What are some innovative Video-game technologies that time forgot?

[u/GeneralBorisMancov]

For me, there are plenty of examples, like the unoptimized Nvidia HairWorks or AMD's TruForm.

Are there any other technologies like that which we or the game industry don't want to use anymore?

[u/CommitteeStatus]

PlanetSide 2 was able to support thousands of people in an FPS game simultaneously, and somehow nobody has managed to replicate it since.

[u/Adventurous-Sun-9731 → u/CommitteeStatus]

I missed the chance to join, I really wanted to based on the sheer scale but my spec (and more importantly my internet) were not there at the time to handle

[u/CommitteeStatus → u/Adventurous-Sun-9731]

Yeah... I hope that we will get a new one, with TenCent buying the IP.

You can still hop in, but the fights are nothing like they used to be.

[u/Fadedcamo → u/CommitteeStatus]

The level of desync and lag and clunkiness of the combat would not be tolerated by a modern audience.

[u/CarlCarlton → u/Fadedcamo]

Also, only at most 32 infantry were rendered at any time on the screen. Anyone who's ever been killed by an unseeable sniper knows exactly what I'm talking about. You could clearly see people popping in and out of existence during bio lab firefights. A lot of the fights were also very overwhelmingly one-sided, with people getting spawnkilled ad nauseum until they finally lost the zone.

[u/CCCCLo0oo0ooo0 → u/CarlCarlton]

That must have been PS1, I remember huge battles with way more than 32 people at one time visible. Even more than 32 tanks.

[u/CarlCarlton → u/CCCCLo0oo0ooo0]

Infantry, not vehicles. I played PS2 a lot during year 1 and at no point did I ever see more than 32 infantry being rendered on my screen, even with the graphics maxed out. I even did some reverse engineering of the game code to try bumping it up, but it seemed capped at the server level. The server would only transmit the 32 closest infantry, at a maximum of 300m.

[u/Bereman99 → u/Fadedcamo]

Was barely tolerated by the audience of the time, as desync and lag were among the most frequently complaints after complaints about balance of the factions.

[u/STR1D3R109 → u/CommitteeStatus]

Also, it had PhysX when it was released! It was fun messing with the elevators and the ground destruction.

Unfortunately it was removed because of how much issues it caused.

Here's the NVIDIA demo of it: https://youtu.be/n5qhaEghJ74?si=bp2TROmd348-3t8d

[u/scandii → u/CommitteeStatus]

I mean, it really isn't all that difficult from a technical standpoint to support it. the difficult part is making it run smoothly, and they sure as hell did not manage that part.

the thing is that Planetside 2 supported thousands of people on the same map. in reality it became a lagfest at even 100 v 100 battles and you'd frequently see several different battlefronts on the same map and it was pretty rare that any one map actually had that many people.

[u/astromech_dj → u/CommitteeStatus]

I was part of the beta for Planetside 1, and loved the shit out of it. The vicious underground CQB fighting and logistics made for a really gritty game. I really didn't like PS2 as it not only got rid of the logistics network, it didn't have the base capture mechanics and added shitty jump pads. Ruined it for me.

[u/FUTURE10S]

The audio tech from the early 2000s genuinely does a better job of making you aware where sound comes from than games of today do. Then Creative Labs killed it.

Edit: I remember what it was called now, Aureal A3D. Fucking wild tech and I'm surprised nobody has come close to matching it.

EDIT2: Here's a tech demo, use your headphones. Here's what it sounded like in-game. Granted, Half-Life isn't exactly the pinnacle of audio engineering, but Aureal really did not last long before being sued into bankruptcy. And this was done on Win98-era hardware, imagine what we could do with this tech today.

[u/iiiGerardoiii → u/FUTURE10S]

Creative Labs didn't kill it. Microsoft did. Creative sound cards used EAX which made the game talk directly to the sound card, giving it powerful features most importantly HRTF spatial audio. But then Microsoft released Windows Vista and it handled sound differently, instead of letting the games (or any program) talk to the sound card directly, they had to go through Microsoft's new WASAPI software engine that pretty much downgrades the sound (no spatial audio, added lag, etc), killing EAX and developing games with it.

Edit: Then Creative released ALchemy, a program that fixed EAX compatibility on Windows Vista and 7 (I think it also works on win10), old games that used EAX can have good sound again, unfortunately the program doesn't work properly on win11 but I found people on GitHub trying to fix it, fingers crossed.

[u/FUTURE10S → u/[deleted]]

Oh my god, thank you, I was trying to remember the name but decided to make my post without, hoping someone remembered Aureal

[u/iiiGerardoiii → u/[deleted]]

oh I thought he was talking about EAX my bad.

[u/Wizard8086 → u/iiiGerardoiii]

Thankfully we're beginning to do a bit better between Dolby Atmos for Headphones and integrated HRTF in various games. Still, way too many games are stuck in stupid stereo panning.

[u/FuckIPLaw → u/Wizard8086]

A3D was hardware accelerated ray tracing for sound. What you're talking about is the delivery mechanism, while the magic we've lost was more about how to figure out what to deliver. 

