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Cinematic Game Graphics
CowboyRobot writes "LucasArts engineer Nick Porcino has an article detailing what to expect from graphics in the next generation of game systems including the "influence of cinematic realtime rendering, the promise of advanced lighting techniques and high-dynamic range images, the uses of the rendering pipeline, and the future of multiprocessor-based rendering and advanced geometry."
These will allow run-time rendering of high quality backgrounds and characters, ultimately resulting in games that are closer to full-blown Pixar animations, allowing better narratives and more immersive user experiences."
Look, the graphics are important, but I must say. Story, story, story.. That is what is going to make a great game beyond any cool effects and such. This is especially true if games are going to become more immersive and be more "cinematic" in nature. Games like Half-life, Marathon, and Deux Ex were games that succeeded not because their graphics were the absolute cutting edge, but because they had reasonably good story lines. I would still like to see more in the way of character development and story progression, as the immersive environment depends much more on story than anything else. After all, how many of you remember the Infocom games?
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This article makes for interesting reading for developers and gamers alike.
On a more basic level, I can think of several games I have played that really impressed me graphicly. One that springs to mind (that got a mention in the article) was Quake III from id Software. Another game I remember being impressed with was WarCraft 3 from Blizzard (The way it let you angle the camara and sort of fly from an overhead view into tight third-person was awsome).
With all the cinimatics we're seeing in games (both for the computer and the console) I can only begin to imagine what the future holds for this industry, but I think gamers can be sure of one thing. They definatly have something to look forward to :)
-Adam C. Greenfield
Is that Jar Jar Binks will now be able to appear in every game they produce. Imagine Knights of the Old Republic II... with Jar Jar! I'm already drooling like a Gungan in heat.
Nice graphics is a bonus, but if the AI is still as stupid as it was 10 years ago, who cares? We need better AI! It shouldn't be that hard. Take for example Morrowind - no AI at all. Even I can do better than that. ;)
low-impact game players like me are out of date in 3-6 months and can not play games until we upgrade our computers!!
this is insane and why I like consoles.
I mean I had a monster Fusion 3d card from the day it came out and it worked flawlessly until Black and white came out. after that I had to upgrade to a Gforce 2 GTS.
in recent years, the gaming industry is moving to fast for me to keep up anymore.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
To get a good console system, you need to shell out maybe a $150. For computers, you need a damn fast computer and a damn good graphics card. I prefer to play games on my computer, especially FPS's, but the performance of a lot of games seriously lags what it should be considering what an XBox can accomplish with a similar architecture, but slower clock speeds. Maybe it's windows bogging it down, maybe it's the x86 architecture itself with it lag due to backwards compatibility, but I just want to play splinter cell 2, not some realtime movie game. I've always opted for better framerate than more special effects when playing games.
Sam and Max was a great LucasArts game with minimal graphics. George Lucas has a capacity to be wowed by technology and graphics much to the detriment of story -- look at the new Star Wars movies as Exhibit A. Incredibly impressive digital character like Jar-Jar, yet used totally wrong -- as opposed to Gollum in Lord of the Rings. Or look how lovely Naboo is, yet how excruciating is the dialogue between Anakin and Amidala. How painful the plot. I worry that as games become more cinematic, with massive budgets, huge staffs, and herculean marketing machines behind them, the craft of game design and the art of storytelling will get lost. It's not just LucasArts ... Square with their movie and their over-rendered, RPG-lite Final Fantasy games (boring as all get out, to me) is another example of this trend.
Meh, PC gaming will always survive though, and remain the most fruitful playground for original titles, because no publisher or license is required.
Lots of REALLY overdone camera-swoops of battlescenes, taking up lots of player time when they are expecting a chance to actually exert some control the events of the game.
Hey - it's what happened to the Final Fantasy Series, and several other console games once designers got the power. There's only so many bullet-time-style uses of cinema-style art that is compatible with player freedom.
Ryan Fenton
Off-topic, I know, but I've been wondering...
ok, so we've been able render Toy Story in real-time for a while...
But, where are the cards that can generate the sound of one arbitrary object hitting another? I don't just mean positional sound of pre-recorded samples, but really create the sounds from scratch (or an "audio-enabled model").
Yea, but don't forget the industry pumps out plenty of crap as well... you might end up with Leisure Suit Larry Xtreme Edition (*shudder*).
