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submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 57 points 3 weeks ago

I want fidelity, crisp frames, with a cool art style, not some jank and blurry attempt at "realism". Ban TAA, ban ML upscaling, ban frame generation. Ban AAA.

(All the best games are indie games)

[-] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago
[-] [email protected] 17 points 3 weeks ago

TAA can be fine when implemented well. Temporal information can be very useful for adding more detail over multiple frames that couldn't be obtained without doing more samples every frame.

However, when done poorly it makes things blurry as you move the camera. The information needs to be correctly adjusted for camera movements or it smears all over the screen. It's also made worse with things like rain drop effects and things like that.

TAA is useful. It's just too many games just enable it and it without knowing how to use it well and it just degrades the image.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago

Do you have an example of a game using TAA correctly? Because so far, all the games I've played with TAA on are blurry.

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[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

It's completely shit, it's like covering your monitor in vaseline. All games with deferred rendering should use SMAA.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

I recently upgraded my computer with the best possible components, and it makes me so mad that games look worse than they did when I put my last pc together. What’s the point of bothering with graphics at all if you’re going to add a smear filter.

Indie games out here killing it with pixel art.

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[-] [email protected] 46 points 3 weeks ago

If we consider a game as a cake, I think of the graphics as its frostings. Sure, it could make the game look very good, but won't do shit if the base of the cake is crap.

[-] [email protected] 18 points 3 weeks ago

i'd consider realistic graphics as fondant, sure you can create amazing visuals with it... but that thing is barely edible. give me some buttercream (stylised graphics) instead

[-] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago

One of the things I liked about Blizzard was that they never tried to use fondant. It was all buttercream...

Until Activision made them start mixing fiberglass into the frosting to cut costs

[-] [email protected] 14 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

As Alton Brown said, "Cake is only the delivery system for frosting."

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[-] [email protected] 34 points 3 weeks ago

I can't handle getting addicted to Nethack again at this point in time

[-] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago

It’s still great. Like old school Civilization, or even older Zork

[-] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago

I did a lot of stuff in the first Zork (kill the troll, solve the maze, open the gates of hell, etc), but I never quite figured out how I was supposed to win.

They had to start putting graphics in their games before I could beat them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Zork

[-] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago

Hitchhikers Guide was even worse.

Fuck the babble fish puzzle.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

Plus getting a third of the way into the game and if you didn't take the junk mail at the beginning you have to restart.

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[-] [email protected] 30 points 3 weeks ago

It’s creative bankruptcy. Things don’t need to be realistic, it’s called style.

Stuff like Zeno Clash and Dishonored hold up aesthetically because they aren’t going for realism. And I’d take Morrowind’s arthropod bodies back if I could have the moral complexity and ya know, themes back.

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[-] [email protected] 27 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Just don't understand people looking at screenshots and gameplay videos and commenting on how the shadows on some background detail look slightly better with the FSSMGXTR scaling setting turned to BBXT5 instead of HAMndX3.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

It's the same mindset as people who overclock or tune their cars

[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

I remember people discussing hardware and one of the best advice comments I've ever seen was:

"Turn off that little FPS counter and just enjoy the damn game."

People get so wrapped up in the hardware hobby they forget why they care in the first place, which would be fine if it wasn't just fuelled by hardware marketing to make everyone else feel like they're "missing out."

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[-] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

And then they complain that their framerate is too low, causing flickering or lag apparently but it causes blurring instead which they do with motion blur effect already. 🤪

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[-] [email protected] 27 points 3 weeks ago

Does ASCII art count? Dwarf Fortress, MUDs, etc. are great fun.

[-] [email protected] 21 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Text rendered onto a screen is also graphics.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago

How many layers can be peeled before it's not a video game anymore?

[-] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I honestly think it would be interesting to play a game by sound alone, where you play as a blind person (maybe Daredevil or Zatoichi or something) and you navigate the world by listening. Ironically, it'd probably need to be on a VR headset so that the game can detect you turning/tilting your head and adjust the stereo balance accordingly.

Maybe Zatoichi would be best, as you could hear an enemy swinging a sword like "SHING" and "SWOOSH" etc, and maybe that would give you enough information to block or dodge. You'd probably also need haptic feedback to tell you when your blade connects.

Maybe there could be graphics, but only to recreate the sense of smell, like the screen is pure black except when you smell something and then a word appears on the screen like "rose" or "blood" etc.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

There is some game where you are blind any the only thing you can see is blood from what ever you killed splashed on the walls. Totally forget what it's called. But yea yours sounds cooler

[-] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

The flash game The Blind Swordsman does something like this.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Just remove the video part. Now it's just a "game."

