I tried some hl2 maps and the need for speed most wanted map. I'm really impressed by how close the rendering is to the original games. Not only did they get the lighting and shading right, there are also details like the NPCs being present, or even animated falling leaves particles in the most wanted map.
I'm at a loss how they managed to convert/managed so many different formats — the textures, level data, sprites, etc. Rare games on the N64 made extensive use of "vertex shading" like techniques, and these have all been carried over to a higher degree than I would've expected...
Off topic, but you're the guy who made the HN User Tag script! I recognise you since I have you tagged as "tag-legend". Still waiting for you to post your creation as a Show HN! ;)
They are definitely ripped from the game. More significantly, there's a lot of work on the rendering engine side of things to make all these different types of games with their different rendering techniques work on the browser.
GTA Vice City was made for the PlayStation 2. The PS2 has a 300MHz CPU with 32MB RAM, and a GPU with 6.2 GFLOPS (slightly simplifying, it wasn't a standard PC architecture). The game was read from DVD, and the DVD drive could push 5.28 MB/s (if everything was sequential on the disk).
So it's safe to assume that the difference is mostly due to advances in tech, though advances in compression algorithms likely also helped (not that the PS2 had a lot of spare CPU cycles to decompress content).
I think it's still pretty common if you play a lot of PC games, but it's likely much less so. There seem to be less and less games giving you out-of-the-box developer console access which over time will likely cause new video game players to not know about them as much.
Interestingly noclip (as in Danny O’Dwyer) have their own video game archiving project going on, where they’re preserving and uploading old clips to https://archive.org/details/noclip?tab=collection
Absolutely incredible. They seem to have extracted not just level geometry and textures (which I could kind of imagine normalising to some kind of universal 3D scene format), but also animations and shader effects (which I always imagined being much more bespoke to each game/engine).
Also: copyright lawyers will surely be in touch soon?
This has been around for years and AFAIK none of the copyright holders have ever raised an issue, it helps that the developer isn't tempting fate by taking donations or running ads on it.
Copyrights only generally only start getting entertained if money is being made from it. It might be copyright infringement to post brand logo to a forum but it wouldn't be pursued. Make that forum the forums icon and start generating advertising revenue based on that icon and you'll start getting cease and desist letters.
Wow, the ENTIRE massive ocean of Windwaker with all the islands loads faster than single rooms for other games. And then zipping around it so fast from the sky, all the islands seems so small compared to how big it all felt playing the game as a kid
I was also surprised about how "small" Kakariko willage from OoT was. But I guess that's some of the cleverness of the time. Make something small, but fill it and make it feel alive.
It's really crazy what camera angles and clever design can do. Check out GTA San Andreas for what I feel is the best explanation of this - the game felt enormous when I was a kid, but when you see the actual true size of that map, it's pretty damn small.
"Big" and "small" are funny terms when you talk about computer graphics. A surface 10 units long is short if your character moves at 10 units per second. It's long if your character moves at 1 unit per second.
You can easily see the entire GTA map and it might seem small, but if you place the camera at street level I think it's clear the map is rather big.
The Pokemon Snap one brings me back to when I was a kid. They had these Pokemon Snap machines, and you used to be able to take your memory card to the local mall and use them to print out stickers from the photos you took in game. Those "bridges" between the virtual world and the real world endlessly fascinated me.
I thought this page was mostly geometry+shaders. But the snap version has lots of interactivity! You can trigger lots of the stuff you could trigger in the game. Have they replicated all that manually or how?
The Pokemon Snap behavior is a mixture of handwritten code and parsing of the game's AI code. It was originally written in a very structured way that makes it easier than having to fully emulate. More involved interactions are missing (Magikarp evolution in the valley, a lot of the cave sequences)
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What an undertaking!
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I tried it with Vice City, it took a bit longer to load for me. That said, it looks a lot smaller than I remember it being.
So it's safe to assume that the difference is mostly due to advances in tech, though advances in compression algorithms likely also helped (not that the PS2 had a lot of spare CPU cycles to decompress content).
Also: copyright lawyers will surely be in touch soon?
Hopefully that's not the case here!
There is also a geography game which uses game maps instead of real maps: https://lostgamer.io
You can easily see the entire GTA map and it might seem small, but if you place the camera at street level I think it's clear the map is rather big.