lazygecko

Just an inane question which popped into my head. Texture resolution was pretty much a non-factor in earlier 3D games from the early to mid 90s since they would be tiled rather than stretched across surfaces. The first games where I remember this being natively in the graphics settings was probably from 1998 onwards. I know it was technically possible to mess with mipmap settings and whatnot using console/config commands in Quake, but I wouldn't say that counts.

There's an ad for some racing game (with dinosaurs?) on either the DS or 3DS that is equally ridiculous.

Yes, that is Toby Maguire making ecstatic exertions from the bathroom.

I think all the X games except 2 and 7 already have PC versions. Not exactly stellar ports though in most cases, I'd wager.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=11sFj8ZFWRP3-MxXBDp86WxjSlRWfh0nU Feel free to use in your shitty Doom wad!

Looking at how long this has been going on an escalating now, I am seriously dumbfounded at how these things haven't faced the bloodlust of copyright lawyers and their usual zealotry. And this would be one of the few cases where it'd actually be called for. Do these huge companies like Disney not realise that this is actively damaging the integrity of their brands? You'd think they would have held YouTube at gunpoint for enabling this shady industry.

Least toxic gaming community would be a more interesting discussion since the overwhelming majority of them are all so irredeemably toxic that comparing them is just pointless. Doomworld scores unusually high in that regard. The level of discourse and civility here is among the highest of all communities I frequent, or used to frequent. Within the last 5 years in particular the social climate in most other forums has gotten remarkably worse and made me feel unwelcome to the point that I rarely visit any more, if not flat out leave. It's depressing to think about.

I don't think this is really true. When talking about the color/palette limitations of the systems, there's far more underlying details both in terms of limitations and possibilities, so casual tech conversations tend to be very reductive. The Genesis is very, very bottlenecked by the colors even when taking dithering and shadow/highlight tricks into account. This mainly stems from how the colors are sub-divided into 4 parallel 16 color palettes. These cannot really overlap with eachother, ie a tile/sprite can only use 1 subpalette at a time (the only "workaround" being splitting an object up into several sprite layers). Those 4 palettes have a huge impact on the artist's workflow and how the graphics end up looking. The main advantage of the SNES palette is more or less that more objects on the screen can be afforded their own unique colors. You just have a lot more sheer flexibility. Whereas Genesis games tend to get a much more "uniform" color distribution where more things share the same pool of colors. Notice how in the vast majority of games, the level art tends to be made up of 2 main groups of gradients which takes up the majority of the "budget" for the palette(s) reserved for background art, maybe with a few accents here and there for things like lights or flowers. Then you typically have 1 palette used mainly for the player character(s), another for enemies/projectiles/etc, (maybe some of these things are also made out of the level art palettes if the artist knows what they're doing) and then UI elements typically pull their colors from one of the sprite-focused palettes. Dithering tricks aren't really going to help you there if you wanted to, say, have an object onscreen with a purple color scheme when the 4 palettes all have been primarily reserved for other types of colors. Dithering usually just yields more available shades within an existing color group. We actually used to do mockup port screens on another forum taking all these specific limitations in mind, and it's a really great way for learning how this works and what kind of challenges you have to face. Here is one mockup I did of how Street Fighter Alpha 2 (based on the SNES version) would work on the Genesis: The first 16 color palette is reserved exclusively for the background art. The second palette serves as a kind of jack of all trades with a grayscale and different primary colors, being used here for the lift layer, projectile and effect sprites, and UI graphics. The remaining 2 palettes are used for each character respectively.

McDonald's hosted birthday party around 1994. This was at a downtown restaurant also housing their administrative HQ, so they took us on a tour around the offices. I managed to get separated the group wandering off on my own, entered an empty office room with a computer on, and sure enough, that computer was running Doom.

For the average listener/consumer, music is merely a vector for either celebrity worship or lifestyle/identity that make up the more overarching pop culture. And yeah, this is mainly what's being pushed by the record labels, and also the surrounding music press. Music journalism in general is pretty much a joke and seem to go out of their way to talk about anything but the actual music. Even in a magazine like The Rolling Stone you might at most see some lip service paid to production or lyrical themes. It's an odd situation especially if you juxtapose it against cinema where the average film critic seems far more likely to respect the intelligence of their audience and isn't afraid to discuss the actual filmmaking merits.

Dwarf Fortress procedually generates everything, and I do mean everything, including every facet of the worldbuilding and history that makes up the game space.

There's more than one way to fix a few stray peaks in a track without resorting to destructive normalizing.

Loudness is a completely relative term. It can't really exist without anything to compare it with. Thus within the framework of a track, or an album, if everything is loud 100% of the time, then nothing is, really. The loudness war as a social phenomenom is kind of fascinating once you get into really studying the history of it. It's heavily intertwined with radio and the mastering industry. I have my own theory about the latter where its modern incarnation is basically a glorified scam industry akin to astrology. The loudness war started with radio stations competing with eachother for attention and how they started processing their signals. There were technically two of them, with the first in the early 80's where stations simply started overmodulating their analog FM signals, and this escalated to the point where they actually started bleeding into other radio frequencies, so it didn't take long for legislators to drop the hammer on that. The second loudness war as we know it today started later when radio engineers started macgyvering their own multi-band compressors (that's how they were invented. Didn't exist as commercial products prior to that) to squash their signals with more surgical efficiency. After this was normalized, artists and bands started asking studio engineers why they couldn't just get that signature "radio sound" on their music straight away, so it all snowballed from there. At the same time, as digital formats for consumers was starting to phase out vinyl and tape in the market, I'm guessing the mastering industry was starting to feel paranoid about getting marginalized once the rest would start to figure out that their services would no longer really be that important considering the difference between analog and digital mastering. When transfering analog signals to analog formats, there's so much that can go wrong on the way, so an entire profession had been established for the task which required surgical efficiency and specific equipment. But with digital, it's the exact same binary data from one end to the other. Like any human being, all those mastering engineers probably wanted to keep their comfortable jobs. So they started to rebrand their services around more vague and romanticized notions of signal processing, and this all coincided with the rise of the loudness war which they were quick to leverage for their marketability.

Did not like the game much at all. Quake 4 was sort of a watershed moment for me when I finally decided that I had enough of these linear scripted setpiece shooter. And that was before Modern Warfare had even come out. Little did I know what the industry was in for... I also distinctively remember a "graphics improvement mod" being released that basically just increased the specularity of the normals by like 3 times. Looked absolutely terrible and I could not believe just how many people thought that was a genuine improvement.