Atmospheric lighting tech and ray traced shadow stuff has gotten really fucking good lately and the consolidation of a lot of tools under things like Unreal Engine 5 have made them a lot cheaper and more accessible to independent studios. So if you want to make a really nice looking, AAA shiny game but with a limited budget and scope then on board spaceships is a pretty good way to go. By their nature they have repeatable assets, enclosed and limited worlds, and lots of opportunity to use that cool lighting tech for atmosphere.
That's not the only reason, but I'd bet heavily that it's one of them.
These are also basically the reasons why Space was such a dominant theme in the early days of gaming. When your screen is black by default, a little triangle is all you need the computer to draw to represent a spaceship.
Remember that era in the mid 2000s when every AAA game was brown and grey? That's because it hid the fact that real-time global illumination wasn't a thing yet.
it hid the fact that real-time global illumination wasn’t a thing yet
I don't see how that follows.
Having more than like 1-2 runtime dynamic lights (usually a flashlight) didn't become somewhat common until like late 2010s, and pre-baking a shitton of light maps to simulate things like lights turning on or moving goes all the way back to HL1 if not quake.
The number of lights isn't the thing, it's the color bleed between adjacent objects. Like if you look at a Cornel Box Model, the way the white wall is a little red near the red side, because it's picking up reflected light from there. That's a subtle thing that'll make your scene look wrong, but it's a lot harder to notice if everything is brown.
Pre-baked light maps have accounted for colored light bouncing and mixing at least as far back as HL1, but I think the compile tools of the time did something weird like averaging out texture colors or ignoring them all together.
It was a computational issue, dynamic lights are expensive to calculate at runtime, fully prebaking multiple dynamic source requires you store exponentially more data for each source to account for all the ways the sources can interact if you don't want to do any lighting calculations at runtime.
It was, and I am eternally :deeper-sadness: over the fact that some stupid update they made to windows or something recently broke the game & made it have unplayable amounts of stuttering & slowdown that increase the longer that you play it.
It's extremely rare that you can get a "tactical shooter" game that is actually tactically engaging, and in which the guns actually feel impactful & fun to use. In fact most shooters these days, I would say, have a big problem with having weapons that just don't feel good to shoot. It's not a universal issue obviously, but most the games where this isn't a problem are some sort of boomer-shooter revival game, and while I'm a fan of those, sometimes you want something that isn't going a thousand miles a minute.
I think the big problem with FEAR now, or at least the one I hear people talk about, is that it breaks if you have Nvidia hardware. I think there's fanmade patches to fix it.
But god, yeah, the guns in FEAR. Best shotgun in gaming still, to this day, and that assault rifle felt so meaty too, I loved it. And the AI still holds up too.
Atmospheric lighting tech and ray traced shadow stuff has gotten really fucking good lately and the consolidation of a lot of tools under things like Unreal Engine 5 have made them a lot cheaper and more accessible to independent studios. So if you want to make a really nice looking, AAA shiny game but with a limited budget and scope then on board spaceships is a pretty good way to go. By their nature they have repeatable assets, enclosed and limited worlds, and lots of opportunity to use that cool lighting tech for atmosphere.
That's not the only reason, but I'd bet heavily that it's one of them.
These are also basically the reasons why Space was such a dominant theme in the early days of gaming. When your screen is black by default, a little triangle is all you need the computer to draw to represent a spaceship.
This seems very plausible.
Remember that era in the mid 2000s when every AAA game was brown and grey? That's because it hid the fact that real-time global illumination wasn't a thing yet.
I don't see how that follows.
Having more than like 1-2 runtime dynamic lights (usually a flashlight) didn't become somewhat common until like late 2010s, and pre-baking a shitton of light maps to simulate things like lights turning on or moving goes all the way back to HL1 if not quake.
The number of lights isn't the thing, it's the color bleed between adjacent objects. Like if you look at a Cornel Box Model, the way the white wall is a little red near the red side, because it's picking up reflected light from there. That's a subtle thing that'll make your scene look wrong, but it's a lot harder to notice if everything is brown.
Pre-baked light maps have accounted for colored light bouncing and mixing at least as far back as HL1, but I think the compile tools of the time did something weird like averaging out texture colors or ignoring them all together.
I know HL2's compile tools accounted for the color of textures better, though they still did some weird things.
It was a computational issue, dynamic lights are expensive to calculate at runtime, fully prebaking multiple dynamic source requires you store exponentially more data for each source to account for all the ways the sources can interact if you don't want to do any lighting calculations at runtime.
Honestly, your comment here makes me wish there were some mid-tier indie-devs doing a spiritual successor to Doom 3, or the original FEAR game now.
God the original FEAR was so good
It was, and I am eternally :deeper-sadness: over the fact that some stupid update they made to windows or something recently broke the game & made it have unplayable amounts of stuttering & slowdown that increase the longer that you play it.
It's extremely rare that you can get a "tactical shooter" game that is actually tactically engaging, and in which the guns actually feel impactful & fun to use. In fact most shooters these days, I would say, have a big problem with having weapons that just don't feel good to shoot. It's not a universal issue obviously, but most the games where this isn't a problem are some sort of boomer-shooter revival game, and while I'm a fan of those, sometimes you want something that isn't going a thousand miles a minute.
I think the big problem with FEAR now, or at least the one I hear people talk about, is that it breaks if you have Nvidia hardware. I think there's fanmade patches to fix it.
But god, yeah, the guns in FEAR. Best shotgun in gaming still, to this day, and that assault rifle felt so meaty too, I loved it. And the AI still holds up too.
Shame about the sequels tho.
Nightmare Reaper is some kind of weird mashup of OG doom, Duke3d, a looter-shooter, and a couple of other neat retro concepts.
I have heard of it , yes.