i've been thinking about video games graphics... like phones and low power devices can now render 3d environments and run shaders... we could have like a new era of ps2 graphics that run on shitty batteries but nobody seems to like this as an aesthetic framework or whatever

to me there's some sort of aesthetic dissonance i can't really explain when i run a game that emulates 100% faithfully the psx's graphics yet it uses like 3gb of ram

like buddy you're calculating some ancient computer's texture distortion artifacts on a pixel shader, just sneak in a dot product real quick and you have lighting for free...

not to diss on psx aesthetics because they're pretty cool honestly but like... the aesthetic goal post shifting kinda sucks, psx distortion is now cool enough that it's worth emulating, i guess unity diffuse shader appreciation will happen in 2030 when it needs a giant gpu to run

even "indie" games are still very industry-dominated in terms of which technical corners are cut... if you don't have time or expertise you're going to go with the "industry ready solution" or whatever and ...

... the industry ready solution maybe has a lightmapper that doesn't work or unclamped framerate by default and many people will have to choose to make your laptop melt into a plastic husk if they're unable to work around that or even consider it

this thread is just to further radicalize myself to make my next game in some minimal game engine that i will probably fail to use and will make me cry a lot