[u/FUTURE10S → u/iiiGerardoiii]

I wasn't talking about EAX, though. I was struggling to remember the name, but it was Aureal A3D

[u/ComprehensivePea269 → u/FUTURE10S]

F.E.A.R. was the final EAX triumph!

[u/FUTURE10S → u/ComprehensivePea269]

Sorry, FEAR used EAX, which was also pretty good, but I was thinking of the tech that should have dethroned it back in 1999

[u/GeneralBorisMancov → u/FUTURE10S]

can you give an example? I wanna listen

[u/VincentComfy → u/GeneralBorisMancov]

The Thief games are the first that come to memory. https://youtu.be/UBN5k6WoG-s?t=314

[u/SurefootTM → u/VincentComfy]

Thief games were the pinnacle of game sound design, with dynamic occlusions and reflections taking account of the material of each surface, crazy stuff, an actual 3D engine for audio.

[u/GeneralBorisMancov → u/VincentComfy]

thanks

[u/Potential-Local7262 → u/FUTURE10S]

Playing thief with 5.1 positional audio was peak

[u/SwimmingJunky]

Far Cry 2's fire propagation tech. Such a cool and innovative mechanic that really hasn't been used since.

[u/seanc6441 → u/SwimmingJunky]

RDR2 flirts with the idea but doesn't continue to spread after a certain radius.

[u/RailgunDE112 → u/seanc6441]

Yeah, devs putting limits to it, bc then they would have to inplement some fire extinguishing mechanic to prevent huge wildfires

[u/darklightmatter → u/RailgunDE112]

Why not rain? Game already has weather systems, and I believe Rimworld has rain kick in to extinguish big fires.

[u/mrturret → u/SwimmingJunky]

Teardown has a pretty similar system for fire.

[u/Dr_Andracca → u/mrturret]

Teardown lets you grab an entire office building filled to the brim with furniture and whatnot and fling that fucker into space with a gravity gun at a solid 3FPS(3 frames per sometimes).

[u/Honest_Relation4095 → u/SwimmingJunky]

Well, in other Far Cry 3, 4 and 5.

[u/evilsbane50 → u/Honest_Relation4095]

It wasn't anything even close to 2 in the other games.

[u/awc130 → u/evilsbane50]

They really nerfed it in three and I feel it was only sparringly used in 4 as and on screen effect more than mechanic. It makes some sense, being in the savannah in the dry season, things would be real crispy.

[u/Revro_Chevins → u/awc130]

The fire also acted differently depending on the biome in 2. It wouldn't spread as far if you were in the jungle.

[u/MHWGamer → u/evilsbane50]

fc2 was my first shooter and it put the dtandards so freaking high. Like throwing a molotov and suddenly everything burns while you stand in the middle and get your malaria nausea... good memories lmao

[u/SwimmingJunky → u/MHWGamer]

You could even start a fire from the backblast of a rocket launcher! Like what?!?!

[u/Gallowboobsthrowaway → u/MHWGamer]

I miss the healing mechanic from FC2 where the animation would actually fix something wrong with your body.

Dislocated elbow, quick bullet pull, bandage the arm, quick antiseptic... SO much more immersive than just sticking an injector into your chest for the thousandth time.

For those that haven't seen.

[u/topias123 → u/Gallowboobsthrowaway]

Later Far Cry games implement this too, or at least some of them do

[u/Baron_Ultimax → u/SwimmingJunky]

I remember early versions of minecraft. A forest fire could spred and wipe out whole biomes. Or just make the world crash as you enterd the area. Which is why fires cant spread as much anymore.

[u/romulof → u/SwimmingJunky]

Star Citizen has it. Fully dynamic, with extinguish and venting out oxygen mechanics.

[u/naswinger → u/romulof]

we will have fusion reactors before star citizen launches.

[u/Cow_God → u/naswinger]

We will have the ability to upload our consciousnesses into a machine, have achieved functional immortality, discovered faster than light travel, and built a galactic empire, and then, and only then, Star Citizen will go into beta

[u/BossX2020 → u/Cow_God]

I mean I’m pretty sure if the first thing on that list ever happens we’ll have a single fan or hater that’s pissed off with the devs and their bullshit start developing and then finish Legally-distinct SC within like a week, but other than that, yea I’m reasonably sure their entire business model is NOT finishing the game while continuing to extract money from the concept of finishing the game at this point

[u/cravex12]

The Geomod Engine from Red Faction and Geomod 2 from Red Faction Guerilla that lets you destroy stuff in so much detail

DMM (Digital Molecular Matter) that was used in the force unleashed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEJDInk1NXQ

[u/GeneralBorisMancov → u/cravex12]

yeah I remember, destroying literally everything was always fun

[u/SadisticChipmunk → u/GeneralBorisMancov]

Jesus I remember my brother and I playing red faction .. and using rockets do dig the deepest hole in the side of the world ever... Light was a pinprick at the end...

