Current Events > Man how the fuck did the Jak & Daxter games look so good?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Its insane that these were relatively early in the PS2s life cycle and looked better than most late era games, while having sprawling seamless worlds and these beautiful expressive animations. The first game especially borders on anachronistic in how technically impressive it is; this came out in 2001. 2001! How the hell did ND squeeze so much out of the PS2 so early?

https://youtu.be/gY8zJZZgb2g

shit, it might be time to run through the trilogy again.

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Its honestly their efforts on the artsyle that really helps

I miss when Insomniac and Naughty Dog were half my PS2 library

Proofpyros posted...

Its honestly their efforts on the artsyle that really helps

I miss when Insomniac and Naughty Dog were half my PS2 library

Better animation than Pokemon Sword/ Shield

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They swapped game engines multiple times and spent a long time optimizing them.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETbnL3uNayY
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Foppe posted...

They swapped game engines multiple times and spent a long time optimizing them.

This. Naughty Dog in particular is a studio notorious for squeezing every drop of graphical and processing power out of the consoles they made games for.

Truly magicians of the craft.

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All that at 60 FPS!

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Andy Gavin has a blog with this detailed breakdown on how they developed Crash 1, and the fact that the game was able to look that good and run at a decent, stable framerate is a miracle in itself. One thing they snuck into the game in order to get it to work is that the game needed to overclock the PS1 compared to the rpm that Sony set out for all games to run at. The game is a technical marvel, and it was the founding fathers of Naughty Dog along with a ground-floor member of the team they picked up that was able to innovate enough for that game to become a reality.

I'm saying this because Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin stayed on at Naughty Dog up until Jak 3. I'm pretty sure Andy Gavin was the big tech guy of the team, and as well as being one of the driving innovators behind the technology that created Crash Bandicoot, he did a fuckton of work that made the Jak games so awesome.

I'm pretty sure he had to write a new engine specifically to animate eye movement, and if you pay attention to any of the Jak games, the shadows are 1:1 representations of the model's movement on a flat 2D plane and they're sharp as fuck. Compare the shadows in Jak 2 to the shadows in any game past the PS2 - they have taken such a massive step back, especially in games like Forza. It's understandable that CPU intensive games don't have the time to render realistic shadows along with everything else, but the fact remains that the Jak games have some of the best shadows in 3D games to this day. And I think a lot of that comes down to Andy Gavin.

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I'm surprised they haven't released the trilogy on PS4 as a collection

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MrMallard posted...

Andy Gavin has a blog with this detailed breakdown on how they developed Crash 1, and the fact that the game was able to look that good and run at a decent, stable framerate is a miracle in itself. One thing they snuck into the game in order to get it to work is that the game needed to overclock the PS1 compared to the rpm that Sony set out for all games to run at. The game is a technical marvel, and it was the founding fathers of Naughty Dog along with a ground-floor member of the team they picked up that was able to innovate enough for that game to become a reality.

I'm saying this because Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin stayed on at Naughty Dog up until Jak 3. I'm pretty sure Andy Gavin was the big tech guy of the team, and as well as being one of the driving innovators behind the technology that created Crash Bandicoot, he did a fuckton of work that made the Jak games so awesome.

I'm pretty sure he had to write a new engine specifically to animate eye movement, and if you pay attention to any of the Jak games, the shadows are 1:1 representations of the model's movement on a flat 2D plane and they're sharp as fuck. Compare the shadows in Jak 2 to the shadows in any game past the PS2 - they have taken such a massive step back, especially in games like Forza. It's understandable that CPU intensive games don't have the time to render realistic shadows along with everything else, but the fact remains that the Jak games have some of the best shadows in 3D games to this day. And I think a lot of that comes down to Andy Gavin.

This video talks about all the tricks they used to make Crash Bandicoot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o

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I remember being blown away by jak 3, which was the first one I played.

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