Author | Lightnews

Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 5d

A new book about Tomb Raider to peruse whilst interminably awaiting further adventures. 🇫🇷

Mon 3ème livre pour @thirdeditions.bsky.social est désormais disponible !
Dans "Les Légendes de Tomb Raider : sur la piste d'une icône", je revisite une série qui compte énormément pour moi et qui a marqué ma vie de joueur !
www.thirdeditions.com/products/les...

Les Légendes de Tomb Raider. Sur la piste d'une icône

Lara Croft est une icône comme le jeu vidéo en connaît peu. En onze jeux principaux, elle aura connu la gloire d’un succès hors du commun, mais aussi des échecs et des tumultes incroyables. Cet ouvrag...

www.thirdeditions.com

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 27d

The braid joints were animated via a rudimentary physics engine, rather than hand animated like rest of Lara.
The physics engine used spheres and boxes to represent solid objects like her backpack and neck to collide the braid against. Ergo, independent of polygon count.

It just needed tuning...

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · 28d

Lara's braid was replaced for a presentation at E3 as it would clip right through her back and neck which looked rather grotesque.
Then we had a huge list of higher priority tasks to crunch through before launch so it stayed as the temporary bun.

Nothing to do with polygon count as stated here⬇️🤦

Tomb Raider @tombraider.com · Sep 12

Happy National Video Games Day! 🎮

Did you know that Lara Croft did not have her iconic braid in the original Tomb Raider released in 1996? It was removed because it used too many of the polygons that could be displayed at one time. Instead, Lara's hair was tucked into a bun.

#TombRaider

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Reposted by Paul Douglas

The Associated Press @apnews.com · 28d

The apparent use of artificial intelligence to clone an actor's voice for video game character Lara Croft has fans and actors up in arms.

AI-cloning of Lara Croft's voice has 'Tomb Raider' fans and actors up in arms

In France, the apparent use of artificial intelligence to clone an actor's voice for video game character Lara Croft has fans and actors up in arms.

bit.ly

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · Aug 16

GenAI used in this way:

Not cool.
Not classy.

Infinity Tomb Raider @infinitytombraider.bsky.social · Aug 15

🗣️Françoise Cadol, French voice of Lara Croft, was NOT asked to record any new voicelines & did NOT give her consent for any subsequent use of her voice, especially with AI.
She only recently found out about the remasters.
Thanks to OFP members @hedteur.bsky.social & @ssiguss.bsky.social!
#TombRaider

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · Jul 26

A lot of us from that era honed our crafts on the Amiga computer, before multimedia/game degrees became de rigueur. Eg. Toby Gard's animation portfolio created on the Amiga was featured in one of the computer art magazines a year or two before he joined Core Design too.

#Amiga

Picture of Toby Gard with text describing his animation work on an Amiga.

Rearview picture of a woman with red hair brandishing a bloodied sword.

Caption reads 'The girl looks quite out of place when compared to the others,' reasons Gard. 'She was drawn during my 'Disney' phase'

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · Jul 26

The Amiga computer is 40 years old.
It was more affordable than PCs and Macs, allowing those of us who had limited means to be creative. I loved that machine, spent so many hours programming on it, building 3d objects for my demos and games, making sounds with a 8bit sampler and so forth.

#Amiga

'Lohnar' open world 3d game demo on Amiga 500 by Paul Douglas. Early 1990s.

Definition file for a 3d object that kind of looks like a dalek. Really a tapered hexagonal prism with a sphere on top...
13 vertices, 7 polygons, 1 sphere, 1 partitioning plane (for sorting).
By Paul Douglas, early 1990s.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · Jul 22

All of videogaming history fits into 4 Duke Nukem Forever dev cycles.

Weasel, still in that bunker @wildweasel486.bsky.social · Jul 22

by my estimate: today is the day. it has now been one Duke Nukem Forever dev cycle since the release of Duke Nukem Forever.

Weasel, still in that bunker @wildweasel486.bsky.social · Feb 24

In 148 days (July 22nd, 2025), Duke Nukem Forever will have been released for exactly as long as it took to release since its announcement.

Mark your calendars.

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Reposted by Paul Douglas

Bitmap Books @bitmapbooks.com · Jul 19

Happy 40th Birthday to the Amiga 🎂

Grab a copy of our book - Commodore Amiga: a visual compendium: www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/...

#bitmapbooks #books #retrogaming #gaming #birthday #ocs @rachelsham.bsky.social

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · Jul 18

a man in a blue shirt is sitting in front of a brick wall and looking at the camera .

ALT: a man in a blue shirt is sitting in front of a brick wall and looking at the camera .

media.tenor.com

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · Jul 17

My experience was the classism was pernicious. Quite a few working class in the trenches but rarely in positions above that; "Congratulations, here's a job on the production line but don't get ideas above your station" It's been similar outside gaming, just with less exploitation and abuse.

