I tried some hl2 maps and the need for speed most wanted map. I'm really impressed by how close the rendering is to the original games. Not only did they get the lighting and shading right, there are also details like the NPCs being present, or even animated falling leaves particles in the most wanted map.
I'm at a loss how they managed to convert/managed so many different formats — the textures, level data, sprites, etc. Rare games on the N64 made extensive use of "vertex shading" like techniques, and these have all been carried over to a higher degree than I would've expected...
Off topic, but you're the guy who made the HN User Tag script! I recognise you since I have you tagged as "tag-legend". Still waiting for you to post your creation as a Show HN! ;)
Many of the contributions are others reversing and implementing a new game on top of the existing API, so the really labor-intensive per-game work is still spread out reasonably well.
A lot of games use similar or derived map formats (for instance, most Valve games). There’s a fair bit of game-specific tinkering to do, but you sometimes don’t have to reverse-engineer a new binary format from scratch…
They are definitely ripped from the game. More significantly, there's a lot of work on the rendering engine side of things to make all these different types of games with their different rendering techniques work on the browser.
GTA Vice City was made for the PlayStation 2. The PS2 has a 300MHz CPU with 32MB RAM, and a GPU with 6.2 GFLOPS (slightly simplifying, it wasn't a standard PC architecture). The game was read from DVD, and the DVD drive could push 5.28 MB/s (if everything was sequential on the disk).
So it's safe to assume that the difference is mostly due to advances in tech, though advances in compression algorithms likely also helped (not that the PS2 had a lot of spare CPU cycles to decompress content).
I think it's still pretty common if you play a lot of PC games, but it's likely much less so. There seem to be less and less games giving you out-of-the-box developer console access which over time will likely cause new video game players to not know about them as much.
The concept at least is well known by younger generations. There is an entire movie based on the Backrooms YouTube series coming out that is centered around the idea of "noclip."
It’s not an actual crime, but If it’s an online multiplayer game it is a violation of the terms of service. Add to that it tends to ruin other people’s enjoyment of the service, thus negating the main purpose of the service. I think people who cheat in online games are pretty sad, pathetic, and selfish.
Yeah, even in single player today. Can't let the idea having fun in a game or having control over a game spoil the statistics of "achievements" for the Achiever players anymore. (Sigh.)
Interestingly noclip (as in Danny O’Dwyer) have their own video game archiving project going on, where they’re preserving and uploading old clips to https://archive.org/details/noclip?tab=collection
Absolutely incredible. They seem to have extracted not just level geometry and textures (which I could kind of imagine normalising to some kind of universal 3D scene format), but also animations and shader effects (which I always imagined being much more bespoke to each game/engine).
Also: copyright lawyers will surely be in touch soon?
This has been around for years and AFAIK none of the copyright holders have ever raised an issue, it helps that the developer isn't tempting fate by taking donations or running ads on it.
Copyrights only generally only start getting entertained if money is being made from it. It might be copyright infringement to post brand logo to a forum but it wouldn't be pursued. Make that forum the forums icon and start generating advertising revenue based on that icon and you'll start getting cease and desist letters.
Wow, the ENTIRE massive ocean of Windwaker with all the islands loads faster than single rooms for other games. And then zipping around it so fast from the sky, all the islands seems so small compared to how big it all felt playing the game as a kid
I was also surprised about how "small" Kakariko willage from OoT was. But I guess that's some of the cleverness of the time. Make something small, but fill it and make it feel alive.
It's really crazy what camera angles and clever design can do. Check out GTA San Andreas for what I feel is the best explanation of this - the game felt enormous when I was a kid, but when you see the actual true size of that map, it's pretty damn small.
"Big" and "small" are funny terms when you talk about computer graphics. A surface 10 units long is short if your character moves at 10 units per second. It's long if your character moves at 1 unit per second.
You can easily see the entire GTA map and it might seem small, but if you place the camera at street level I think it's clear the map is rather big.
The Pokemon Snap one brings me back to when I was a kid. They had these Pokemon Snap machines, and you used to be able to take your memory card to the local mall and use them to print out stickers from the photos you took in game. Those "bridges" between the virtual world and the real world endlessly fascinated me.
I thought this page was mostly geometry+shaders. But the snap version has lots of interactivity! You can trigger lots of the stuff you could trigger in the game. Have they replicated all that manually or how?
The Pokemon Snap behavior is a mixture of handwritten code and parsing of the game's AI code. It was originally written in a very structured way that makes it easier than having to fully emulate. More involved interactions are missing (Magikarp evolution in the valley, a lot of the cave sequences)
Sorry, to clarify, it's supposed to be a multi-step process (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxlvsts3c6o ) where you get it to jump onto land, then it gets kicked to another location where you can knock it into the waterfall.
In the game, these are actually two separate entities, and I haven't done anything to prevent the "kicked" one from immediately spawning in the air here
https://noclip.website/#snap/1A;ShareData=AUsPn92;%5eVT:h=19... , or to hook up the first one to the second (although the system to signal between distant pokemon, which it probably uses, is mostly implemented). There are a few other instances of things that are supposed to be spawning conditionally which aren't handled yet, like extra lapras in the beach.
I thought this was from the NoClip guys on YouTube but according to the FAQ there's no affiliation:
> Any affiliation to noclip, the documentary people?
> I chatted with them once, but the name is a coincidence. The name comes from an old Quake command that would let you fly through the levels here, just like in the game.
This is incredible. Going through the FFX maps is just mindblowing. I love this project so much and I hope they keep adding games, but I do think this needs to become a bigger community effort. There are so many games out there that "should" be in this.
One of the best submissions on this website in my opinion. A true collection of pieces of history both touching our new different modern lives and accessible! And a feat of engineering no less!
Looking at FEZ levels instantly made me want to see if there was something hidden in the levels' names. I've yet to finish it, and boy is this game amazing.
I haven't tried all of them, but a few of the Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door areas freeze up the site completely for me. Not sure what's causing this.
GTA III seems smaller than I remember, nice to fly around, noticed a few things I hadn't spotted when playing - like the word the stadium seats spell out.
Wow! I just spent xx minutes down memory lane - impressive loading speeds and ease of use. Awesome tool for studying level design from some of the greatest.
They do not share a file format. If you look at the GitHub repo for this site (https://github.com/magcius/noclip.website) you will find parsers, etc. for every single game.
Are you reffering to the graphical butchering that occurred in the gearbox port? I grew up playing CE on the PC so if wasn't until years later that I found out how much I was missing graphically compared to the original.
I originally only had CE on the Xbox, and I later played CE on the PC. I always remembered the Xbox graphics being better and I chalked it up to a nostalgic view of one of my favourite games.
I've been a huge Halo fan and played all the games and it was only last month I learned that the gearbox port genuinely butchered the graphics.
It currently breaks in Firefox private mode because I use the Cache APIs to try and prevent downloading the same file more than once, but Firefox disables the Cache APIs in private mode in a way I can't easily detect up-front. I'd love suggestions for a workaround or fix.
Firefox is such a pain to me as a web dev who does a lot of WebGL and Web Audio API work. Even CSS and SMIL animations can get funky. It’s not nearly as bad as Safari but it’s harder to swallow due to how small the user base is relative to the amount of time it sucks out of my life.
Ocarina of Time felt so much larger! Playing BOTW and TOTK, it now feels like a tiny level. Also, nice to get to explore the Water Temple after so many years living as a mythical space in my mind.
If you've never seen Dark Souls' maps, I encourage you to take a look at them. They are intricately woven together in ways which is not common in games today.
