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[Dictator93]

It's a bit different because the train section in Crysis Warhead does not affects animations in any way and the train only goes in a straight line...which was the major challenge while making Uncharted 2, not the fact that they had a still trail surrounded by a moving scenery.

And the fact that Crysis didn't have repeating section has nothing to do with it being more technically advanced int his area, it's simply because of the level design. Since in Crysis Warhead the level was to finish once the train reached a certain point and the train would move irrespective of what the player's doing (granted the path is clear), while in Uncharted 2 the level would just stop progressing if the player stops progressing by just standing at a point. What I am saying is that the progression of the level is tied to the player due to them wanting a "cinematic experience". They could have made a level like Crysis Warhead in Uncharted 2 if they wanted to easily but that would result in a much shorter level or a level that's badly paced (since there is no guarantee where or what the player is doing when one scenery moves from another)

Also Shadowfall is 2013, but yes it is comparable (even better in some areas) to Crysis 3 and Ryse that came out the same year.

The train turns. Also I think it is not exactly a positive or a negative that the train doesn't "change animations" of characters on it. ikewise it isn't technically impressive in uncharted. The only reason they could achieve those animations in uncharted is because you cannot physically leave the train... its not like it was using multiple physics grids or anything (star citizen).

I definitely think shadow fall deserves a mention though, it is doing a heck of lot of stuff I find quite comprehensive. Especially their area lights.

 

[gollumsluvslave]

Cool thread!

For me the only thing I'd really change would be Halo CE for 2001.

Huge levels, bump mapping, some crazy physics, and the enemy AI, which to my mind no Halo game since has really matched.

Sure the framerate chugs a bit on Final Run, but what PC could play Crysis in 2007 at a decent framerate at high settings? I remember seeing all the Crysis hype and my mate had bought it, and at the time he had a top rig with a 8800 GTX and the Crysis was a slide show on the high settings, let alone ultra.

Other than Halo I'd give it to Rogue Leader on GC.

My first run through Halo on Xbox was just mind blowing at the time - like 3DFX Voodoo Graphics GLQuake mind blowing.

Good times!

 

[ChronotriggerJM]

Interesting video on the lighting in Shadows Fall (pretty long video lol) I get the feeling Guerilla Games is Sony's Cryteck lol.

http://youtu.be/_29M8F-sRsU

Damn European coders

 

[Phediuk]

Nichibutsu's Tube Panic wouldn't be a bad candidate for 1984.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KlJmJgoOrY

 

[REDSLATE]

Wasn't Half-Life 98? Pretty sure that tops an arcade rail shooter.

 

[Phediuk]

Wasn't Half-Life 98? Pretty sure that tops an arcade rail shooter.

Even if we're just talking PC shooters from '98, Unreal blows HL away.

 

[petran79]

here's something interesting for 1994:

http://dingevoninteresse.de/wpblog/

Ecstatica 1 takes place in a small village upon a rock, surrounded by a deep valley. The walkable area is restricted to this very rock, but still it is quite big and it is open. Not just a bunch of rooms but an exterior area. If you take a closer look at Ecstatica’s backgrounds, you will be puzzled by the really high-quality of the level geometry. Yes, there is real geometry behind the backgrounds. It even looks like not only the characters are all made of Ellipses but the walls, the floor and the plants as well. Those stone floors and walls look just like something you would use displacement mapping or metaballs for today. The Compare that to titles like “Alone in the Dark” (see screenshot below) which were using painted environments. Alone in the Dark is quite a visually appealing title. But having actual geometry to render the backgrounds from is something different. Remember: When Ecstatica was shipped it was 1994! How the hell did those Britons do this? This was not a multi-million dollar production. On what hardware were they able to create and render this vast amount of geometric data?

I recently worked on some code doing a reconstruction of the level geometry based on the set of about 240 background images. I managed to mix this reconstructed geometry with the collision- and navigation mesh. The current state already looks interesting. I propably won’t be able to explicitely reconstruct the complete geometry…

• 
  the available camera views are too sparsly distributed

• the texture infomation I reconstruct is quickly diminishing in quality as you get farer away from the camera due to the projection effect

• It would require a LOT of post-processing in order to merge and clean up the generated mesh data

• It’s actually too much geometry. Given my 8 Gigs of RAM I’m unable to represent all 340 backgrounds in one blender session – even though I threw away around 99,5% of all generated polygons (using the “Decimate” modifier).

