Slashdot Mirror
The Future of PC Gaming
Warrior-GS writes "GameSpy has two new articles up talking about the Future of PC Gaming. The first talks about the The Future of PC Game Engines, talking to Tim Sweeney, Chris Taylor, Stuart Moulder and others about everything from physics to lighting to AI. The second is an interview with Peter Molyneux about his areas of expertise and what lies ahead. The series will continue next month with a look at the Future of User Created Games and an interview with Warren Spector on PC Gaming's future."
Warren Spector is a true game innovator.
Look at thief, system shock, ultima underworld, deus ex. I'm always for the lookout of his latest games.
Thief 2 was especially heinous. I used to play that game for hours. My first wife eventually gave me the "you love that game or me" speech, and I ended up choosing the game. That divorce led me down the road to many other ones. Its sad really. But damn was that game fun!
Yeah, I'm a Republican AND a geek. It is possible.
Does anyone else miss 2D scrollers like Super Mario 3 or overhead adventure games like Gauntlet? I have grown so weary of 3D shooters, I wish somebody could offer a decent 2D game that engaged my brain.
evil adrian
What are the game producers going to do when they finally get to the point where the games look like real life, but still have the entertainment value of the movie "Glitter" or "It's Pat"?
An exquisitely rendered turd is still a turd.
I use to be a Text Adventure/Interactive Fiction FANATIC. But lately I can't stop playing FPS. They are like Crack to me! (But I don't want any help in breaking my habit, thanks!)
Anonymous Cowards suck.
..hasn't been a decent PC game produced since Pirates! ... oh wait, that wasn't a PC game..
Seriously though, I know the Holodeck doesn't make for good Star Trek episodes, but how many of you Slashdotters wouldn't LOVE to game in that manner. Totally escaping reality, you could experience any aspect of life that you wanted, consequence free. I'm very sure that would cause widespread peace of mind and mental health, because people would have an easy way to vent any destructive urges in a non-destructive manner. Hopefully, I'll be able to see stuff like this in my lifetime (I am about to turn 21), but perhaps I'd only see the humble starts of true "Holodeck" type technology.
A game that mirrors reality to exacting detail, where the only limits are those of your own imagination-- THAT'S what I want! Hurry up, developers! ;)
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
The future andy.
IN THE YEEEEEAR 2000!!!!!!!!
In the year 2000 robots will do 80% of our housework. But we will do 90% of theirs.
For those who haven't heard of it, I recently picked up an older game called "Nocturne." The gameplay was clunky, and the storyline at times annoying, but the lighting effects were quite awesome for its time. In fact, in comparison to some games I've played today, the lighting is quite superior.
From what I've read up on the game, all scenes are rendered from complete darkness. This means that only the point and spot light sources exist (no ambient). Shadows in the game are incredible. If an object passes in front of a light, the shadow blocks it.
While some newer games have good shadow effects, having a realistic shadow that follows the characters movement (in the game, your character has a trenchcoat which swishes around, making the shadow move too) is extremely cool in comparison to the often used "dark blob" shadow effects in many games. I'm hoping Doom 3 uses these "dark and sinister" effects too. It would be extremely cool to be able to site who is coming around the corner by their shadow cast on the wall or ground.
In short, polygons and texture rendering play a great part in detail, but realistic light and shadow rendering make scenes much more lifelike.
The "engines" article talks about 20 passes per polygon and so on. Great! But the majority of machines being sold by Gateway and Dell are not even T&L equipped cards. We're talking pre-Radeon era ATI cards. Now you have people buying awesome, awesome machines with 1.8 GIGAhertz at the very bottom end, systems that John Carmack and Tim Sweeney couldn't have imagined ten years ago, but only the hardcore gaming types are bothering to get the $200-$400 video cards that games like Doom 3 are going to require. For Carmack it might work, but for everyone else it isn't worth three years and millions of dollars to develop a PC game that ends up selling 20,000 copies. That's a pretty realistic number these days.
I wrote a terrible 2-D game in Visual Basic (*yes I know... must be AC to avoid Karma suicide*) that had my boss hunting turkeys. He blew his turkey call once too many times at work. Anyone interested, post a reply I get back to you.
I am still stuck playing 80s and early 90s arcade games as well as late 80s to mid 90s PC games. I also play with the emulators of legacy classic console systems. I don't think anyone is satisifed with todays games, with the exception of their graphics and audio. If only the 80s and 90s games had netplay, they'd still be popular today.
I'll be happy when the future of PC gaming involves me not having to buy another version of Windows just to play them. Hopefully, once the hardware gets fast enough, games can be written in some sort of compiled scripting language that has an interpreter for any OS and any processor. It's not too much to hope for.
Is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Nothing else comes close.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
You slashdot users are so funny. It's so easy to be altruistic when you have nothing to begin with, isn't it? I'm aware this is widly off-topic, but I'd like to see you put a few years work into something and then apply the term free to it in ANY way. Those that say they're above securing their ideas for money have neither a good idea nor money.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
i was surprised that none of the gaming gurus had anything negative to say about PC losing out as the gaming platform like this earlier slashdot article .
