Go figure
But hey, this was around 2000 ! To me it feels like the stone age - could you even write shaders in anything other than assembly at the time ?
Engines have always tried their best to avoid having artists choke on actual shader code, and the workarounds at that time were... a bit strange when compared to our current standards (some engines offered only two or three different type of shaders, for instance). Maybe it was closer to how 3dsMax worked at the time, I have no idea. Compiling shaders takes some time too, might have weighted their decision in this direction :shrug:
Aloys wrote:Beside, at some point Cyan would have had to add new shaders, but I guess updating the executable was no problem for them.
Yep, and since the artists were in the same building as the programmers, that must have helped them a lot in figuring out how to setup some effects. But it's impressive to see how many Ages they built without using custom shaders (besides the waveset/grass/bubble ones).
That's probably why Uru/Myst V aged quite well for games that old. Artists at Cyan were good at using Plasma's lighting and multitexturing.
Aloys wrote:Don't tell me *you* wouldn't want to write custom shaders. :p
Don't twist the knife in the wound !
There isn't a single Unity project where I haven't written a custom shader, and I just love using grabpasses, alpha hashing, distortion, parallax, etc. But before that in Plasma, I have spent countless hours trying to understand how to design some materials/light effects. The result of all these weeks of accumulated knowledge can be summarized to this:
- Show Spoiler
Don't.
More seriously though. This is one of the reasons I had a big "Plasma ragequit" a while ago. Today I'm not against the idea of exporting one of my WIP Ages to Plasma should I ever finish one, but I know I'm going to be fairly limited. Not that you can't make a good-looking Age with Korman, but it's always going to be work due to the lack of accurate preview, among other things.
Aloys wrote:I don't see how this was a performance win, even in 2003.
I hope in the case of Plasma it was motivated by good reasons unknown to us. But then, people don't always take good decisions...