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thepressureabove · 7 hours

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You should all come and play runescape with me

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thepressureabove · 7 hours

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thepressureabove · 7 hours

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When was the first 3D video game published? Trick question, this is a post about how "3D video game" is a meaningless phrase.

In 1984, King's Quest: Quest for the Crown was published. King's Quest was marketed as a "3-D Animated Adventure," even though it looked like this:

At first glance, it looks like any other low-resolution 16-color adventure game of the pre-EGA era. But it has one revolutionary feature that sets it a step above its peers: You can walk behind things.

To be clear, that's basically it. There's not even sprite scaling or anything; King Graham is the same size whether he's close to the "camera" or not. Modern gamers would probably find it a bit ridiculous to say this game has a "camera" at all. But you can walk around in that green field, and you can go behind the tree or the castle tower, and those things would hide the part of Graham's sprite behind them—and you could also walk in front of them!

Well, if you didn't fall off the bridge. Why did Roberta Williams never put handrails on those things?

Anyways, the next game I'm going to mention is Wolfenstein 3D (1992), another game which marketed itself on cutting-edge 3-D technology.

You can see a lot of graphical improvement between these two games set in castles, and not just because Wolfenstein has thrice the resolution and 16 times the colors. The sprites can be scaled with their distance from the camera, for instance, and the backgrounds aren't static flat planes. They're dynamic flat planes, capable of warping as your angle to the wall changes.

In some ways, this is as great a leap over King's Quest as King's Quest is over Zork, or at least Mystery House. But is it really 3D? It's still just a bunch of distorted 2D sprites being drawn to the screen. There's nothing really 3D going on in the computer. It's no Super Mario 64 (1996).

SM64 is among the first popular "real 3D" games, with models and polygons and stuff. And it is, again, a great leap above Wolfenstein 3D. It doesn't distort 2D sprites to mimic 3D shapes; it shapes 2D textures around 3D models. Totally different! It has polygons and stuff!

Now, I'm not 100% sarcastic about that. There are some technical differences between how SM64 handles its textures and how Wolfenstein and other Id shooters handle their sprites. But those differences aren't so much "doing something completely different" as they are "doing the same thing with fewer limitations".

And it would be absurd to claim that Wolfenstein graphics have more in common with KQ1 than with SM64. It would be even more absurd to say that SM64 has less in common with W3D than it does with older and newer titles using what people commonly consider 3D technology.

On the left we have Battlezone (1980), an arcade title which predates KQ1 as much as W3D predates SM64. It has little in common with Wolfenstein's graphics, not needing to distort any kind of 2D image file to mimic 3D, because it's just wireframes.

From a graphical perspective, it has more in common with KQ1 than W3D; both use vector graphics. (Bitmap images would take too much storage space for KQ1.) In fact, you could probably make a compelling argument that KQ1 and Battlezone's vector graphics have more in common with each other on a technical level than they do with Wolfenstein's 3D sprites or SM64's 3D models.

And on the right...it's either leaked security cam footage from Area 52, or The Callisto Protocol (2022). I can't explain what separates it graphically from the other games in this post, because there are so many new systems—systems which require specialist graphical engineers to understand, let alone create or use. I could rattle off some technical terms like subsurface scattering and cloth simulations and soft-body deformation, but I don't understand these techniques on anything but the shallowest level, and TCP has elevated them to another level.

I know it sometimes seems like graphical technology stopped having Big Improvements some time around the seventh or eighth console generation, but it kept going. The difference, I'd argue, is that the improvements have been more spread-out, enabled less by advances in hardware technology and more by learning how to use those advances, distributed throughout a hardware generation rather than concentrated at the start.

Anyways. The point I'm trying to make is that modern games make every prior game in this post look ridiculously primitive. SM64 was impressive in its day, but Mario is rendered with less than a thousand triangles, separated into several rigid components. And his face is just a couple dozen flat polygons with a texture printed on them. Even modern indie games often animate eyeballs with more polygons than Mario's entire body, with the eyeball and eyelid and so forth all being separate models with textures and shaders bringing them to life. Giving them more depth.

Making them even more 3D.

There is not a firm line between 2D and 3D. Wolfenstein 3D is more 3D than King's Quest I, and Super Mario 64 is more 3D than either of them, and Skyrim more 3D than that, and The Callisto Protocol more 3D still. If someone dismissed Doom as not being "real 3D," they're drawing an arbitrary distinction around one of many graphical innovations that made gaming graphics incrementally more verisimilitudinous. That's all.

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thepressureabove · 7 hours

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I am being driven to madness by the fact that bees and butterflies aren't better studied than other pollinators because they are more important to the ecosystem, they are just better studied because...people like them more?

Seriously

My plants are attracting HUGE amounts of flies, ants, wasps, and moths, and when I identify them and look them up there is no information! Especially flies, wow. They're so diverse, there's SO many different kinds. I'm getting a ton of bee-mimic flies and hover flies.

Wikipedia says hover fly larvae eat aphids while the adults are pollinators. That means they are beneficial in two ways at once! But most of the Wikipedia pages for species are only one sentence, if they exist at all. Likewise here's the wiki page for the most common bee mimic fly where I am. It's one sentence!

If you only pay attention to butterflies and bees, and plant the plants that are the best for butterflies and bees, you would maybe neglect keystone plants that support the largest amount of other insects. And these insects are like, a massive proportion of the bugs in a healthy ecosystem. And birds and mammals need bugs for food! A lot of birds are mostly insectivorous, and anyways, an unbalanced diet of all bird seed can't be healthy even for the omnivorous birds. They need to eat a variety of foods!

Not to mention that larvae are necessary for feeding baby birds!

The back yard is overflowing with birds. There are red-bellied woodpeckers, a gray catbird, a barn swallow, tree swallows, wrens, sparrows, house finches, goldfinches, bluebirds, bluejays, grackles, orioles, cardinals, doves, and a bunch of others I'm forgetting about, and they are constantly singing and making a commotion, and it's louder now than the ugly man-made sounds that are always barging in through the quiet.

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thepressureabove · 8 hours

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