How about a low poly games thread? Personally, I fucking love this graphics style, it's simple, clean and pretty neat.
Sadly, there aren't many upcoming games that feature this style though. However, I've found some newer games that are a worthy mention and prepared some webm's and stuff about them, which I'll dump in the upcoming posts.
Feel free to post other examples that you know about or that you are looking forward to, or games in the past that you enjoyed that have low poly graphics. Also, pictures, gifs, webms etc., of neat low poly stuff in general are welcome as well.
What's your favourite game that features this god-tier art style?
Ultra low graphics mod on skyrim can look neat sometimes.
>>320510905
Damn, that looks pretty comfy. I wonder if there are any mods in general that enable flat shading instead of soft shading though.
>>320511205
Idk but with the right enb that fits the cartoony style this could be great for people with shitty laptops
>>320510702
What is this?
>>320511478
holy shit that would probably run decently on my laptop, can run skyrim on low 30ish fps.
Wonder if such enb exists
>>320511692
This look great.
>>320510905
>>320511478
more? looks cool as shit.
>>320511478
>this could be great for people with shitty laptops
A really good point. Don't know why there aren't many games like that made though. Isn't it easier for studios to model this stuff rather than spending hours making really detailed high poly models? I wonder why AAA studios don't want to make high budget games with this style.
Also, like you said, these assets wouldn't be that taxing on resources.
>>320510905
looks better than vanilla skyrim
I'll start posting stuff that I found in the following posts.
>>320511653
The name of the game is Necropolis. This one I'm pretty hyped about. It's a third person action RPG, and the visual are fucking amazing in terms of low poly if you ask me. Main gameplay features include challenging combat and puzzle solving. No release date yet though, but from the trailers it looks pretty fucking nice.
anyone remember a low poly game that was posted a lot in webm threads? It looked like a FPS and the guy had a lantern for a weapon and was running and jumping along walls.
>>320511923
this reminds me of megaman legends, i loved the style of those games. with certain shaders running on an emulator it really shines even more.
This one is called Hexters. According to the devs, it's a tower defense, Darwinia, Settlers, Dwarf Fortress combination of features and gameplay. I find the Darwinia units neat, but I doubt that the game will reach the complexity of DF. Also it has co-op mode, which is kinda neat because I can't think of any games in recent days that have city building in co-op, correct me if I'm wrong though. The game is on Greenlight with no release date as of yet.
>>320511692
Neat
Little Devil Inside looks pretty awesome.
Inner Space. A exploration flying game with destructible terrain. Exploring stuff and collecting shit. Supposedly you can use the ship as a submarine as well and explore the seas. Potential deep sea spookiness? Also on Greenlight, with release date in Q2 2016.
>>320511923
because the best selling video game franchises of all time except lol nintendo have barely or no artstyle of their own except "realistic" graphics
call of duty, gta, asscreed, all those sport games
you cant do those with low poly, and everyone else wants to be like them
Some of these look great, thanks for sharing guys.
>>320513123
Wasn't that game on kickstarter? How are things now? Also I remember people talking about the water in the game. I wonder will they really deliver regarding that.
>>320510905
Fuck textures, don't need that shit. Vertex colors scale perfectly no matter the size and save so much performance.
>>320513536
It's been greenlit, so it's pretty much just a waiting game at this point.
the FF4 ds port was comfy as fuck
>>320513547
>Vertex colors
That combined with some good lighting in scenes can sometimes be more pleasing than any detailed texture.
Ahni Spirits. Horror game with boss fights and puzzles. I'm also looking forward to this one, the atmosphere looks creepy and deer horn guy design looks cool. There's a playable demo on the Steam Greenlight page. Release date in Q1 2016.
>>320513757
I really the like the large thigh'd, chibi style models Square Enix uses for their portable games.
>>320513547
Vertex colors eat up VRAM
>>320514090
How so? I know that the colors can be changed at runtime, but does it really take up that much compared to textures?
>>320511692
what game?
This and megaman legends are the best looking low poly games. Are there any indie games that use low poly, I like pixel art but get sick of it when all it looks mediocre.
Sea of Solitude. I couldn't find much about this game, other than the screenshots. Looks like a typical adventure game with puzzles, however the visuals and atmosphere look neat. Game is in early development, so no release date as of yet.
I'm currently in the beginning stages of development but I'm making a third person action rpg with low poly. Dis gon b gud.
>>320514428
>indie games
You have low poly horror games that have pixelated textures like picture related. I know that Game Maker is usually used to make 2D games, but the 3D games with low poly stuff that's made with it isn't half bad.
>>320514629
>Dis nev gon b finish
ftfy
>>320514629
Post progress. More info on what you're making?
>>320514950
Not with that attitude it's not. Thankfully you're not working on it and I am.
>>320514997
Don't want to give out too much info but you play as an immortal on the run from galactic police and Death.
Polyball. Your typical "ball rolling" game, similar to stuff like Super Monkey Ball. There isn't that much to say, roll ball, don't fall, collect stuff.
I guess this is what people meant when they said pixel graphics having re-emerged, people would start making n64 graphics level games.
Sky Rogue's a personal favorite, though it's kinda bare bones at the moment. It's still a chill as fuck game. I think there's a demo available on the itch site.
