PVS isn't that expensive to compute. Especially nowadays. I assume this is actually referring to the binary space partitioning techniques used in DOOM and improved in Quake, Half-Life, etc in the late 90s, early 2000s.
The BSP tree was also extremely useful for optimizing netcode for games like Quake 3 Arena and games within that family and time period I believe.
PVS requires some hierarchical scene representation with no seams between walls. I know no other way to build such representation other than BSP. But BSP works fine only with pretty low-detail map geometry consisting of brushes. No large detail meshes or terrains can be used with it. If a game has a lot of open spaces or semi-open spaces it's nearly to impossible to build a BSP for it.
All Source / Source 2 games still use both PVS (bsp/octree) and pre-baked lightmaps. Of course, they’re quite notorious for the staticness of their environments.
There's nothing necessarily static about BSPs - in fact level editors use BSP brushes (other piecces of geometry stored as BSP) - exactly because calculating set operations between BSPs is fast and well defined, and results in another BSP.
In fact, Red Faction, one of the first games to feature destruction on the PS2, used BSPs under the hood instead of voxels/marching cubes.
What was expensive, and made these game levels static is, was the occlusion calculation and light maps, which were relatively expensive at the time, and the fact that the first instances of those engines, like Quake were designed for the Pentium.
In practice many useful representation can be built only in a hierarchical way. Unless you want to force artist/map makers to split their maps in regions manually.
Lots of old racing games used a PVS. The way it was calculated was by flying a camera around the track and calculating what was visible every few meters using occlusion culling, then at runtime you just see what section of track you're on and only draw the objects that you know are visible. Recalculating the PVS for that is definitely a slow operation!
I feel there was a very narrow time window in the 90s when a bunch of game franchises were started where the devs could get away with shipping stuff with a ton of bugs. The first two Fallout games come to mind. So does the original Deus Ex. This is definitely the exception not the rule though! Hardware constraints weed out shitty (or at the very least suboptimal) code very quickly.
This is the exception not the rule however. If there's one unifying thing about games that succeed despite major issues with the code its that the developers tend to have extensive experience playing board games and can make a compelling gaming experience without having a game with all the bells and whistles.
I think maybe that was just when YOU were playing games, because games today still ship with tons of bugs - it usually isn't until a few years later that there is stability
Yeah try some early access games! I also don't remember thinking the games he mentioned were particularly buggy at the time. They worked fine for me on my PC. Why are you so sure they were unusually buggy? Just curious. You may be comparing what you heard to what you have seen.
I posted Bernie's "Conversation with Claude" a while back, and it was just about immediately taken down.
Let's face it Y combinator is mostly AI startups for the next few years, and any anti-AI sentiment is going to hurt the bottom line.
That being said, I disagree with Sanders on a number of points. He wants to stop data center construction. Can't think of a more luddite un-nuanced solution to the "problem"
The real AI danger is not the threat to white collar jobs (which will simply have to evolve), but something we will see roughly 18 months now when Joe Schmo asks Claude Giga Max Supreme 8.0 to help him reduce his taxes, and it hacks into the IRS and deletes everyone's records.
That’s fine. You said we’ve got 18 months until Claude takes our taxes away so you’ve just gotta get all of your driving done in the next year and a half before the roads fall into permanent disrepair, because of AI
Don't forget the coastal geography.
Iran's coastline in the Persian gulf is longer than California's coastline, and they can do drone attacks anywhere in the Gulf, not just the narrow strait portion that everyone seems to focus on.
Cuba allying with Iran is pure fantasy though. There's no logistical connection between the two nations. It would be as irrelevant as Greenland allying with Antarctica.
The world has seen this play out before. Launch a service, sell it at a loss to achieve hypergrowth, raise prices add ads and enshittify.
The thing that is difference is the scale and the hardware. When Britain underwent its rail building boom in the 1850s, the bubble bursting left the kingdom with 150 years worth of infrastructure. Unless we invest in energy buildouts, we will be left with billions in rapidly depreciating GPUs
Yes, id invented it, but I think they published one slightly earlier game which also had texture streaming. The technique (virtual textures) would not become ubiquitous in most engines until the PS4 era though.
Unfortunately nowadays id Software doesn't seem to be at the cutting edge of engine technology anymore. Most interesting new developments now come from Unreal Engine as far as I can tell. Like virtual geometry (Nanite) or efficient ray traced direct illumination (MegaLights).
No, they are only using ray traced global illumination, which Unreal Engine already had several years prior (Lumen). They are not second place either, because several other engines also had it before id Tech.
> They ripped our Carmacks texture streaming stuff outta the engine years,ago though
I'm pretty sure they are still using texture streaming. There is no alternative to that.
The id tech 8 engine is a whole lot more performant than the unreal 5 engine and absolutely does what it needs to, fantastically, I would add for the game it was made for.
I actually used similar camera draw distance trick in my game Rogue Stargun.
The real way to optimize this stuff really well is for the artist to spend a lot of time making LODS for the distant objects. For the really distant objects, esp for a platform like n64, you can replace the distant objects with billboard imposters which are basically just flat poster textures that swap perspectives at certain angles.
GTA V does this extremely well with many manually made LODs and its very costly
Another game that I find has very impressive draw distance is Just Cause 2. You can see objects very far away when flying etc, but they look very detailed and do not change when moving closer. Definitely blew me away the first time playing it.
reply