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Comment by metaxy2 | Hacker News Reader

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

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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...

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.

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

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).

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 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

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