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I feel old because the post talks about these techniques as if they're surprising innovations or compromises for more accurate simulations, but most of these tricks were industry standard for 3D games in the early 2000's. Much of the science about lighting, physics, and rendering we take for granted today was mostly unknown; developers just did the best they could with the basic tech that was available. Back then, just the fact that we could put thousands of hardware accelerated textured polygons on the screen was a miracle to us.
While Max Payne was cutting-edge, a lot of what made the visuals appear impressive was due to hand-tweaking by a team of highly skilled artists and designers, who were probably using ridiculously primitive tooling. Pretty much every realistic 3D game of this era had to make do with low-res diffuse textures, prebaked lighting, mostly fixed-function rendering, pre-scripted interactions, and particle dynamics that were basically just a few lines of C++. Other early-2000's games like Serious Sam, Halo, and Metroid Prime also managed to create immersive visuals with very limited tech, using the same techniques as Max Payne.
I certainly appreciate the shout-out to the artists and designers from the era, These techniques were bent, twisted, and pulled in every way a development team could to produce artistic results that in some case genuine “moments” worth remembering while playing a game.
I remember being at a friends house while working on my masters thesis and him telling me to take a break and try out Halo. I had not had a console since the Nintendo 64 came out. I booted Halo and was literally mesmerized when I came out of a tunnel onto the Halo and saw the sky and the landmass. I can still remember that afternoon 20+ years later. Bought an Xbox the next morning.
Current game devs, especially in the AAA space, spend a lot of time and effort looking for hyper realism and embracing new tech to achieve accurate PBR. I wonder whether the limitations of the older hardware force a more artistic stance on everyone, even down to technical artists, to embrace an art style and art direction and work to achieve attractiveness vs realism. Or I could just be seeing my early 20’s through rose-tinted glasses.
There's a great deal to be said for setting an aesthetic expectation.
Take Minecraft, for example. The most successful game of all time along many axies, and it looks .. a certain way. It's definitely not realistic. It's not even pretty in a lot of cases. But it's consistent, and people have pushed it to the limit and created some truly beautiful artwork.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think visual fidelity can be a selling feature, but art-style and consistency is much more important.
The most successful and ported game of all time it's one even more reduced in graphics than MC. It's Tetris. But, as a middle example, there's Pokemon for the GB(C), from RBY to GSC.
Absolutely agree, that's why Zelda BOTW hit so hard; artistic vision that spoke to me hard, even though it was released on specs that are 1-2 generations behind.
BOTW hit me like a truck. I think that’s the only game as an adult, with a job and family, that I have over 500 hours in. I think it is also illustrative to consider the next closest game in play time for me is Elden Ring at ~400 hours. The similarities (and with FromSoft acknowledging world design inspiration from BOTW) to creating vast worlds with a clear and compelling ‘style’ absolutely carry the experience, even in spite of the less than technical cutting edge implementations and hardware.
> Current game devs, especially in the AAA space, spend a lot of time and effort looking for hyper realism and embracing new tech to achieve accurate PBR. I wonder whether the limitations of the older hardware force a more artistic stance on everyone, even down to technical artists, to embrace an art style and art direction and work to achieve attractiveness vs realism. Or I could just be seeing my early 20’s through rose-tinted glasses
I'd argue that during Max Paynes time (early to mid 00s) gaming was far more graphics tech driven than these days, especially on PC. It is far more common to see heavily stylized or non-photorealistic games these days than back then imho. When I think early 00's PC games, lot of it is shooter games pushing the tech envelope very heavily, stuff like HL2, Far Cry, Doom 3 etc, and I don't think we really see that sort of games often these days anymore.
Early to mid 00's was peak Moore's Law. Every year left last year's computers on the curb. Graphics hardware acceleration and programmable shaders were expanding their capabilities in ungainly leaps and bounds. Every new piece of popular hardware wasn't just the marketing number going up, it was Christmas for software. You didn't need 100+ devs to compete in the big leagues. And yeah there were a lot of moody FPS games, but I can't describe the delight of first seeing a Katamari Damacy or a Portal. It was a time of untilled earth and unplucked fruit.
As someone who played the game back then, I didn't read the article as suggesting the techniques were surprising, particularly innovative, or unique to Max Payne. Just as a case study of one of the games that used those tricks to particularly great effect (as argued by the author).
> While Max Payne was cutting-edge, a lot of what made the visuals appear impressive was due to hand-tweaking by a team of highly skilled artists and designers, who were probably using ridiculously primitive tooling
And let's not forget what while the game was released in summer of 2001 - it was in a development for the almost five years, with the first demos at '98 E3. There is a lot of things what were not even available in 1997 (Voodoo just released) and in 2001 there was already GeForce 3.