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Reposted by Paul Douglas

Richard Moss @mossrc.bsky.social · Jul 15

The feature-length first episode of @terrorbytesdoc.bsky.social is now free to watch on YouTube. Dozens of interviews digging into the history and evolution of horror in games, written and directed by me. And if you like it, you can buy the whole series from terrorbytesdoc.com. youtu.be/TA2aZVn9FvE

TerrorBytes Ep. 1 – Enter the Survival Horror | Full Documentary Episode (FREE)

YouTube video by CREATORVC LIVE

youtu.be

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · Jun 18

From when Sega had arcades.
Pretty sure I got this card from the one in Irvine, CA. 1990s. More standard arcade than the theme park like attraction that SegaWorld at the Troc was.
#Sega

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · Jun 14

In 1994 a group of us would go play Virtua Fighter in the arcade on Derby's Cornmarket during our lunchtimes.
The fluidity of the characters' motion was mightily impressive at the time and hugely influential.

Time Extension @timeextension.com · Jun 10

Please Find 22 Minutes To Watch This Video On The Genesis Of Sega's Virtua Fighter. (Image: @SEGA) (Repost)

Please Find 22 Minutes To Watch This Video On The Genesis Of Sega's Virtua Fighter

Another classic video from Splash Wave

www.timeextension.com

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · May 21

My PC ISA devkit had the first GPU as did the blue debug stations, so we were used to the extra jankiness during development. The later green debug stations had the revised GPU as did Yarozes.
Retail consoles with the first GPU are rare, anything much after Western launch is revised version.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · May 21

Technically the original GPU truncates the values from the gouraud shader DDA to 5 bits before modulating texel colours, whereas the revised version uses 8 bits resulting in visibly less quantisation noise.
Changes were also made to speed up transparency and frame buffer effects.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · May 21

Lara's arm had a tiny 1x1 (!) texture map so it clearly illustrates the banding but so does her backpack and torso. It's also very apparent in Tomb Raider's first level entrance with the snow that has the wolves footprints. Many other games demonstrate it too.

Visible banding in the entranceway of the first level of Tomb Raider on PlayStation with the first version of the GPU.

Smoother shading of the snow and wolve footprints in the first level of Tomb Raider on PlayStation with the revised version of the GPU.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · May 21

Did you know the original PlayStation had a revision to its GPU and VRAM early in its life?
The Initial version had noticeable colour banding on shaded texture maps and slower effects like transparency. Consoles released after tailend of 1995 fixed this.

Noticeable colour banding on Tomb Raider running on a PlayStation with the original GPU.
(Screenshot author unknown)

Smoother gouraud shaded texture maps on Tomb Raider running on PlayStation with revised GPU and SGRAM.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · May 17

My understanding is the extensive playfield compositing features of VDP2 were added later to augment VDP1 which renders sprites/quads to framebuffer. This was due to VDP1 having lower throughput than the (also in development) PS1 GPU.
Exactly when this happened in development process I dont know.

Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · May 15

Just improper use of step-down transformers. We only had a few transformers so they would often be swapped around the building and hence voltage outputs not switched correctly.

AIUI the extra VDP came later. We had final hardware docs in summer 94. Before that I dont know timelines.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · May 12

We used the same Saturn devkits at Core. One per team. Testers had the hardware address checker.
Earlier kits were the Sofia boxes from Japan. We had a protoype the size of a beer fridge with only one SH2. Alas, someone fried the mainboard by introducing it to 240V. It probably ended up in a skip.

Andrew Borman @borman.bsky.social · May 12

Some of the Sega Ssturn equipment used for the never-released version of Descent from the Volition donation to The Strong.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · May 11

The player can toggle the underlying grid (spaced in yards because, well, it's golf) with 'G' key on PC which aids visualising the contours of the course and depth perception.

This formed a starting basis for the game mechanics design and prototype of Tomb Raider, which I worked on next.

Screenshot of 'The Scottish Open: Virtual Golf'.
Shows player 'paul' in the bunker 38 yards from the flag.
Grid lines are enabled - there to aid the player with reading/parsing the course terrain and depth perception.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · May 11

The PC version fitted entirely in a few megabytes and came on 2 floppy disks. A CD-ROM version was also released.
Like most Core games of that era it could have done with plenty more time & polish but 'bish bash bosh' was the order of the day.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · May 11

A Sega 32X version was planned for but Core only had the one devkit which was used to port BC Racers. By then 32X had flopped so was abandoned. Later ported to Saturn and PlayStation (as 'Tournament Leader' in Japan). With addition of female avatars, that were missing on PC due to space and time.

Screenshot of 'Virtual Golf' on PlayStation. Featuring female avatars and better texturing and detail than the PC version.

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Paul Douglas @cnhyv.bsky.social · May 11

'The Scottish Open: Virtual Golf' by Core Design was released ~30 years ago.

Jon Hilliard and Jason Gee made the game in about 6 months. I helped out with the 3D terrain, LOD, camera etc. Had to run on a low spec 486sx PC.
It was the only entry in the short lived "Core Sports" range.
👇

Box cover for 'The Scottish Open: Virtual Golf' on PC. Released in 1995.

Screenshot of 'The Scottish Open: Virtual Golf' on PC.
Shows player 'paul' teeing off on par 4 hole.

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