PCs have so far been one step ahead of consoles in terms of hardware/processing power, hope those innovations (like AI, ability to use more polygons etc) hit the PCs before consoles.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
A video card's ability to crunch polygons is not as important as it used to be. What is important is what you can do with those polygons. Polygons are just a medium to deliver your textures, lighting effects and shaders. Particle effects are also a staple in modern video games.These are the things that will be improved in future game engines. Imagine a game engine with full global illumination (not faked)
If you remember, virtua fighter had more polygons per charachter than virtua fighter 2. Virtua fighter 2 looked so much better because it acually had textures instead of just flat shaded polygons.
.. the past of gaming. When I my brother moved back closer to me and I got his setup with a computer I introduced him to the "hottest" game of the time. DOOM and DOOM II. Of course at the same time I was playing Unreal, but I wanted him to have the same experiences and appreciation that I have for modern games. Also I needed a head start, that bastard learns to damn fast... Anyway, after he mastered DOOM, HEXEN, Betrayal at Krondor, and a few other classics, I let him in on the magic of Unreal and we have played more matches of UT than I can count now. He would not have been so good if he didn't know where all of the things we take for granted came from. He isn't awed by just graphics, he enjoys story, gameplay and originality as well.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Ah yes, Gamespy. That lovely little company that is so desperately trying to spread it's vile disease all over online gaming, trying to force all us online gamers to use their appalingly poor connection services. Those people are just as guilty as monopolizing as Microsoft, except it actually worked out for Microsoft...
Secondly, that Peter Molyneux is a comedian. Black and White 2? Since when do you create sequels to horribly flopped games? I have yet to meet anyone IRL or on IRC who has played B&W and liked it still after 2 weeks. Oh, and before people start yelling at me; being horribly overhyped is NOT a definition of a succesful game. (Daikatana anyone?)
Hate me!
Given the current trend of releasing a game engine without much of a gain included (Morowind, Neverwinter Nites, Dungeon Siege), with the expectation that people paying for the product will finish it. I predict the in the future you'll just get a copy of GCC and some artwork when you purchase a game. The game developers will cover their asses by sticking a "some assembly (ASM) required" sticker on the box.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
AI lends it's self to paralell processing.
So, are they moving towards requing 2cpu's for entry level gaming, one for general game play and the other busy doing all the AI in the background.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
if you ask me games were better off in a simpler time... i can never seem to replace the excitement i got when i first saw a naked girl in a video game back in good old "colonel clusters last stand" for the atari. actually i think it was the first and last naked girl i've ever seen, or likeness of one even... hey, she had nice breasts... a whole 4 bit, errr a-cup? who needs grand theft auto 3! /paul
fact: microsoft > linux
It's just like slavery. It's so much easier to go with how things are, and the stupidity of most people is what is holding us back. Let's turn your words around. It's so easy to be altruistic when you have no slaves that you need for your plantation, says the southerner to the northerner.
One big problem is that we want opponents to learn "online" but how many of us are willing to deal with the long learning curves of a lot of AI? Most people want to 1. sit down at a game 2. be challenged 3. maybe see the opponent due something new.
But to do something new would probably require a lot of trial and failure... and a lot of moments where users will think "damn, this thing has gotten stupider!"
So then you can enforce a baseline behavior... which is more static, more predictable and basically where AI is now (lots of scripting, etc).
I guess the best solution would be for developers to come up with a dozen or so strategies and a system for switching/blending between them. Heck, maybe even have the developers run improvements and then upload them to all the users.
Of course "meat" opponents online do that already: they're called gaming forums. The ability of a person to come up with a great strategy and then propogate it to everyone else online may be the most difficult thing to implement in any game AI.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Look this dude up. He's always posting bullshit stories about ex-wives, and he always rakes in the mod points. The last one was that his wife left him because he chose Windows over Linux/BSD.
"The future of computer games is not about reinventing the wheel; it's about improving the engine... I think the trend is going more towards buy than build"
NOTE TO SELF: if I own one of the giant engines of the industry and someone asked me what the trend in the industry is, be sure to answer with the above statement.
come on fhqwhgads
Any game in the Metal Slug series. But my all time fave is Strider. If you haven't checked that game out get MAME and try it. There is something so great about an engaging, fun game that you don't have to commit a year of your life to.
It is not enough to succeed, others must fail. - Gore Vidal
What I'm wondering about is when we'll see environments that are far most plastic -- ie, reactive to the weapons/tools used in the games.
For example, why can't I blow a hole in a door or a wall? Why don't wooden materials in a game start on fire (and continue burning, causing health damage) when exposed to explosive or flame weapons? Shouldn't continued exposure to explosive or high-powered weapons cause some buildings to collapse entirely?
While an obvious reason not to is it wouldeliminate the find-the-switch-to-open-the-door trivial puzzles, think of it as adding dimension to the game -- sure, blow the door open but you might get killed when the ceiling collapses.
