Is there a remake that actually makes the original game pointless?

[Midgarian]

Appreciate those additional points, well said! Yeah, I feel like KojiPro must have had their hands full, designing the irregular terrain, helping the player to read that terrain (with the Odradek Scanner), deciding on how Sam would interact with the irregularities of the terrain, designing methods to have Sam's enemies reliably navigate that terrain (the subject of a cancelled GDC talk, incidentally), etc.

Coming back to the original Tomb Raider, just to highlight some of the discussion from the above-mentioned LTTP thread, from 2018:

With regard to the "tangibility" point you raised:

From the Richard Moss podcast:

From searching a bit just now, on the topic:

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You are really spoiling me here with these posts :)

Thanks once again, another engaging read.

I have never messed around with the Level Editor but it's always been in the back of my mind, and now I have a Gaming PC it's certainly something that's on my bucket list.

I've always thought in an ideal World all games would launch with a level editor, to be able to encourage vibrant modding communities and ensure a near-virtual endless tail for the games. Portal 2 is a wonderful modern example. I wish the Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy had one. MGSV is another that would be beautiful with a level editor.

...Each room [in Classic TR] has two types of surface geometry — rendered and collisional. The former are what is seen, while the latter control how objects collide and interact with the world. Furthermore, these two types are specified separately in the room data — each type is completely independent of other, i. e. collisional geometry shouldn't exactly match visible room geometry. While this distinctive feature was never used in originals (collisional room "meshes" fully resembled visible room "meshes"), it is now extensively used by level editing community... /QUOTE]

Humble brag on my part, this sounds exactly like my comment of "Readability VS Tangibility" :P

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[Schopenhauerian]

You are really spoiling me here with these posts :) Thanks once again, another engaging read. I have never messed around with the Level Editor but it's always been in the back of my mind, and now I have a Gaming PC it's certainly something that's on my bucket list. I've always thought in an ideal World all games would launch with a level editor, to be able to encourage vibrant modding communities and ensure a near-virtual endless tail for the games. Portal 2 is a wonderful modern example. I wish the Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy had one. MGSV is another that would be beautiful with a level editor...

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No problem! :) Really appreciate your comments. One other article that I thought was interesting, that comes to mind in relation to what you noted above:

[...] "The Souls modding community is lacking any sort of formal support, but more than makes up for it in passion," Zullie said. "A few years ago it was a Herculean effort to just put a new model for a weapon into the game. We're continually picking the game apart and then developing the tools to streamline it."

"However, I don't imagine anyone's likely to make an automated process for this while navmeshes remain an obstacle, since the practical applications would be pretty scarce," she added. (Navigation meshes are necessary to help NPCs and enemies pathfind around a map - and like collision data, navmesh data varies wildly between the Souls games.)

"Without them, the best we can essentially make would be strictly PvP focused arenas. With them, we could create entirely new, fully functional levels for the game - player published DLC, for all intents."

It seems like a difficult but promising future for Dark Souls modders - and with Katalash (author of the Unity-based visual map editor DSTools) and others looking into making tools to create navmesh files, we could see some truly exciting mods in the coming years.

Eight years after release, Dark Souls modders figure out how to make custom maps

It might be surprising, but until this point it's been pretty much impossible to import a custom map into the original …

www.eurogamer.net

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The centrality of those navigation meshes would seem to bring us back to that cancelled Death Stranding GDC talk: "...a core focus of AI development was simply finding a way to support agents that could reliably and believably traverse the game's unapologetically unforgiving landscape. Come and learn about the strategies used to coax natural movement out of a brutal, fragmented navmesh, techniques to improve tactical positioning across extreme terrain, the hybrid pathfinding approach used to provide long-range navigation through the game's winding crevasses, terraces and ravines, support for traversal across dynamic, player-placed structures such as bridges and ladders, and more!"

With regard to the "tangibility" point you raised:

[...]I love your use of the word "readability". I think perhaps the word "tangibility" comes in as well. Readability for the level design's visual design and Tangibility for the actual interaction with the level design.

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From searching a bit just now, on the topic:

...Each room [in Classic TR] has two types of surface geometry — rendered and collisional. The former are what is seen, while the latter control how objects collide and interact with the world. Furthermore, these two types are specified separately in the room data — each type is completely independent of other, i. e. collisional geometry shouldn't exactly match visible room geometry. While this distinctive feature was never used in originals (collisional room "meshes" fully resembled visible room "meshes"), it is now extensively used by level editing community...

Room Geometry [TRWiki]

trwiki.earvillage.net

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Humble brag on my part, this sounds exactly like my comment of "Readability VS Tangibility" :P

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Yup, I thought so too! Interesting comment from Gavin Rummery: I'm not sure but it sounded to me like the simplicity of having the rendered and collisional meshes fully aligned, seemingly by default (in the Level Editor/grid system/animation systems they designed), was a key part of what made it easy for the level designers -- Heather Gibson, Neal Boyd, and Toby Gard -- to draft and edit the designs of the levels multiples times (to their satisfaction), without unduly bogging down the entire development pipeline:

"...becuase [the grid-based Level Editor I created] was so easy [for the Level Designers] to use... that's what made Tomb Raider [as] intricate as it was for the time, because the levels could be modified so easily... in some ways I do feel that's been lost... I love games like Uncharted and whatnot but you can tell that – I've looked into how they're doing it – and you can see that they have to just kind of design the path through the level and where you're going to be able to grab onto and where you're not, up front, and then the artist then just [makes] these fantastic-looking environments, but they're kind of restricted to what's been decided already... having that kind of easy way of building environments is obviously just not possible anymore..."

Whereas today it seems the process is inevitably more involved, perhaps requiring input from multiple parts of the dev team:

Collision Meshes & Game Models (collision physics) : KatsBits TUTORIALS

www.katsbits.com

...Generally speaking "Collision Models" are used to reduce the amount of effort a game engine expends... whilst the player moves around and interacts with it; the more complex the world, the higher the resource demands, to the extent that some form of collision reduction is an eventuality. In other words collision models are essentially a resource optimisation, they allow for basic collision and player interaction whilst keeping processing overheads to a minimum...

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