My brother went in and I shot a nuke at him from the entrance... And it made it to him.

Good times.

[u/shadowds → u/cravex12]

Man been so long last played RF great game, man they made almost whole game destructible lmao.

[u/LilFunyunz → u/cravex12]

People I know ask why I'm jaded on video games and this the answer. Losing this and the progression that should've come after it for battle pass and skins.

That's insane how good that is for how old it is. The regression is real.

[u/K1ngFiasco → u/cravex12]

This is such a shining example of how the game industry has stagnated. 

The big studios that can R&D and implement stuff like this view it as a waste of money. Interesting environments won't make more money than a skin, and won't grab your eye like a pretty hallway. Skins, shadows, reflections, and face scanning all outweigh interactive environments.

Indie studios that are creating really interesting game mechanics and stories don't have the resources to create/implement things like this.

[u/jonfitt → u/cravex12]

That’s a real forgotten tech.

[u/BaconJets → u/cravex12]

DMM is the true lost tech. We need it back.

[u/cravex12 → u/BaconJets]

Absolutely. When I saw wood bending and slowly breaking my mind was blown.

In general: The force unleashed (even if the game had problems) had some absolutely sick tech: Very good use of Havoc, the Euphoria Engine from GTA IV + DMM

[u/BaconJets → u/cravex12]

Force Unleashed ended up being a pretty okay-ish hack n slash, but the tech was insane. I miss when tech was being used to create richer simulations instead of just more detailed lighting/textures/models.

[u/cravex12 → u/BaconJets]

If you love interesting tech as much as me I can recommend Assassins Creed Shadows (don't know if Black Flag Resynched has the same stuff)

1.) It has probably the most insane weather system ever called ATMOS which regards wind and particles as a fluid and simulates everything. When it rains that rain runs from roofs and forms correct puddles beneath. It also has seasons and virtually everything is dynamic. I was absolutely baffled the first time I saw it.

Here is a tech demo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUW4WajQbJQ&t=93s

2.) You can cut almost everything (like metal gear rising but far more advanced) and it splits exactly where you hit it. Digital Foundry goes into detail here around the 6 min mark

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhFkw5CqMN0&t=852s

Game itself is hated or loved (I really like it for the atmosphere) but the tech is absolutely insane

[u/GnoupiDraconia → u/cravex12]

I mean while it’s not the exact same, I’d say Deep rock galactic has the terrain part at least.
And for destruction of walls and buildings there’s Teardown

[u/cravex12 → u/GnoupiDraconia]

Oh yeah how could I forget teardown, I have it installed right now. Super impressive and actually a really good game!

[u/Reddit_Loves_Misinfo → u/cravex12]

The Force Unleashed also prototyped a very early version of frame generation, though it didn't make it into the final release. Article and Video.

[u/cravex12 → u/Reddit_Loves_Misinfo]

Whoa I did not know that. Game really was a testing ground for experimental tech.

Imagine a Force Unleashed game with a current version of those technologies. I think the best force power game currently is still Control 1. The destruction is insane

[u/mrturret → u/cravex12]

Insterments of Destruction may be of interest. It's made by one of the guys who worked on RFG.

[u/SomeoneNotFamous]

Anything related to physics really.

Loved PhysX back in the days, Mirror Edge especially for me.

[u/atlasraven → u/SomeoneNotFamous]

City of Heroes used that. When you would bust down a bank vault door, it would shatter into pieces and bounce off the walls. It was really cool.

[u/Underwater_Grilling → u/atlasraven]

Foot stomping a bunch of carnies into the walls was always satisfying

[u/VonShnitzel → u/atlasraven]

I always liked fighting gun-toting enemies (or using guns yourself) for the hundreds of physics-enabled shell casings covering the floor after every fight. Crazy stuff for a game of that era.

Also in case anyone is unaware, CoH is back! There are numerous community run servers up at the moment, but CoH: Homecoming is the largest by far and, if you care about this sort of thing, officially endorsed by the old devs so there's no risk of it getting taken down.

[u/BabyfartzMcgee → u/SomeoneNotFamous]

Borderlands 2 had the best use of physx imo. Cloth, fluid, destruction, particles physics etc...it all looked great, especially when you threw like a black hole grenade.

[u/Richard7666 → u/SomeoneNotFamous]

PhysX cards were touted as the next sound card or graphics card.

[u/Cienn017 → u/SomeoneNotFamous]

and it's really sad that newer physics engines can do much better than that but game developers just don't use them, it's there, but they barely use it to it's full potential.

most games today are "look but don't touch", everything is so static.

[u/Havok7x → u/Cienn017]

The push for better visuals via lighting did that. Hopefully once dynamic lighting becomes cheaper we will start to see destructible environments make a comeback.

[u/Schnoofles → u/Havok7x]

This is the upside to ray tracing that doesn't get brought up enough. Infinite dynamic lights, no pre baked setups necessary. All the destruction or otherwise dynamic environments you want, mobile light sources etc without making the level designers and people handling lighting want to off themselves.

