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Localizing High-End Games for Low-End Machines
CowboyRobot writes "Intel engineer Dean Macri has an article at ACM Queue listing the challenges in designing PC games that will run on very different processors.
PCs vary widely in their performance, and if game developers design only for the high-end, they limit their market.
The article lists specific tips on how to guarantee that even old slow machine can run new games, such as 'the number of triangles used to create the trunks and branches could vary based on the available processor and graphics hardware performance', 'replace the clothing on characters in a game with actual geometry that separates the clothes from the underlying character model', and for simulating ocean waves, having low-end systems rely on basic sine waves while higher-end machines use more sophisticated methods."
This would require an incredible amount of engineering support for practically no payoff.
Next generation games like Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 will allegedly scale to meet these sort of demands. And as long as the engine and development tools are written with scaleability in mind, the challenge should be far less for the game developer (assuming they can afford the engine!)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Why would they bother optimising games for low-end hardware? We all know that software drives sales of hardware.
Hell, look at most of the hot games coming out: they have marketing deals with the graphics card makers.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Instead of trying to do super-duper processor detection degradation stuff, let the player choose levels of detail and such-like.
That way he can choose whatever's important to him... if he's a big fan of realistic trees, let 'em have it at the cost of slower AI or whatever.
The Army reading list
The keyword is "graceful degradation". Take away the elements that contribute to the "wow factor" for the power user but the low-power user won't really miss.
Of course there's a flipside to this -- people with low-end machines invariably crank up all of the settings and then complain when it runs at 5fps (this happens all the time with current games, many of which do have detail sliders setting various levels of detail. Some games, like Operation Flashpoint, let you set a desired framerate and it varies the geometry complexity to try to maintain it). Alternately if the visuals are totally automatic people will complain that it looks like crap on their machine but looks great on someone else's machine.
Okay, so imagine we've got a FPS set on the water (just for kicks, call it Waterworld). You have the sine wave water and I have the sophisticated uberalgorithm water. When you shoot me, your client-side model for water thinks I am in spot A, while my uberalgorithm water thinks I'm in B. You shoot me -- but from my perspective (pun intended!) you couldn't have seen me.
/render/ the smoke.
Sounds like about 10 million "he hacks!" calls waiting to happen.
I remember people turning the smoke off in their Halflife clients because they wanted to see through it. At one point, my graphics card driver wouldn't even
Let's try an alternate approach: let's market the games for the sophisticated gamer and that will get more people to buy better machines. Not everyone is rich, but (see above) It's the Graphics Card, Baby!
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I remember when games were about gameplay.
I swear this is the biggest fallacy ever.
Have you actually gone back and played those old games recently?
For me games are very much like old comedy shows and jokes, because they're old, I've heard all the jokes before. In games, I've played all those old school games, I've heard the joke done to death and only gain enjoyment from the reminiscence.
Game genres have gone through evolution after evolution, each generation extracting and developing upon succesful ideas until we are at the current state.
Look at Pole Position, compare it to Outrun, and then Burnout, the evolution is obvious. Each game has kept the same gameplay fundamentals and expanded/improved upon them. Of course the increase in hardware performance has helped, but I would say that if the hardware was available at the time of Pole Position was made with none of the history of the racing game, we would have seen Pole Position simply with flashier graphics.
Instead of forcing me to make individual choices about every single optional CPU or GPU taxing feature, try and detect the capabilities of my computer and give me the best picture quality I can get at a smooth framerate.
That way I don't have to study the impact of every single optional feature... if my computer can handle two pixel shader passes, 100 MB of textures, and models which have been decimated to 10000-20000 triangles each, I still won't have to know what a "pixel shader" is before playing.
I dunno...I'd still rather play Pong or Frogger than huge overdone games.
Extremely obvious and predictable appeals to nostalgia seem to be really popular with mods on Slashdot.
You'd rather play Frogger?
Then my question is, for every person who claims they'd rather play Atari or any given classic system than a present day one, how many serious gamers who own both ACTUALLY spend more hours per week playing 1970s/1980s games than post 1990 ones over long periods.
It's often said, but it's an extremely few who can back up their whistful nostalgic ponderings by citing that as the absolute reality of their gaming behaviour. Heck, I'm a serious collector of TI 99/4A parts and games, owning and coveting some virtually non-existent or prototype carts, and even I spend far more time on my newer systems than on the TI 99/4A (although I played Parsec for the TI 99 a bit this afternoon).
I don't play it because it's better than my newer systems. It's not because it can compete. It's nostalgia.
I don't have a problem with nostalgia, but I do contend against the idea that something like Super Monkey Ball 2 or Metroid Prime can be outdone in general by something like my favourite TI 99/4A games. The technology simply did not allow all the things that a new game can allow us to do. And some of those new thing are fun, and immersive. So I refuse to believe that absolutely all new computer/gaming technologies and techniques developed since the 2600 have been completely irrelevant to the advancement of gaming entertainment, and that, Frogger being just as much fun as present day games, we may as well just go back to coding CGA games in BASIC for all it matters.
The problem is that the hardware has gotten faster and now the developers can slack of more on their coding because 'by the time the game is released, there will be faster hardware available'. The progress in game 'speed' has nothing like kept up with the hardware speed. How else do you explain that the likes Descent and Terminal Velocity with their full 3D features ran just fine on a 486/66, and ran perfectly on a Pentium 66 with the full textures and details cranked up? Hardware speed has gone up by a factor of at least 50 (possibly even close to 100) since the first Pentiums were released. How come we now need this new high-end hardware to run all the new games when the technical advances have not been all that great? Original Quake worked just fine in 1024x768 on a Pentium 66. See how far you get with the recent first person shooters on hardware like that. Bottom line - hardware has long become the replacement for the skill of developers. How else do you explain the difference in resource consumption between, say, Windows 98 and Windows XP? Does it really do sufficiently more to justify a 10 fold resource use increase?