ROSS'S GAME DUNGEON: SiN

[Veyrdite]

Awesome episode Ross, enjoyed it thoroughly.

 

I have a love-hate relationship with games that punish you with harder sections if you don't find the secret ways of making them easier.  It gives you a legitimate feeling challenge that your friends will also get stuck on, but it's also easily spoiled by one person sharing the secret (or a walkthrough). 

 

Hazardous Course 2 (hl1 mod) had a whole bunch of these, I had no idea that it was even a theme until I watched someone else's walkthrough.  I glitched and spammed my way through most of these sections legitimately and in my defence I consider it a life achievementTM (along with the lava-surfing section from Conker, brrr). 

 

I definitely got HL1 vibes at 58:19 :

 

 

That's the outdoor area where you hear grunts talking about freeman and where a sniper starts shooting you if you grab a medkit off a padmount transformer.   Is this area from the base game or the expansion (ie after Hl1's release)?

 

 

 Your graphics drivers check the executable name to work out what list of hacks to apply to the game. This is a big tradition, both for fixing stuff in current games (AAA releases tend to have big graphics driver updates released afterwards) and stuff for older more popular games (so they don't break with modern drivers).  I think I even recall Mesa (a common Linux graphics driver stack) has such things.  A lot of graphics devs hate game devs, rumours like this are all over the place:

 

Quote

The problem here is that the games being manually optimized by the graphics card vendors can have pretty horrendous code. To the point that I remember reading a post at some point about a large game not even calling glEnd after a glBegin. So these big companies get the graphics card companies to manually go through and hack together some specialized code (including the shader code that will replace the shader code written by the big game company) to fix up how the game works, and optimize it so it works well.

 

The low fade distance for the vegetation probably didn't have to do with polygon counts, but more to do with the fact they're transparent.  Transparent objects require more passes to render and (worst of all) proper sorting before you render them, because they depend on what was rendered behind them (unlike opaque stuff).  Sorting is expensive if you don't have a clever system.  The doom, build & quake engines have massively effective ways of handling terrain (brush) sorting, but I'm not sure about transparent object poly sorting in quake2, it might have been a super-slowdown case where even having three plants onscreen brings on the tremors.

 

White edges around characters with some versions of AA: could be bleed from an atlassed charset maybe?   Normally you stretch the texture UVs ever so slightly larger than the mesh quads to get rid of this problem, but that must somehow be getting ruined by the AA method.  Some graphics drivers used to auto-stretch/twiddle UVs in weird ways sometimes too; I recall stories about some game engines having to detect this (to-counteract it) and other ATI vs Nvidia emulating or not each other's behaviour?  I'm not sure.

Edited December 30, 2020 by Veyrdite (see edit history)

[Deep Dive Devin]

That's interesting. It's kind of funny how much people freak out over newer graphics technology when I'm pretty sure we STILL have trouble just with transparency stuff, especially water effects. I remember seeing a Nier Automata screenshot where the ripple effect that's SUPPOSED to be on things beneath the surface just rendered on top of anything overlapping it, no matter where it is. There are a lot of little details graphics could be working with to make their worlds more alive and seamless, but they still just seem to be focused on bumping up the numbers of things, like the later really boring parts of Dragon Ball.

Edited December 30, 2020 by Shaddy (see edit history)

[Im_CIA]

I don't think Johnny C has the mathematical background ( as in a phd in theoretical mathematics ) to breakthrough AI on a fundamental level. But there are a lot of applied AI engineering challenges, especially on the consumer side, that he can probably tackle. I know a guy who knew absolutely nothing about AI, but he optimized some data processing for an ML shop which trimmed down the shop's hardware margins by several magnitudes.

Edited December 30, 2020 by Im_CIA (see edit history)

[ultrayoba]

John Carmack is an awesome dude, however a bit overhyped. id games actually were most times not the most technologically advanced things at the time, at least not completely. Origin, LucasArts, Bethesda did a lot of advanced 3d first-person stuff in mid-90s.

[Chrisfratz]

Does anyone know what track the music from the opening turret section is on the soundtrack download that Ross released? I can't find it.

[Im_CIA]

1 hour ago, ultrayoba said:

John Carmack is an awesome dude, however a bit overhyped. id games actually were most times not the most technologically advanced things at the time, at least not completely. Origin, LucasArts, Bethesda did a lot of advanced 3d first-person stuff in mid-90s.