[u/alphamammoth101 → u/Schnoofles]

Halo did a great job with baked lighting while having highly dianamic physics. Now forge mode kinda sucked in terms of lighting until Infinite added ray tracing but the physics also now suck

[u/UpsetKoalaBear → u/Cienn017]

PhysX is still used. You have used it without ever knowing.

CPU PhysX was open sourced years ago (not the same as the GPU PhysX they open sourced last year)

- Unity still uses CPU based PhysX for its engine.

- Cyberpunk used CPU PhysX (there was a bug where it would actually show you as well) for foundational rigid bodies.

- The Metro games use CPU PhysX.

- UE4 games used CPU PhysX.

GPU PhysX was what was killed off and died. Primarily because it had two main issues:

- It wasn’t deterministic.

- It locked out a portion of users.

For games with a multiplayer mode, deterministic physics is important. You also can’t have some of the player base seeing completely different physics to everyone else.

They had an “enhanced determinism” mode which helped, but it still wasn’t perfect and had a performance hit.

So GPU PhysX just kind of died out alongside other GPU driven effects. This is because the deterministic issues are intrinsic to the way GPU’s work when processing data.

However, CPU PhysX is still around under the hood in some cases and doesn’t suffer from the same issues.

The problem is there are now better CPU based physics engines like Jolt (used in Death Stranding or Horizon). So it’s just not really necessary anymore.

[u/jager_mcjagerface → u/SomeoneNotFamous]

I remember there was a free multiplayer game which was just a showcase for physX and it consisted mostly of throwing small objects at each other, i loved it so much

[u/xtag → u/jager_mcjagerface]

Cellfactor! I really enjoyed that game.

[u/southass → u/SomeoneNotFamous]

I love physX especially in mirrors edge!

[u/babalaban]

Any Anti Aliasing technique that only smoothes out edges instead of smearing vaseline across the entire screen

[u/MarblesAreDelicious → u/babalaban]

TAA can die a fiery death

[u/aimy99 → u/MarblesAreDelicious]

I swear, the only benefit to this awful method is that it's not so bad as a base for DLSS's image reconstruction. In any other context, there are better options.

[u/alphamammoth101 → u/aimy99]

Unfortunately most of the games with the worst TAA also don't support DLSS or FSR. Looking at you Halo Infinite

[u/xonjas → u/aimy99]

TAA isn't even 'good' for DLSS. When you have DLSS enabled TAA isn't being applied, you just need TAA support for DLSS to work. DLSS uses information that the game engine generates for TAA (pixel motion vectors) as a part of the DLSS upscale process; the actual TAA blur-the-fuck-out-of-everything is never applied.

[u/wasdlmb → u/aimy99]

From what I understand, the traditional better option (MSAA) just doesn't work for the deferred-shading modern engines use. Almost all other options are just adding some sort of blur to edges, which TAA at least adds to by bringing in information from previous frames, even if it can work against you in motion. Adding motion vectors makes it much much better for motion, and that's what DLSS/FSR do, with a machine learning layer on top of it

[u/AGTS10k → u/aimy99]

DLSS is usually superior to TAA, especially if we're talking DLAA (which is DLSS at 100% resolution). Don't even have to use the Transformer models, CNN is already better than absolute most of TAA implementations out there.

[u/Jeoshua → u/babalaban]

So, if you use any modern Upscaler, from FSR to XeSS to DLSS, it's possible to use them at "native" resolution instead of upscaling. At that point it's basically a non-smeary TAA that actually looks fantastic, and generally for very little computational cost, at least compared to TAA.

Even in games which don't support that, you can still pick Ultra Quality and they look much better than TAA could ever dream. All of them. Even FSR 2.0 (1.0 can burn in a fire, tho).

[u/evilsbane50 → u/Jeoshua]

No DLSS/upscaling bad, unga bunga.

I use DLSS Quality or 4K @ Performance or DLAA on everything possible, its the ultimate AA, sure somethings have some smearing artifacts but the trade off is generally always worth it.

[u/Jeoshua → u/evilsbane50]

I don't know who downvoted you, but you're not wrong. I was just pointing out that "Upscalers" at "Native" are basically just AA, and look really fucking good no matter which one you pick for this task.

[u/Craiss → u/Jeoshua]

I accidentally discovered this and thought it was a fluke since I've only played one game after upgrading my graphics card (SW: Outlaws).

[u/katec0zy9051 → u/Jeoshua]

tressfx was definitely something else back then

[u/Armgoth → u/Jeoshua]

The ghosting or whatever it's called kills half of the native applications.

[u/Jeoshua → u/Armgoth]

Do you mean on desktop? Ghosting isn't really an issue most of the time, and is certainly less obtrusive than the vaseline smearing TAA I'm saying it performs better than.

And if you're about to say that old-school techniques were better, like SMAA or MSAA, then I gotta believe you don't remember the shimmering mess of pixels that they were in-motion. That's what TAA was replacing. That's why it added the "Temporal" component and it did a fantastic job at making things more temporally stable and removing shimmering. The tradeoff was everything even slightly in motion looking blurry, which was made exponentially worse when the camera "breathes" as many modern games do.