Max Payne 1 & 2 are some of my favorite games of all time. I love everything about them: their graphical style, the story, the general vibe, the gameplay. They are still very fun to play so I can recommend picking them up and doing a play through. They are easy to pick up, not long, and very rewarding at each moment
The game also had support for mods. After the first playthrough I've always played the game with the kongfu mod enabling wallrunning, kicks, additional weapons such as Sticks, and various other action orientated changes.
Additionally, I believe Rockstar gave the go-ahead for work on a remake for 1 & 2. Hopefully they have James Perry McCaffrey's voice work in good enough quality. RIP.
I remember playing a matrix mod. It was awesome. There was this famous fight near stairs with so much bullet time and effects. Another was near an elevator with pillars.
It was also a part of 3d mark 2001 back then, I've used it up until mid 2010s to see the evolution of graphic cards.
I remember as a kid playing the Police Quest series (mostly III) and thinking that games had insane graphics at the time. When Max Payne released it was absolutely mind blowing to me. The story is also very well done, something lacking today even in AAA games.
3 is good too, different environment but similar principle. And graphics look fine even by modern standards
That goddamn baby level though. I could strangle the person who stuffed that messy labyrinthic pile of crap into my John Woo-esque shooter.
I thought that level was great. To me it really sold someone with a jumbled up mind trying to push on through.
Without that level Max Payne wouldn't have been anywhere near as memorable for me.
Oooh that level... I was young when I played that game, and did not see that one coming. I also fell by the side. Memory is a bit blurry thankfully, but I erred for a while trying to climb up. I think it was a bug. Caused a few nightmares...
"and very rewarding at each moment"
Depends I would say, not the word I would use in the context of dead babies, but they were definitely great, intense games.
Can you even buy Max Payne 1 from any store today? A while back I looked around and couldn't find a single legal source for the game.
Both are available on Steam and GOG. (But you'll need community patches to run it on modern hardware.)
It was available on Humble Bundle a few months ago as part of Remedy's full lineup, along with the sequel, the Alan Wake games, and Control.
You could try Alan wake. It really gets similar vibes.
Not entirely coincidentally, given that both are Remedy games and share some key creative staff, in particular Sam Lake [1] and Petri Järvilehto.
One of the lead developers is a friend of mine. In the mid 90s he was part of the Dust demo group, eg https://demozoo.org/groups/360/ so I guess then a lot of the algorithms were used for Max Payne then as well
Also interesting how his life changed after the game, he went a totally different route and left programming for good.
Remedy was heavy with Future Crew too. It was demo scene crew all the way down.
I came out of the demo scene into pro game dev, and there was a lot of useful overlap, especially at the time (mid 90s) when you were really trying to get anything 3D on the screen.
What's he doing?
Tech is an exhausting treadmill for me at this point. Hard to find somewhere I can work where my high empathy is a positive power and not a stressor.
Focusing on chinese medicine, meditation, mindfulness.
He had a burn out. He mentioned to me in the mid 2000s after Max Payne 2 that he could not touch or see a keyboard anymore.
I just saw him last year, he is in good spirits, programming a bit again iirc but we did not talk that much about it. Still one of the smartest people I ever met.
Speaking of Max Payne and graphics, there's an amusing hidden sketch with references to engine development in the game: https://youtu.be/Ca04hCF9FL4
Bump maps and detail textures were a highly advanced and praised graphics technology in 1998, interesting to now see it explained as fake trickery from back in the day
P.S. I still see polygonal instead of truly round barrels in modern games, when will we finally have quadratic surfaces or some other solution for that?
> when will we finally have quadratic surfaces or some other solution for that?
Truly quadratic? Not with any technology resembling current GPUs which are all about computing strictly linear (/affine) functions as fast as possible. Plausible approximate dynamic level-of-detail approach? That was first used by Quake III Arena in 1999, widely advertised as being able to render truly curved surfaces (which was of course not the case, it just tessellated Bezier patches/splines in real time).
We've had tessellation shaders for a long time now, able to dynamically subdivide surfaces to approximate round shapes on the fly on the GPU. The fact that there are still polygonal barrels is likely mostly about what things to prioritize.
The Holy Grail of real-time rendering is probably micropolygons – the ability to render the whole scene using polygons a fraction of the size of a single output pixel, something that off-line renderers like Pixar's RenderMan have done since the early 90s. There are reasons why GPUs are not very good at rendering a lot of extremely small polygons, leading to approaches such as Epic's Nanite virtualized geometry in Unreal Engine 5 which basically implements a software renderer running on GPU compute shaders.
Well, it was also known to be fake trickery. But fake trickery that ran fast and looked good.
IIRC Quake 3 levels had true curved surfaces, though presumably they were polygonised at some point in the rendering pipeline.
They were dynamically tessellated on the CPU. These days we can of course do the same thing on the GPU, using tessellation/geometry/mesh shaders or even compute shaders, depending.