>>320514090
Compare two floats for UV coordinates versus three for colors, how does this eat up VRAM? Remember that eliminating texture lookups and switching is very costly.
low poly meme fad when.
I want the 2d retro pixel shit meme to end already.
>>320514341
A bare minimum for a mesh requires a float3 vector for positions (sizeof float == 4 bytes, so 16 bytes per point, 48 bytes per triangle). For lighting, which is essential, another float3 vector is needed to store the normals (bumps up the memory usage from 16 to 32 bytes per point, 48 to 96 bytes per triangle)
For per-vertex color, another float3 vector is needed for color (for transparency, add another byte for the alpha; normalized floats are used to abstract away from RGB888 where each channel is 8 bits per channel, but you can get away with normalized uchars these days). This bumps the memory cost from 32 to 48 bytes per point, 96 to 144 bytes per triangle)
Since you'll use lighting to make the colors more varied and less flat, you can afford to store a single color into a 1x1 texture and not store any UVs (another float3 vector). Changing this color requires changing the single texture rather than rewriting each attribute in VRAM.
Thus, its easier to use a texture to store a color rather than per-vertex
>>320515738
Consider above.
>>320515526
Christ, this is still in development?
>>320515526
>I guess this is what people meant when they said pixel graphics having re-emerged, people would start making n64 graphics level games.
I hope it becomes more popular. I've argued many times before that innovation and original idea are a rare thing in today's industry. AAA publishers are scared of failure with their million dollar budgets so they try to copy instead of making original IPs.
It's funny, because these high budgets are there due of all the high poly assets that take a fuckton of time to make and animate, not to mention retarded amounts of marketing, but that's another story.
I mean fuck, they can make 10 low poly models with the same time and money that they spend one detailed high poly character.
Look at the pros:
>Relatively easy to make compared to high poly stuff
>Not that taxing on resources, which makes it playable on toasters
>Can still look awesome and interesting like games in OP picture
The whole "you need better graphics" is a bunch of marketing bullshit to sell new consoles and graphics cards.
>>320516141
Consider what? Switching from a float2 to float3 and effectively eliminating texture lookups is a good tradeoff.
NEVEREVER
>>320516141
Wait a second, so what happens when you use textures? Vertex colors enable to change the color at run time of each individual triangle. Do the triangles still get treated individually, or are they batched/optimized into larger pieces?
>>320516141
Forgot to mention webm related; had to optimize the hell out of it to get it to run on a low (V)RAM system like aDreamcast.
>>320516447
Theres no need for a float2 UV vector when the texture has only one color/pixel; just sample from anywhere in the texture.
You'll have to have a float3 normal vector though; computing light values in a dynamic scene is a bad idea since, as mentioned earlier, rebuffering the mesh costs more than rebuffering a 1x1 texture
>>320515935
>low poly meme fad when
Hopefully soon
>I want the 2d retro pixel shit meme to end already
Agreed. Most of the games are platfomers and aren't even that detailed when it comes to pixel art. Don't get me wrong, there are some really good examples of neat pixel art, but most of them are pretty bland and uninspired.
>>320517062
Obviously I'm talking about multi-coloured meshes, individually coloured triangles. How would you solve that with your method? This is unrelated to normals and lighting, but it allows you to skip the diffuse part of the G-buffer.
>>320517062
>webm related
Making something serious, or just learning stuff for fun?
>>320515526
did it ever get faster? I used to play it when it was free (I think you have to pay for the beta now) and it was fun but for a game that's self-described as "fwooshy" even the fighter jets controlled like bombers
>>320516910
Both vertex-based color and texture-based color happens in the fragment shader; polys are still treated the same way, just doesn't have another vector for color attached to them, but samples from the small texture at render time.
>>320517431
I was going off how the terrain in >>320513547, excluding rocks, was flat colored and shaded. For multi-colored mesh, the system starts to fail; the only approach I can come up with at the moment would be something similar to how early consoles handled sprites/UV mapping on a smaller scale: assign IDs to each vertex and map it to a certain color. Either you can use a texture where each pixel corresponds to an ID, or push an n-sized array and map from there.
![tumblr_nxxk9nBHi81tfir0mo1_500[1].gif](https://i.imgur.com/TgHSsXa.gif "tumblr_nxxk9nBHi81tfir0mo1_500[1].gif")
driftstage is a lot of fun even if I am terrible at racing games
>>320518429
I'm playing the Steam version- never played a prior version. It feels comparable to other flight simulators- in terms of maneuverability it does feel a bit stiff but not so much more than expected. Bombers do control like rocks, but the smallest ship feels like it moves as it should.
>>320516372
How long has it been? I just recently got into it.
>>320518723
You already buffer bone matrices and shit, a single float more won't hurt. I'm just talking about eliminating as many state changes as possible, not 20 year old console architecture.
>>320514090
Compared with textures, no they don't.
>>320519935
The costs come from rebuffering an entire mesh over and over again when you want to change a color. Keeping each color you want in a small and manageable texture bound through the program's lifetime reduces that cost and some bytes. AAA tier texture have their costs for both in memory and changing states from rebinding textures (which is as costly as rebinding a mesh).
>>320520449
When done right and not with the mindset of "more [thing]", it is.
