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"You said tripple the size. As I said, can you explain how bump maps could be larger?"

I can offer a little detail. Have a peek at this image I made here. No, this is not an in-game mesh, but it's the sort of graphic that game consoles are rapidly approaching the ability to do in real time. There are a lot of photographic textures in that scene. Each texture is 2048 by 2048 in size. Here's a breakdown of the data involved:

- Color texture. (24-bit) :: This is the color image for the surfaces. The warning sign and the "DO NOT BLOCK ENTRY" sign both use images made in Photoshop to look like that. Those vents on the back wall are also simply photographs. (I'm starting to wish I made a render of this cannon without the textures to give an idea...)

- Bump texture (8-bit) :: This generates a 'bump' on the surface by adding an embosed looking shadow to the texture. The tiles on the floor in this image us that process.

- Specular Texture (8-bit) :: This controls how much 'shininess' is reflected from the surface. It is hard to see in this pic a great example of this process, but it's fairly subtle in this pick. Take a look at the tiles in the floor, though. There is some roughness on the floor from the specularity image, the bump image, and the glossiness image.

- Glossiness Texture (8-bit) :: This affects how 'big' a specular highlight is on a per-pixel level. This is great for making metal or something look 'smudged' when light hits it. The floor also uses this technique. Unfortunately, you'd have to see it animated to really get an idea of what effect it has on this scene. Basically, if the camera were to slowly truck to the right, you'd see a sort of 'shimmering' effect as the light hit the different areas of the glossiness map, causing the specular highlights to change in size. That's really the main reason I put that in there, I thought it'd make it look a little more like a real set.

- Diffuse Texture (8-bit) :: This texture controls how much light is reflected from each pixel of the surface. Sort of a poor man's HDRI. The floor just under the cannon uses this effect. It's sort of bluish in this shot. If the light dimmed a bit, the cannon would still be quite visible, but the blue floor beneath it would be black. The seams between the tiles are also almost black in the diffuse channel.

- Normal Map (24-bit) :: I did not use normal maps in this scene. If I had, the bump would look a little more convincing. (Although, for a scene like this, it would have been hard to tell.) These are full color images that represent bump in 3 axes instead of just one. I could have made those vents in the background appear to have more depth to them if I had known about normal maps at the time. To be honest, though, if I did this shot again, I probably would not use them. I would, however, if I were trying to simplify the geometry. There are 1.2 million polygons in this scene. The main reason there are so many is that every edge is rounded. A normal map could have done effectively the same trick at the cost of texture memory. Unfortunately, this would have been painful, as it was this scene took most of my gig of memory to render. As it was, I had dithered down the color textures to 8-bits each. (yes, those are 8-bit images and not 24. I wasn't sure whether to mention that or not... Hard to tell, iddn't it?)

Assuming I had used normal maps and didn't use an 8-bit image for the color channel, each texture in that scene had 80-bits of data. If I could only have used 24-bit color textures, then I would have seen at least a doubling of the assets. (But not quite tripling..) If I had come from using 8-bit textures... well the numbers turn a lot worse. Unfortunately, I do not know if game companies typically use 8 or 24 bit color t

That isn't the first time the Register has had some fun with wording.

"That's all nice and well, but who actually makes the content that fills up those 2GB? You'd need a pretty large team and several months or years to make that much stuff..."

2D and 3D artists make the content that fills that space. The thing to remember is that it isn't necessarily a linear relationship between how much arist time is needed and how much RAM is being taken up. Using 2x the texture size, for example, doesn't take twice as long to generate. A lot of time spent on making 3D art is in shrinking things down to meet the requirements.

Check out this image I made here. (Note: That's not a game model.) *All* of the textures were originally generated at 3072^2 resolution. They were too high for my tiny gigabyte of RAM, so I had to knock them down to 2048^2. If I had started at 2048, it wouldn't have been much faster to generate them. The source imagery was big enough in either resolution, so short of the extra processing time it'd have taken, it would have been pretty much the same.

The real time spent will be in making something more ambitious. Twice as long? I doubt it. Maybe one day when the game machine has specs that exceed the artist abilities, but we are generations away from that. The tools we have today are pretty darned cool, and they're only going to get better as each generation goes by.

In short, these companies already have the talent *today* to put 2 gigs worth of content on the screen.

"what's proposed here is just does not seem possible under low bandwidth conditions. it's not like you can just run off to computer #2,398 and say "go render frame 1,503" -- there are textures and models and state information that probably total somewhere on the order of gigabytes (give or take a factor of ten) in order to render that frame."

I can give you a little data here. Take a look at this image I made. The scene is roughly 1.5 million polygons, and virtually everything is textured. The folder containing the bare bones version of this scene is roughly 600 megabytes. I could probably cut that size in half via JPEG etc, but we're still looking at a massive amount of data to send to one person to render a frame. I know this because I seriously discussed sharing the rendering with a friend of mine on the east coast. We both felt it'd take longer to ship than it would to render.

I doubt this scene is anything close to what they were doing in Shrek 2, let alone whatever will happen with 3.

Hehe. The Register has had some fun with this organization name, too.

Hmm, that [reflectionsoldiers.com] thingie is kind of neat and it's automatic.

To accomplish that, use the following syntax and post as "HTML Formatted". Unfortunately, one problem with posting as HTML Formatted is that you must then use <p \> to create blank lines to separate paragraphs.

