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applfanboysbgon 6 hours ago [-]
> Did you ever wonder why explosions and other effects looked so much cooler on the original PlayStation than they did on the Nintendo 64?
Begging the question, aren't we?! Of the examples displayed, I much prefer Star Fox's fx to Silent Bomber's. They fit the game's style well, and the explosions when killing an enemy are just the right amount of rewarding, while not being so ostentatious as to be distracting. SF64 nailed the game feel of destroying enemies, those small little intangibles that make the game satisfying on a visceral level, as Nintendo is so good at doing.
It's the same issue you encounter with audio mixing. You have to clamp out-of-range values, even though they don't occur a lot. If you don't you get awful artifacts, and have to lower everything so that it can never overflow your range.
atoav 2 hours ago [-]
Gladly this isn't that much of an issue anymore since most audio mixing nowadays is done using floating point numbers (either 32 or 64 bits).
Last week I made a test in Bitwig where I boosted a 0dBFS sine wave by 64dB into "clipping", exported it to 32 bit float wav, imported it again, reduced gain by 64dB and there the old sine was in all it's glory. Theoretically now with rounding errors and a loss of precision, but nothing audible.
Of course as soon as you go into 24 or 16 bit fixed point representations (and you will have to eventually) that clipping becomes a problem.
keyle 6 hours ago [-]
Interesting so the N64 had a more flexible color blending process, and in doing that no clamping.
So the 'good explosions' were possible on N64 if you did the blending+clamp by hand?
andrekandre 7 hours ago [-]
> Did you ever wonder why explosions and other effects looked so much cooler on the original PlayStation than they did on the Nintendo 64?
yes! fantastic article and now i finally know why ^^
Begging the question, aren't we?! Of the examples displayed, I much prefer Star Fox's fx to Silent Bomber's. They fit the game's style well, and the explosions when killing an enemy are just the right amount of rewarding, while not being so ostentatious as to be distracting. SF64 nailed the game feel of destroying enemies, those small little intangibles that make the game satisfying on a visceral level, as Nintendo is so good at doing.
Last week I made a test in Bitwig where I boosted a 0dBFS sine wave by 64dB into "clipping", exported it to 32 bit float wav, imported it again, reduced gain by 64dB and there the old sine was in all it's glory. Theoretically now with rounding errors and a loss of precision, but nothing audible.
Of course as soon as you go into 24 or 16 bit fixed point representations (and you will have to eventually) that clipping becomes a problem.
So the 'good explosions' were possible on N64 if you did the blending+clamp by hand?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturation_arithmetic