On Next-Gen Consoles And Technical Innovation

Thanks to GamesRadar for reprinting an Edge feature discussing likely technical innovations which the next generation of videogame consoles may introduce. The piece discusses the impact of massively parallel computing on consoles, noting it's "...been plagued by a lack of good development tools, and with most developers taking three years even to get familiar with PlayStation 2's brace of vector units, this must be a real worry." It goes on to discuss graphical effects, from post-scene processing ("allows subtle ways of changing the look of the game in terms of brightness or colour saturation") to depth of field ("The biggest question remains whether developers will find any useful in-game applications for such technology.")

Comments

Appalling article

[EnglishTim]

That article has to go down in the hall of fame of utterly crap EDGE articles. (Hey - it's a *big* hall...)

The author demonstrates a complete lack of understanding about consoles, and many of the techniques he talks about are possible and in use on current-generation consoles.

The concept that until the PS2, consoles had merely been a subset of the wider PC industry is laughable.

No, it seems to me that basically after the recent editorial walkout at EDGE they had a guy with practically no technical knowledge about consoles who happened to know a guy who worked at Climax, and they were desperate for content, so he wrote this bullshit article.

Of course, as with all EDGE articles, they never identify the authour, which in his case, is probably good for him.

Re:Appalling article

[bigman2003]

Not to mention the fact that one of the two POST PS2 consoles was the most direct copy of a PC ever in the console business. So it is quite possible the author does have his head up his butt.

Re:Appalling article

[cgenman]

The author doesn't help his case by saying that now consoles are diverging from personal computers, what with IBM designing all of the processors and ATI designing the graphics cards. If you go back through the GamaSutra archives, you'll see that parallel processing is nothing new in gaming systems... The PS1 had two main processors, a DSP, and all sorts of other chips to utilize. Should I even mention the architecture of the Sega CD or 32X? Or anything with an Fx chip? Or the myriad of games that scheduled the audio chip for processing duties? The 68000 paired with a z80 twin architecture was used in both the Genesis and the Neo Geo.

The console has always diverged from the general purpose computer... Far more in the early days than now, when the computer vs console wars were described as "a brain without a spine versus a spine without a brain." Ask an emulation programmer some day how similar the architectures are. I hate to use the words "kids these days," but sometimes I wonder if gaming magazines are still hiring straight out of high school, with people who are still totally clueless about what happened just a few years ago.

He doesn't help his case any about saying that videogames are all about visuals. There have been many stunningly beautiful games that played terribly and faded into the anals of history. This, of course, leads to the total lack of discussion about the gameplay potential for the graphics tricks that he mentions. Wide dynamic range lighting means that when someone shines a bright light source at the player, the player cannot see what is happening near that light. It also means that you must get close to dark alleys to see what is in them, etc, etc. Depth of field allows you to mask things you don't want the player to see just yet, like pop-in or enemies that will come into play later.

While it is an interesting article from the standpoint of looking to future directions the graphics aspect of programming a game will take, it is badly marred by these inaccurate, sweeping generalizations. Honestly, if I didn't know any better, I'd doubt this guy had enjoyed playing a game in a long time.

Graphics and story

[MoonFog]

Check this statement out: Despite the howls of anger this statement will provoke from musicians, AI specialists and physics fanatics, at the end of the day videogames are all about pretty visuals.

This was discussed here on Slashdot a week or so ago, and fortunately the statement is only partially correct. I see nothing wrong in game makers creating cool graphics, it's not like when a new game comes out to my playstation 2, I have to get the latest geforce card to get maxfps. By all means, the game makers SHOULD make use of the capabilities that lie in the graphics card.
However, there are fortunately still games that rely on a great story. Finaly Fantasy would have been half the game it is if it weren't for the story. Gameplay and challenges are also important parts of a game. That statement is nothing more than BS, like most of the article.

Re:Graphics and story

[Mr. Piddle]

Finaly Fantasy would have been half the game it is if it weren't for the story. Gameplay and challenges are also important parts of a game.

Perhaps due to a luxury of huge budgets and big talent, Final Fantasy games tend, on average, to be very well-rounded: graphics, story, music, characters, etc. I say "on average", because I had a lot of trouble connecting with FF8's characters, for example, but the games are generally top-notch otherwise.

Final Fantasy X really bridged the movie and game industries, and the depth of its story rivaled even that of most novels. I could wish the story were a bit less linear, but what they made was so impressive that I soon didn't mind while playing.

Re:Graphics and story

[MoonFog]

I agree, you are off course correct that the makers of Final Fantasy have a luxury that many game makers don't have, money and a long history of game making.
I have played FFX for more hours than I like to remember, and it's IMHO the greatest game ever created, mostly because, as you say, of the fantastic story. The authors of the article on topic here claimed that all games are about is graphics, and I very strongly disagree with that. It is an important factor, but would you really play a game that had no story, sucky gameplay but fantastic graphics for more than a couple of hours ? I sure as hell wouldn't.

Re:Graphics and story

[CashCarSTAR]

It's about balls. For your example, Square has them, and they are solid brass.

Seriously. Gamers appriciate when chances are taken, and risks are made. FFX was a huge risk for a lot of reasons. The game was a radical departure from pretty much everything else out there. Instead of a big global world-spanning adventure, they did something that felt much more compact and personal.

And games are much more than graphics. The graphics are merely a tool, something to be used in order to create something special. For me, storyline, character, controls, and something I call "The Viewtiful Factor" (In other words, give me lots of cool shit to do and see...something more and more games have in spades these days), combine to make an enjoyable game.

Re:Graphics and story

[CaptMonkeyDLuffy]

Funny, I thought FFX was actually a good example of 'let's stick to the current trends' rather than some major departure from the norm.

