Something I feel like a lot of people miss (even in the big industries) is the fact that old graphics weren't *just* 'low-poly'. It's incredibly noticeable in character designs like 'retro Crash Bandicoot' in the N.Sane Trilogy and related games. They show a really low poly Crash model, but he looks nothing like the real old Crash looked like, as a lot of it was done with a sort of squash-and-stretch approach rather than just low poly counts (as well as the fact that the Naughty Dog tried to fit as many polygons as they could onto the screen at once).
I think it's also important to note that the original PlayStation in particular didn't use floating point numbers in it's coordinates (if I'm remembering that right), and it also had built-in dithering.
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.
There's something fascinating about the "Between Times." You know. The era of 2002-2005ish. Look at Doom 3. Everything is almost a Claymation like effect. Or Splinter Cell, with its insanely high detail look, the Xbox version somehow still standing up to this day... I'd say Crysis in 2007 ended this era of retro-but-not-so-retro 3D graphics.
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.
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.
mgs2 was one of the best textured games ever made, even to this day. they had wall textures that were "fully 3d" in that they showed very detailed elements like pipes and the shadows they cast on other parts of the wall. all of it was entirely textured
@@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.
you also need to disable texture filtering if you're aiming for the PS1 look, and depends heavily on vertex colors when faking light sources. i'm working on a game heavily inspired by Medal of Honor 1999 and Medal of Honor: Underground and i was able to get a convincing PS1 look that REALLY ties itself together
@@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
@@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
As you touched on briefly, the PS1 was limited to only be able to do graphical calculations using whole integer numbers instead of floating point values (numbers with a decimal) so often you would see pixels jump back and forth in whole movements instead of smoothly/with aliasing
Another important thing to note is that UV seams and especially sharply shaded edges were often avoided because, to the GPU, a vertex can only have one normal, one UV, etc. So to pass that information to the GPU you'd (and still do) have to duplicate any vertex with more than one UV or normal on it. This is why almost no games that are *actually* old use flat shading. It's very expensive.
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.
I’m not sure how I found your channel, I’m no game developer but I love watching how you explain things! Keep it up and when you do get your game going I will play it!
There's also the fact that 64 bits consoles used Gauraud Shading, while more modern engines use phong shading, env mapping, antialias and render much more polygons than the ps1 / n64 / saturn..
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
Can anyone please explain to me why light effects were so different between the PS1 and N64? This question has been on my mind for a long time. Light effects on the PS1 for things like lasers, fire, and explosions actually looked more like emitted light. The were bright, intense, and full of color. On the other hand, N64 light effects were sometimes barely there at all, and seemed more like flat, painted expressions of a flame, laser, or explosion and were often dull and boring in comparison. Of course, first-party and Rare games often did a little better in that area.
I still have hard time believing that the Playstation does all of its 3D using only fixed-point 16-bit integers. Floating point math is an extravagant luxury that we take for granted
Hey Garbaj! Just wanted to let you know, this video showed up briefly on the Film Theorists channel at 15:50. It was brief but you were still there! I recognized this video, and it also showed your channel name. Keep up these amazing videos!
I admire the determination of developers looking to recreate the look and feel of a console generation. Although retro+ (idk what people would call it, retrowave is taken by music) where they mimic the look and use modern tech to enhance it can create some cool results. A lot of these games look amazing with just a few tweaks, and like in the video, it's mostly lighting, shadows and some anti-aliasing. Soul Reaver on the PS1 is an amazing game, then you take the dreamcast version, spruce it up a hair, and it looks like an HD remake, or at least how my brain remembers it when I was younger.
Based on all of the information I've absorbed about video games over the years I've learned that lighting is probably the most impactful single factor when it comes to graphics.
@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.
@@CausticSpace 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.
What I like to do is use shaders to make my characters fullbright with vertex wobbling and all that while leaving the environment traditionally lit and solid (still with sharp pixely textures though). Not only does it improve readability by having the enemies pop out from the environment but it also has a cool stylistic look.
How would someone recreate Mode7 in modern game engines? For people who don't know Mode7 was used in the SNES days to create 2D sprites that could be calculated in such a way that they looked 3D. For example Mario Kart SNES or Star Fox.
I feel like now, in modern days, retro graphics from yesteryear feel more like an art style to me than the "standard". Given our grand advancements of technology, we can make our games look like most things we want, either super realistic or, in this case, like ps1 graphics. One game that I enjoy that does this this style in a bit more modernized way is ULTRAKILL. It has many characteristics of ps1 or late 90's 3d game graphics but also has the joys of things like dynamic lighting, which is done to fit in a lot more with the games aesthetic. Though maybe the game resembles more of quake, it obviously has features that let you play in a ps1 style so I think it leans a bit more to that side as well. All in all, I believe you can do a bit more with the ps1 "look" as long as it blends in nicely with your game's aesthetic and doesnt look jarring. Though if you are aiming for accuracy, then Im not the kind of guy to stop people from doing what they want and enjoy :)
I have no knowledge of coding or game modeling, so I am quite surprised that this trick of mimicking lighting is not a common knowledge among those who do graphic works.
