A PlayStation 2 could not afford to draw every rock and wall in full detail all the way to the horizon. So the games carried each piece of scenery in several versions, from detailed to simple, and swapped them by distance: the simple version far away, the detailed one up close. The swap was not a jump. The console blended one into the other as you approached, and faded small things out before they got too far to see.
That behavior is part of how the games look. Distant scenery is meant to be soft, and detail is meant to arrive.
Upstream's choice
OpenGOAL decided against all of it, on purpose. Its level extractor says so about the console's near and far versions in a comment: "But we don't want any of that." It drew the most detailed version of terrain and scenery at every distance, built its own texture detail, and offered a few optional console distances for characters.
The result looks sharp in a screenshot, but it is not the game. Far walls came out about three levels of texture detail sharper than the console drew them at 3840 by 2400, and in Jak and Daxter, pickups in other parts of the level could be seen from where you stood.
It started with a race
The first clue came from watching a Jak X race in an emulator. In the distance, Spargus blended smoothly from its simple buildings to its detailed ones as the car drove in. Phaethon drew it all at full detail. On September 6th Jak X's scenery got the console's distances.
Faithful detail here is a look, not a speed trick. A modern PC can draw everything at full detail without trouble. The point is to draw what the game drew.
All four games
From October 4th to 15th the same treatment reached Jak and Daxter, Jak II and Jak 3, piece by piece:
- Terrain picks its version by distance. The trilogy had been given Jak X's fallback distances of 150 and 300 meters by mistake; its own are 30 and 70.
- Characters fade and disappear at the console's distances, and upstream's optional culling setting is gone.
- Textures take their sharpness from the console's own texture settings instead of a guess.
- Scenery fades out at the console's distances, small things first.
- Terrain blending, where one version melts into the next, is checked by running the console's own vector-unit programs over every level of all four games.
On Jak and Daxter's village, the terrain distances alone changed 282,020 pixels of a single frame.
Remastered, further out
The remastered preset keeps the same system and pushes every distance out together, half again as far as the console, so detail arrives sooner on a big screen. One thing stays at the console's distance even there: the black backing panels behind billboards in Jak II's slums, which would otherwise draw as solid rectangles the console never showed.
Alex (maintainer, and a mechanical engineer by trade)