slickrcbd: That's the issue with old games. Just about all the old games have the graphics start to look samey halfway through the game. It's due to limited hardware in graphics and storage technology.
It wasn't until the end of the 20th century that graphics and storage made it feasible to have unique graphics for every area.
It's less how old it is, since i think
Geneforge was made 2001 (or so it says) so it's not like it was a Chip's Challenge tile look with only 100 tiles.
No it was the limited tile set he worked with (
At least in the first game). The game took the better part of 20 hours and i played it twice, so i didn't have the energy to play the second or later.
Course i also found a bug to have high movement and fast casting (
but terrible melee).
slickrcbd: Obviously you are too young, or didn't get into gaming until the 21st century, but in the mid '90s when Exlie was made it just wasn't feasible to do so. Exile I was distributed as shareware in an era when 14.4K (14,400 bps, modems to day are 56,000) modems were considered decent and 2400 baaud modems were still common.
I'm not that young. I grew up with 286's and the 8bit computers. As for gaming, most of it was probably on the Atari800XL, so mostly large sprites, like joust, pacman, riverrat, spy hunter, dig dug, etc. And games via Dialup, heh i remember the Diablo 1 demo that was like 30-40Mb and only the first level with the butcher, but took forever to download. Oh yes, i do remember 5k/s downloads, and people getting mad when they pick up the phone to make a call and the phone is already in use.
slickrcbd: There were CD distributions as part of shareware collections, but it wasn't the primary source, they were an early digital download.
Anyways, in the dial-up era, a digital download couldn't be too big or it would take all night. I recall downloading a 32mb update for Mac OS 8.1 that literally did take all night.
As such reusing tile sets and making use of palette swaps was a common, space-saving trick.
I understand saving space, though some software sets i found a fishtank screensaver for Windows 3.1 which generated the textures when you installed it (
it was like 20Mb but took up 60Mb and couldn't compress), so making tiles with variations and patterns through permutations wouldn't be too hard. But they had to come up with the idea and experiment, as well as prevent permutations that looked terrible so they'd have to go through all the permutations and either select ones that were good or ones they didn't want. Or generate them all and only use the better ones.
But the idea of permutations is more a newer thing i've seen in UE4 and not really anywhere else, though my experience is limited.