In the n64 era, lots of games faked hard shadows by cutting polygons and shading them or by putting alpha textures with shadows drawed. Rare games does this extensively, the best example is the first level in perfect dark.
Please keep these up! I'd be down to have a super fun, yet accessible PS1 graphical tutorial series done by you! (maybe one specifically on how to model characters, construct them and texture them in-depth: a bit more in detail than the old one)
Check out the recent "Powerslave Exhumed" release by Nightdive, or at least the Digital Foundry video on it. They've done a great job at reproducing a weird combination of the PlayStation and Saturn original version, and a good deal of it is the rather unique subtractive lighting system that game had on Saturn giving it a really strong, high contrast look. It also has options to reproduce CRT effects, affine texture warp and fixed point transform vertex wobble, which are all mostly really good and work well together to make it feel a lot more like playing the games in that era, and not like coming back to a modern port of an old game (it doesn't have an option for 20 FPS with drops, though, like the Bloodborne demake!) It helps it's just a great game too: like a way before it's time Metroid Prime.
One thing these PS1 style games don't quite nail is using super saturated vertex coloring. Play a game from that era and it has such a distinct way of lighting the scene. Very moody and dark but with extremely deep colors. If something's in a back alley at night, expect deep blues or orangey yellows, not just a more realistic light that is closer to white. It should all be lit like a rave.
1:05 I remember importing KH2 models into unreal for fun for the first time, it was horrifying! XD I'm still wondering how they made all their hand-painted stuff look so good, faking all the shadows, lights, etc. for characters on PS2, like, was painting directly on the model a thing back then?
Real time lighting was actually in a few games from the time, Conker's Bad Fur Day used it expensively throughout the entire game, Conker himself having a dynamic filtered shadow which reacted to light sources stretching and projecting over the environment
I recently got into Blender, wanting to use it to do some concept art work, and I find that videos like these, even if I'm not looking to make game assets, are so interesting and fascinating. A different side of the work that I love.
I feel like another more theoretical concept to making a game feel like a ps1 game is that many of these devs tries to stuff in high quality handmade textures into limited hardware and tried to maximize the most of limited tech while hiding its drawbacks, I feel like Silent Hill 1 is an amazing example where yes it’s a low Res game but you can see and feel the effort put into it, I don’t know the name but someone made a silent hill 1 inspired game that perfectly would pass as a ps1 game of the era
Thank you. Can you show how to animate the facial textures? Also, I'd love to see GC era, such as Custom Robo, Megaman X Command Mission, Pokemon Coliseum, and Tales Of Symphonia.
Lighting will always be one of the most important elements to 3D rendering, going for something retro or going with something advanced will always involve lighting.
Actually really interesting, I don't know why I hadn't thought of lighting before, now it seems really obvious. It would also be kinda cool to check out the weird era for 3d graphics that was the early 90's, by that i mean Jaguar 3DO and 32x
They also all used Gouraud shading, which is where the surface normal is only calculated per vertex, and smoothed across the polygon. Modern gaming engines use per pixel shading which was basically impossible to do on hardware back then. this alleviated the flat look of just basic ambient lightning, as it's very fast, but it isn't accurate.
Another thing to note is that back then these were more commonly played on CRT TV’s that displayed graphics differently than LCD’s because things were more fuzzy and soft back then. Now it’s so sharp you can see the pixels too well. So if you want an even more authentic view, gotta go with a crt, it is even hard to emulate perfectly, but better than nothing.
Another part of this is that games back then were meant to be displayed through a crt monitor. The pixels on screen were basically tiny light bulbs displaying one color. This created the signature low resolution, but they also used various visual modeling techniques like texture hashes and proto OLED techniques of leaving some pixels black to create the illusion of depth and detail. That's why older games look flat and jagged on newer monitors, you weren't supposed to see the game in that much detail. It's also the reason the crt filter exists for most emulators.
One thing I would have liked to see in the video is per-vertex/gouraud shading. Individual objects could be dynamically lit, but it had to be done by assigning light values to each vertex in the mesh, rather than per-pixel method modern consoles use.
I was an artist that worked on the PS1. We did have directional lighting, which when it was combined with gouraud shading, really helped make the models look better (there's no reason that the character model you used wouldn't be real-time shaded)
I played tons of the Crash Bandicoots when i was a kid, 1, 2, 3, that racing game and Crash Bash.... Good old days before internet. Wild to think that my generation was the last one to live a childhood without it's influence, 1995
There's also a huge difference between flat polygon shading and Gourard/interpolated. PS1 had dynamic light in many games used in limited way - Tomb Raider 2 onwards used flares and gun flashes, and you can clearly see some fighting games have smooth polygons while others have corners pop out more.