While not true of all recent games, there has been a trend to less gameplay, more cut scenes. I'd argue that Square has been one of the companies leading that trend, and that FFX was just a simple case of following that formula.

Then again, I must admit I'm not the biggest fan of Square... They make good games, but I really think they are by far the most over rated developers in the business.

Future?

[niff]

I've always been able to predict upcoming technologies on video cards and gaming consoles by looking at 3d modeling software like 3dstudio. New techniques you see show up there, will show up as hardware solutions some years later.

Things that are normal in 3d software now but are missing in hardware rendering are things like decent refraction, area lights, global illumination, caustics, raytracing. We can expect to see at least some of those implemented in hardware somewhere in the future.

In defence of the article

[Andy_R]

Maybe you are thinking PC = x86 machine, the comment makes sense if you consider PC to mean simply 'Personal Computer'. Until the PS2's coprocessor-heavy architecture arrived, all consoles have been similar in architecture to personal computers - a single general purpose CPU doing all the work.

Considering the Xbox/GC as the last of the monolithic designs where clockspeed was the answer to everything, and PS2 and future consoles as multiprocessor dsp farms where memory bandwidth is the answer to everything makes a lot of sense to me.

As for the techniques mentioned being possible with current consoles, that's true - but only in the same way that the last of the Nintendo games ventured into 3-D - It's possible by clever programming pusing the envelope, but it's not what the next-gen N64 machine was designed from ther ground up to be capable of.

Re:In defence of the article

[Snowmit]

As for the techniques mentioned being possible with current consoles, that's true - but only in the same way that the last of the Nintendo games ventured into 3-D - It's possible by clever programming pusing the envelope, but it's not what the next-gen N64 machine was designed from ther ground up to be capable of.

What?

I've read this paragraph over six times and the only way I can make it make sense to my tiny mind if be replaceing "Nintendo" with "Super Nintendo" and "N64" with "Super Nintendo".

Nintendo ventured into 3d games late in the SNES lifecycle (Starfox) and the N64 was designed from the ground-up to be 3d. That's why all of the launch titles were 3d and the controller came with an analogue stick and the logo is a 3d cube carved to look like N's.

Re:In defence of the article

[IntergalacticWalrus]

What the hell are you talking about? All consoles predating the XBox and Gamecube were co-processor-heavy architechtures, with slow main CPUs, fast/feature-full graphical sub-systems and dedicated sound CPUs. The PS2, with his many co-processors, is not much different from a SNES, which had a puny 3.5 MHz CPU, a co-processor dedicated to sound decompression and tracking, and a complex set of logic chips that took care of (at that time) complex graphical operations like scrolling layers, alpha effects and rotation/scaling.

Re:In defence of the article

[NanoGator]

"It's a pity that slashcode isn't advanced enough to allow editing for typos."

Actually it's designed that way on purpose. Once you say it, it's out there, can't change the past. That's why they gave you a little button marked 'preview'.

graphics, graphics, graphics.... aggh!

[jago25_98]

Technical Innovation:

ABILITY TO SEE SOMETHING ELSE OTHER THAN IMPROVED GRAPHICS!!

Aggh this drives me mad! Please, please I don't care if it looks good, you only bother with it because pretty pictures market well.

[/semi-troll]

Ok maybe it is a troll but would you still mod down if it's an important point to make?

Most wanted innovation in gaming

[MMaestro]

First of all, I take this article with a grain of salt IMMEDIATELY.

In hindsight, PlayStation2 marked the transition.

*cough* The Dreamcast blew away the PS2 in graphics and innovation (at least in the beginning) so other than the use of DVDs to hold data and built in DVD player, the PS2 was nothing more than a modified PS1.

Second of all, the article misses the most important factor to note in modern games. Load times.

Ever since the PS1 load times in games have annoyed the hell out of gamers. The Dreamcast and the PS2 both outright failed to solve the issue, the Gamecube resorted to mini-discs, and the Xbox fell back on precaching large portions of the game at a time. What I really want to see (or not see) is a decrease or a removal of load times in games. Being forced to stare at a "Loading" screen is no fun. It takes me out of the game. That said, get rid of the things. I won't even pick up Final Fantasy Anthology or Chronicals because I'd rather play my SNES originals just to avoid load times.

Re:Most wanted innovation in gaming

[Bagels]

How about do what Metroid Prime did on the 'Cube? It avoided load times by loading rooms as you passed through the doors (actually, as you shot the doors to open them). From the user's perspective, zero load time.

Re:Most wanted innovation in gaming

[unclethursday]

This worked, for the most part. But, sometimes it would be apparent that Metroid Prime was loading the room, when the door didn't open immediately. Granted, it would only be a second or two before it would open, but you knew it was loading.

The only other times the game is obviously loading is when you are on the elevators. The cut scene of going up/down the elevators is there to hide the "Now Loading" screen.

Overall, though, Metroid Prime is a fine example of how one can mask load times on disk based media, much like how the original Soul Reaver on the PSOne and DC did by making you walk through tunnels in order to stream the new levels in front or behind you. For all intents and purposes, both games had no load times, in the perspective of not having a "Now Loading" screen come up.

Re:Clue meter-- low

[Svenheim]

The XBOX suffered when you think about production costs. Yes, a very powerful console, but Microsoft is selling every single XBox at a huge loss. Of course you couldve made lot more powerful consoles than those out today 5 years ago, if you didnt worry about the cost. In the long run, no company (not even Microsoft), can afford to sell systems at that kind of loss, which I think is part of the reason why XBox2 probably wont be shipped with a hard drive.