Max Payne – two decades later – Graphics Critique (2021)

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.

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).

> Much of the science about lighting, physics, and rendering we take for granted today was mostly unknown;

I'm not so sure. I grew up playing with offline 3d rendering rather than real-time game stuff - and game dev was merely reusing the same smoke and mirrors that people used to keep rendering time under a week a decade earlier. People always knew the "correct" way to do things but it was just out of reach given the hardware constraints. GI, radiosity, path-tracing etc already existed well before this - but nobody could do it on consumer hardware

> 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.

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 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.

That goddamn baby level though. I could strangle the person who stuffed that messy labyrinthic pile of crap into my John Woo-esque shooter.

You could try Alan wake. It really gets similar vibes.

"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.

3 is good too, different environment but similar principle. And graphics look fine even by modern standards

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.

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.

> 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.

Ah yes these are mislabled. But GTA III is indeed 2001 so the comparison is still correct.

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.