• Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    30
    ·
    2 months ago

    Everyone always praised Myst for its great graphics. I always thought it was cheating because it was pre-rendered.

    • tiramichu@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      24
      ·
      2 months ago

      Even being prerendered, it was an intensely impressive game for 1993.

      And it’s not like they didn’t have plenty of problems to solve.

      Here’s an interesting interview with founder Rand Miller about developing Myst and how they were barely able to make it work due to the limitations of CD drives.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWX5B6cD4_4

    • ElectricMachman@lemmy.sdf.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      ·
      2 months ago

      Lots of the best games were prerendered! Donkey Kong Country, Fallout, Jagged Alliance 2, Duke 3D, the Pro Pinball games, just to name a few.

      I do have a soft spot for prerendered graphics.

      • Trail@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        2 months ago

        I am not sure prerendered describes ja2 and fallout (some of the best games tbh). Aren’t those just sprites?

        The rest I have not played.

        • yamanii@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          2 months ago

          Prerendered sprites by taking screenshots of the models on their single expensive silicon graphics.

        • ElectricMachman@lemmy.sdf.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          edit-2
          2 months ago

          The characters and environments in Fallout and JA2 are basically still frames (sprites) of 3D models at specific angles. They were rendered once on a powerful development machine, and converted to sprites for our lowly Pentiums and Voodoos.

      • Hawke@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        2 months ago

        BioForge was particularly impressive for the time, with mixed pre-rendered graphics.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      2 months ago

      Sure it was pre-rendered, but it was still impressive to see PCs do that at the time because of the sheer amount of storage it took. Myst basically required a CD-ROM drive because the game is basically made of pictures, PCM audio and video. There’s an astonishing amount of video in that game from the early 90’s. It was another symptom of CDs having an astonishing amount of capacity for their era. Myst couldn’t exist on floppy disk.

      It is pretty cool to see what they’ve recently done to Riven. They really brought it to life in Unreal Engine.

    • ThirdWorldOrder@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      2 months ago

      Speaking for myself but in 1995 or whatever I didn’t even know what the term rendered was. Game looked cool but I liked Tex Murphy Under a Killing Moon for state of the art graphics lol

    • Altima NEO@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      2 months ago

      It was, though the difference was how early that game came out and the volume of images it had. It was pretty huge!

      The novelty died out quick though, as everyone else started prerendering stuff.