I've been playing a lot of MOH:AA, and even some of the demo levels like Stalingrad would be more interesting if repeated RPG strikes blew walls over, if grenades blew open the floor, heavy machine gun rounds went through walls, and so on.
Most games have some trivial things you can "destroy" (boarded up windows, glass panes), but the basic architecture/structures are totally impervious, which strikes me as the single most unrealistic aspect.
I've never understood this, either -- if I can move to one side of a wall or the other, why does the wall have to be permanent?
My other gripe is with health, which should be more easily fixed. I think health should have two components -- an overall 'health' aspect which should gradually go down, and a 'current stamina' value which should quickly go down during rapid movement, climbing, firing of big weapons, but recharge by stopping and doing nothing. The stamina value should impact the health value, as well as how fast you can run, accurately shoot, etc.
I'm not the most exposed gamer, so I only know by the games I've played, but the simple health metrics and static environments have always surprised me.
The article addressed the future of polygons (more passes for bump maps and cool lighting effects)...
...
The current state of realtime-3d is about the same as it was about Quake-1 time. There are more tricks, faster processors, but its still a static world, with limited number of moving polygons. For instance, the detailed and breathtaking city in GTA3 is entirely pre-rendered and static, however to great effect. There is so much potential; arbitrary building damage is currently impossible (except for cheesy texture changes; bump mapping and increasing the # of passes as described in the article might improve the current effects, but won't solve the underlying problem). There is a whole airport of apparently damage- roof uber-titanium-based airplanes in the airport of GTA3 because the majority of the models are completely static. You won't see a modern game with a Hollywood style real-time earthquake or other amazing affects..they can partially be created using tricks, but truely arbitrary realtime manipulation and destruction isn't obtained using the current hardware/software.
The far-future of 3d-gaming is a truly dynamic world, where the game can control every polygon in real-time! The sorts of effects I'm talking about are currently being used my movie studios at hours per-frame
No, nothing in the realm of computing or digital media or even technology in general as we know it today is like slavery. Nothing.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
It has become common belief that the better tech, the better graphics. It's simply not true. There's much more than a technological aspect of graphics in games, there's also something called aesthetics.
SNES era games come to mind. Games like Zelda 3 and Super Metroid had wonderful graphics - they are in low resolution and in few colors when compared to today's games, but the design work is excellent.
I have no doubts that DOOM 3, for example, will have a great combination of technology and design. My point is just that graphics aren't bad just because they're old!
So, considering this, those guys who are building better and better engines are actually going to be helping out both of the above types of game developer, and surely more as well.
I am waiting for the day in the not-so-distant future, where someone releases a game with a story and characters compelling enough (decent engine too) that it causes the larger audience of people to realize that games aren't just for kids. The next thing after that is Sex in games. Wait, that's here already, but wait until it gets even more real.
I used to play a lot of computer and console games but I got pretty bored of the same old thing again and again. Rarely there would be a true gem that I would play even after completing it, e.g. Diablo 2.
Nowadays I tend to play Go (The oriental board game) a lot. I am kind of addicted to it. I am still so rubbish that GnuGo can whip my ass on its max difficulty setting, but it's still fun playing against other people on the internet.
I have found something in Go that I couldn't find in any computer game, but still lacking is the eye-candy you get with modern games. Sometimes I have to get the latest 3d shooter and play it for a bit just to watch shiny things rotate.
graspee
id software has a large following so I seriously doubt it will only sell 20,000 games. The doom and quake series alone have been phenomenal sellers. That being said I believe their take on it, especially the first game with the new engine is make the best engine possible, create a really cool game around it, and sell the first game to the early adopters(hard core gamers). Soon afterwards the hardware will catch up, and then we can sell the engine to a handfull of other companies to make really cool 3d games, make an even cooler game with the current engine while Carmack starts making the new engine.
So, does anyone have any idea on what could be done in 100 passes (besides Carmack). How many passes does Doom III take on todays fastest hardware?
:)
On the topic of polygons, we could always use more! I've heard some graphics guru say that ideally you'd want 4 polygons per pixel. So that a 1024x768 frame should have over 3M pol. I personally can't wait for the day when I could play Doom V at 1920*1080 @ 60fps with over 8M polygons per scene (each having gone through 100 passes) that would be sweeeeet
Dont't forget the unbelievable funny Monkey Island 1 & 2 which were greatly written and sometimes ridiculously hard (how it the @#$@! was I to know you're suppose to use an actual *monkey* as a monkey wrench to shut off that valve by the waterfall to get at the secret passage behind it! arrgghh!).
I remember good old Mario 1 with the negative world and Mario 2 with all those cool boss enemies! Mario 3 was probably the most popular game ever on NES...
This may soud fruity but, you know a game is good when it leaves you with some cool memories of how cool and fun it was even if its through rose-tinted VR goggles...
why run from Vincenzo?
