Partly for inspiration with my obsession I have lately with storyboarding animation shorts I've been watching movies that drastically vary in quality. Lord of the rings is the most obvious one for general inspiration because overall even the 3D effects were done to an amazing standard but I couldn't help be fascinated by the drop in quality for the mission impossible movies.
They were always I think it's fair to argue B-Tier action movies so not anything to be amazed by. However even when it comes to action movies if they're long running you can see as time goes on even the omfg look at the amazing 3D vomit aspect has gone down the hill and it's so damn disappointing. The reason being is Hollywood are going to be people who can afford big render farms among other things so they should be able to churn out the most amazing special effects you've ever seen but I've seen blender users on 1080's do better jobs than the retards who do the compositing and the effects for 'modern' movies and general 3D.
What do we get instead? Tom Cruise panicking in a closed cubicle over some poorly rendered low res 3D smoke that I could have done a better job with and I have a 1660 super. Hell, it would have been more cost effective and a better job to just deploy a smoke machine and have it blow around the way you want it to which is another example of why practical effects are so much better sometimes and even take less effort to do.
Fucking Hollywood can't even get basic compositing and 3D effects right anymore, they also did this 3D scene with the Kremlin and I could instantly spot they'd done a green screen/possibly studio mockup and it was baffling how low detail the effects were for what was inevitably a pretty big budget movie.
It coincides with demographic decay. In some ways a symptom in some ways a cause.
When you degrade a people and pander to the lowest common denominator, that's a two edged sword.
Games as well. Tech has some real cool shit these days but with 99% of the people trying to use it being drooling retards it looks like complete ass even compared to some things that came out 10+ years ago where they had actual skilled developers that knew how to properly model & tweak things to get them to look as good as they could and not run like hot garbage then relay on scaling crap to make up for it (eat shit Remnant 2).
Yes indeed. Think back to the days when id ruled the FPS universe. What did they do? They not only built their world, they wrote the engine to display it.
How many current gen developers could code a game engine, in C, entirely from scratch? This was fairly common in the heydey of game development. Now?
In some respects the scope of the objective when creating a new engine was a bit smaller back then, and thus a little easier to program from scratch.
Although at the same time, a lot of programming tools back then were also more prone to bugging out and breaking, especially compilers.
Still, I generally agree that game developers of yesteryear were exceedingly competent by comparison. Producing extremely solid games within 1-2 years sometimes, with teams no larger than 20. And while yes, some might say, "games are more complex than they used to be", the actual workload required for said features in a lot of games does not actual line up with the amount of bloat that companies end up hiring.
Hells, game developers used to have to create most animations by hand, without motion capture even being on the table.
I mean I've gotten pretty experienced now with code, game engines are a nightmare for anyone in defence of developers. You ever even looked at that stuff? Everything needs to be done from scratch, everything. It makes zero sense to do it these days with the existence of open source game engines.
The only reason you'd have to write your own engines now is if you were inventing your own programming language or a new type of maths no one had ever thought of before. Let's be real, that sort of thing is something only a once in a few generation genius could develop. Much of what a good game is now boils down to storytelling and design mostly.
If I were to do something revolutionary I'd probably be tinkering with the back end of an open source engine like Godot because it's all there for me. What's great about the open source engines too is of course you can tinker with everything all you like just as you would with an engine from scratch but none of the pitfalls involved with having to debug it all yourself and piss away potentially years to get basic features working.
I agree, someone like John Carmack doesn't come along every day.
I've looked at the source of Quake II, and while I can read it, coming up with it is an entirely different story. I haven't written very much C, myself, and never really got pointers.
The basic layman's rundown is you have to have an extremely good knowledge of geometric maths to even start rendering something on a screen. Not to mention a pretty good in depth knowledge of how graphics are even rendered on a screen to begin with. So it will involve lots of vector maths based on mouse input and crap like that. I imagine as well like with most of things there will be tons of third party dependencies to scour through when it comes to even getting graphics up on the PC in any capacity.
Basically, it's a fucking nightmare even for a fairly experienced programmer, which is why it's only the severely autistic that enjoy doing that sort of thing and usually in their off time.
Pointers make more sense if coming from machine/assembly. I recommend Code by Charles Petzold for a general overview of computing, and few days of any form of assembly to really get C pointers.
There's no reason to write an entire game engine from scratch besides wanting to do ir, which is perfectly fine. You're just not going to write one and then make and publish a game with it unless you're a one in a million type of designer.
I'll bet most developers these days couldn't write "hello world" in C.
Doesn't have to do anything with generational decline and has everything to do with how industry works. At the start of game development, in 80s-90s, there was no internet and no silicon valley boom and so programming jobs were rather limited in scope. There wasn't as much headhunting and salaries were not diverging as drastically.
At this moment it's mirror opposite - there's always need for more programmers and, when it comes to payment, traditional gamedev is least competitive of it all. Even mobile gamedev salaries can be 2x-3x to what a PC coder earns. So it's the dregs that are developing the modern AAA titles - proficient specialists are highly unlikely to find themselves there. Unless they're fanatics but that burns out fast and they soon leave the industry for greener pastures.