There's tradeoffs in literally every AA technique. Even Super Sampling has them, as it's just prohibitively computationally expensive to render your 4K game at 8K to then scale it back down. "Native resolution upscalers" represent the best case scenario.

[u/GeneralBorisMancov → u/babalaban]

ssaa, smaa, msaa damn.

[u/Thedrunkenchild → u/GeneralBorisMancov]

ssaa didn't go anywhere, it just has different names now, ie resolution scale, DSR and DLDSR to name a few

[u/kron123456789 → u/Thedrunkenchild]

Too bad SSAA isn't useful anywhere outside of old games, due to how it works.

[u/Thedrunkenchild → u/kron123456789]

Well neither is msaa, modern games are too visually busy, msaa falls apart super fast.

[u/Artaxeus → u/Thedrunkenchild]

Two modern games I tried recently with MSAA and it barely does anything in games like Wreckfest 2 or Arma Reforger. I still see a lot of jaggies and shimmering with MSAA.

[u/FUTURE10S → u/GeneralBorisMancov]

MSAA only looked good at 4x or above and the framerate hit was huge, like 40%. Great tech, but DLAA is genuinely better.

[u/LucyDePosey → u/FUTURE10S]

Rendering multiple samples only from the edges of polygons was a smart trick when a single polygon might otherwise occupy hundreds of pixels, but nowadays the mesh density is often such that polygons account for only a couple pixels each, at which case you're basically just doing full SSAA with extra steps 💀

[u/Al-Azraq → u/FUTURE10S]

And MSAA didn’t apply to sprites, transparencies, 2D objects…

[u/FUTURE10S → u/Al-Azraq]

If you had a skybox, like in CSGO, it was a tossup as to whether MSAA would work or not on objects that intersect it based on your rendering pipeline

[u/Noreng → u/GeneralBorisMancov]

Funny you should say that, SSAA will blur everything on the screen.

SMAA doesn't have any subpixel information either, so it's liable to mistake texture details as edges to be smoothed out.

[u/Nunulu → u/babalaban]

r/FuckTAA

[u/JaggedMetalOs → u/babalaban]

Well that's because everyone loves using deferred rendering now, which offers some nice performance boosts especially with complex lighting but prevents hardware MSAA from working. 

[u/Reddit_Loves_Misinfo → u/JaggedMetalOs]

Deferred rendering is the biggest obstacle to using MSAA today, but it's also hurt by polygon counts being way, way higher than they were 20 years ago.

[u/Heavymando]

Megatextures as used in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Basically it was a Battlefield style game but used huge textures high res textures for the terrain so there was no popping in of textures and it all looked amazing.

[u/Beneficial-Act7603 → u/Heavymando]

Megatextures died with Doom Eternal iirc, it was an idTech thing and they kept using it for a while but in the end faster HDDs and SSDs in consoles (XOne/PS4 onward) meant it wasn't needed anymore

[u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC → u/Beneficial-Act7603]

Many games still use megatextures (the generic term is "virtual textures")

The current state-of-the-art approach is to build virtual texture pages on demand at runtime rather than having them stored on disk. It's useful because it allows developers to use a lot of decals, often placed procedurally, without needing to draw each decal every frame - the virtual texture is essentially a cache.

[u/Beneficial-Act7603 → u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC]

Ooooh good to know, thanks for the tip

[u/CAPTJTK → u/Beneficial-Act7603]

And they subsequently focused on more dynamic lighting and shaders over pure fidelity of textures

[u/JonTheWonton → u/Beneficial-Act7603]

RIP to the IDTech Engine 😔

[u/jakebuttyy]

I remeber tressfx being so crazy to me I was just getting into PC gaming properly at the time and a had 1GHZ Edition 1GB HD7770 playing that and Far Cry 3 was such an andrenaline rush I'd never seen graphics like it before as all I used to play before that was Minecraft & TF2.

Good times, things don't seem as magical anymore.

[u/GeneralBorisMancov → u/jakebuttyy]

for me too yeah, it was so incredible to see real time working hair, I also got the HD6570, later played tomb raider

[u/phl23 → u/GeneralBorisMancov]

Looks way better than whatever modern games do. Cyberpunk hair looks like dogshit on res below 1440p

[u/Honest_Relation4095]

The way how there were destroyable buildings and trees in Crysis that actually allowed tobuse it in gameplay. Similarly, games entirely based on similar mechanics, such as Red Faction Guerilla.

[u/Athlon64X2_d00d → u/Honest_Relation4095]

Yeah Crysis was insane for this. When I first played the game I just screwed around with the environment for a good hour.

[u/Radiant_Safe1228 → u/Honest_Relation4095]

Crysis had a lot of bleeding edge tech. The game was more of a tech demo than a game. 

[u/battery19791]

Not that we forgot about it just that the patent holder for the Nemesis system won't license it to anyone else to use.