The Doom and Quake series of games are not good examples of retail products. Selling boxes at retail is only part, it may even be the smaller part, of the income. Licensing the engines found in these games is the other part of the income. These games are partly "advertisements" for the engine. That is how they can get away with such high system requirements. The requirements won't seem so steep by the time the products based on a licensed Doom III engine appear.
It's a very captivating article, a nice "Where Are Now" piece. Unfortunately, five years from now, I'd look at this article the same way I look at the game of pong. It's unimaginable what will be possible then.
In sad news today, Run DMC's Jam Master Jay died today at the tender age of 37. Truely a slashdot icon, he will be missed. Gunshot wounds really suck... until you die... then they don't hurt anymore.
R.I.P Jason Mizell (1965-2002)
And that's the truth. It's about having fun gameplay. Nearly every gaming mag is jaded to 3D games now. Luckily, Sega is releasing their 2D Sonic Collection on the GameCube and it's getting good scores. I hope this will revitalize making good 2D games again. The last good all-new 2D game was Castlevania: Symphony of the Night which sold quite a bit. It took what make Metroid so great and made it on the PSX .. It was not 3D, it was a 2D side-scroller and everyone loved it. And it sold a ton! Reviewers liked it, but some ragged on that it wasn't 3D. These people need to die. Horribly. We need to go back to what was so great and urge companies like Nintendo, Sega, and Konami to start releasing NEW 2D games like SNES Zelda, or SNES Metroid, or Sonic, SNES Mario, and Castlevania. THESE are the games a lot of us crave, and we're stuck with the CRAPPY LIGHTING handheld GameBoy Advance to play them.. It's selling so much that this is reason enough that there is an audience for a GOOD 2D platform - NEXT TIME INCLUDE VIDEO OUT or at the LEAST make a cart-add-on for the GameCube so we can play these on our TVs. No one is buying the GameBoy because it's portable, they're buying it because of the awesome 2D games!
Funny thing is that I've seen these same articles and the same reactions for over twenty years know. Ever since Bill Kunkel et al started the first video game magazine, there always has been articles with a prognostication about the future of gaming and how crappy the games of today are.
It seems that the future articles state that: the games will be bigger, faster, have more features and be more realistic and interactive. The complaints seem to be the games of today lack innovation, have no plot or substance and have poor quality. The best articles have a up-and-coming game designer revealing the latest and greatest and a wily veteran designer with a "return to the basics" mantra.
Do yourself a favor. Next time you see an article with the "Future of Gaming!" title, just read the above paragraph which will sum it all up neatly for you and you've saved ten minutes of your life that you can now apply to playing Vice City.
Actually I never have seen it, and I don't think there is enough alcohol to make me want to. You're dead on with alot of the garbage coming out of the gaming world, but at the same time alot of companies are getting smarter. They've taken the whole infinite number of monkeys with typerwritters theory to heart. Most, of the better games, or more specifically game engines use their releases just to sell the engine. On top of that they have been including more robust modding tools so that the amatuer can have a crack at it. Nearly all of the best FPS games and game types have come from the community not from the companies. Get enough people working on anything and the results tend to be very good.
Contra : Shattered Soldier (soliders?) was just released for the PS2. It's still 2D. You still die after being shot once, evidently. I've heard it's fantastic.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
Dude, she'd be like 80 years old. Or even 80 years dead. That's disgusting either way. But I'm not saying you are wrong. Just sick. ;^)
This reminds me of an odd college lecture...
;)
I had a PC achitecture class at my college. When we got to the history of video adapters, our professor explained in graphic detail how each successive graphics adapter (mono to cga to ega to vga) was pushed along by the need for more detail in pornography!
He pointed out how EGA looked lousy, and 256 color VGA was bad for round things with light, such as women's stomach's or breasts. He was pretty into this explanation. He wasn't kidding! This class had about an equal number of men and women.
I would have thought desktop publishing or gaming or something like that would have pushed graphics adapters along. So, maybe based on my professors great theory, maybe its not the gamers that are pushing on realtime rendered 3d graphics, but maybe the porn-mongers. And all this time I thought it was quake upping the odds!
Of course, if you listen to liebermen games such as GTA3 are supposedly pornography.... Maybe I highly realistic, pornographic 3D will be the killer app to get a GPU into every home.
Easy guys, I put my pants on one leg at a time. The difference is after I put on my pants I make gold records!
http://www.the-underdogs.org/ is a great web site that hosts hundreds of the games of yester-year. So go ahead and get the timeless classics like the original Civilization, Pizza Tycoon, Defender of the Crown, Populous, Lords of the Realm, Ultima, System Shock, Eye of the Beholder, Master of Magic, X-Com...to name just a few :)
"The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it." - G.B. Shaw
Agreed. I love the GameBoy Advance because it has some sweet 2D games that are very similar to those of the Super NES. It is a shame that Nintendo did not add any sort of lighting to the thing. Oh well, I still love it.
Metroid Prime looks awesome, but a part of me would rather see something more along the lines of Super Metroid.
