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The Evolution Of Games
Thanks to Reality Panic for pointing to a new IGDA-hosted article comparing evolutionary biology to the organic process of videogame creation. The author compares the Cambrian era, an "early period of developmental simplicity for organisms", to the '70s and early '80s for games, with both containing "...a number of... oddities with few or no modern descendants". He goes on to liken the possible wiping out of the dinosaurs with "the impact of a giant meteor" to "...the arrival of the Sony PlayStation... [marking] a mass extinction of 2D games", and concludes by suggesting that, like the evolution of fauna and flora, "...periodic outbreaks of originality, and the corresponding extinction of certain game genres, are useful to drive the form forward, but the conservative intervals between these events are what serve to sustain."
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The meteor was the market crash in the '80s. Atari, being the fat, lazy, unadaptable dinosaur that it was, could not stand the ensuing cold. The NES and SEGA were the small mammals of the time, and that's why they survived. PS1 was an offshoot of SNES, a direct decendant of the NES. I am not sure even nature is as fickle as the videogame market, though.
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Games are starting to look simular even though vastly different. The reason for this? 3D
Think about it, back in the day you had single screen games. Everything took place on a single screen, and you had to move your sprites around to make a game happen in different and unique ways. Nobody would accuse PacMan being anything like Space Invaders but they each left you in control of a single sprite on a single screen. Eventually clones of nearly every good game happened, but it was new so it was overlooked.
Then came systems that could actually SCROLL their screens. You had Mario hopping around, you had 9,000 games that required moving right and beating up the bad guys (i.e. Double Dragon, Batman) and you had some zooming space ships. Zelda came along and was different, but before long that was coppied. So now we have scrolling games.
Eventually came true 3D. We are on a convergence. A big convergence. No longer is coding an engine from the ground up for each game a substainable buisness model, or even necessary. Compare Alice to Quake III. I would say they were remarkably different. Alice is a platformer, Quake III is a first person shooter. They both run on the same core engine.
Right now there are different 3D engines for different types of games, but there's becoming less of a reason to seperate engines between game types. It wont be long until one engine can be a first person shooter, a platformer, and a racing or flying game. I would venture to say it's already possible, Conkers Bad Fur day for example embraces all of these elements at one part of the game or another.
The reason this is percieved is the better 3D engines get, the more games are going to look alike reguardless of what core type it is.
As computers/consoles become more powerfull, have more RAM, and the engines become more refined the blurrier the line between game types becomes. I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. Sure, not every game has to be 3D, but we've crossed the threshold of the 3D age and theirs no going back.
The main difference I see between a racing game and a platformer? The racing game uses less detailed polygons because at high speeds it doesn't matter which leaves more memory for bigger worlds. A platformer moves slower and doesn't need as big of a world so more power is put into fine details.
How long will it be until a game comes out were the main character is able to interact with the environment on a platformer level, jump in a vehicle (or on a mount) and drive through the same world at high speeds with great detail? I can't put my finger on a particular example at the moment, but I'm sure it's already happened. Halo seems like a good example for now, UT2K4 is supposed to be simular.
Innovations not dead, reinventing the wheel on a regular basis is. Personally I'm hoping for incremental engine upgrades. Wouldn't it be nice if the UT2K3 engine would work with the game code from the orginal UT? I wouldn't mind the better rendering on the old game. Wouldn't it also be nice, if for some reason you haven't upgraded your game library for a year or so, then someone gives you a nice shiney new flight simulator for Christmas. You put the game in, decide it sucks, but all of the sudden since you got a game with an updated engine all your old games suddenly look better?
The day is coming. This convergence is a GOOD thing. Don't bitch about an empty gas tank when somebody GIVES you a car.
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Though there are few examples of 2d games being made on the home consoles (some of which are absolutely incredible) even more significant are the vast sums of money being made by 2d games in the portable (game boy, cell phone, pda) markets. 2d isn't just still alive, it's the next big thing.
Lots of people talk about using Direct3D for 2D stuff--getting free hardware transparency and linear transformations as a bonus.
Not to mention most of the other features of current 3D cards, such as lighting, shaders, etc, although the impact of that sort of thing isn't explored much in 2D.
It's an approach that has a lot of aesthetic appeal, because art designer knows exactly what camera angle their art will be viewed at, and can do a better job optimizing for that angle/distance.
It also offers the developer better control of what's displayed on screen at any one time (in other words, there's a definite limit to how much is visible at once in a 2D game, whereas once the user has control of the camera or the camera adjusts to the user's viewpoint, you lose some or all control of how much may be drawn on screen at once). In 3D space you spend a lot of time designing to keep the user from being able to get to a point at which they may see too far, so that the polygon count is within a reasonable range. Of course, with newer engines and more powerful computers this has become less and less an issue, but it still is kept in mind by good level designers.
On the other hand, there's more changed in the transition from pixels to polygons than just an added dimension. Pixels are discrete, blocky, integer-based objects, while polygon meshes exist in approximately continuous space. When playing a pixel-based plaform game, if the game is designed properly, you can tell exactly when the character is standing on the platform and when they've walked one pixel too far. I don't think any polygon-based platform game yet created has had that level of exact precision. A friend of mine even suggested voxels would be a good idea in platform games for this very reason.
Good collision detection and a fixed camera view can fix a lot of the issues with platforms, though. Many of those issues come from camera angles that may distort the viewpoint or may leave the character in the way (in 3rd person views). Maybe it would be too costly to get pixel-level collision detection from polygon-based graphics, but it could be a good excuse to get designers to shy away from their need to force players to utilize pixel-level accuracy in their jumps.
Voxels are good when you have time to do the render, have a lot of space (and more importantly volume) to render, and so on, but with all current 3D cards being optimized for polygon rendering, I don't think you're going to see voxel engines taking off in gaming (though there are a handful of them out there).
-PainKilleR-[CE]