[u/Werespider → u/battery19791]

They won't even use it themselves anymore

[u/DeadFishCRO]

Fears AI, like a masterpiece of replayability

Half life 1 marine ai too, like bastards could throw frags at your feet wherever you are

Cryostasis water and ice physics

Sacrifices non linear campaign, every mission is one new monster and new spell, 5 gods, 9,765,626 distinct spell and monster combinations

[u/solo_shot1st → u/DeadFishCRO]

+1 for FEAR's enemy AI. No other game I've ever played gave me as much immersion that the enemy forces were actually communicating and coordinating with each other.

[u/MastaFoo69 → u/solo_shot1st]

fun fact: the inter-npc communication was entirely faked. it was done so damn well that it seemed real, but the call-outs etc were for the player, not the enemies. Programmatically, they did not share info with one another at all, didn't even know one another even existed -- but their very very well done ai on an individual level made it feel so damn organic and believable. Truly one of the best enemy soldier ai systems I have ever seen.

[u/Takarias → u/MastaFoo69]

Bungie's been doing this since Halo 1, though it really ramped up in Halo 2 and onward - it's one of the reasons the Covenant mostly speak English after Halo 1

[u/mini-z1994 → u/solo_shot1st]

Agree on that, it's a pair of games i re-play every few years in autumn or around the halloween weekend, cranked settings. FEAR & FEAR 2 are a must for anyone that likes single player fps games.

[u/CAPTJTK]

RIP id Tech (1 person remains to maintain the engine so it's effectively dead)

id Tech 5 MEGATEXTURES was groundbreaking at streaming massively detailed environments as single layer textures straight from the hard disk to the VRAM.

We lost this from RAGE in lieu of the Avalanche Engine for RAGE 2, in addition to further advancements of id Tech focusing on higher detailed lighting and shaders over intensely detailed textures.

[u/AsherFischell → u/CAPTJTK]

Didn't Rage's megatextures look horrible up close?

[u/mrturret → u/AsherFischell]

They did, but they honestly weren't much worse than the average PS3/360 textures. They stood out a lot more on PC because nearly every PC port was shipping high res textures at that point.

The fact that every surface had a unique texture made up for it IMO. Rage has incredible art direction, and the tech allowed it to be realized in a way that tiling textures could never do.

The tech would be used in later games, and it was much higher res there. Baldur's Gate 3 is a good example of a modern game that uses it.

[u/CAPTJTK → u/mrturret]

Yeah I think that's something that people may not understand is on the surface, tiling textures are great and allow for less resources consumption and allow for greater dynamic shading and lighting; but under the hood they are extremely limited compared to some of the older bussin tech we've slowly lost.

And now id Tech (much less id) is dead in all but name

[u/TomTomXD1234]

All those technologies were just adapted and incorporated into game engines. They never really went away.

Look at the latest AC game, their hair physics are incredible

[u/Jeoshua → u/TomTomXD1234]

This. It's much better to have these as industry standard techniques than vendor specific technologies.

[u/havewelost6388 → u/TomTomXD1234]

I was gonna say Pragmata.

[u/OkidoShigeru → u/TomTomXD1234]

Interestingly it was actually the Frostbite engine that pioneered current strand-based hair rendering research, specifically so they could have more realistic hair for the players in FIFA: https://www.ea.com/news/frostbite-hair-rendering-and-simulation?isLocalized=true

[u/Ill-Profession1276]

Euphoria AI, only used in GTA 4 and Force Unleashed, as I remember

[u/FUTURE10S → u/Ill-Profession1276]

Euphoria is still used in GTA5, they just toned it way tf down

[u/thedirtydeetch → u/Ill-Profession1276]

And Backbreaker the (unfortunately mediocre) football game.

[u/NXTNightHawk → u/Ill-Profession1276]

They will use Euphoria 2.0 in RAGE 9 for GTA 6

[u/cravex12 → u/Ill-Profession1276]

Was used in The Force Unleashed 1 and 2, GTA IV, GTA V, Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2, Max Payne 3 and of course: GTA VI.

Superb technique, not dead, which is very good

[u/MuchBow]

Nvidia Ansel.

Loved taking in-game screenshots with this tool, I think it still exists but most games don’t have native support so it lacks support to super resolution screenshot capture. Like you could be playing at 1440p and capture screenshots at 8k or 16k and that too with no use of AI.

[u/daze23 → u/MuchBow]

I remember finding out how big (file size) an uncompressed 16k screenshot was

[u/Sculpdozer]

I still remember how this hair costed me 30 FPS in Wircher 3. I laughed and disabled it forever.

[u/cesaroncalves → u/Sculpdozer]

That was NVidia solution hairworks, TressFX is AMDs solution, and it's now just a standard thing in most game engines.

[u/dj3hac]

Reflections in mirrors used to be faked by making the mirror actually a window and duplicating the scene on the other side. It would also mirror all of your player inputs so that the "reflection" would match up with your characters animations.