If you look at Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Capcom vs. SNK 2, you can see that Capcom did a great job of making 2D games that take advantage of 3D effects. The sprites were all 2D, but the backgrounds and special move effects were 3D.
Even Symphony of the Night (which was great because it was a Castlevania game that had lots
of the elements that made Super Metroid great as well) used some 3D effects to complement the mostly 2D graphics.
Nintendo could make a totally awesome Metroid game using 2D Samus and enemy sprites. They could use 3D effects for the backgrounds and weapon effects.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Replying to fp's is the new punk-rock.
oviously the person whom thought i was trolling instead of making a joke has not seen this video making fun of the apple switch commercials.. (i was reffering to..)
..
http://drunkgamers.com/switch0001.shtml
(drunkgamers.com)
pick your mirror from there.. pretty funny
As I said in a reply to another message about interactive environments. There is PS2 game out in Japan called Zettaizetsumei Toshi. It's getting a US release under the title Disaster Report.
This game is a survival game where you play a person in a city that just got hit by an earthquake. The environment changes around you, true it's scripted but walking along an I-beam and it starts to walk from an aftershock and you quickly leap to another and grab on as the one you were walking on plummets several stories down.
I still remember a preview video I saw of this game where the main character is running down the street and a sky scrapper next to him start to fall over. While the game isn't Hollywood quality, it leaves me hopefully for what is instore for the future.
on the seamier side of things.. i'm still waiting for tim sweeney to announce the sequel to his classic gay sex masterpiece, manhandler.
Well, regardless of whether or not you were trying to be funny, Neverwinter Nights was _never_ intended to be a stand-alone game per se. It was, from the beginning, designed to be a replacement to the traditional pen-and-pencil RPG Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. It was designed to give the players more flexibility in getting together (hey, when was the last time you were able to get 5 or 6 folks together to sit down for 2-6 hours especially when they all work or live 45 minutes or so away?) and the ability to meet new players. Not to mention it was also designed to allow dungeon masters and world builders the chance to show off the big brains, imagination, and creativity they (and, it seems, most of /.) possess (or claim to :-p). They didn't design it for the players to finish .. they designed it for the players to USE as a tool for CREATION and RECREATION (see, can't really have on without the other ;-).
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
This article is about the future of tech journalism. Notice the byline at the end? "This article is the editorial opnion of gamespy network. Sponsored by the Intel Pentium 4"
Obviously, it was a well written and insightful article. And it was about all the reasons that new games will need bigger and faster processors. And Intel paid Gamespy to write it. Interesting, not wrong.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
"or 3rd person, which gives pretty good periphieral vision, but then makes lining up a jump a real pain"
Actually, with 3rd person I can usually get the above-head, looking down shot that I can't get with 1st person (where I look down, and try to land when the platform just sinks out of view so it'll be under my virtual feet). Any 1st person game I've played that has required special jumping tricks has always ended up being thrown away in disgust. 2D are much easier to line up the landings on, and 3rd person is the closest you can get to a fixed plain (straight down, an easy line-up).
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
He's right. It's like asking Colenol Sanders "Which do you think is healthier, chicken or beef?". Whether it's conscious or unconscious, the answer is going to be Chicken.
If your company writes the engines, you want the industry trend to move towards buying your engines.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
Mariah's fans everywhere are insulted. After all, it had some great reviews.
...so it's time to load up X-Com. What an incredible game! The music, atmosphere, loosing half your squad cause you ran them all down the ramp right into an alien ambush...
I loved it. I always named my cannon fodder troops after the people I disliked.
"Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."
All the "future of gaming" articles I'm constantly seeing are about improving the physics models in games and creating more realistic graphics and actions?
Civilization 3 is an extremely popular game with no physics or highly advanced graphics engine, just some nice animated units that entertain you while your conquering Egyptians.
Heroes of Might and Magic is also a very popular game that also does not require physics, and barely has any animation.
Diablo 2 is unimaginably popular and their physics consists model consists of pushing you in the opposite direction when you get "knocked back" and all the characters/monsters die in roughly the same way with similar animations.
I'm not sure about Warcraft 3 but I can't imagine it requires a sophisticated engine that makes the goblins blow up in just the right way.
This is self-serving tripe about first person shooters. There are dozens of genres out there that don't require physics engines to make their games the absolute best. Hell I just want a game that doesn't crash or contain so many damn gameplay bugs; can we have an article about the future of better QA processes please?
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Uhm, there IS a tv out for GBA. Its not a lisenced nintendo product, but it exists.
d uc ts_id=1496&
:)
http://www.lik-sang.com/info.php?category=6&pro
good old liksang.
its a nifty bit of hardware, but its 50$.
no
I loved Zork when it first came out, and spent an inordinate amount of time going through the maze while mapping it out on tractor feed paper, just so I could have a complete map. (damn one way passages). And there were other gamers out there doing the same thing... but not too many.
When CGA graphics rox0red my box0rs, I always had a great time dialing up to my local RBBS and downloading a cool game and giving it a whirl. Computer pinball became a demigod in my household. These graphics brought more gamers into the fold.
