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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."
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?
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.