How did they do it in 1994? My current assumptions are

• They chopped the game world into chunks swallowable for 1994 hardware

• For individual chunks they used some CAD software to create coarse geometry (walls, floors, stairs, etc.)

• They used a custom raytracer to shoot rays through the world, querying the relevant geometry chunk and then, as a final step, they generated the ellipses on-the-fly using some form of texture mapping. I base this assumption on the fact that the stone walls show certain patterns. The basic principle of this last step actually is rather simple. Instead of calculating the ray intersection with a plane from the coarse geometry you put a set of ellipses there, each only described by its center and its radii. Because you’re systematically scanlining over the sensor area of your virtual camera, you should be able to keep only those ellipses in memory which are actually hit by rays.

 

[Train of Midnight]

Awesome thread, OP. Was this all your own research or are you basing this list off of something else?

 

[Phediuk]

here's something interesting for 1994:

http://dingevoninteresse.de/wpblog/

Ecstatica 1 takes place in a small village upon a rock, surrounded by a deep valley. The walkable area is restricted to this very rock, but still it is quite big and it is open. Not just a bunch of rooms but an exterior area. If you take a closer look at Ecstatica’s backgrounds, you will be puzzled by the really high-quality of the level geometry. Yes, there is real geometry behind the backgrounds. It even looks like not only the characters are all made of Ellipses but the walls, the floor and the plants as well. Those stone floors and walls look just like something you would use displacement mapping or metaballs for today. The Compare that to titles like “Alone in the Dark” (see screenshot below) which were using painted environments. Alone in the Dark is quite a visually appealing title. But having actual geometry to render the backgrounds from is something different. Remember: When Ecstatica was shipped it was 1994! How the hell did those Britons do this? This was not a multi-million dollar production. On what hardware were they able to create and render this vast amount of geometric data?

I recently worked on some code doing a reconstruction of the level geometry based on the set of about 240 background images. I managed to mix this reconstructed geometry with the collision- and navigation mesh. The current state already looks interesting. I propably won’t be able to explicitely reconstruct the complete geometry…

• 
  the available camera views are too sparsly distributed

• the texture infomation I reconstruct is quickly diminishing in quality as you get farer away from the camera due to the projection effect

• It would require a LOT of post-processing in order to merge and clean up the generated mesh data

• It’s actually too much geometry. Given my 8 Gigs of RAM I’m unable to represent all 340 backgrounds in one blender session – even though I threw away around 99,5% of all generated polygons (using the “Decimate” modifier).

How did they do it in 1994? My current assumptions are

• They chopped the game world into chunks swallowable for 1994 hardware

• For individual chunks they used some CAD software to create coarse geometry (walls, floors, stairs, etc.)

• They used a custom raytracer to shoot rays through the world, querying the relevant geometry chunk and then, as a final step, they generated the ellipses on-the-fly using some form of texture mapping. I base this assumption on the fact that the stone walls show certain patterns. The basic principle of this last step actually is rather simple. Instead of calculating the ray intersection with a plane from the coarse geometry you put a set of ellipses there, each only described by its center and its radii. Because you’re systematically scanlining over the sensor area of your virtual camera, you should be able to keep only those ellipses in memory which are actually hit by rays.

Very cool. Doesn't really challenge Virtua Fighter 2, but it reminds me a lot of the techniques that Outcast would use to generate huge, smooth environments a few years later.

Awesome thread, OP. Was this all your own research or are you basing this list off of something else?

As far as I know, there is no other such list out there, which is why I made it. The winners were filled out almost entirely from my own memory because I've had this idea for a thread for awhile now. I have a piece of paper lying around somewhere with a bunch of games scrawled down. I don't pretend to be some game history savant, as after all, much of the list was just picking whatever the most powerful arcade board for that year was (and Sega/Namco dominated that field.) For the honorable mentions, Wikipedia's lists of Namco and Sega arcade games were very helpful. For the later PC games, nothing too complicated, just go with whatever the best engine that year was. Even then, though, I had to scour some old GAF threads to find some ideas for 2009, because I still don't know what to put there. Still couldn't find any better candidates than ARMA 2.

