Technically best Model 3 game?

[Gabbyjay]

What do you think is the most impressive Model 3-game from a technical standpoint?

I gotta say I'd go with LA Machineguns... man the Vegas-stage is jaw-dropping, even today, and really showing off Model 3's muscles.
Huge buildings, skyline, huge draw distance, huge texture variety and a TON of stuff going on on the screen.

Any other games you'd recommend to impress people who did miss the golden arcade era?



(From an artistical standpoint, being a racing-game-guy, I like Scud Race and also the "Dome"-Track of Daytona 2 (it is only BotE, not in the Power-Edition).)

[Bart]

You know, we should really add some debug instrumentation to log frame statistics and see which game uses the most polygons, the most meshes, the most alpha blended polygons, etc. That said, I agree that LA Machineguns is quite impressive. It's a very well-executed game and a blast to play on real hardware with those vibrating guns. The way the camera zooms out to city scale (even though it's really just a small cluster of buildings) and swoops down to parking lot level in the first stage is really cool.

I think Virtua Fighter 3 is excellent, too. I don't think it pushes the hardware too much but trying to put myself in the shoes of developers at the time, I wonder how they figured out skeletal animation, skinned mesh rendering (which I believe VF3 uses to a small degree around character joints?), and basic rope/cloth physics (characters' pony tails, clothing). I think some of this is done in real-time and not baked into the animations. Granted, a *lot* of this was probably put into place in VF and VF2. Back in those days, I don't think there were a lot of easily accessible resources on 3D graphics programming. Presumably most of these techniques were the domain of the CG effects and simulation industries and there weren't an endless array of tutorials online or standardized textbooks. I always marvel at what 80's and early 90's programmers were able to devise.

[Ian]

That's a tough question really. For max polys I'd say ocean hunter probably pushes that envelope, or maybe Harley.

But yeah virtua fighter 3 was quite revolutionary at the time. Like Bart said, skeletal animation, quite realistic physics. The motion capture stuff had been done before with vf2 and vf1 I believe. Not so much the hardware, but the early real3d software it was really designed so that you load up a database and it was basically sort of static. So you would load all the texture / geometry data for a level, then when the level was finished you'd load the the next one.

Later versions of the sdk they added the ability to stream textures and I think geometry in real time whilst the game was running. So whilst the gpu only had 8meg of texture memory, it streams textures in and out of memory as you drive through the game world in harley for example. With the previous approach that would have been impossible. Many pc games for years just took the static approach to loading assets, even up until the valve source 1 engine which just loads everything when you load a level. Streaming assets especially from hard disk you have to be very careful with latency.

But visually daytona and scud are probably visually the most impressive I think. Both games still look fantastic even today. Scud uses some sort of BSP style culling system which although maybe technically quite impressive, was a little bit flawed. You can see visible holes in the geometry in places, like in the sky for example. This isn't an emulation bug, the original hardware was like this. Most other games don't even try to be clever with the culling. Sega rally for example really just throws the entire level at the hardware, and gets the hardware to cull the non visible geometry. It also makes quite heavy use of LOD models. So again the hardware is automatically picking the model LOD. This is something that would have to be done in software (cpu side) on any other system at the time, because most GPUs just process polygons, they don't have a high level scene graph of the geometry. Scud also has custom mipmaps, so instead of relying on the sdk to automatically generate the texture LOD chain they rolled some of their own for some water effects. It's not technically complex but a nice visual trick.

LeMans24 is technically quite impressive. The day night cycles have totally dynamic lighting, combined with the fogging and real 3d head light it makes for some quite fancy visual effects.

[MrThunderwing]

It's probably not the technically most impressive, but the Model 3 game that just totally floored me the most graphically when I first saw it was Scud Race. It looked like a game from the future, man! The step up in graphics from all the (at the time still really impressive looking) Model 2 games was just staggering. The huge drive through Dolphin Tunnel aquarium on the Beginner Day stage was just such an out there concept, but just so incredibly well realised and impressive to look at.

Star Wars Trilogy Arcade was also something that really wowed me when I first saw it too. I did play Daytona USA 2 at least once in the arcade, but I think it was Power Edition rather than BOTE and the generic NASCAR track the Astro Speedway circuit got changed into, didn't quite have the same 'wow' factor.