Boltgun, appearances
2023-05-29
After playing through Boltgun (and reviewing it) i wanted to remove some of the more artificial "retro" flavoring and reduce the quality to make it actually look like a retro game.
It’s very interesting how much AO does for the game’s visuals.
A more dramatic example;
Specifically, it’s interesting that the game leans so heavily on dramatic colored lighting and AO to give its textures character. Most of the textures seem to be completely flatly shaded (no in-built fake shadows), and AO is used to give the impression of a deeper and more interesting texture.
In the old days, lighting was too expensive, and AO hadn’t been invented yet (Crysis was, to my recollection, the first AAA game to feature it). Texture artists would manually add fake shading and shine to textures to give the impression of a full-fledged lighting system, taking great care to align textures properly so the effect worked.
Here, though, the pipeline is cheap due to (relative to modern expectations) low-resolution textures, but not burdening the artists with faking shadows. So an artist can slap together a very basic texture, made chiefly on greys and browns, put it on some geometry, and apply the runtime AO to make it pop (it doesn’t seem to be baked into any kind of megatexture, otherwise why would it be a toggle – but oh boy would megatexturing have been perfect here). The lighting pass for LD’s would give color variety to a scene, rather than the textures themselves doing the lifting.
