Support NeoGAF

[grmlin]

I don't have a specific gif for that, but playing Unreal with a 3DFX blew me away back then

This and Half Life.

 

[Kain]

Can't post screens right now, but the physics and animations of KH2 were just the shit back then. Add to that the art direction of worlds like Port Royale or Space paranoids and my mind was just destroyed at every turn.

 

[Pokemaniac]

This is a Gameboy Advance game running real time.

How did they do it?

The GBA is a lot more powerful than people give it credit for. While it's popularly viewed as being close to an SNES in terms of power there are some areas where it's actually closer to a PS1.

 

[Kaji AF16]

The cargo plane mission in GTA V. I almost couldn´t believe I was playing that on a 2005 machine with 512 MB of RAM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNiPOeg9ZDc


Another mind-blowing moment: playing Outcast back in 1999

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHbXtaVQ49Y


And of course, Super Mario 64 in 1996. I won´t forget the first time I saw it.

 

[Mr_Appleby]

There's also this cool moment where an entire floor bends up to become a wall, only to serve as a floor again once Mario adjusts to the change in gravity. I have absolutely no clue how the gradual gravity change could be done without constant checks, and that would surely cause performance to take a hit. Yet somehow the game stands out at a solid framerate with realistically ever-changing gravity.

It's probably not gravity like you think of it, a good theory I read - and it also works in practice as I've tried it - is to cast a ray down from Mario's feet until it intersects with a bit of ground geometry. Then you find what's called the Normal of the polygon you intersected with - the normal is the vector pointing "up" in the polygon's local space (maybe better to think of it as pointing out) and the reverse of that vector is Mario's new "down" direction. Use interpolation to smooth the transition between different down vectors and you have something approximating Mario Galaxy. No doubt that would just be the start of a system and there would be all sorts of extra stuff at play.

 

[Tye The Czar]

That's a 3D model. Utter sorcery.

Here's a great seminar showing how they did some of it.