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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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
Reactive environments (aka deformable terrain) are fairly difficult to achieve. Recent games have begun to attempt this (Red Faction, I believe), but it's going to take a fair amount of reinventing the technology. This has to do with how BSP's (the 3D map of the environment) work, and that the whole thing would have to be rebuilt any time something was changed (imagine having to wait for the map to reload every time you launched a rocket). Most 3D engines rely on being able to pre-compute where everything in the map is, to cut down on rendering time once the action starts (allowing for higher FPS). Maybe someone who played Red Faction can relate how successful they were with addressing these problems. Further adding to the complexity is that now you have to account for building physics. When you blow away that wall, does the roof come down? How much wall needs to be present before the whole thing collapses? How much building has to be added to each map (that you normally wouldn't see) to accomodate possible destruction? All of this greatly increases processing overhead.
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.
Maybe next time I will leave a disclaimer about how I in no way condone spousal abuse in any way.
After all, we can't have people just telling jokes all willy nilly, somebody might find them funny and beat their wife!
Does the fact that it was sponsored by Intel make its points any less valid? Did Intel pay Peter Molyneux, Tim Sweeney, Chris Taylor, and Stuart Moulder to say "All of you, run out and buy bigger and faster processors, or suffer the consequences!"? Probably not. Every interview has some inherent bias, but this one was pretty decent.
"The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it." - G.B. Shaw
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
With dedicated video cards and dedicated sound cards, it looks as if we already have a dedicated AI card - its called the motherboard. Asus and Abit make excellent AI cards :-)
Revolution = Evolution
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!
...was one awesome game!
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