The saga continued, with more technology (processor and graphic) upping the ante. Duke Nukem (the side scroller), [I'm going to fork to id now, just like I did in real life] Commander Keen (4 was my favorite), Castle Wolfenstein 3D (learned my first bit of German, then killed Barney), DOOM (absorbed me, frightened me, forced me to bleach my underpants), Duke 3D, Quake (online revolution, I still haven't escaped), etc... etc... etc.
Now I'd like to make a different observation based on that list. Rather than looking at how much the processor and graphics technology improved, I want everyone to consider how much the "gamer" demographic increased. Think of how much those better graphics and game logic made games more accessible to non-gamers.
Increased computer and (especially) graphic technology is what keeps gaming on a growth model. Without coming out with something "bigger and better" on the completely shallow sense, then few *new* gamers will take on the challenge of finding the inner quality of the game.
I too remember the days when Gameplay was king. Now I search long and hard for those games today that still reach those expectations. But as a modern gamer, it's not easy to get my attention with subpar graphics (and sound).
I would say that advanced graphics do indeed equal good graphics, because "good" graphics are graphics that make the game more enjoyable and accessable to the mainstream crowd. Games aren't just competing with arcades anymore, or books, or a spreadsheet. Games are competing with television, movies, and increasingly reality itself.
I love the classic games, but I don't play them anymore. (often, the nostalgia is better than the experience. Ever tried to explain to a new gamer why DOOM was the shit? I bet you had to settle for "this was brand new" or "revolutionary") I may feel a little shallow, but when it comes to better graphics, I say bring it!
Well...it might have something to do with game realism. Making a game indistinguishable from reality is the Holy Grail of game developers and a large portion of gamers. Granted, there's those (myself included, as a matter of fact) that are content playing strategy games like Civilization 3, Alpha Centauri, or MOO. Point is, it's difficult to improve on something that's already good. Civilization 3 can only look so good, there's not much else that can be improved about it. FPS games, on the other hand, attempt to mimic the real world - and, in most cases, fail miserably. That's why there's such an overwhelming desire among the designers to make them look more realistic.
"The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it." - G.B. Shaw
If you're looking for a good side scroller may I suggest Soldat, a multiplayer real-time "Worms" type game, guns guns guns and John Rambo's bow to boot!
Beats Abuse for multiplayer IMHO. Win32 only at this point unfortunately.
Wah!
Tell that to those poor electrons we have slaving away, whipped to faster and faster speeds. They don't even get overtime or even an uptime bonus. Poor sods.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
On page three of the GameSpy article, they get into AI a bit. I wonder if we're ever going to have AI cards like we do now with nics and graphics cards.
Why not? Why not have a whole processor dedicated specifically to the type of algorithmic applications that AI requires?
My
Limekiller
Are the most immersive. Think Zelda 64. Think GTA3. These are games with a lot of action and a lot of attention to detail. The designers made it entirely entertaining to do nothing more than explore the landscape all day long. The attention to every detail is there in some of our other favorites, too... Space Quest I-III spring to mind, not to mention the Z-word, Zork. Even the abstract, near-wordless Out of This World -- a game I'd happily spend hours arguing is the most entertaining game of the last twenty years -- had this quality, full of the little details in the periphery that made playing the game such a successful escapist fantasy.
I remember playing Prince of Persia back in the day on my green monochrome, system speaker sound, POS computer. It was a ton of fun. Then I went over to my cousin's house, who had a screaming fast 286 with EGA and an original 8-bit soundblaster, and you know what? It made Prince of Persia A LOT MORE FUN.
Because velocities should add. Tribes 2 is the only game that has this right. Fire a projectile while moving at 100km/h, the projectile's initial velocity should match that and accelerate more from there. T2 mortars also make a lot more sense than Q3 rockets.
I'm quite sick of shooting myself with rockets in Q3 after taking a jump pad (think Longest Yard).
The game had a style that screenshots just can't reproduce fully... the characters were 2D polygonal models, not sprites, and the animation was superb. Cinematic cut scenes were a novelty in 1991, and the cut scenes in OOTW were fantastic.
The game looked like nothing else ever seen in video game world, broke all sorts of storytelling boudaries for video games (remember how it left it to the user to figure out where the cinematics ended and the game began? Totally immersive) and was a blast to play for hours on end. It had action elements, strategy elements, puzzle-solving... and a compelling, minimal storyline.
good game.
Granted, a good game engine goes further than just putting pixels on the screen, but the future of gaming doesn't rest in the ability of programmers to design wonderful new game engines. It lies in the creativity of the designers to take gaming in directions its never gone before.
This comment was generated by a squadron of trained super elite albino ninja chickens for you.
FreeDOS. Seriously. It even has experimental FAT32 support. And its free. And the latest one is CD bootable. Pop the cd in, load Ultima V to your FAT32 HD (unless you're using NTFS) and play. I believe you can even customize the boot cd and make an Ultima V "live cd". Saving might be a problem there tho...