So yeah, the thread wasn't that hard or anything, since the best arcade board / PC game engine was usually easy to determine. The tough years are 1998 through 2001, because that's when consoles were rivalling or surpassing PC specs in a lot of areas.

Also, the previous thread I made on "Absolute firsts in video games" gave me a few tips regarding 70s arcade games: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=830107

 

[TheRedSnifit]

here's something interesting for 1994:

http://dingevoninteresse.de/wpblog/

Ecstatica 1 takes place in a small village upon a rock, surrounded by a deep valley. The walkable area is restricted to this very rock, but still it is quite big and it is open. Not just a bunch of rooms but an exterior area. If you take a closer look at Ecstatica’s backgrounds, you will be puzzled by the really high-quality of the level geometry. Yes, there is real geometry behind the backgrounds. It even looks like not only the characters are all made of Ellipses but the walls, the floor and the plants as well. Those stone floors and walls look just like something you would use displacement mapping or metaballs for today. The Compare that to titles like “Alone in the Dark” (see screenshot below) which were using painted environments. Alone in the Dark is quite a visually appealing title. But having actual geometry to render the backgrounds from is something different. Remember: When Ecstatica was shipped it was 1994! How the hell did those Britons do this? This was not a multi-million dollar production. On what hardware were they able to create and render this vast amount of geometric data?

I recently worked on some code doing a reconstruction of the level geometry based on the set of about 240 background images. I managed to mix this reconstructed geometry with the collision- and navigation mesh. The current state already looks interesting. I propably won’t be able to explicitely reconstruct the complete geometry…

• 
  the available camera views are too sparsly distributed

• the texture infomation I reconstruct is quickly diminishing in quality as you get farer away from the camera due to the projection effect

• It would require a LOT of post-processing in order to merge and clean up the generated mesh data

• It’s actually too much geometry. Given my 8 Gigs of RAM I’m unable to represent all 340 backgrounds in one blender session – even though I threw away around 99,5% of all generated polygons (using the “Decimate” modifier).

How did they do it in 1994? My current assumptions are

• They chopped the game world into chunks swallowable for 1994 hardware

• For individual chunks they used some CAD software to create coarse geometry (walls, floors, stairs, etc.)

• They used a custom raytracer to shoot rays through the world, querying the relevant geometry chunk and then, as a final step, they generated the ellipses on-the-fly using some form of texture mapping. I base this assumption on the fact that the stone walls show certain patterns. The basic principle of this last step actually is rather simple. Instead of calculating the ray intersection with a plane from the coarse geometry you put a set of ellipses there, each only described by its center and its radii. Because you’re systematically scanlining over the sensor area of your virtual camera, you should be able to keep only those ellipses in memory which are actually hit by rays.

It was pre-rendered, had no textures, and ellipsoids in 320x200 had, like, 2K pixels at most. The technology was, um, interesting, but it was never a powerhouse; in fact, the entire point of the engine was to get a good-looking game without pushing the hardware.

EDIT: Keep in mind that the ellipsoids you see are actually only 2D. Your basic Ecstatica scene is created by using a prerendered background (with z/pixel information), and the characters are drawn using stretched and rotated 2D sphere bitmaps (that have a drawn-in highlight). If you ever get the game, look in the files for something called sphere.dat (or something similar, dont remember exactly). The file contains the ONE sphere bitmap that is used for all the ellipses in the game. Basically the data gives a color offset and z information per pixel in the sphere-map. Neat idea, but it didn't last.

 

[petran79]

It was pre-rendered, had no textures, and ellipsoids in 320x200 had, like, 2K pixels at most. The technology was, um, interesting, but it was never a powerhouse; in fact, the entire point of the engine was to get a good-looking game without pushing the hardware.

EDIT: Keep in mind that the ellipsoids you see are actually only 2D. Your basic Ecstatica scene is created by using a prerendered background (with z/pixel information), and the characters are drawn using stretched and rotated 2D sphere bitmaps (that have a drawn-in highlight). If you ever get the game, look in the files for something called sphere.dat (or something similar, dont remember exactly). The file contains the ONE sphere bitmap that is used for all the ellipses in the game. Basically the data gives a color offset and z information per pixel in the sphere-map. Neat idea, but it didn't last.

thanks for the clarification.
Basically till Resident Evil showed up and made survival horror popular after AITD, Ecstatica and to a less extent Bioforge were very good choices for the genre but sadly only on MS-DOS PCs.

