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Ashley

Games are just made from sellotape

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Clickbait title I know but somewhat accurate.

Just stumbled upon this tweet and its one of many that shows behind the scenes games are just smoke and mirrors stuck together but often it is done in really interesting ways so I thought it would be fun to share some.

 

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My favourite one of these is that for the original Half Life, they wanted the player to enter a train at the beginning, but they didn't have a system for modelling vehicle physics and movement, so they just made the train carriage into a hat and made an NPC wear it. The NPC then just slid along beneath the track wearing his train hat, and the player got to ride the train.

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There's a YouTube channel I enjoy called Boundary Break that shows a lot of these.

 

I really enjoy it when a game has a camera mode and isn't afraid of letting you see all the mess behind the scenes - Mass Effect Legendary and Jedi Fallen Order both did this.

 

One I really like is Fallout New Vegas, where there's a slideshow at the end with a voiceover (Ron Pearlman). It turns out this is in a room. Behind the slideshow is a unique NPC for the voiceover. It's not even a generic one.

3Om5e4S.jpg

(I think the train hat is also Fallout)

 

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Always been a fan of Zullie the Witch, who exclusively digs into Souls games in a similar way to Boundary Break as @Cube mentioned (who are awesome!). 

It's less than a minute long, but my favourite example of hers has to be the Ornstein and Smough fight from Dark Souls, when one of them gets supersized...

Spoiler

They don't get supersized, the room and the other boss taking a nap on the floor just shrink :laughing:

 

Edited by Julius
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1 hour ago, bob said:

My favourite one of these is that for the original Half Life, they wanted the player to enter a train at the beginning, but they didn't have a system for modelling vehicle physics and movement, so they just made the train carriage into a hat and made an NPC wear it. The NPC then just slid along beneath the track wearing his train hat, and the player got to ride the train.

Seems to be a recurring approach

 

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18 hours ago, bob said:

Maybe I mis-remembered.

In fairness you're also made of sellotape 

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21 hours ago, Ike said:

Dragonball Fighterz does some funny stuff.

 

 

I feel like these need a side-by-side of the actual moves, because i have no idea what it's supposed to look like - it just looks broken.

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2 hours ago, bob said:

I feel like these need a side-by-side of the actual moves, because i have no idea what it's supposed to look like - it just looks broken.

Here’s the one from the first video.

Basically just shows it’s a lot of fancy camera angles to make it look good.

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Ah I see people have discovered the concept of "animating to camera". That's the joy of a fixed camera, you can do all sorts out of view!

It does remind me I am pretty sure it's one of the Paper Mario games whereby the Mario object needs to be in every scene because a lot of logic etc is hanging off that object so if there's a cutscene where he's not needed he's actually just floating around outside of the camera. Can't find it now though as my Googling is failing me.

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Here’s another one from Fighterz which has a side by side with the proper cutscene.

 

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That seems like a roundabout way of doing a skybox? I'm not seeing the advantage of doing it that way.

Back in the day I've dabbled in map making for Quake 3 engine games, Elite Force to be precise, and I actually managed to make a test skybox. It's exactly that, a box with sky textures, only it encompasses the whole level.

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I love stuff like this! As @Cube pointed out, Boundary Break is a great channel that focuses on out-of-bounds developer tricks like this; highly recommend a sub if you haven't already!

This is one of my favourite little tricks that they pointed out, from Super Mario Galaxy...

super-mario-galaxy-door.jpg

Why bother coding an all new actor when you can just shove an old one behind a door?

 

This is a little different, but there's a Youtube channel that's run by Jasper, the guy who made noclip.website (A brilliant website that allows you to scroll around various 3D maps from a huge variety of Nintendo games in real-time through any web browser! Strongly recommend checking it out!).  He's done some fantastic breakdowns of how various rendering techniques and tricks from a bunch of different Nintendo games work! Check out this vid below for a good example...

 

His channel (and website!) are all brill! Well well worth checking out :D

Edited by Dcubed

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1 hour ago, Sméagol said:

That seems like a roundabout way of doing a skybox? I'm not seeing the advantage of doing it that way.

Back in the day I've dabbled in map making for Quake 3 engine games, Elite Force to be precise, and I actually managed to make a test skybox. It's exactly that, a box with sky textures, only it encompasses the whole level.

Reduces rendering load and RAM requirements.  A smaller skybox is easier to render than a big one on such vintage hardware ;)

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23 minutes ago, Dcubed said:

Reduces rendering load and RAM requirements.  A smaller skybox is easier to render than a big one on such vintage hardware ;)

A memory advantage is the only logical explanation, but I can't imagine how they achieve this. Then again I'm no expert. As far as I'm aware the actual size of the polygons don't matter (the number stays the same), and you can use the same size textures for both. As far as I can see, the Zelda skybox isn't rendering the bottom side, which would make things easier, but on the other hand they need memory and processing for the movement of the skybox this way.

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