Retro Gaming

[Jassassino]

Okay ladies sorry to disrupt the public divorce but I'm shifting this conversation back from the spectral realm:


I was looking into this morning how Soul Reaver managed to do what it did on the hardware at the time. Allowing players to freely jump between one world and the next.

Essentially, the illusion of an entire concurrent playing zone was created by, when shifting into the spectral realm, code would distort the meshes and objects currently in the game world at that time along pre-programmed X/Y/Z axis, whilst overlaying brand new textures and vertex colouring all in real time on those same meshes. Basically, these consoles (PS1 and later Dreamcast) could support a script which changed geometry at the literal click of a button. That's fucking wild. Its really impressive what games innovated upon and built back in the day and paved the way for so much in modern gaming (which has since been under utilised IMO).

Playing Shenmue the other day too; this did Oblivion's pre-programmed, timetabled NPC routines way, way before it. It kind of blueprinted NPCs having lives which adhered to times and schedules. Honestly, absolutely insane. Imagine being the programmer they ask to do that? You're essentially going into uncharted territory for the sake of a player's immersion.