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Apr 27, 2024 07:34
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- Rastor
- Jun 2, 2001
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True, but back in the PS1 days it was a lot more doing stuff like having the console render at resolutions that were meant to be impossible, and finding data-corrupting bugs caused by electromagnetic interference in the console because they were running the system that hard.
And also
quote:http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/04/making-crash-bandicoot-part-3/
The secret to Crash’s success was its Art. And the secret to its Art was its Programming. [ Andy NOTE: well, and the F-word ]
Andy and Dave broke a lot of rules. First and foremost, they didn’t follow PlayStation’s library restrictions. Other developers often complained that Crash was using some sort of secret Sony library. That is the exact opposite of the truth. The truth is that Crash used as little as it could of Sony’s library and the programmers basically hacked everything right to the hardware.
Years later Sony tried to create a game called Harry Jalapeño to compete with Crash. No, I am not making that up. Besides the name fail, the internal team in San Francisco also utterly failed to create the complex worlds and characters that we created in Crash. Let me repeat – an internal Sony team couldn’t create Crash. Let the rumors of “insider information” forever rest.
Hitting the hardware directly was against the rules. But by the time Sony saw the results they needed a Mario killer. It was too late for them to complain.
It is easy to underestimate the value of the pre-occlusion and vertex animation hacks. But let me tell you, this was everything.
The occlusion meant more polygons in the background, and more polygons meant we could do the levels. Without it we NEVER could have made the world look as good as it did.
Our occlusion worked on a texture level. That is, if we had a giant polygon with a fern texture on it (think many leaves but lots of empty space) the occlusion could actually get rid of polygons behind the leaf part of the texture but leave the polygons seen through the alpha channel holes. No other game had that kind of detail in occlusion, and it paid off immensely. Given how small ground polygons could be in the distance, a little fern action went a long way.
We were up against the polygon draw limit at every twist and turn in the game. We wanted to have as much distance and detail visible as possible, but the minute we went over that limit the game started getting “hitchy.” We’d build a level over night (really 4am-11am, the only times the office was ever empty) and come in to see the results. Wherever we had too many polygons we’d add some leaves or whatever to occlude some distance. Wherever there were more polygons available to draw we’d pull leaves out.
And remember, more foreground (boxes, enemies, platforms) meant we had to have less background. So just when you had a level perfectly balanced, someone (usually me or Mark) would determine that the level was too hard or easy and we’d have to add a platform or enemy and the level builder (usually Bob Rafei or Taylor Kurosaki) would have to start balancing the background poly count over again. It was so cruel.
We couldn’t see the result of any change for at least 12 hours, so if we made a mistake we’d make a tweak and then we’d have to repeat the process. No level was “done” till the game shipped.
Crash was 512 polygons in the first game, with textures only for his spots and his shoelaces, and his model didn’t change much through the 3 platform titles. It took me a month to settle on the perfect 512. As Andy said, we went with non-textured polygons instead of textured ones on most of the characters. Instead of texture, we used corner colors to create the textures that seemed to be there.
There were many advantages to this strategy. The simplest was that we got more polygons. But we also solved a texture stretching and warping issue inherent in the PlayStation’s renderer that tended to make textures look terrible. Since you spent most of your time looking at the character, and he could get quite close to the camera, avoiding texture mess meant a lot for visual quality.
And there was another important issue solved by using polygons instead of textures. The PlayStation tended to render every polygon as a pixel, no matter how small it got. Had Crash’s pupils been texture, they might have disappeared when the got smaller than a pixel. But by making the pupil 2 polygons (a quad), they almost always showed up as long as the total eye, including whites, was more than a few pixels tall.
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May 18, 2016 15:52
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May 5, 2016 16:15