This comment is in denial. When AAA hires, they have top-down mandates to diversify. If you think the talent pool for video game dev is bad because low salaries, what happens when you further dilute that pool with gender and race requirements? You end up being forced to hire barely functional (but highly diverse) retards. How many such devs do you need to throw at a AAA production? Thousands, apparently. And the end results are Diablo 4 and Starfield.
The visual effects for LOTR were made on Win98 and used simulated actors for the VFX effects for Helm's Deep and Minas Tirith.
We're so lucky that those movies were made at the only time it was ever both culturally and technologically possible to make them right.
Not only that, but they absolutely landed the perfect cast members across the board. Which is quite a miraculous stroke of luck all on its own.
It’s a shame we can’t say the same about the Hobbit.
I tried at least three to get into that movie but each time I gave up within 30 minutes
Sadly true. Although having given it a proper rewatch a year or two ago, I did find some aspects of the attempt rather endearing. It was still a clusterfuck, but you could tell that there was at least some earnest and honest effort given by some of the writers, cast, and even the visual effects department.
Unfortunately the studio was a bit too greedy while expecting more and immediate results than were reasonable given the scope of the story they were working with.
It's also due to changes in effects.
CGI looks too perfect. Practical effects and traditional animation will always reign supreme.
When I first saw Gunbuster recently, the fact that EVERYTHING was hand-drawn lent it a certain quality that made it even more pleasing to the eye, and I can't explain how that works. And yet it does.
It was made in 1988-89, and it still looks stunning today.
Of course, the movie Akira is this writ large.
My only theory is that the imperfections inherent in the medium keep everything from falling into the uncanny valley.
I agree, the Evangelion rebuilds are probably the clearest demonstration of the downgrade. They recreated scenes from the original shot for shot and they actually look worse.
At the same time, the Jujutsu Kaisen anime adaptation is an awesome example of what CGI assistance can do for animators. I can't imagine that the complex cinematography would be possible on the same budget.
Rebuild is still much higher production value than much anime farmed out to the lowest bidder. I think this scene shows off character and cinematography.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPS0Uk0TkP0
I still need to see those movies.
I saw the series and End (ADV dub of both). Hoooly cow, no wonder this show is so beloved.
I wish I'd seen this 20 years ago. Wow.
I disagree because good artists can make imperfection, thanks to procedural materials especially you can randomise stuff and get the sort of look you're wanting. Again, see Blender shorts and the like for what a proper artist with access to modern tech can do. All the big studios do now is churn out whatever crap they've got on hand and they can't even do consistent results now scene by scene. Less of an issue these days what tech you're using and more about art skill.
Maybe it's because Gunbuster was made by the absolute biggest fans of the medium, like Hideaki Anno, who treated the art form with all the respect it so deserved.
Passion project, not corporate slop.
Loved Evangelion, which I saw for the first time last year and is from the same creators, for the same reasons--warts and all.
A lot of stuff is done because they want to show only Hollywood can do it. Sort of like all the people in movies like Ben Hur. It's expensive and Indies can't do it. Then Star Wars proved a smallish budget could make a great film, so they went all in for expensive FX. Now FX are cheap and fairly easy to do, while big time physical effects are too expensive. They can't right the ship without going broke, and the indie guys can do it cheaper anyway.
Godzilla Minus One was proof of this.
When The Matrix referred to the late 90s as the peak of civilization, I considered it laughable but, well, you don't have to look much farther than the Wachowski trannies to see it was true.
I just finished a re-watch of Rambo 2. The practical special effects in that movie held up pretty damn well for a forty year old movie.
Most people are happy to consume the next trash from Hollywood regardless of its quality.
That's not the full story fortunately. Movies have consistently sold fewer tickets over time and ever since the DEI/ESG revolution, box office has dropped off a cliff. The industry will not be able to sustain itself at its current trajectory. We haven't seen course corrections yet because they didn't seem to have a Plan B for when their reprogramming failed.
Tickets are dropping because people don't spend money to go see movies as much. Viewership of media is at an all time high through streaming.
I don't know much about Nielsen ratings for streaming, but that tracks with zoomers watching more media than previous generations. Still, it's nowhere near enough revenue to sustain $100M+ movie projects, and streaming services have been failing and downsizing right and left.
That isn't true any more when looking at the box office receipts and Nielsen ratings for streaming. The studios are releasing bomb after bomb, and streaming is dominated by shows that have been off the air for years or decades.
Even Hollywood knows it. That's why there was suspiciously no political rants during acceptance speeches at the oscars the other day even though it is an election year. They are desperately trying to bail the water out of their sinking ship. They are way too late though.
I blame Blues Brothers 2000
after the Matrix, the first Pirates of the Caribbean, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, movies with know nothing but slow decline with very rare exceptions.