Max Payne 1 is a fun playthrough during xmas, kinda like watching Die Hard. Takes place during a blizzard.
A remake/remaster of Max Payne 1&2 is in the works by the original developer (Remedy). Stated to be financed by Rockstar (who own the IP) to normal Rockstar AAA levels.
What I loved the most about Max Payne’s graphics at the time was the textures. There was just enough dirt and grit to make it look real. They did just enough softening of the light map that static shadows looked real (albeit static). The artwork was phenomenal. Best environment artists at the time. Contrast to GTA3 and you can see just the level of love that went into each wall texture, each couch, each tile on the tiled wall.
The GTA VC screenshots are actually GTA III
Ah yes these are mislabled. But GTA III is indeed 2001 so the comparison is still correct.
I am really intrigued by the fact that this person blogged occasionally and then stopped in 2021. What happened to him? Is he ok and become a game designer or just got tired of game industry and quit?
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What a fantastic read. I loved this game when I was a kid.
It's still amazing. Crisp textures did a far better job than current shaders and a full-polygon bloated geometry. Max Payne 2 perfected it.
max payne 1 is what triple AAA(-?) gaming should always be.
What books does one read to get this level of graphics programming knowledge?
Graphics is not an academic body of knowledge as such. It's a bag of tricks developed over 50 years, going hand in hand with industrial hardware development.
There _is_ deep and rich academic framework around the subject, but I think to understand "why this" you need to program to understand the problem space since it's not really anything you could derive from first principles. I mean you get the rendering equation and so on, but the graphics knowledge portrayed in the article comes from understanding the three pillars of real time rendering.
It's about delicate interaction between human visual system (how to fool it), algorithms, and the hardware capabilities.
In general you need to program graphics, not read it. I mean I'm in the "reading" category myself and the people who've focused on programming are much better than myself.
Real time rendering by Akenine-Möller, Haines et all is the standard entry reference. Now in it's fourth edition. It's really good and dense.
If someone wants a simple recipe how to learn real time graphics alone in their cellar, nowadays I would recommend getting Real Time Rendering and going through https://learnopengl.com/.
After that you just continue... continue ... continue.
There are some people who understand everything about the topic instantly intuitively apparently but that's very, very unique. For the rest of us it's a life long adventure facing our own limitations and trying to get better, one program after another.
Speaking as graphics/geometry dev for 20 years now.
As an amateur game programmer, I found nothing too advanced in there. A classic book series would be Game/Programming/GPU Gems, about as old as Max Payne. But frankly, you'd run into most of these concepts attempting to make a 3D game with Godot or something. That's the nice thing to take away from TFA in my opinion: They made a very nice looking game (for the time) with largely pretty simple techniques used cleverly.
A lot of what is shown here comes down to the people in the art asset and level pipeline.
The real story to tell would be what tooling was used to pre-bake the lighing in the textures, e.g. if they used a seperate rendering package or mostly painted by hand, or in what mix.
Also what guidelines they used to make sure the baked-in reflections would match the use and environmental lighing of objects in the scene, e.g. just general constraints or how much customization there was for important unique arrangements. Is it done by the same person in a tight loop or did it involve hand-ofs, etc.
The excellence of the result is down to a lot of tasteful choices in how to blend these techniques, achieved either from experience or iteration.
As programmers we tend to focus a lot on the raw rendering techniques, but there's a whole systematic practice around art direction and how to achieve and maintain quality in it that feels I guess softer and less deterministic but is still worth talking at length about.
This especially struck me when the reviewer here recommended using multiple stacked texture planes and parallax mapping to improve things. I know a handful of games that have done this, and unless used exceedingly sparingly (e.g. mesh fence over pipes or something, where the foreground isn't expected to have a lot of depth) in my experience it very quickly gives away the illusion and looks very hokey. Humans are good at telling it's planes sliding over each other and doesn't correspond to their experience with depth perception. It also makes a scene a lot busier as the camera is moved, firing "something is changing here!" perceptual sinals all over the screen (note how all the lavish particle effects are about feedback instead), and is not the atmosphere Max Payne was trying to achieve.
In other words, sometimes it's about knowing what possible thing not to do, too. And a lot of magic happens when disciplines meet.
> e.g. if they used a seperate rendering package or mostly painted by hand
IIRC Max Payne was one of the earlier games to rely heavily on photo-reference textures (instead of hand drawing or computer generating them). Keep in mind that in 2001 digital cameras were rare, expensive, and low-res, so people often just used film cameras and scanned in the physical photo with a flatbed scanner. Max Payne was far from the first, though; even 1998's Half-Life used some photo-ref textures.
The lighting in Max Payne's textures was probably mostly just the lighting from the original photo. Every texture had to be hand-manipulated to make it usable on 3D models, so changing the lighting would have added even more work and would have looked less realistic.
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