How do games render their scenes? | Bitwise

I'm a professional programmer who works on games, web and VR/AR applications. With my videos I like to share the wonderful world of programming with everyone!

How do games render their scenes? We'll discuss how oldschool 8-bit games rendered their scenes and gradually move our way towards modern 3D rasterized games. You'll learn about rasterization, anti-aliasing, shadow mapping and more!

A lot has happened the last year in my life regarding moving, a new job and health issues, which is why I have not been able to make a lot of videos, but all is fine again now and I chose to work part-time so that I can spend more time on making videos more regularly! :)

I also created a Patreon page on which I release e.g. source code and have a tier option that includes having a personal chat with me!

References

Music in in outro:

[unvergebeneid]

0:09 to be fair, Asteroids looked a lot better back then than what's shown here. It used vector graphics instead of pixels, so this low-res capture doesn't do it justice!

[Frostyflytrap]

Hey, props for taking such a broad topic with a long history and condensing it in into a concise overview easy for anyone to understand.

[Ashona]

HE’S ALIVE. THE MAN IS ALIVE. It’s 4am when I got the notification, but this video is more important than sleep

[Chadderbox]

I love when you upload. I always learn something from these videos!

[aweik]

It’s always a party when you upload. Awesome
stuff, keep it up!

[proudbeme]

its amazing to see you posting again! your videos always get me so excited!
the fact that doom uses a tree structure for level data/rendering is really cool!
thanks for going into so much detail in your videos, they are always such a joy to watch~

[HerrFlachpfeife]

Cels are the transparent sheets used in traditional 2D animation. The individual pieces of 2D art are painted on cels and then multiple cels are layered on top of each other to form a single image. Cel shaders are named this way, because they emulate the look of hand drawn toons.

[electromaniacal]

8:35 Cel shading comes from traditional animation. From Wikipedia: "The name comes from cels (short for celluloid), clear sheets of acetate which were painted on for use in traditional 2D animation."

[lndozois]

Also. The “cel” from “cel shading” is not named because the quantized shades form “cells”, but is named after the cartoon shading it was meant to emulate. The shading painted, by hand, onto cellophane sheets or “cels” used in cartoon production.

[MDKk]

It's a great video, but there is some misinformation. 3D graphics cards wasn't the thing that enabled true 3D graphics. Quake was released before those and it was a true 3D game with texture maps. A lot of other games used polygons before that as well. some were fully 3D, but were flat shaded. Others were a mix of 2D backgrounds and 3D characters. The game Outcast was released a few years after the first 3D graphics cards and it didn't utilize them at all. However it was one of the most beautiful games of that time. It used Voxels for the terrain and textured polygons for the characters, buildings etc. It also had things like anti-aliasing, depth of field, bump maps, character shadows. It was game ahead of it's time. So no 3D graphics cards (or 3D accelerators if we want to be accurate) didn't enable true 3D. It just made it a lot faster.

It's also a bit ironic that the game shown on screen is Virtua Fighter. That game had a PC release in 1995 and it didn't use 3D cards.

[searchformeaning]

Your videos are a fantastic introduction to understand how game mechanics are implemented! I've been trying to understand these mechanics for years, but your videos are the first that really allowed me to understand what's going on. Thank you!

[chod]

One significant change that was omitted was when fixed function pipelines went away and we started witing our own shader code. A lot of cool graphical effects came about because of this change. I think it was around 2005 but that's just from memory.

[evgenius_]

"It's just a bunch of triangles"
*showing game footage, where rendering based on quads, not traiangles*

[aiarch]

you make all these difficult details look so easy to understand 👍

[Sorry-bwqw]

This channel is pure gold! Glad to see that you still upload!

[raghurajnair]

The explanation is so technically elegant and concise. I had to sub immediately. Well done!

[thisrandomdude_]

you're alive! So glad you uploaded :D

The video is amazing, as expected :)

[djessy]

I don't understand how you can have so little subscribers with the quality of your explanations, I'm sharing 🙏

[nb]

Just new to your channel but really loving the informational videos. Took me only a few seconds to subscribe and like because I could already tell it was quality content. Keep up the good work!

[duckcluck]

This video is mind-blowingly good. I'm a very visual learner so I heavily appreciate all the visual examples and diagrams