Noclip.website – A digital museum of video game levels

I tried some hl2 maps and the need for speed most wanted map. I'm really impressed by how close the rendering is to the original games. Not only did they get the lighting and shading right, there are also details like the NPCs being present, or even animated falling leaves particles in the most wanted map.

Every time I stumble upon this I end up losing an hour. The Rare era Nintendo 64 games are particularly interesting from a graphical stand-point, as Rare really got the most out of the N64's limited texture cache by blending textures with vertex colours. In Banjo-Kazooie its mostly for used as a primitive baked-lighting (Mad Monster Mansion being a great example of this.) But by the time you get to DK64, they're really working overtime to leverage vertex colours to…

The creator of this site made a really interesting video about the gravity fields in Super Mario Galaxy: https://youtu.be/QLH_0T_xv3I Among other things I was surprised to learn that Mario's collision shape is a sphere rather than the more standard cylinder or capsule shape used for the player character in most games, which simplifies the physics when gravity changes direction. When you look at his character model the proportions make more sense once you know that they were designed to fill…

Can somebody explain what this is supposed to be? (Pet peeve: links on HN with zero context... is there a blog post?) I select a game, and it just renders gibberish. I get I can use the mouse and WASD to "move", but it just renders glitching vertical bars of random colors in both Chrome and Firefox, no matter what game I pick or where I "move". The "About" explains precisely nothing except controls to use. Tried on up-to-date Chrome…