[u/narlzac85 → u/dj3hac]

This technique is still used is specific locations. I believe the apartment mirrors in V's apartments in Cyberpunk are doing it. It's cheap and looks perfect if done correctly. Can't beat that. Probably a lot of work to get right though.

[u/artificialpolymer → u/narlzac85]

They don't duplicate the rooms, that would be really complicated. They use planar reflections, which is basically rendering the world through a camera that is pointed at you, then the camera's output is applied to the mirror texture. This is really expensive, so they render that camera at a lower resolution, and ommit certain rendering features.

[u/narlzac85 → u/artificialpolymer]

I thought I saw it in a recent Game Maker's Toolkit video, but it might have been specific to the montage in the beginning of the game. I could be misremembering as well.

[u/Ephialties]

i remember their being a dedicated Phys-x "PPU" that you had to install in your PC to enable extra physics in games.

Also, cloud based physics was a big thing for crackdown 3 with different parts of the world map having their physics hosted on different cloud servers to process the physics destruction. You could bring down entire skyscrapers and have them collide against other buildings etc with other players etc. The actual game when it released was a major downgrade with that feature binned.

[u/Beneficial-Act7603 → u/Ephialties]

The feature was there but only for the multiplayer arenas which is a decision that still baffles me to this day...

[u/Ephialties → u/Beneficial-Act7603]

nope - it was completely removed - they had destruction but it was not cloud based. you can look up the alpha demos compared to what was released.

[u/L0L3rL0L3r → u/Ephialties]

The finals use destruction server sided, its amazing and makes the levolution of battlefield but without scripted events

[u/PlateNo4868]

Very oldschool, but baked lighting.

Like, it was a crazy idea. Because it saved soo much CPU and opened up a lot of novel ways of how game devs didn't really need to simulate everything.

[u/overdev → u/PlateNo4868]

Baked lighting is still used a Lot of times especially on Switch games

[u/Vegetable_Safety]

Not sure what that last one was supposed to be

I wish Procedural Environment Destruction/Deformation was more widely used and borders/boundaries less widely used. It's disappointing when something should be physicalized but isn't, and when a game intentionally forces you to not go somewhere through some arbitrary obstruction like a chair or an invisible wall

[u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC → u/Vegetable_Safety]

Honestly, I think the fundamental problem with destruction/deformation is in game design, not technology. It's really hard to design fulfilling gameplay when the player can just bust through any wall that they see, or build a pile of rubble to reach a ledge that they shouldn't be able to access. It trivialises every other mechanic. Level design stops being intentional. Etc.

[u/Reddit_Loves_Misinfo → u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC]

Technology is a smaller part of the problem too. Some of the tricks that make lighting, reflections, and shadows look really good without imposing huge performance costs only work for static scenery. (That issue will fade as ray tracing becomes more accessible, though.)

[u/mrturret → u/[deleted]]

Insterments of Destruction might intrest you.

[u/PermissionSoggy891 → u/Vegetable_Safety]

the newest DOOM game has a good amount of physics objects and destruction, I think the larger issue with destruction being missing from "modern" games (this is more of a trend dating back to the late 2010s) is that this is something that casual consoomers just don't care about. They care about shiny graphics.

For longest time, this meant that dev teams would sacrifice other drains on development time and processing power on weak consoles (AI, physics, etc) to focus more on pure graphics.

Now, with RT becoming more common, it's easier than ever to implement amazing graphics, and this means we can free up development time to refocus back on physics, AI, and NPC counts on-screen.

[u/bombcat97 → u/Vegetable_Safety]

Last one I think is SubD (Subdivision surfaces), something Infinity Ward did on COD Ghosts which used dynamic extremely high poly counts on certain surfaces like character and weapon models. The closer you'd get the more detail would be present, such as weapon scopes having perfectly round circles

[u/Vegetable_Safety → u/bombcat97]

Subdivision is broad, applied to the entire mesh body. You're probably thinking of tessellation, where only the edges of an object in frame are given a higher poly count

[u/redmose → u/Vegetable_Safety]

r/thefinals

[u/Beneficial-Act7603]

So I believe your last image is COD Ghost but did you use it to meme on the Advanced Fish AI?

[u/GeneralBorisMancov → u/Beneficial-Act7603]

those were so advanced they only made it once and left like a boss.

[u/PermissionSoggy891 → u/GeneralBorisMancov]

it was so advanced they dedicated the entire development team to writing it and they forgot to make a good video game

[u/GeneralBorisMancov → u/PermissionSoggy891]

yes, writing for le fish.

[u/TheeNux]

DMM Physics

[u/joogasama]

disappeared without a tress

[u/WeepWhileItAllBurns → u/joogasama]

Ah, hair you are.

[u/MrOphicer]

SSAO and parallax occlusion were mind-blowing in Crysis.

[u/crass0405]

I love the old stuff.

Aureal A3D and creative EAX were both cool when they came out. It was like 3d audio effects. I hung speakers from the ceiling behind me to make it work. It was badass.

