PERSONAL

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Scattered, Plateau, Gamepad

1 year ago969 words

I've been working on stuff I don't want to show yet, plus here's some rambling about Tomb Raider, video game graphics plateauing, and an issue with my gamepad's right trigger. EXCITING STUFF.

I've been quite scattered and thrown off lately, as is probably apparent from my recent blog posts. I'm currently alright, mentally, but I suppose I've just... been increasingly detached from things, or something? I'm still working on stuff, but I suppose I've been relatively chaotic about it all year. Rather than just spending all my work time focused on Atonal Dreams, as was the case for months before.

I also talked to both of my remaining uni friends multiple times this week - for hours each time - and we're all struggling in our own ways. So I suppose that's been distracting. I've been thinking a lot about how I'll likely move out early next year, and both of them have offered to help me out in various ways with that.

I wrote ∞ last week ∞ about some bolt of inspiration that hit me, which I hope might allow me to bring into being a non-game project I've wanted to make for years. I've spent the last few days working away at that.

I've got concept art and stuff, all of which I could potentially show either here or on Patreon, but this time I think I'll wait until I actually have a demo of the actual thing I'm making since I could probably get to that point (or at least a rudimentary proof-of-concept version of it rather than a polished final thing) within a few days if I put my mind to it. So then if people have anything to say, it's at least relevant to what the thing even is rather than based on probably-inaccurate assumptions.

I just haven't had as much time as I'd like to put my mind to it due to the distractions! I've been working on the 3D model of one of the characters, but - like with so many things that I really should know better by now - I vastly underestimated how long it'd take. It's mostly done, at least. Not much left.



I've been playing more Tomb Raider games. After finishing the original PS1 trilogy, I played Tomb Raider: Anniversary, which was a remake of the first one for the PS2 to commemorate the 10th anniversary.



I find it amazing how quickly video game graphics advanced! As this convenient comparison video nicely shows. Just a decade between these two. But Anniversary is the middle part of a trilogy of sorts by Crystal Dynamics, so I played those two, too: Tomb Raider: Legend and Tomb Raider: Underworld.

The latter, Underworld, is from 2008, and I don't notice much difference between its graphics and those of the Final Fantasy VII Remake I played recently (I don't usually play modern AAA games so that's probably the best point of reference I have). The latter's definitely better, but it's nowhere near as much of an improvement as Anniversary's visuals are compared to the PS1 original's.

Some googling reveals that many discussions have been had about whether game graphics have plateaued in recent years. I suppose once they got to the point where they were mostly realistic, only subtle details remain to be improved upon.

Personally I don't care for hyper-realism anyway, and greatly prefer more stylistic visuals that aren't bound by the limitations of reality. But I don't prefer the ultra-retro look; I prefer Tomb Raider: Anniversary's graphics over the originals.

I want to play the recently-released remake of Star Ocean: The Second Story - which I played a lot as a child but never finished - and it bothers me that it, like the Live A Live remake, combines pixel sprites with 3D environments. I wish they'd just use 3D models.

I only used pixel art for MARDEK because 3D wasn't an option. Now that it is, I have no desire to go back.

My favourite visual style is probably low-ish-poly stylised cartoony 3D, which is a category I suppose a lot of Switch content falls into? I love how Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom look. I'd much rather that than dramatic gritty realism.



Also, annoyingly, I can't even play Underworld though because it's not detecting one of the buttons on my gamepad! Did you know that the left and right trigger 'buttons' (LT and RT) on controllers function significantly differently to the shoulder buttons (RB and LB)? It's something I only realised from coding for controllers in Unity. While the buttons are a simple boolean toggle (is pressed vs not pressed), the triggers give an integer value between 0 and 32767 (the max integer value) depending on how hard you press.

Typically games would check for whether a certain value had been exceeded to trigger a button press when the triggers are used like buttons, but for Tomb Raider Underworld - or the version I got via Steam, at least - this value seems bizarrely high, and for reasons unknown, my gamepad's RT seems to reach only half the max value when fully pressed - the LT one seems fine - as revealed by some controller calibrator thing in the Steam client.

So the button used for firing weapons doesn't work. And while I can configure the key bindings so some other button does that, all the buttons are used for useful things that I can't really afford to lose. Ugh.

I got Tomb Raider Legend and Anniversary through Steam and had no issues with this when playing through those, so I don't know why it's just this one game that's not detecting it properly. Maybe that's just one of the risks with playing old games, or something. Oh well.