I must admit that I've got the Zork games archived on a CD somewhere (classic series if I do say so myself), I never did finish Zork 2 & 3 and that was 10 years ago!! That would be a trip down memory lane.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Don't make me laugh!
The already short budget allotted to video games will be devoured in graphics production to make graphics that don't look like shit with the new technology. We already see this problem in many games today; too much attention is paid to fanatically high quality graphics that no one really even pays attention to, and very little time is spent on working on the story and making the game FUN.
To me, graphics aren't what make a game fun. The devs might have put a lot of work into the graphics, but IMO the money for game projects can be better devoted to more important aspects of the game.
...cause with all the fans making noise you're not going to understand a word of the story.
neither Doom 3 nor HL-2 are officially "out." Why do I even care what happens after that? Give me that gravity gun, darnit!
"These will allow run-time rendering of high quality backgrounds and characters, ultimately resulting in games that are closer to full-blown Pixar animations, allowing better narratives and more immersive user experiences."
exactly what makes someone think that better graphics has anything to do with better narratives? I suppose that means picture books are somehow better than novels? give me a break...
Wake me when they make a rendering pipeline that corrects for bad story writing on the fly. That'd be useful.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
there's bunch of games, legendary games, GOOD GAMES, that don't have any story at all but that doesn't matter because they're not about the story.
though, just plain good graphics never made a good game, just remember those pre-rendered camera-fly-by games of mid 90's.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I'll be happy when graphical achievement tops out, at least somewhat. I think it's already begun, actually, but we're not quite there yet. When that happens, we may actually be able to get some sort of basic standards going, with games becoming more like books or movies instead of constantly requiring upgrades and more processor power. PC gaming, especially, falls victim to this. I have a PlayStation2, along with a gaming-class computer. The other day, I realized that I paid more for my video card than I did for my PlayStation2--and I spend many more hours playing games on my PS2 than I do on my computer. If we start seeing diminishing returns in terms of graphics, maybe we'll be able to stabilize at one level for a while... it's ridiculous that a $250 card is "outdated" within a year and a half (if it lasts even that long).
I'll just wait till John Carmack has something to say on all of this. Why? because he actually delivers on the technology he speaks of. LucasArts and EA have been going on and on about movie like Video games, and yet have never had much to show for it.
Additionally, any real game player knows that playing the bloody game is *much* better than watching mindless mini-sequences.
Sunny Dubey
ultimately resulting in games that are closer to full-blown Pixar animations, allowing better narratives and more immersive user experiences.
Oh bullshit.
How do better graphics translate into better narratives, or immersive user experiences?
There's always going to be a "Woah!" factor with each new generation of consoles, but people get over it rather quickly. And once they do, you better hope your games have substance or they'll litter store shelves. Permanently.
Can't we just sum this up with : better technology = better games in the future.
While this is great news, id much rather play a poor graphics game that had amazing gameplay than a rendering masterpiece with gameplay that makes me want to rip my hair out and smash something. Actually, no, id rather have amazing jaw dropping woody-making graphics and amazing gameplay!
Hopefully we can put some of that cpu power into some sweet damage models, good ai, and open maps too?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Far Cry! Far Cry! When a new level loads I often spend a few miniutes just drinking in the scene( unless something hulking comes running out of the forest).
Does Duke Nukem Whenever fall into this? I wonder what the game will be like, and what the cut-scenes will be like? I wonder what the story line will be about? But what I am wondering is when it wil actually come out? :P
Just in case the server crashes and burns (like they usually do),I have put up a mirror.p a=showpage&pid=139 is at http://mirrorit.demonmoo.com/r_189/www.acmqueue.co m/modules.php%3fname=Content&%3bpa=showpage& %3bpid=139
The mirror of http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&
You know what? I hope it doesn't get too much better than this.
I'm no technical luddite, but to me, the current graphical position we're in is, I feel, sufficient to do almost anything a game creator would want to do. Realistic shadow and light effects, faces that look realistic enough to convey who the character is supposed to be (in the case of a game like Buffy where the character is supposed to be Sarah Michelle Gellar), explosion and fire effects that actually look convincing, etc.
Would I like more? Eh, I guess it would be cool if a face really could be made up of 15,000 polygons instead of the entire model of the body. The downside is the amount of time and effort required at that point. Gran Turismo 2 had something on the order of 600 cars, each of which were made up of ~350 polygons. Now many of these were nothing more than pallette swaps, with nothing more than a graphics set and spoiler added onto the base car, but many were unique vehicales that had a distinct manner of driving that would interest some people. Gran Turismo 3 bumped the number of polys per car up to ~3,000 (IIRC), and thus bumped the number of cars down to 150, because there simply wasn't enough time for the team of artists to create more than that.