What is even more interesting is that a developer from Russia is working on Ecstatica 2. He even extracted data in Minecraft map format

http://ecstatica2.livejournal.com/

that castle in first person view is even more impressive!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBk-8PtrkOk

 

[Dezeer]

One addition for Half-life 2 that I would add is/was for its ability to be started/played while only small part of it was loaded, and it would install/load the game in background and it would prioritize what files to load.


I remember playing it with 512kbps internet and having to wait 30-60 seconds in the loading screen between levels while it 'streamed' the necessary files.

 

[eot]

One addition for Half-life 2 that I would add is/was for its ability to be started/played while only small part of it was loaded, and it would install/load the game in background and it would prioritize what files to load.


I remember playing it with 512kbps internet and having to wait 30-60 seconds in the loading screen between levels while it 'streamed' the necessary files.

Eh? I don't remember that at all.
I had those load times in 2004, but that's because my PC wasn't quite up to the task of running the game. The source engine also has those weird loading screens that look like you're connecting to a server.

 

[capitalCORN]

Eh? I don't remember that at all.
I had those load times in 2004, but that's because my PC wasn't quite up to the task of running the game. The source engine also has those weird loading screens that look like you're connecting to a server.

Actually, one of the promises of Steam was streamed gameplay. Wherein you could play the game in the midst of installation. Obviously this feature fell by the wayside.

 

[ChronotriggerJM]

I honestly think 2013 should go to Killzone Shadows fall.

I was reading the Digital Foundry article on the MADDER implementation for it's audio, and how incredibly streamlined the Physically Based Rendering is, something that seems to have been added to Cry-engine mid 2014. That paired with advances in lighting in the form of area lights and what have you. Mediocre game, but holy crap are they pushing the bill on tech.

 

[Dezeer]

I honestly think 2013 should go to Killzone Shadows fall.

I was reading the Digital Foundry article on the MADDER implementation for it's audio, and how incredibly streamlined the Physically Based Rendering is, something that seems to have been added to Cry-engine mid 2014. That paired with advances in lighting in the form of area lights and what have you. Mediocre game, but holy crap are they pushing the bill on tech.

I am quite sure Ryse (Nov 2013) had PBR/PBS.
Digital foundry said this about it:

Crytek has adopted a physically-based lighting and shading model with Ryse.

 

[ChronotriggerJM]

I am quite sure Ryse (Nov 2013) had PBR/PBS.
Digital foundry said this about it:

Good catch! I had only looked it up for the engine I guess, and they released it into engine support mid 2014. Pretty awesome that both these games used them right out of the gate.

Do we know if Metro Last light was pushing this?

Here's the equivalent article for Killzone
.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-the-making-of-killzone-shadow-fall

 

[KKRT00]

Good catch! I had only looked it up for the engine I guess, and they released it into engine support mid 2014. Pretty awesome that both these games used them right out of the gate.

Do we know if Metro Last light was pushing this?

Here's the equivalent article for Killzone
.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-the-making-of-killzone-shadow-fall

Metro:LL doesnt have PBR.

 

[SimpleCRIPPLE]

God damn I miss 90's Sega.

I practically lived at the nickel arcade playing those games.

Dayytonaaaaaaaaaaaa

 

[Dezeer]

Good catch! I had only looked it up for the engine I guess, and they released it into engine support mid 2014. Pretty awesome that both these games used them right out of the gate.

Do we know if Metro Last light was pushing this?

Here's the equivalent article for Killzone
.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-the-making-of-killzone-shadow-fall

Didn't Remember me have PBR, release June 2013 for PS3, 360 and PC?

 

[ChronotriggerJM]

Didn't Remember me have PBR, release June 2013 for PS3, 360 and PC?

Yeah it certainly seems that way Now I'm starting to wonder when it was first implemented, and why did Remember Me go under the radar so well?

I actually feel like were headed into a time where dynamic systems will make game development much easier and possibly more cost effective. With Global Illumination, PBR, and more and more procedural animation implementations surfacing, were headed into some good times me-thinks.