A lot of people forget about Michael Abrash too.  I tried getting though his Graphics Programming Black Book, at least the first half that deals with optimization, like 3 times. Those old guys were on a whole other level altogether

Edited December 30, 2020 by Im_CIA (see edit history)

[ScumCoder]

On 12/29/2020 at 10:34 PM, Kaiosama TLJ said:

Since you talked about TMNT, I'll tell you a curious fact: It started of as a independent comic book, and as far as I know, it's a lot gritty compared to the other media it spawned.

I can confirm.

 

Due to certain circumstances, the TMNT comics were the first (and for many years the only) introduction to this franchise that I ever had. And because back then my parents weren't fully understanding what comic books are, they just thought all comics are for kids (the cover is colorful, has some bipedal animals, so it's obvious, right) and it's OK to buy some of them for ~8 years old me without even checking what's inside.

 

Needless to say, the rather hardcore violence and body horror left some scars on my psyche. I guess I should thank the TMNT comics for partially making me who I am, the same way Ross is thankful to Spiderbot.

[xawesomecorex]

Great Episode, though there was some trepidation at first because I thought what else could possibly be said about SiN. Well you proved me wrong in that, good job! Anyways, I think I just discovered what to do in the subway fight with Mancini the Mutant. If you  shoot him in the face with your shotgun he'll stagger and grab his face. If your aim is quick enough you can basically stun lock him by doing that and come out of the fight relatively unscathed. 

Edited December 31, 2020 by xawesomecorex (see edit history)

[Comic-Sams]

I thought the Sci-Fi game with a great soundtrack was gonna be Halo, I know it is not niche and quite mainstream but I thought you where gonna talk about XCloud and streaming services and the 'secret weapon'. But it is nice t o see a more niche shooter get the spotlight.

Edited January 1, 2021 by Comic-Sams (see edit history)

[steviewonder322]

Oh man. The only time I'd ever heard of SiN was when Inside Gaming played through Episodes:Emergence. If anyone wants to see how rough that game is, give their old playthrough a watch. Strangely they also played Heavy Metal F.A.A.K. 2 once they started up as Funhaus, which is a great playthrough as well.

 

Anyways based on Ross' review this game seems right up my alley and makes me question why no one ever talks about it. Is it available on any storefronts? Feels like the kind of thing GOG would get involved with.

[killerkongformoney]

Anyone else notice that there were no awards?

[BTGBullseye]

54 minutes ago, killerkongformoney said:

Anyone else notice that there were no awards?

[evatron]

what was that example quake 2 game with lip sync ross used?

[ekket]

5 hours ago, evatron said:

what was that example quake 2 game with lip sync ross used?

Not a game, a machinima:

 

It's pretty good.

[Mira]

This episode inspired me to recreate the oil rig theme from the game in the style of Michiru Yamane:

(some liberties needed to be taken because the first half of the original is basically just drums, bass and noise so I had to create some baroque-ish melodies over it based on motifs from later in the song; it should start to sound like the original from around the 45 second mark onward)

[evatron]

On 1/12/2021 at 10:55 PM, Mira said:

This episode inspired me to recreate the oil rig theme from the game in the style of Michiru Yamane:

(some liberties needed to be taken because the first half of the original is basically just drums, bass and noise so I had to create some baroque-ish melodies over it based on motifs from later in the song; it should start to sound like the original from around the 45 second mark onward)

hey thats actually not bad

[ZardoZ]

Recently played SiN for the second time and had a total blast with the game. Thanks for that, Ross! I'm very excited about the upcoming remasters of SiN and Kingpin, which unfortunately are now delayed for more than a year and may never be released. Anyway, SiN does provide some of the best levels in the 90's shooters, i think the level design is only a step behind that of Half-Life, which in my opinion, is the very best to this day when it comes to "environmental storytelling", where the corridors of Black Mesa tell their own story and help you fill the gaps and make your own conclusions, and form theories about the bigger picture of what is happening.

SiN still follows a more traditional level formula for the time, where the levels involve some backtracking and switch hunting, but they are great because they feel natural, like existing places that make the world believable, which was still at the time a very fresh concept compared to the abstract levels of Doom, Quake and Unreal. That being said, all these games are great and i love them to death.

 

PS: Here's something curios... i've noticed near the end of SiN, where a mutant breaks through the wall, Ross got the Mancini mutant, check it out:

 

 

But in my game, i get the big second act boss coming through the wall. How so? Is there different versions? Is it a difficulty thing? I played on normal difficulty so... did Ross play on easy? 

 

 

 

Edited December 5, 2022 by ZardoZ (see edit history)