And therein lies the rub: Ever-expanding graphics place a burden on smaller dev teams that will eventually become too large to bear. Gran Turismo's popularity lies in (at least as far as I'm concerned) its realistic (sans damage) physics, almost RPG-ish approach to car collection/upgrading, and the "real" cars. Arguably, such a game could be done 10 years from now in HD with all kinds of crazy effects, and legitimately, the game was done 6 years ago on a 33mhz MIPS processor. But 10 years from now, when someone wants to create something that captures a similar subset of cool features (maybe a fun arcade-y dogfighting game a la Crimson Skies, maybe the new and revolutionary fighting game that introduces some unique quirk to make things fun), they're going to have a hell of a time competing visually in a market where 1,000,000 poly models require a single artist to work for almost a month to make a single character look halfway decent.
My point, thusly, is that we've reached a plateau in graphics similar to movie effects. Lord of the Rings, or X-Men, or Spiderman would suck 10 years ago because of the lack of effects houses and hardware capable of doing justice to the storylines. That burden is off of the film producer, and now they can legitimately tell any fanciful story they wish. The same holds for game developers; outside of being limited to 64 simulataneous players for want of RAM/processor cycles, a game developer isn't really heavily limited in the graphics/physics/speed department from telling his or her story, or producing his or her experience. But at the rate things continue, that developer may be limited in the monetary department because of the expenditures necessary for future games.
Whatever might be on the gaming technology horizon, it doesn't seem as though it will be coming from LucasArts.
to compute AI, collision detection and physics. Rendering Toy Story at 60 fps is one thing, playing Toy Story is much more difficult.
word.
Games aren't going to match Pixar movies until the writing, acting, and animation is up to Pixar's level, and you can't get those from a hardware upgrade.
The next generation of video cards and game consoles will be fully capable of using HDRI in realtime
It's almost 2 years since the R300 release. One of the demos was Paul Debevec's Drawing with Natural light rendered(at 30 min/frame in '98) demo from just a few Sigraphs back was being rendered in realtime on a 9700 pro. Still waiting for the games (Fry cry being the only thing I can think of).
Funny. That is exactly the same what gaming technology engineers were talking about when the first consumer GPUs were hitting the market in the nineties. Meanwhile, the best games ever made by LucasArts are successfully emulated by ScummVM on 486. Cinematic realtime rendering, advanced lighting techniques and high-dynamic range images and multiprocessor-based rendering and advanced geometry my arse.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
A story, when written well, relates the human experience. Ultimately, the goal of the game is to allow you to experience life in an entirely different world. Narrative is not necessary in gaming. Even RPGs have limited storylines. One of the most popular series of all time, Ultima, has a story as a backdrop, but most of the plot is open ended. Frankly, game design is mostly a technical discipline. The game designer doesn't need to work as hard at capturing the imagination of the player.
Cinematic graphics are but one key in the future of gaming. The technical infrastructure of MMORPGs, the AI of NPCs and enemy characters, the usability of the modern video game are all issues. Frankly, I can't wait until gaming finally gets its psuedo-ray-tracing (1 million polygons**) in real-time so we can get on with developing the other side of gaming.
**I admit I only have an elementary understanding of graphic engines.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
Wish game developers would hire some project managers who could actually get a game out the door in a reasonable amount of time.
Still patiently waiting on Duke Pukem, Doom and Half Life...
I don't mean to sound funny in any way but this is a serious worry. I'm frightened by the over hype of Video Game consoles. I'm afriad when I see computers more powerful inside gamming machines that retail for 100 to 400 dollars. Makes me wonder if spending 2000 to 3000 dollars on my computer or 500 dollars on a graphics card and Half Life 2 is worth it. Makes me wonder which industry is Really screwing over it's loyal customers. I know the bottom line is to make money, but damn this seems like pure product assasination. Instead of Microsoft and Sony developing computer security, or working on fixing they're current products they are in a race to strip the PC of every title its ever had:
Master gaming machine,
Master processing machine,
Master rendering machine,
Best priced machine,
Most useful and fun machine.
