one of my favorite little details of the original Doom games, for some reason, is the big floppy disk icon that flashed in the bottom-right corner as the hard disk did stuff
it's not actually in gzdoom. not sure about chocolate, i'll have to look for it next time. running off an SSD tho :X #mastodoom
i think part of it is it's a nostalgic reminder of when this game was very high-end. even on our pentium 90 in 1995 the framerate would dip below 35 (the max) at times
i've never quite been able to untangle why (for lack of a better term) the technological impressiveness of a given game has contributed to my enjoyment
i'm rarely impresssed these days, but back then it was Very Cool when a game busted out some novel effect or hit a level of fidelity rarely seen on its hardware
and to play something on the then cutting edge felt... invigorating somehow. maybe it was just the novelty, which is gone now since most tech is Good Enough to render pretty scenes
@alyx yeah this stuff was a big deal to me too. Like i would play Wing Commander Privateer and when you took enough damage it would play these cockpit damage animations and the game would hitch for a bit to load them which just made them more impactful?
@Triplefox good example. yep, the little hitches and lurches of Doom running on a 486 are exactly what i'm thinking of here. they were as much a part of my experience as the feel of the mouse or the sound of the OPL2 music
@Triplefox regarding impact-boosting pauses, see also hit stop, which i think may have originated in Street Fighter II
http://sourcegaming.info/2015/11/11/thoughts-on-hitstop-sakurais-famitsu-column-vol-490-1/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity2D/comments/5ip3t5/how_would_one_make_the_hit_stop_effect_used_on/
@alyx what's interesting about this is that hitstop pauses happen after you see the impact and hear the audio, but hitching happens before anything else. The only thing you might hear is the crunching of the hard drive or the BGM continuing
@Triplefox ah, yeah, that's a meaningful difference.
it's funny, playing PC games today, i get MAD or DISTRAUGHT (usually the latter) if my perfectly frame-paced, 60-120fps graphics hitch or stutter
i like my games smooth now, ok
@alyx i think the first time i was truly upset by poor framerates was with quake in fact. Would not run well on a 486. And then much later on Counter-Strike gradually used more and more memory as they updated it causing an experience i had been enjoying to be plagued with very long disk accesses
@alyx and that is really different from how it used to be which was simply that either the whole thing worked perfectly or not at all
@Triplefox yeah, quake was tough at launch. and that was WITH john carmack's visionary 3D-programming wizardry augmented by michael abrash's assembly-language genius
TF2 is a more recent game that was playable for some people at launch but then performed worse and worse as F2P junk choked the engine
this all reminded me of steel talons for the atari lynx, an arcade conversion that ran at approx. 3 fps on the handheld
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iej5HJLd7Eg
acceptable ranges for framerate were quite low until the 2000s!
everything is pretty, so nothing is pretty
perhaps in response we're seeing a lot of games that intetionally adopt visual/tech constraints, such as low poly counts or chunky pixels, as a way to stake out a unique visual identity
instead of getting lost amid the same-same 3D productions that are choking the market they make up the difference by combining carefully chosen constraints with sharp art direction
ofc that's also a function of budgets; small teams literally can't afford to chase the "AAA" look
guess it's another case of constraints fostering creative responses, just like in the old days
@alyx realistic != pretty though also, there is a lot of really pretty abstract art in games and a lot of really ugly ~photorealistic art
@morganastra for sure. i meant "pretty" in the popular-jane sense of more polygons / effects / fancy shit = Clearly Better. which is ofc not true
@alyx Yeah, most of the leaps kind of stopped being noticeable a couple of gens ago. 😅