FreeDOS.
Why not fork?
One thing I sorely missed here was NURBS. A lot was said about polygons, but that's old tech which shouldn't really be used. Just because MS forced DirectX polygons in the business. Little known fact is that Nvidia had spline support on their first gfx card, but was forced to abbandon it as MS wouldn't incorporate it.
What I also missed was more on user made content, more to the point: user made content which finds itself automatically into the game, instead of evryone who wants to see it having to download it. Broadband territory, sure, but essential for the huge worlds being dreamed up. Cheating is an issue, but I'm sure systems can be defined which limit opacity, size, wireframe and other cheats. Just imagine being able to REALLY create your own house/player character/house which you can use in the MMORPG.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Metal gear on NES and even before that on the MSX (?) system was probably on of the earliest game to promote a stealth approach instead of contra-style crazy action.
:D
It was so cool popping in back of a truck that takes youinto the enemy base, or needing a silencer to wipe out enemies while sneaking around them and the cameras while learning their patrol patterns.
I'm not a big action 3d gamer nowadays (lat FPS was unreal tournament) but I'm looking forward to that splinter cell game
why run from Vincenzo?
Civilization 3 can only look so good, there's not much else that can be improved about it.
Civ3 looks good, but there's a lot that can be improved about it. That's why there have been so many patches needed. And the multiplayer expansion, so they can sell you the same game (ahem, what it should have been) twice. And the sad thing is I'll happily buy it twice...
...talk strategy. REAL gamers talk spousal management.
Warren Spector is a very smart man, with many fine accomplishments to his credit. I'm looking forward to his next projects quite eagerly.
That said, his involvement with the first Ultima Underworld game was quite small (Origin's liaison with Looking Glass), and his involvement with Thief, while not actually nil, was extremely close to it. He had no involvement with Thief 2 at all. And, of course, there were a lot of other people who helped make all these projects happen.
Warren's job includes talking to the press, so his name gets out there a lot, but if you actually pay attention to what he *says*, he's always trying to spread the credit around, because he *knows* that he tends to get way more than he deserves. Warren is indeed a true game innovator. But singling him out in this way is both misleading, and an insult to the dozens of other brilliant people who contributed to those games.
Warren is certainly due a lot of credit. But you do him (and other readers) a disservice if you try and give him so much more credit than he is due.
{This is an edited version of a post I've made before -- and doubtless will again.)
I want an MMPORG set in George Romero's universe featuring AI-controlled flesh-eating zombies who grow in number with each passing gamecycle and against whom I and the other players fight a persistent battle for resources, territory and survival. I want it to be as grim yet mordantly funny as Dawn of the Dead, emphasizing both communal action and blood-curdling thrills.
Yes, Resident Evil Online is pointing in this direction, but it's severely limited to small-scale squad play. Give us whole cities with thousands of human players banding together against stiffs. When there's no more room on Counterstrike servers, the dead will walk the earth!
Last time I checked electrons traveled at the same speed on the same medium, always. We are making clocks that switch between conducting and not-conducting states faster but I don't think that electron's civil rigths defenders shold be woried about that.
16,777,216 comments ought to be enough for any forum!
Gamespy: The future is FPS!
Peter Molyneux: The future is god games! Lots of them!
*sigh* Doesn't anybody like adventure games anymore?
-R
As long as these so called developers blatantly ignores and insult the 51% of human population known as females, there isn't going to be any future of them.
How the mighty have fallen. From the beautiful, original, and stable populous, to the eye-candy (though the shape-changing hills are super lame) black and white which can't manage to remain stable with the latest patch. Next time use the APIs properly, guys.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Speaking of OOTW, you do know they made a real sequel, right? Not Flashback, but an actual game that picks up where the other one left off. It's called "Heart of the Alien", and it was unfortunately only released for the SegaCD.
But now it's it's available for free at The Underdogs. Just download, burn to a CD, and run on an emulator (I recommend Gens.)
Enjoy.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
...was one awesome game!
This space available.
The game industry can be summed up as thus:
1) Small company makes great, original game. They are not sure how they did it, and couldn't do it again; most game companies are one-hit-wonders with regards to original ideas.
2) Every other company makes a "me-too" product in order to cash in on the success of the original
3) The original game spawns a genre, in which the only improvements are to graphics, and sometimes (but not often) the AI. New versions force you to buy more expensive hardware. One or two companies dominate, and smaller fish nibble at the edges.
Someone decides that a bunch of game developers have some special insight into the future of gaming, while those same game developers seem to be able to do nothing but make a prettier, more CPU-intensive version of someone elses game.
This is one article I'll skip. All it will say is, "Yah, and we are going to re-write *insert game title here* but with real time vertex lighting, and more polygons..."
Might have already stated this, but PC games have a limited future. There are going to be fewer and far between. The consumer knows it, the developer knows it, and the publishers are causing a great deal of it. Most of the production money is going into the console titles, with less and less firms wanted to shell any cash into PC products. Also, games will come out on the consoles first and then be ported to the pc.