My pet peeve is when games with PS1 style also purposefully include the worst aspects of it such as texture warping that cause terrible motion sickness for many people. If you are going to include something that causes motion sickness in many people, at least put a toggle for it like PuppetCombo started doing in their later games.
When I saw the thumbnail, I was thinking it was going to be like an SFM SMG4 sort of deal, but no it's an actual serious conversation that is actually pretty strong.
Very informative. I learned recently about the dithering the system did by default. It was a clever way to sorta blend colors to trick your brain into seeing smoother graphics.
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.
You're missing a big point about PS1 graphics, just like everyone else. Limited color space!!! Like come on, your D.va texture uses at least a 1000 colors, not even 256. In reality, PS1 supports only 16 colors per face/polygon. So in order to make a car for gran turismo with more than 16 colors, devs used palettes. you get 16 colored texture about 256x256 resolution max, and divide it in different parts like windiws, car body, lights, that would use different palletes to make up for more colors. So in reality, there's like 16 colors x 16 palettes = 256 colors, but not all at once. That makes your D.va model obsolete and unfitting with the restrictions and artstyle of PS1. You can only have 16 colors per polygon. Multiple polygons can share the same sets of palettes for the same texture, but you can't just have a 256 color texture on PS1.
Also gotta remember that we lack some tools today that artists had back then, like it was common to bake something akin to a directional light into vertex color data using tools, not just manually painting (although it always required some amount of manual painting) and plenty of games used dynamic vertex lighting too, which unity kind of supports but not very well, and unreal doesn't support at all (idk about Godot sorry) and that's just like one thing there's a million technical aspects to consider when making retro graphics
@@jlewwis1995 that's true but it's not really practical to do for a big level you could make in a modern game engine which would need to be broken up into a ton of different meshes and all those meshes are probably reused several times in the scene and need to be reused in other scenes as well. On the PS2 they had tools specifically for game levels and I'm sure they were common for other studios and consoles. I think people in the Haunted PSX community do use blenders baking features occasionally though if their level supports it
@@morganlak4337 well it depends, if it's in outdoor level you probably want most of it statically lit anyway unless you want a day night cycle so the rendering feature would be really useful there, if it's a mix of indoor and outdoor you could bake the outdoor part and place dynamic lights for the indoor area in places that need it and bake the colors in areas that dont need it, that's one of the benefits of using vertex colors vs lightmaps, mixing static and dynamic vertex lighting is extremely easy
You'll see this tech most commonly in older valve titles, baked lighting is a godsend for performance and can do the same job that dynamic lighting can provide
This does explain why myself and many others like the aesthetics of the old stuff better. If the character always has good lighting, they look good from every angle. Some lighting in a lot of these recent games tends to be extremely unflattering; I remember hating the way Halo 4 looked, because everything looked like it was made of cake frosting. In old games, color was used much more deliberately. If ever I get around to having someone make a game for me, I will ask for them to not rely on dynamic lighting too much. Also, subscribed
I remember someone (possibly this channel) talking about how older games used the fact that everyone was watching on old ray tube TVs and using the fizzy to their advantage.
I'd enjoy seeing how the n64 got it's signature blurriness from it's (I'm guessing) texture filter. Would be neat to see it turned on and off. Maybe eventually a comparison of the two console's features.
Not the texture filter, the extremely small texture cache and the fact that accessing cartridge ROM directly was faster than RAM. Textures were made as small as possible.
Here's another big aspect of low-polygon graphics: There's the fact that older video games themselves were used on CRT displays. Even the original HD-ready televisions were modified CRT displays, they just had more digital electronics behind them and the screens were wide and flat. That's a big deal because CRTs had three key upsides over digital flat panels. They had better responsiveness, deeper image, and soft resolution. CRTs are electrically simpler than digital flat panels and they had much less input lag. So any movement or environmental rendering happened quicker than on modern TVs. CRTs also have more contrast and they don't even have a backlight. So even if the early low-poly models seemed flat, they had the intrinsic depth of the TV itself. Then there way a CRT produces an image. A digital flat panel has a fixed grid of pixels that light up to create an image. A CRT just has colored phosphors that don't move with the image. So a CRT resolves any jagged edges on a low-poly model.
Not video games, but this is sort of how miniature painters add lighting effects to their models. You can't count on the lighting being correct, especially at the scale and angle most people view them (from above, multiple feet away). So instead, they paint the highlights and shadows on. Applying lighter or darker shades, to simulate what the hypothetical lighting would be for the figure. While a majority of the time, this is just used to fake the presence of sunlight overhead, you'll sometimes see OSL (Object Source Lighting) effects to simulate specific light sources from different angles. Either from elsewhere or from an object on the model itself (a lantern/torch, glowing crystals, magic effects, etc).
Screen resolution is the main thing that generate the retro vibe, not even the lighting and shadow, 240p instead of 1080p directly brings us back in the 90s...
Lighting is so powerful for fidelity. Excellent lighting can make a game look one generation ahead, whereas abysmal lighting can make it look a generation behind.