<a href="http://www.reflectionsoldiers.com/forumtest/ viewforum.php?f=2&sid=7ea89aa14629180fff24300e7e87 4225">the same link</a>

Are there alternate approaches? (Especially to the need to post as HTML Formatted?)

I'd like to get the word out. If you are so inclined, please spread the word. If you have suggestions on how to spread the word (or anything else), make your comments and suggestions this WikiLearn page.

"People should stop calling them "the RIAA" because they aren't worth the time and effort it takes to type the word "the" or to hold down the shift key Instead just call them riaa."

Personally, I like how the Register refers to them.

"How do other people solve this problem? Can anyone give any advice on how to get their attention? Adwords on Google?"

It's hard. Money's often a good motivator. But if that's not possible, try appealing to artists that are earlier in their learning process. Give them a chance to shine. I went from this to this in about a year. (note: the second image is of a work in progress, that's why he has no arms.)

Pretty phenomenal leap, dontcha think?

Ferion hasn't paid me, nor was there any condition to. The situation was this: I'm a 3D artist who needs to be challeneged in order to enhance my portfolio, and Ferion is an indie game who needs artwork but can't really pay for it. So the deal we struck up is I do the art sans deadlines (i.e. give me time to do it right, learning as I go) and I get to demo it to promote myself. They get the artwork they need.

A similar situation might work for you. A lot of budding young artists out there want to get a job doing that for a living, but they don't have the portfolio/demo reel they need to get that job. They need to be challenged. Offer them that possibility, and you'll find a few shining gems. It just make take a little time for that shine to surface, if you know what I mean. ;)

Also, I'm an admin over at www.scifi-meshes.com. Head on over there and put out a feeler. Space Quest is exactly the type of project some of the artists there would want to work on. If you have difficulty getting responses, contact me. (My username there is NanoGator as well.)

"How do other people solve this problem? Can anyone give any advice on how to get their attention? Adwords on Google?"

It's hard. Money's often a good motivator. But if that's not possible, try appealing to artists that are earlier in their learning process. Give them a chance to shine. I went from this to this in about a year. (note: the second image is of a work in progress, that's why he has no arms.)

Pretty phenomenal leap, dontcha think?

Ferion hasn't paid me, nor was there any condition to. The situation was this: I'm a 3D artist who needs to be challeneged in order to enhance my portfolio, and Ferion is an indie game who needs artwork but can't really pay for it. So the deal we struck up is I do the art sans deadlines (i.e. give me time to do it right, learning as I go) and I get to demo it to promote myself. They get the artwork they need.

A similar situation might work for you. A lot of budding young artists out there want to get a job doing that for a living, but they don't have the portfolio/demo reel they need to get that job. They need to be challenged. Offer them that possibility, and you'll find a few shining gems. It just make take a little time for that shine to surface, if you know what I mean. ;)

Also, I'm an admin over at www.scifi-meshes.com. Head on over there and put out a feeler. Space Quest is exactly the type of project some of the artists there would want to work on. If you have difficulty getting responses, contact me. (My username there is NanoGator as well.)

I found a pic of the 10 in 1 system, here.

Heh, you guys might find this funny. I was reading about the Register today and they had an interesting editorial about Hilary Rosen. Check it out here. I about died laughing when I read that.

"I'm a decent artist. It's 50% talent, 50% work. I've found I have a cartoonist style, but I can't do still life. No matter how hard I try, I know guys who could beat me when they were in junior high school."

Whoopee, they figured it out before you did. That's not something that was given to them at birth it was a skill they arrived at at some point. Drawing is the ability to decompose an image down to a series of lines and plotting them out on paper. It's not easy. Spatial relationships have to be recognized etc. Those guys may have a better spatial recognition, that doesn't necessarily mean they're born with talent to draw as a result of that ability.

In any case, the point is as long as you think you can't, you can't. I hate to sound After School Special here, but it's true. Though I agree people can have forms of learning disabilities that make their struggle much harder, I don't believe that people just can't do stuff. I should know. I've climbed from being a terrible artist to one that's not half bad. This project didn't happen until I sat down and learned the various things I needed to learn until I could arrive at that point. It was all a matter of breaking it down into a ton of little tasks.

Hey dudes,

A few days ago I did a mockup of a slightly altered version of Slashdot's Games Dept theme that is a little more pleasing to the eyes. You can see it here. It recieved some good response, however the topic only got a few views. Just wanted to post it one more time in a busier thread and see if people like it enough for me to submit to the editors.

(I know, it's OT. At least I put some work into fixing the problem that's being complained about!)

"From the OMFG-it-looks-like-shit dept.

Well, it sucks."

I know this is off-topic, but I'd like to throw my two cents in as an artist. The main problem with the color scheme is that the gradient goes from overl-bright purple to white with white text on top of it. This can be corrected by changing the gradient to go from black to a mid-range purple. It'd look much more tasteful.

I took about 5 minutes and roughly mocked up a screengrab of a more tasteful implementation of the Games Color Scheme. Check it out here.

Okay, so I'm off-topic and bitching about something that's been griped about a million times. At least give me credit for taking a little time to provide something to grab color codes off of. :)

" It's a self-contained Atari game unit. The joystick *is* the console, battery operated with 10 preprogrammed titles and RCA out to your television"

I found another pic of the unit here. Enjoy.