 

[xir]

Hope this is an ok bump, been thinking about this wonderful thread lately, sad to see OP's pics are gone, but the youtube links are here, but with 2016 being the first year of commercial VR, does it get a foothold or are we looking at Uncharted 4?

 

[Dabi]

Shenmue is a SHOE-in for 1999... c'mon.

 

[Stiler]

I think both Descent and Myst deserve places on this.

Descent (1995) was one of if not the first game to use 3d vs sprites

Myst (1993) well....it was Myst, basically drove the entire adoption of Cd Roms while using stunning backgrounds and high quality audio (at the time) which required cds and couldn't be done on floppies in a reasonable amount.

 

[Poimandres]

I think both Descent and Myst deserve places on this.

Descent (1995) was one of if not the first game to use 3d vs sprites

Myst (1993) well....it was Myst, basically drove the entire adoption of Cd Roms while using stunning backgrounds and high quality audio (at the time) which required cds and couldn't be done on floppies in a reasonable amount.

Dude... not in a world where Daytona USA launched in 1993. Nothing can touch Daytona.

 

[Tain]

Hope this is an ok bump, been thinking about this wonderful thread lately, sad to see OP's pics are gone, but the youtube links are here, but with 2016 being the first year of commercial VR, does it get a foothold or are we looking at Uncharted 4?

I'd give it to Robo Recall in VR, probably.

edit: i'm a dumbass, 2016

 

[Stiler]

Dude... not in a world where Daytona USA launched in 1993. Nothing can touch Daytona.

Daytona was a great fun arcade game but Myst had a huge impact on the computer market and gaming in general.

It ushered in the cd-rom which not only affected pc's but paved the way for your playstations, etc. It was the biggest selling computer game of the 90's on top of that.

It brought adventure games into the mainstream, from pc's to consoles, even people who didn't normally play video games played it.

 

[SilverArrow20XX]

I'd say Space Invaders over Fire Truck. Space Invaders was also (one of?) the first games with programmed music that changed with gameplay.

 

[DECK'ARD]

1984. Groundbreaking true 3D free world space sim with massive galaxies to trek through, trading, piracy, missions.

Nothing comes close.

It's so much more impressive in scope, in technology, in sheer fucking ahead-of-its-timeness than any cookie-cutter sprite-based racer. Yes, wireframe is pretty hokey these days, but a full 3D space combat game back in 1984 was cutting edge, and some of the things those guys did with the hardware (changing screen resolution part way down the screen to allow high-res mode for the main view and high-colour mode for the HUD) are incredible.

Missed this thread, but thank God for this post to make up for the absolute disgrace of passing over Elite for 1984 in the OP.

The game was made by time-travellers from the future.

 

[Poimandres]

Daytona was a great fun arcade game but Myst had a huge impact on the computer market and gaming in general.

It ushered in the cd-rom which not only affected pc's but paved the way for your playstations, etc. It was the biggest selling computer game of the 90's on top of that.

It brought adventure games into the mainstream, from pc's to consoles, even people who didn't normally play video games played it.

True, I loved Myst, but we are talking about most "technically-advanced" game for each year. Tech wise, Daytona was doing a whole lot of stuff that had never been seen before. It was technically way ahead of the curve.

 

[TheRedSnifit]

Descent (1995) was one of if not the first game to use 3d vs sprites

System Shock in 1994 for a PC game. Probably a bunch of arcade games that did it first.

 

[120v]

Hope this is an ok bump, been thinking about this wonderful thread lately, sad to see OP's pics are gone, but the youtube links are here, but with 2016 being the first year of commercial VR, does it get a foothold or are we looking at Uncharted 4?

kind of a tough one because we're seeing some really technically accomplished stuff like Horizon. but Raw Data and Robo Recall are probably the most "advanced" available gaming experiences on offer at the moment

 

[zorlaczerohero]

Missed this thread, but thank God for this post to make up for the absolute disgrace of passing over Elite for 1984 in the OP.

The game was made by time-travellers from the future.

Indeed! I was horrified when I saw Elite wasn't there, my guess was the OP never played it back when it was fresh. Nothing touched it at the time, nothing!

