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The Future of Gaming
nvembar writes: "The International Game Developers Association has the text of the lead designer at ION Storm, Harvey Smith's keynote address. In it he addresses "high fidelity similulations" entering games, making them more flexible and realistic. It's an interesting read on the future of gaming."
This is a continued problem in some forms of game design, an alternate version of the one million monkeys typing. Any huge number of gamers will find holes in the system.
I think that eventually you'll have to have some system that can be used to implement an indefinitely large world.
My own idea / fantasy project is to have an earth type planet that would have the suerface area of Jupiter. Then you could effectively block off areas, at least for lower levels by having vast areas of ocean or desert or whatever.
The point being is that you would have to have a completely different system to manage something that is that large scale
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Haven't all their games flopped miserably despite all the hype?
This is a serious question, btw...
no matter how 'realistic' graphics and AI get, if you're dealing with a flat screen and a mouse/keyboard it's not much of a 'simulation'.. Even pedal/wheel controllers are better, but whatever happened to the headset/glove controller idea? Surely we can approach something 'affordable' soon on this front..
air and light and time and space
Here is something that I have been saying to friends for some time but haven't seen come about.
Mix the generas!
Think about it. You could have Joe RTS playing his game, making marines, orcs, cataphracts, krogoths, whatever, and commanding his armies like he likes best. Then also you have Jane FPS running along as a sniper or commando in the same game just that everything appears 3d first person. Then Bob flightsim could even join in. Or Nicole Harpoon. or...
Different clients, different engines all interpretting the same data.
Potentially P2P could be used to eleviate problems with needing a massive pipe and uberservers.
Make it a massively online game with a persistant world.
Mix well and you get an awesome game!
Just imaao, of course.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Well, not the corner of game developers I watch...Bliizard Entertainment certainly seems to be doing well...every single title since warcraft 2 (maybe even warcraft) has been a wild success, and sold an amazing amount for its time period...Diablo2, for instance, had something like 2 million units pretty close to the release date (it had some huge number of pre orders). What's 2*10^6 * 50? one hundred MILLION dollars...and a significant number of people also bought the $35 expansion...
w ww.diabloii.net/+diablo+2+sales+figures&hl=en
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:gPH2eeM6r70:
"Guinness, Anyone? - Gaile [20:38:PST]
The 2002 Edition of the Guinness Book of World Records includes two pretty remarkable entries:
Battle.net is listed as the World's Largest Free On-Line Gaming Service. The entry features a lovely image of the Sorceress, and states that since opening in 1997, more than 8.2 million active accounts log more than six million games daily. Peak concurrent usage tops more than 210,000 players per day.
Diablo II is listed as the Fastest Selling Computer Game, having sold more than one million copies within the first two weeks of being released in June 2000, and with 2.75 million sold worldwide. (Yes, both figures are lower then the true sales figures, but hey, even then it made the book!) Additionally, they cite Diablo as having sold in excess of 2.3 million copies since its release in 1997.
Thanks to Prysym for the note."
That's just diablo 2! Then you can factor in starcraft, the starcraft expansion, diablo 1, even the warcraft series. Warcraft 3 is going to sell extremely well too it looks like, and the new game, World of Warcraft, will probably provide an assured source of monthly income for the company (assuming these sales figures continue).
"Your game is going to be late, overbudget, buggy and outdated, or really, really short." Late, sure, but that's np...later and better is better than never. Overbudget? Maybe, depends how realistic you planned it. Buggy? there may be a few bugs...Starcraft was extremely late but also 1. hardly buggy at all and 2. very VERY well balanced. Was it outdated? sure a few RTS's used 3d engines (Total Annihilation for ex.), but it's still wildly popular even today, years after its release. It may even out do quake 1 for longevity (depends when starcraft 2 is released, hehe). As for shortness, well...depends on the game type...Quake 3 single player is extremely short...but it's not supposed to be played for that. Max Payne is also short (it took me ~15 hours to beat the first difficulty level...didn't bother doing New York Minute or the other ones after I finished) but it's single player only so that's less acceptable (but it was so fun to play I didn't really care).
So...what? imho the future of gaming is rosy for the companies that 'get it'...electronic darwinism or something...As for consoles well, I don't follow consoles at all so I don't really care what happens to 'em...
--Jubedgy
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis hebes
Good points there
With regard to cheating issues, what about incorporating some sort of encryption scheme, wherein each machine exchanges keys with the others when a game starts? Maybe the "master box" (the one starting the game off) could serve as a keymaster of sorts in this case. I know Q3 Arena has a pure server option to help alleviate cheating, maybe adding ecryption on to that sort of thing would be beneficial.
Just one more note: what do you mean by "server splits"? I apologize if it's something horrendously obvious; I'm a little frazzled from coding atm.
That's committing the cardinal sin of MMOG's. The Client is in the hands of the "enemy". If you offload game relevant calculations to the Client Computer, they will be hacked. Every current MMOG has had some critical bits of the game code running on the client when they shouldn't have been, and every one of them has been bitten in the ass by it. You simply cannot allow any machine other than one under your (the developer's) full control have any say in anything critical. The client machines should be nothing more than an interface to the game, and a display system for the game world. Anything else is flirting with disaster.
Yeah right - and in a similar light, the low cost and high quality of digital video cameras everywhere will have people producing free movies that rival Hollywood quality.
Gets me to thinking though. Is it a parallel scenario that game-designers seem to just wanna push the eye-candy envelope ignoring aspects of gameplay, as Hollywoord has abandoned thoughtful movies to cranking out dick-flicks, chic-flicks and teen/highschool/first-lay movies?
If so - god help us.