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[-] [email protected] 14 points 3 weeks ago

I saw a text based porn game yesterday. Was pretty fun but not much porn.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago

What's the fediverse etiquette for "can wet get a link to that?", but in a way that's not weirder than this already is...? I've made it weird. Maybe it was already weird.

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[-] [email protected] 14 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

A line drawing of a dude with the left arm in view. There are 3 hairs. You can count them. Also, as a bonus, 4 hairs on the part of the belly in view, 3 hairs on the part of the torso in view and 4 hairs on the part of a chin in view. Oh and 3 dreadlocks coming down from the head

That's 3 hairs on the arm you see. Give me my $90

[-] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago

I want a fun game that can run on my shitty PC

[-] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

Lucky for your, there are lots of older games as well as plenty of indie games that focus on gameplay with very limited graphics.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

Anything from 6 or so years before your PC fabrication ought to be easy to run at a fast framerate.

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[-] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago

I'll just leave this link to Mindustry here, I guess...?

[-] Quibblekrust 12 points 3 weeks ago

It was never about fun. It's about experiencing the game.

When I read a book, the goal is to have whatever experience the book is going to give me, and leave my own life behind for a while.

Getting lost in a AAA fantasy world with super-high-fidelity graphics is an amazing experience.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago

Journey the game had extremely great graphics that are also good style and made you get lost in the fantasy and experience.

The character still did not have things like visible strands of individual hair. Realistic does not automatically make it good. It just makes it expensive.

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[-] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago

Are dcss tiles banned? I don’t want to play it ascii

[-] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago

You can play adventure books

[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago
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[-] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Unpopular opinion but graphics do matter a little bit or at least more than the meme depicts. Dwarf Fortress was unplayable before they added actual graphics to it. I wish things moved between tiles fluidly like in Rimworld instead of it being a slideshow, but I can actually stand to play Dwarf Fortress now. If the only video games that existed were text-based, I'd probably never play video games again. Ps2 era graphics on the other hand, hell yeah. 90s era dos graphics are passable too. But PLEASE no text adventure games.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago

Dwarf Fortress was unplayable before they added actual graphics to it

OBJECTION!!

The ASCII graphics have a charm of its own, even if it skews the horizontal-vertical distances due to characters being 8x12

[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

Dwarf Fortress was unplayable before they added actual graphics to it.

Supremely unbased, I still just see elf, dwarf, plump helmet...

[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

Hyperbole and a half style artwork.

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[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

There was an excellent text based RPG called Roadwarden that came out the other year. It's just text and illustrations so thought I'd use this post to mention it.

If small amounts of animation are allowed then WORLD OF HORROR was decent too.

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[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Abandon widespread* texture use, return to polygons+vertex colors+in-engine cutscenes (and similar data-saving techniques like soundfonts).

my examples (2D: created with Godot, 3D: created with Blender)

A simplified polygonal scene, originally from Futurama scene that's styled like anime. Fry is saying "You and I are enemies now." while pointing at a jpegified Professor Farnsworth. Meta note: The scene was made in the Godot game engine.

Peter Griffin in a polygonal art-style, saying "I find this... shallow and pedantic." with a smug face and touching his fingertips together.

The entire scene is low-poly with colors defined using the mesh itself,  also the image is optimized for color to reduce data, resulting in dithering patterns. In a gray room with black and white triangle tiles, there are 6 badgers of various sizes standing and facing the viewer. Similarly, there are 5 eyes floating in the air one of which is not fully opaque. There is 1 banana on the floor.

A low-poly, vertex color-only model of a tail-less gecko, pathetic-looking and purple under its eyes. The origin lines from the software Blender can be barely seen

spoiler Animated eye A polygonal eye, starts looking straight ahead and goes into a smooth lower scanning motion, when the eye is near its edge blood vessels can be seen. Multiple elements of the eye a few slightly different forms that shift in a 'boiling' animation.

This was using a feature that likely isn't viable (for common use) due to performance.

:::

And for something not-by-me, see Spyro's vertex color skyboxes.

The Lofty Castle skybox from the original Spyro. A beautiful sky, with the bottom half being dark-ish purple space with small triangular stars, the top-half with a visible planet and another smaller planet/moon in a blue sky, with the middle of the sky being separated by a line of clouds with an orange/pink glow on the upper half


* general normal maps are ok, but I didn't have much luck beyond using generated noise for metal. I even tried some stuff with watercolor, maybe with better shaders it could work but untextured is easier.

Or another example, any material you can just apply without alteration (for instance, make something look like wood) is alright too. Maybe UV mapping is not too bad, but extra per-model work is not ideal.

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[-] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

I've yet to actually play it, shame on me, but A Blind Legend took an interesting approach to being graphicsless!

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this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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