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

I feel old because the post talks about these techniques as if they're surprising innovations or compromises for more accurate simulations, but most of these tricks were industry standard for 3D games in the early 2000's. Much of the science about lighting, physics, and rendering we take for granted today was mostly unknown; developers just did the best they could with the basic tech that was available. Back then, just the fact that we could put thousands of hardware accelerated textured polygons on the screen was a miracle to us.

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. Pretty much every realistic 3D game of this era had to make do with low-res diffuse textures, prebaked lighting, mostly fixed-function rendering, pre-scripted interactions, and particle dynamics that were basically just a few lines of C++. Other early-2000's games like Serious Sam, Halo, and Metroid Prime also managed to create immersive visuals with very limited tech, using the same techniques as Max Payne.

Max Payne 1 & 2 are some of my favorite games of all time. I love everything about them: their graphical style, the story, the general vibe, the gameplay. They are still very fun to play so I can recommend picking them up and doing a play through. They are easy to pick up, not long, and very rewarding at each moment

Bump maps and detail textures were a highly advanced and praised graphics technology in 1998, interesting to now see it explained as fake trickery from back in the day

P.S. I still see polygonal instead of truly round barrels in modern games, when will we finally have quadratic surfaces or some other solution for that?

One of the lead developers is a friend of mine. In the mid 90s he was part of the Dust demo group, eg https://demozoo.org/groups/360/ so I guess then a lot of the algorithms were used for Max Payne then as well

Also interesting how his life changed after the game, he went a totally different route and left programming for good.

Speaking of Max Payne and graphics, there's an amusing hidden sketch with references to engine development in the game: https://youtu.be/Ca04hCF9FL4

The GTA VC screenshots are actually GTA III

It's still amazing. Crisp textures did a far better job than current shaders and a full-polygon bloated geometry. Max Payne 2 perfected it.

What books does one read to get this level of graphics programming knowledge?

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