 

[Stiler]

System Shock in 1994 for a PC game. Probably a bunch of arcade games that did it first.

System Shock was not true 3d...it was 2.5d.

To my knowledge Descent was the first true 3d fps game (meaning the world was actually made truly 3d, not 2.5d , etc).

It did this before Quake, though Quake made it huge and popular.

 

[Phediuk]

Indeed! I was horrified when I saw Elite wasn't there, my guess was the OP never played it back when it was fresh. Nothing touched it at the time, nothing!

Oh for god's sake, this again? Yes I have played Elite; however, the 8-bit micros were very limited hardware compared to the arcade machines of that era. The point of this thread was not to show off ambition, but "hardware muscle", i.e., if every game was released on the same platform, which game would have been considered to "push the hardware" the most. Elite is impressive in regards to game design, not demonstration of hardware power.

Anyway, why are we dragging up a two-year old thread to harangue me again about something I explained at length before?

 

[Phediuk]

kind of a tough one because we're seeing some really technically accomplished stuff like Horizon. but Raw Data and Robo Recall are probably the most "advanced" available gaming experiences on offer at the moment

If I were to make this thread again (and I've been thinking about it so that a couple of people don't derail it over Elite this time), I was thinking of putting Elite Dangerous VR for 2014, and other VR games for 2015 and 2016; however, as pointed out, the "advancedness" of VR is a bit hard to quantify unless you just go by system requirements (which is a valid-enough approach, I guess.) You can draw a comparison here to my dilemma over Laserdisc games in 1983, which were also "advanced" in their own way.

2017 is a tough nut to crack too, because frankly, Horizon is the best-looking game I've ever seen in a lot of ways, and yet it's on the PS4. Though stuff like Battlefront 2 and the new Assassin's Creed might change that, considering they looked spectacular on PC in their last iterations.

 

[TheRedSnifit]

System Shock was not true 3d...it was 2.5d.

To my knowledge Descent was the first true 3d fps game (meaning the world was actually made truly 3d, not 2.5d , etc).

It did this before Quake, though Quake made it huge and popular.

System Shock is a full 3D game, it simply uses a tilemap to store the world. While that does restrict use of the Z-axis a bit, it doesn't make it 2.5D.

 

[Bad_Boy]

I honestly think 2013 should go to Killzone Shadows fall.

I was reading the Digital Foundry article on the MADDER implementation for it's audio, and how incredibly streamlined the Physically Based Rendering is, something that seems to have been added to Cry-engine mid 2014. That paired with advances in lighting in the form of area lights and what have you. Mediocre game, but holy crap are they pushing the bill on tech.

was also one of the first games to use checkerboard rendering for MP?

Pretty much a staple for PS4 Pro.

 

[Caayn]

was also one of the first games to use checkerboard rendering for MP?

Pretty much a staple for PS4 Pro.

Killzone Shadowfall used technique similar to checkboard rendering. Instead of using a grid it uses a pattern similar to vertical interlacing.

 

[Ushay]

The ones that stand out to me are

Mario 64 & Zelda Ocarina of Time - These were the first games that had an open world type of design, and it blew my mind.
Halo Combat Evolved - The beach landing scene was amazing.
Crysis - Crytek took open world design to new heights.
Forza - The gold standard in driving games, yet to be dethroned.
Horizon - Looks technically stunning, they have achieved great things with the hardware.

 

[Drippy]

2008 should be a year of GTA IV. Maybe graphics were not that good, but physics are still astonishing, city literally lives and attention to detail is amazing. Really impressive title from a tech point, though it barely ran on consoles.

 

[Phediuk]

2008 should be a year of GTA IV. Maybe graphics were not that good, but physics are still astonishing, city literally lives and attention to detail is amazing. Really impressive title from a tech point, though it barely ran on consoles.

It barely ran on PC too. Also, it had Crysis Warhead as competition.

Though if we strictly go by "game that had the steepest hardware requirements in the year of its release", GTA4 wins 2008.

 

[DECK'ARD]

Oh for god's sake, this again? Yes I have played Elite; however, the 8-bit micros were very limited hardware compared to the arcade machines of that era. The point of this thread was not to show off ambition, but "hardware muscle", i.e., if every game was released on the same platform, which game would have been considered to "push the hardware" the most. Elite is impressive in regards to game design, not demonstration of hardware power.

