this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024
41 points (97.7% liked)
Games
16750 readers
720 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This video and the Portal trailer blew people's dicks off when they came out, but at least the Portal trailer, younger audiences can see why. So much of HL2's tech is now 'Yep, that's a thing. Was it new?'
If you want the proper contemporary experience, here it is in potato quality, with live commentary.
An audience member jokes "And this'll run on my 486?" That's how old the Source engine is, that was a joke that landed.
The industry was so different back then, Unreal Tournament 2004 still shipped with a software renderer.
The industry was so different back then, Michael Abrash documented that renderer's development in Dr. Dobbs, an actual ink-on-paper journal.
Here's one thing that hasn't changed: Intel. This renderer, Pixomatic, was all hand-optimized assembly, from the guy John Carmack hired to outclass him. At one point he realized one instruction in a very tight loop was redundant. Removing it made the loop slower. Which is, in technical terms, some bullshit. Doing less should not take more time. It wasn't from alignment or cache or pipelines or any sensible cause. Abrash called in favors so he could study the actual traces of the Pentium 4, because he just had to know what the fuck was happening under the hood - and Intel made him sign a stack of NDAs, so we the public will never find out.