All in all, the biggest thing that PC's have going for them is the mouse. I'm not kidding. Shooters and strategy games will be popular on the pc, but everything else will go console side. The fact that new hardware comes out on the pc first is actually a minus for it. You have a technology pyramid to develope for, with the newest being and the fewest being on top. Not a pretty demographic. Since consoles are fixed and very powerful right now and have large distribtion they're the only sane choice in a crumbling market.
Artificial intelligence is one topic mentioned in the article and begs the question... When will artificial intelligence be importatn enough to deserve hardware acceleration? they make mention of AI SDK and with interactive help agents, game AI and so on, it almost seems that computer intellegence is deserving of it's own hardware. Hell, we can hardly get convincing AI from a multi-ghz multi-tasked processor. It'd sure make things easier for grandma to get tech support for her own machine and stop the whiney gamers from bitching about poor AI. Would you plop an AI accelerator in YOUR PCI port?
Those pieces of crap at Gayspy are all whores. Take
someone elses hard work (quake), and force you to
get a "gamespy id" to dl tf..... Fuck them and fuck
fileplanet.com.....
Whores...
This is completely against OSS and freedom. Oh,
fuck them....
Thanks, Steve
An organization called the Omnigroup , a well-respected Mac and NeXT-era developer has some interesting concepts by way of gaming. For instance, more games that use time as an effect. Or, Dragon flight simulators. Interesting. It's a new perspective.
Then, we have the legendary game of Myst. What's popular about it? There was no killing. There was, originally, no 3-D. It almost could be done in HTML, these days. Minus some transition effects. Yet, aside from the Sims, Myst was the greatest selling game of all time.
The answer is hinted at, in the title. Myst-ery. Yes. It made players wonder. Human beings can't resist a good question. Myst's question was "Who is innocent, and why would the other destroy these ages?" In the end, one got a twist. I don't think there's been any equivalent to Myst. Not even the sequels. It's a brilliant idea. Worlds contained within books. Entire worlds that one creates.
If only a next generation game could allow one to "write" an age and live in it. That'd own. Combine this with the technology as seen at Reuter's. (Search for "Scientists Shake Hands over the Internet"). I don't have the URL, as I saved the file as PDF, so I can watch for when this technology comes out into the public.
Actually WC3 has what looks like a few-years-ago 3D engine as the front end, and you can pan and zoom on your guys as they walk over hills, build stuff and lay into thier enemy. You can even watch your ice-wyrm gain altitude to fly over a wall.
But most of the time you don't bother, as that's not what the game is about. What the game is about is basically the same as WC1, and that's what makes it fun to play. If the game is going well, you don't have time to play with the eye-candy, you are caught up in the action. The 3d rendering of the same action just makes it this years model
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Ah, yes - I can smell it in the air.
Election Time - where leftists want everything to be free, except their own time and work!
Just wait until you graduate - I'm saying that because you sound just like one of those "speshul" college-kids, all full of leftist "let's share!" enthusiasm. "Real Life" will smack you upside your sharply-honed head (i.e.
"pointy") when it comes time to pay for food, a place to live, clothing that doesn't say "LOOK!!! I'M A FREAK!!!" to your new employer.
In other words - GROW UP!
ScottKin
I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!
A night? A lifetime is more like it.
I've been reading quite few 'good ol 2-D games' on here and found myself remembering those hours figurin that horse-jump in Prince of persia..but then I guess its more to do with those days gone bye..that were just GOOD times not just for the games..but coz we were younger, better, and KIDS:)...
One of the key reasons I believe there has been less innovation in games is the current high barrier for entry into DirectX programming. DirectX is up to version 8.1, with 9 around the corner. It is next to impossible to find any decent, competent texts on how to utilize these libraries if you have never looked at them before. Even if you are a competant C++/C# coder, trying to make anything that could be considered as having "gameplay" is pretty damn hard. I believe Microsoft is kind of dropping the ball by not providing super detailed books on the latest DirectX, aimed for beginners, when a new version is released. There should be detailed books aimed at 3DS Max users and Maya users on how to develop and export models and animations for DirectX applications that do not delve into programming at all. I am sure lots of innovative gameplay could be invented if more people who were less interested in fitting the mold could pick up the tools and use them.
The copy protection on B&W caused quite a lot of problems. Try applying a no-CD crack. When I bought B&W it wouldn't run on my W2K system at work (I worked at a games company at the time) without applying a no-cd crack.
I've wasted countless hours while playing Gorilla in MS-DOS. Do you know a Gorilla clone in open source?
Has anyone else played the Doom 3 alpha? (v0.02)
Even in a tiny little windowed screen, on (supposedly) low detail, it made my lowly P3 1GHz & geforce2 combo cry.
I averaged 3 FPS. And that's while there wasn't a monster in sight.
Last night the power went out. Good thing my camera had a flash....
The neighbors thought it was lightning in my house, so they called the cops.
-- Steven Wright
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