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Comment by breckinloggins | Hacker News Reader

Maybe part of its popularity was the illusion (through pre-rendered images) that your computer could show you more "real" worlds than you ever thought possible. That was certainly one of the things I thought was so cool about Myst.

If that's the case, it partly explains why nothing seemed to follow in its footsteps: you can only pull the rabbit out of the hat once.

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I think that really happened with Riven. It's easy to forget, but some of those stills were as beautiful and realistic as anything being done in realtime 3D games today. [1] [2]

[1] http://www.mysterium.ch/riven/pictures/riven_05.jpg

[2] http://www.grandecaverna.com/myst2/myst2_eramoiety.jpg

Higher quality render of that first Riven image:

http://img7.hostingpics.net/pics/104111.jpg

More (low-res) examples from Riven in 1997 that I agree still beat modern realtime environments in many ways:

http://www.rpgfan.com/pics/riven/ss-004.jpg

http://www.rpgfan.com/pics/riven/ss-001.jpg

Eh, I'd have to argue we've passed those. I'm pretty sure this is rendered realtime, for instance: http://www.bioshockinfinite.com/images/media/screenshots/Sky...

I love BioShock and I desperately want modern games to be as immersive as Riven, but this example image illustrates why it's often obvious that I'm in a flimsy world made of huge polygons (the tracks in the sky) and repeated flat low-resolution plant textures with some transparency (lower left). Being willing to spend hours rendering a single frame and having an artist make sure that every viewpoint looks perfect is what made these things possible back then. We clearly have more freedom to physically choose our viewpoint in games today but I can't pretend that freedom did not come at a huge graphical cost (still catching up 16 years later).

From a purely photorealistic perspective, that looks absolutely awful. It's literally a cartoon world.

That was their stylistic choice, of course, and there's nothing wrong with that. But it's off the mark to hold that up as an example of excellence in photorealism. It certainly wasn't trying to look real.

I wasn't trying to hold it up as an example of photorealism. One of the things we've learned since then, by virtue of our ready access to high-quality realtime graphics, is that photorealism was overrated at the time.

Indeed, it is a choice... and that is part of my point. We've not only got very photorealistic graphics, we've got the experience to know we can do better. Odds are Myst, if made today, would not be seeking photorealism itself! I'm sure it would adopt a style too.

But in terms of quality, yes I still say this looks better. Where Myst has a muddy, hypercompressed image that can barely fit the one visual theme in it due to resource constraints, Bioshock here has the visual bandwidth to show multiple focal points of interest, without it having to feel "crowded" because it's so much bigger, and yes, all in realtime.

These days the thing that strikes me about games is not so much the texture and model quality as the jerky, buggy movement. A 1950s 12fps Warner Brothers cartoon has better walk cycles and way better dynamic action than any 3d videogame I've seen.

BioShock Infinite still looks very plastic, and the shading leaves a lot to be desired.

BioShock is so stylized that it's hard to compare to Riven's attempt at photorealism. But the big difference with prerendered, even 15 years old prerendered, is the lighting. You can't get this kind of light quality in a modern realtime 3d game:

http://myst-aventure.com/gallery2/d/6020-1/Maglev.jpg

Sure you can; you prerender the lighting information. It's a bog-standard technique. You can't necessarily get it with dynamic lighting in realtime (it depends on exactly what you're asking for), but then again, you definitely don't get dynamic lighting in a prerendered scene, so....

I think id Tech 5 wants to get there: http://www.google.com/search?q=id+tech+5&tbm=isch

Are you sure? One could argue Myst is not much more than a fairy tale with a set of beautifully rendered illustrations. The illustrations weren't _that_ brilliant on their own, and the fairy tale part wasn't in a league of its own at all.

The combination was quite new, though and execution certainly was very good.

However, I think that rabbit did get pulled out of the same hat earlier a couple of times. At the very least, the first movie and "the wizard of Oz" did the same.

I also think it isn't hard to think of future products that might give the same, if not a much better, 'wow' effect. For example, imagine wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling 300 DPI displays showing a physically realistic world, showing Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969. Now, imagine that in interactive form.

On the other hand, the internet has made it harder to be wowed by new technologies because chances are you will read about a product far before seeing it for the first time. Because of that, I think it takes a much larger jump in quality to be wowed.

> The illustrations weren't _that_ brilliant on their own

The impressive part is that they weren't illustrations, they were individual renders of from 3D models of the worlds, designed, built and rendered on computers with a small fraction the processing power of my cell phone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94pzx_9LkVI

Yes, they were, but except for a small crowd of nerds, the way they were produced was not part of the magic.

No, but the fact that you could walk through them was.

I think "Walk" is stretching it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst: "The player moves the character by clicking on locations shown on the screen; the scene then crossfades into another frame."

So, just like Google Streetview, with way fewer, way higher quality images.

Back to the 'rabbit out of the hat' subject: I found the 3D view in iOS maps on an iPad way more a 'rabbit' thing than I found Myst a rabbit at the time (the first city I saw it was Rome. I looked at a few others, but still think that is the best)

> you can only pull the rabbit out of the hat once.

What about Avatar? It's a movie, but it's the same basic trick -- forgettable plot, but amazingly photorealistic and beautiful world.

the illusion that your computer could show you more "real" worlds than you ever thought possible

This still happens to me regularly... for example last week when viewing some of the GTA V screenshots. http://www.gtav.net/screenshots/

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