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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."
Not At All :)
Then again, I kind of miss Karateka, but Stick Fighter fixed that.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
Is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Nothing else comes close.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
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.
Well, 3d shooters, aside from interface (why does every game use 1-10) actually have some real variety. The problem is in the leaders - Q3, UT, HL, Shogo, Doom, ROTT, Wolf3d - those are all one genre, just some have more multiplayer mods and some have an SP campaign.
If you look a little further you will find some variation. BattleZone (FPS/RTS hybrid), Tribes 2 (Team FPS with some RTS elements), Aliens VS. Predator (really impressive), the new OMF (waiting on the edge of my seat for that) and various other games that are breaking away from the FPS stereotypes.
The main element they have in common is control - move with left hand, aim with mouse. And really, there's more variety then those sidescrollers had.
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!
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?
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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.