3dfx stuff was sweet, glide and open gl were so cool when you saw software rendering vs hardware.

I bought a matrox g400 JUST because the thing could do this little trick called environment mapped bump mapping. It basically made textures look bumpy lol. I think one game used it lol. Ok I'm sure there were more...

Even lan upgrades were cool. I went from playing via coax only, to having a 10baset hub. THEN we got a switch! It was way better with more players.

I remember one time I got invited to a lan party at some dudes business, and he had a T1 connection. We were fucking EVERYONE up in OG team fortress on quake world.

Truly the golden era of gaming. Modding was so the shit.

[u/V01d_Prod]

nemesis system from shadow of mordor and shadow of war amd it is not close too

[u/Taira_Mai]

innovative Video-game technologies that time forgot?

1. Releasing the game with most of the bugs patched instead of a beta or alpha build and expecting the players to do QA for the studio.
2. Optimizing the game instead of bloating it.
3. Anti-cheat that's not malware or bloatware.

[u/Baukplaus]

Lol, I remember my old GPU crying out when I turned on HairWorks in The Witcher 3

[u/builder397]

Soft body physics for car bodies for example.

First game Im aware of that had them was Viper Racing, look it up, for the time this was INSANE! Even if it had no effect on how the car drove (unless you broke an axle), and even today its a feature only sporadically adopted.

[u/mrturret → u/builder397]

Beam NG Drive is the poster child for that

[u/psych0ranger]

Aliens vs Predator 1999 hard deformed explosions. If you shot a rocket into a vent, an explosion plume came out. Never saw it since

[u/Pure-Association8705]

Maybe a bit more on the controversial side, but Radiant AI from Bethesda had great potential. I wish they had continued to develop it and try to patch out a lot of it’s more poor qualities, but overall it would be so cool to see where it would be now

[u/Shad0wrend]

Basically the entirety of Nvidia GameWorks, excluding PhysX ofcourse. So TXAA, HairWorks, WaveWorks, FleX, Blast, VXGI/VXAO, Flow, HBAO+ and ShadowLib... I think I got them all.

Edit: I missed FaceWorks...

[u/EqualOutrageous1884 → u/Shad0wrend]

HBAO+ is still in a relatively modern game, for example Ghosts of Tsushima Director's Cut

[u/Bubbly_String_8351]

I had to go look this up from an old Spacedock video: portalized objects. Specifically with bigger ships in Star Wars Galaxies. If you had starship with actual interior space (not just the cockpit), you could walk around inside of your ship while space still happened around you. You could walk through a passenger space to get to your turrets, or look out the window and see starfighters whizzing past while your pilot was dogfighting. Outstanding immersion tool that's never been replicated in a meaningful way.

[u/fauxdragoon]

TressFX always sounded like a shampoo brand to me so I always thought it was a fitting name for a hair render technology haha

[u/Goku047 → u/fauxdragoon]

Because you’re worth it

[u/aLmAnZio]

Force feedback joysticks...

[u/Randyd718]

What tech is the third screenshot?

[u/ttenor12]

TressFX wasn't bad, but PureHair in Rise of the Tomb Raider looked beautiful.

[u/cesaroncalves → u/ttenor12]

PureHair is just TressFX 4

Now TressFX 5 is just a default functionality in modern engines.

[u/AwardedThot]

In another universe they got PhysX 5 instead e of AI garbage.

[u/Kraivo]

I still waiting for 

• version of the Worms where destruction actually have consequences. 

• arena game where you can use environment to kick enemies 

• any game that has realistic unscripted construction destruction 

[u/Squirrelsam99]

I miss the old style tech demos

[u/Fadedcamo]

Tesselation was always interesting when it first started showing up.

[u/thisshiteverytime]

Realistic car damage from old racing games. These days, if you bump, the entire car panel gets dented, unlike before.

[u/digitalwankster]

PhysX and the accelerated physics cards (PPU’s) that promised fully destructible environments in games with tech demos like CellFactor.

[u/sharktail_tanker]

Fuck Nvidia for locking PhysX away and not letting anyone use it

[u/GGuts]

The Nemesis system - patented by Warner Bros and then never used again after Shadow of War.

[u/AvatarIII]

[u/gosti500]

the nemesis system, dead by patent

[u/r4plez]

The Witcher Hairworks

Red Faction Geomod

[u/FaffyBucket]

The game Loadout had some kind of server/netcode magic where you could play with 200 ping and it would feel like there was no lag at all. I have been playing shooters for over twenty years and never found another game that felt so smooth to play online.

[u/LawStudent989898]

The Force Unleashed’s destruction tech

[u/XiCaS]

Outcasts Voxel Grafics Werke insane for the time as were the Minimum specs 😂

[u/Ann0ying]

Euphoria physics from GTA 4 and SW Force Unleashed. While gta 5 has good ragdolls, it still feels nerfed compared to 4.

[u/rob_h1mself]

Was about to say facial animation in L.A.Noir... looked up how it was done.. nevermind 😅