I honestly don’t see the difference between regular yellow paint, orange sparkles or highlights.

Sparkling loot is something that was common even back in the 90s and likely before that.

If it helps, you can imagine that yellow paint isn’t there in-universe but only for the player, just like sparkling loot or highlighted interactive elements.

IIRC, there was a second HP1 game, that looked much better, but deviated massively from the story.

“What a nice business you have there. It would be a right shame if something happened to it. Don’t you want to pay us for your protection?” - Anthropic

Tbh, I really don’t mind yellow paint when its done well.

We use it in the real world too. We use yellow paint to mark trip hazards and ledges, we use red paint to mark medikits (first aid kits), we use blue or green paint to mark defibrilators and so on.

Color-coded context info is omnipresent in the built environment.

Would anyone complain about white paint marking lanes in racing games?

Get lost, attribution removing repost bot.

You know where game designers borrowed the yellow paint idea from? From real life. We do use color-coded markings all over the place so that people can quickly see hazards. We use literal yellow paint to demark trip hazards and ledges. We use green paint to mark emergency exits. We use red paint to mark medkits (first aid kits). We use green or blue paint to mark defibrilators. We use red, green, white and/or blue paint to mark dangerous road crossings or cycle paths, and so on. (Colors likely vary by region.)

Because real life is too detailed and “level design” is not enough to clearly show all the information necessary to avoid accidents and to find what you need in emergencies.

In the end, whether you use yellow paint, red paint, sparkles, outlines or lights to highlight interactible objects doesn’t matter at all. All of that is absolutely identical. If everyone would switch over to red sparkles, everyone would have the same complaint just about now red sparkles.

You don’t have to have low-poly art for this to work. Not everything in assassin’s creed was climbable. But you know when it was and when it wasn’t, do you didn’t even try to climb what wasn’t. You could climb vertical walls of mountain rock. You couldn’t climb up flat walls either, you had to have bricks sticking out. Granted, most buildings had something to grab onto. But you saw which elements you grabbed onto, if those weren’t there you would know why you can’t climb.

You might have quite a generous memory of assassin’s creed 1. I just loaded up some let’s play to look at it, and on the one hand the environment is super low poly, and on the other hand the wall textures really don’t give any hints of anything. What is there is that if the wall is perfectly, absolutely smooth, there’s nothing to hold on to climb up. If there’s any geometry at all on the wall it’s climbable.

That brings me back to my original point: In old, low-poly games, any object that exists is interactible. No need to mark these objects, because the marking is “object exists”. Try the same in modern near-photorealistic games. Doesn’t work like that, because here no wall is perfectly flat.

I haven’t played the Half Life games, but they do firmly fall into the low-fidelity-environment category. Lower fidelity environments don’t need such a clear design language, because any object that exists usually exists for a clear purpose.

That’s fair, although there was more stuff in the levels of the second half (but you’re right, even then the only thing you could really interact with were doors).

Doors, turrets, cubes, switches, one type of “portallable” wall, that’s it. Everything else is just an obstacle. They spent the first half of the game training the player which objects are interactible, and in the second half they didn’t introduce anything new that wasn’t just an obstacle (except maybe the doors, don’t remember if they exist in the first half).

But that’s just the point: If there’s not a lot of stuff in the game and all the objects are clearly recognizable, there’s no need for yellow paint because the game world is yellow paint.

Yellow paint becomes necessary when the game is high-fidelity and trying to be photorealistic and thus stuff isn’t quite as clearly understandable. That’s why we use yellow paint in real life for mark ledges that you could stumble over or emergency exits (ok, here it’s green), or first-aid kits (here it’s red), or defibrilators (blue or green) and so on. We do use this technique in real-life.

It can work. I haven’t really seen it done well (haven’t played horizon forbidden west), but I’ve seen it done badly a ton of times.

My kids recently got into Harry Potter, so I loaded up the old HP1 game on a playstation emulator. The whole game environment is made up from a single muddy low-poly mesh. Pretty much every object that isn’t part of that background mesh is interactible. You really don’t have to be smart to figure that out. So total agreement.

