kleeon [he/him, he/him]

good point. I forgot about this dialogue

that game is so good

“No, fuck off”

It’s really not a big mystery why Episode 3 never came out and it’s good that it didn’t

Gabe himself even said that there was no reason for Episode 3 to exist at the time. They could have easily made another episode to wrap up the story but couldn’t come up with any particularly unique ideas for it

black mesa made some weird decisions I don’t like. For example, they removed the detail of Nihilanth third hand being grafted for seemingly no reason. And the canonization of Eli and Kleiner felt like pointless fan-service

I love Portal but I would vehemently disagree with anyone who says it’s a better game than Portal 2. Even just ignoring all the stuff like plot structure and graphics, Portal 2 is way ahead in terms of puzzle design. Also Portal 2 does better job at fully exploring the concept of portals, while Portal 1 feels like a tech demo in some parts

We agree there’d be some graphical compromise, maybe we’re just disagreeing over details of the scale of that compromise and the hardware that would be ‘permittable’ by this scenario.

I was imagining something that looks and plays almost exactly like Witcher 3 except at lower resolution, which doesn’t seem possible to me. I’d say if you simplify the graphics (replace dynamic lighting with pre-baked lightmaps, do gouraud shading instead of PBR, remove most post-processing effects etc etc) and make all models look like half-life assets, you could definitely render something at an acceptable frame rate. However asset streaming would still be a huge issue for a large and detailed open world like Witcher 3, considering memory limits and slow disk reads

In my experience writing straightforward C code is gonna give you basically the same thing as well-written asm would. I’m not saying modern compilers are perfect but they generally do the right thing (or it’s very easy to coax then into doing the right thing). They usually vectorize properly, they know how to avoid obvious pipeline stalls etc. These days order of magnitude performance improvements generally don’t come from hand-written assembly but from using better algorithms and data structures

Also you could look at what games of that era actually looked like. Something like Quake 2 already pushed contemporary hardware to it’s limits and I wouldn’t argue it’s a poorly optimized game

I’d say two things:

1. Modern compilers are way better at generating code than they were in the 90s so hand-rolled assembly is not that useful anymore

2. Vast majority of frame time in a game like Witcher 3 comes from rendering, not gameplay code and you can’t really write rendering code in asm since GPU vendors don’t allow you to program their hardware directly. Also running it on a 25 year old GPU would require way more compromises than just lower resolution because 98 era GPUs don’t even have basic things like vertex buffers or programmable shaders

I think you could make Witcher 3 run on a computer from 2008 if you optimize it properly but that’s about it