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lazygecko

The evolution of game textures

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edit: I meant to post this in Everything Else. But I suppose it's tangibly related to Doom.

Something I've given a lot of thought lately, especially when viewing extracted raw textures when modding various games whether they be modern or classic. After a while you notice a distinct difference in style that has shifted over time, which is not just about higher resolutions.

First we have the early texture mapped 3D games, when resolution standards were at their lowest like 64x64 or 128x128. Doom, Quake, PS1 3D games, etc. What I find interesting about textures from this era is that they look like they are hand-crafted natively at those low resolutions, as opposed to working in very high resolutions and then downscaling which is the standard practice today. I remember recently that someone imported the textures from Metal Gear Solid and applied them to meshes in Unreal Engine 4 with nearest neighbor scaling, and they were surprised at just how functional and well defined these textures looked in spite of the heavy upscaling.



I think this is precisely because they were natively drawn in that resolution, essentially treated like pixel art. Fine details like buttons and edges are defined by as little as 1-4 pixels, and they retain their sharply defined edges when upscaled without filtering. The same principle also applies to games like Doom and Quake, which is why I largely prefer playing them in sourceports with filtering disabled. To illustrate my point I made some animated gifs of Quake textures to show the elements I think are diminished when you apply the filtering that most people take for granted these days:



That's one aspect of old school texturing. The other I took note of is related to lighting and how a lot of it is pre-baked into the texture. I think this was common until around the mid 00's once we started seeing more advanced lighting alongside with specular, and shortly after normal map layers for textures. I distinctly remember playing UT2004 with a mutator that added monsters from Doom 3, and it was striking just how ugly they looked in that engine as opposed to in Doom 3. Didn't take me long to speculate that this was due to how Doom 3 was built entirely around its innovative new lighting, and how everything was made to be as flat and neutral as possible so that the lighting can do all the work. Since then this has become the industry standard.
The interesting thing about this is that, while the newer tech can make the reflections look a lot more dynamic and lifelike, if the lighting conditions are less than optimal which has a tendency to happen, things end up looking unnaturally flat and dull. It was a pet peeve I started noticing more and more as we moved away from pre-baked lighting in textures. At least with the older technique we had more of a sense of consistency in that regard.

A lot of leaps in visual tech for gaming has sort of felt that way to me, in that we have tradeoffs that take two steps forward but one step back. Around the mid 00's we also started seeing a move towards newer dynamic shadow techniques, but at the same time these had very glaring compromises like a very pixelated/blurry resolution with a lot of flickering. And we traded fog for distant land rendering using hideously primitive looking LoD meshes and textures. I honestly prefered playing Oblivion with distant rendering off, for instance. And it kind of saddens me how plenty of games struggle with these things to this day.

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Excellent thread. I think you nailed it on the head: early 3D FPS, just like everything else of their era, were based heavily on pixel art. Just looking at Doomguy's face, the monster sprites and how well they scale (despite some of them being digitized, all were reworked and retouched frame by frame).

GeckoYamori said:

A lot of leaps in visual tech for gaming has sort of felt that way to me, in that we have tradeoffs that take two steps forward but one step back.


Today, artists and game makers in general are required to produce lots of high-resolution, high complexity assets (3D models, terrains, levels etc.) quickly, nobody can afford perfecting every single pixel of every texture anymore, and in modern textures there probably wouldn't be any benefit in doing so, unless suddenly somebody made a game with high-res textures which however were supposed to be "used" unfiltered, just for the novelty. Only then, would this pixel-art attention to detail make sense.

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Well, duh. When you have low pixel budget, you must compensate pixelation with precision. You can't just make a blurry mess (although some people did). But if you have way too many pixels to handle, there's no point in being anal (unless you want to spend a month on a single texture with little to no benefit).

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Jaxxoon R said:

There's also the fact that the PSX was limited to 16 colors per texture.


WTF! how did they LIVE!?!

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Eh, that's not much worse than what these developers had to work with on the SNES. It's just now instead of one small sprite, it's a single large image mapped to a 3D object. There was a 256 color mode, but it was mostly used for framebuffer effects like you'd see in a JRPG's battle transition or FMV stills.

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Jaxxoon R said:

There's also the fact that the PSX was limited to 16 colors per texture.


This tidbit prompted me to investigate, and indeed there was a 4-bit texture mode -but also others at 8, 16 and 24 bits. Was the 4-bit preferentially used/significantly faster/easier to program with that it ended up dominating?

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GeckoYamori said:

giant image


Ugh! You made my browser scroll a mile! Why would you do this?

You've hit on one of the reasons why I'm always really, really hard on level designers when it comes to lighting. There's just no excuse for the fact everyone lights their games like it's 1994 half the time. It makes them look worse than games from 1994, which is kind of a funny irony I suppose.

The other thing about high-resolution textures is most gamers don't pay as much attention as you have. They make high-res replacements that don't fit the look of the game, and often don't even fit with each other.

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Aliotroph? said:

Ugh! You made my browser scroll a mile! Why would you do this?The other thing about high-resolution textures is most gamers don't pay as much attention as you have. They make high-res replacements that don't fit the look of the game, and often don't even fit with each other.


Doomworld should automatically be resizing large images for you.

Do you mean modders making high resolution texture replacements for existing games? That's a problem riddled with tropes in itself. All too often do I see them go way overboard with sharpened, noisy diffuse textures because sharper obviously always means better, and likewise the normal maps are way overdone as well because shiny noisy normal maps must mean better as well.

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Aliotroph? said:

The other thing about high-resolution textures is most gamers don't pay as much attention as you have. They make high-res replacements that don't fit the look of the game, and often don't even fit with each other.


I think the Doom high resolution texture pack does a good job of noticeably making a positive difference for the aesthetics.

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Doom's HD textures are hideously inconsistent and point to how subtle pixel art can be, and how it doesn't always translate well to high resolution and color depth.

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Texture artists need some sort of tool for graphics software which shows the same image next to itself in many sides/angles where editing one will show the others change at the same time, so if you edit in between the main texture and with another one at the side/angle you could then blend them together somewhat at the seams if that makes any sense.

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GoatLord said:

Doom's HD textures are hideously inconsistent and point to how subtle pixel art can be, and how it doesn't always translate well to high resolution and color depth.


idk if we're talking about the same HD textures here, but they look spot on to me.

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Kontra Kommando said:

idk if we're talking about the same HD textures here, but they look spot on to me.


You may have to link me, as I've seen several attempts at HD textures and they were all failures, even though the effort was commendable.

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The HD just makes it more obvious that the world is made of papercraft. Like those HD alien sprites you made, they look worse than the low-res sprites because now they look like evil xenomorph dollies running about.

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