The yellow paint of the early 2000s was “object exists”.

Tbh, I don’t mind yellow paint. I do mind the main character using voice-over to instantly spoil the solution to every riddle as soon as the MC enters the riddle area.

Hogwards Legacy was terrible with this. Riddle: Find the McGuffin in the target area. As soon as the main character steps foot in the target area they say “I wonder if the McGuffin is located behind these vines over there”. Thanks for nothing.

Get lost. Nobody needs you and your misguided quest to remove artist attribution.

Oh, the constant “Click every single pixel on the screen in a line-scanning pattern to find the one missing thing that stops you from progressing”… And all that in a time before the internet, where you couldn’t just look up the solution.

There’s more than one game that I stopped playing because I just couldn’t figure out which pixel to click.

And it doesn’t fix “disabled” objects like things you expect to be able to use, but can’t due to gameplay/design reasons.

That’s imho even a bigger issue in VR, since the interactions are more “reality-like”, so when something doesn’t behave like reality, that’s more of an issue.

Portal 1 had a very spartan level design. There was only a very limited set of interactible assets, so it was easy to learn which five assets can be interacted with. But also there wasn’t really much of anything else in the levels. Everything was clearly visible and understandable, because there really wasn’t anything there.

Try to do Portal 1 in a forest setting, or in a detailed medieval city centre environment. That kind of design language would completely fall apart.

Tbh, all these solutions are yellow paint in a different coat.

Wanna guide the player through a path? Have a guide NPC go before you (might even be the villain in a chase sequence!).

So now I have to tag behind an NPC that runs at 75% of my speed, because if I lose them the whole concept falls apart, so I have to bumble around behind them? No thanks. Or if it’s a villain, the whole immersion breaks after I realize the villain doesn’t actually run off if I don’t follow, but instead just waits at the next corner for me to catch up.

Want to clearly show in which places you can do X thing? Have a clear visually distinct asset that stands out mark those places. Make sure you don’t have similar assets elsewhere.

So the yellow paint is a yellow asset? Or a slightly less yellow asset? It’s the identical thing, just a little less visible. That was OK for Wii games and before that, because anything that deserved its own asset was interactible. There’s a plain wall with a 16 polygon cube on it, well of course this is an interactible button. Now do the same on a highly-detailed wall with bumps, groves, wood supports and so on.

If the argument is accessibility, just make it an option to turn those special assets bright pink/yellow, or just a much more distinct (even if visually unappealing) asset for higher-budget games.

So yeah, that’s just yellow paint in 3D.

Wanna show which ledges are grabbable? This may be the only acceptable use case. But even then, there are more discrete ways like shining stones or have the character extend its arm towards it or something. Or just make basically every ledge grabbable. I had no issues in either sm64 nor in the original assassins creed, and neither had yellow paint.

Assassins creed didn’t have to show you what’s grabbable, because everything was grabbable. You could literally run up to any random wall and the player character would climb it.

SM64 falls in the “16 polygons per wall” category.

It’s a bummer since artist can get a bigger cut of physical media sales and cd are easier to make than a records.

Btw, what about digital album sales? On Amazon, for example, you can buy a CD digitally. You just get MP3s or similar, but it costs the same as the CD, just without the physical media.

Yes. In the original it says @MYGUMSAREBLEEDING in the bottom right corner.

You cropped the image to remove the attribution. Not cool.

And the default DE is a JS app that runs in a webview. You know, the same tech stack we make fun of the Win11 start menu for, but for the whole DE.

Gnome is Javascript that runs in a webview. It’s the same technology stack that we make fun of with the Win11 start menu.

It’s shit technology. No wonder it requires so much RAM.

Tbh, everything flows and changes. There is no “original” that survives without major changes for millenia. People change, language changes, the meaning of words and the understanding of the fundamentals governing day-to-day life changes all the time.

“Original” doesn’t exist in real life.