Anyway, why are we dragging up a two-year old thread to harangue me again about something I explained at length before?

Elite was incredibly impressive in every way, technically and game-design wise, and the fact it was on a 8-bit computer made it even more so.

Strange qualifications really, because if Elite had been put on an equal footing hardware wise it would have just been made even more impressive. If they could squeeze the impossible out of a BBC Micro ...

Not many games are mindblowing, Elite was one of them.

 

[Phediuk]

Elite was incredibly impressive in every way, technically and game-design wise, and the fact it was on a 8-bit computer made it even more so.

this is not a "relative to the hardware" thread, this is a thread about which game is showing off the most hardware muscle period, see first line of the first post in this thread. For god's sake are we really getting into this again.

 

[Snefer]

For the record, PBR is not something that is impressive from a technical standpoint. You can implement it in a day without problem. What is the problem is making the systems that supplement the PBR, such as nice reflections, since PBR is so reliant on accurate lighting

 

[Triggerhappytel]

Interesting list. I don't always completely agree, but then I've never really been into PC games so I'm largely ignorant of how technologically advanced most were at their given point in time.

Would be interesting to see what people would choose for 2015, 2016 & 2017.

 

[Stiler]

System Shock is a full 3D game, it simply uses a tilemap to store the world. While that does restrict use of the Z-axis a bit, it doesn't make it 2.5D.

It was not full 3d like Descent or Quake, it used tile based maps a la Ultima Underworld and similar games. It did some fancy things that made it look 3d, in regards to varying heights, slopes, etc but it was not true 3d.

http://tsshp.sourceforge.net/about.html

 

[TheRedSnifit]

It was not full 3d like Descent or Quake, it used tile based maps a la Ultima Underworld and similar games. It did some fancy things that made it look 3d, in regards to varying heights, slopes, etc but it was not true 3d.

http://tsshp.sourceforge.net/about.html

" However, let me second what Dan Schmidt said in the guestbook back in August about the description of the UW engine you guys have up on the page. Namely, UW _was not_ a raycasting engine. While UW did use a tilemap to store the world, that has nothing to do with the rendering model. In general, I'd suggest that the "world rep" and "rendering engine" be considered separate things when discussing game technology, because they very often are. In UW, we had a tile based world. The renderer used the tiles to explore the view cone and do a high level cull operation. From the list of visible tiles, we generated full 3d polygons, in the traditional XYZ sense, and handed them off to a rendering back end and rendered each poly in 3d as is. That is also how the 3d models like the ankh shrines or benches were done, which clearly aren't "raycast" model 3d objects. Now, in practice, many of our 3d primitives did things like normal checks first, and then chose which algorithim to rasterize with based on scale/normal/etc of the surface being rendered."

~ Doug Church, Ultima Underworld 2 project lead. (He's talking about UU, but SS uses an improved version of that engine)

"2.5D" usually describes games that are literally 2D but use scaling tricks to look 3D (Wolfenstein 3D), or games that do some Z-axis calculations but in an extremely limited capacity (Doom). System Shock (and UU) are neither, they take place in fully 3D environments with a heavy emphasis on the Z-axis and populate the environment with 3D models.

 

[Team Filler]

this is not a "relative to the hardware" thread, this is a thread about which game is showing off the most hardware muscle period, see first line of the first post in this thread. For god's sake are we really getting into this again.

I'm guessing you'd be getting less resistance were the thread titled, "most graphically/visually advanced game for each year."

 

[nkarafo]

Daytona was a great fun arcade game but Myst had a huge impact on the computer market and gaming in general.

It ushered in the cd-rom which not only affected pc's but paved the way for your playstations, etc. It was the biggest selling computer game of the 90's on top of that.

It brought adventure games into the mainstream, from pc's to consoles, even people who didn't normally play video games played it.

Even if Daytona didn't exist, in 1993 DOOM was released and that was, technologically and commercially, a more notable PC game than Myst.

Anyway, i disagree with some of the choices in the thread, i would give 1999 to Shenmue instead of Outcast and 2001 to Rogue Leader instead of Castle Wolfenstein (that was just a Quake 3 engine game, that engine was already old by then).