Hey don't get me wrong, if this means computer's and technology is going to get cheaper and look cooler (see, xbox design) I'm all for it. But if this also means microsoft and Sony can beat the crap out of hardware manufacturers like ATi, Asus, Abit, and others then count me out, I'd rather not participate in the destruction of companies that have provided me with high quality long lasting products in favor of a DRM gaming machine like computer.
Just apply the blur filter. It's computational cheap and makes everything look nice. Pretty much like when beeing drunk (not everything looks that nice when you wake up, though...)
We already have Toy Story-level graphics and we've had them for years... Sony promised us Toy Story-level graphics in real time years ago, and by golly, they released the PlayStation 2 and behold, we did!
Which is to say... been here, heard this. Don't believe it till you see it, and are playing it. And a gentle reminder to the Sony fanboys to take the claims Sony makes about the PS/3 with a grain of salt; they played you for chumps last time, with the worst visual quality of the current generation. (There are many times where even the DreamCast beats the PS/2, because of Sony's poor decisions w.r.t. anti-aliasing.) Don't let them do it again.
This article only touches on with two words what the REAL graphical revolution will be. That's going to be Real-Time Motion Blur. With all the tech heads clamoring on and on about 60+ FPS as some holy-grail, why are we all so accepting of watching our movies at a paltry 24 FPS and deem that it looks more real than any video game? It's because if you ever pause to look at a frame of your favorite movie in action you'll notice that the image is severely blurred and contains imagery that encompasses not only imagery from that moment in time, but from time before it which is interpolated together. This gives an effect of reality far beyond what any high frame-rate would be capable of. The process is CPU intensive becaue it involves heavily processing the current frame data with the 4-5 frames that occur before it but with low geometry counts it could be done on current systems.. When are developers going to get on the ball and get this tech going???
No pixel shader support.
what a worthless post. you mention a 5 year old game (Quake 3) and a 2 year old game as having impressive graphics (i guess you have never played anything since then). uhh okay. thanks for the tips.
then you say that gamers "definatly" have something to look forward to. what the fuck? like we didn't know that.
Most games that utilize this technology now have so much time put into the art that the rest of the game is terrible or the whole thing is only about 5 or 6 hours long and can be beaten with minimal effort in less than a week.
In short, unless there is a great effort by the industry to reduce the amount of effort developers spend on graphics for the same results, I fear that the games will suffer from this. High level shader languages might be key in accomplishing this but it remains a mystery or now.
Sound synthesis is more than just raytracing.
Also, sound echos based on 3d geometry have been possible since the release of the Aureal Vortex 2 chipset several years ago. But that was not creating audio, just simulating its propagation through a 3d space by tracing the soundwave paths.
Progress only hurts those on the cutting edge, everyone else benefits from your lust to have the latest and greatest.
Having said that...I'll be grabbing Half Life 2 the day it comes out.
As studios work harder and harder to provide an immersive graphical environment, production costs skyrocket. Take Shenmue, a game that continues to amaze me with the complexity of its world. You can pick up and examine detailed objects from dishes in Ryu's kitchen to toys bought from vending machines. There was rarely a purpose for this, just an added touch of realism. Features like these helped to make it one of my favourite games, but they also helped to make the creation cost some $70 million (statistics vary)!
As technology advances and visuals on that scale become expected by the consumers, only the richest companies will be able to produce games. This will limit the number of titles being put out, and eliminate smaller studios completely (we see this happening every day).
My hope is that simple, but not ugly, graphics will become a more popular style. Colourful, cartoony designs made of large shapes, and the like. Artistic environments will replace realistic ones. There are plenty of great games that have skirted high production costs by limiting graphical prospects. Chu Chu Rocket, which I was just playing, did that. The graphics do no more than they need to, and as a result, I'm sure it was an affordable game to produce.
I wouldn't want some great puzzler to be rejected by a publisher who doesn't want to spend the money to bump map the scales on its dinasaurs.
While I think the graphics end of games is pretty much set on it's trajectory, I think it goes hand in hand with the environment the game/film/rendered media is set in. As soon as you introduce movement, you introduce physics.
I've always wondered if this is going to yield some kind of environment processor - kind of like a GPU, but one that solely handles physics - physics of liquids, solid, gases, and their interactions. Sure it's nice to write your own, but there's got to be so much overlap between engines it makes sense to model the world properly on hardware. Why not?
I mean, pretty pictures are all very well, but I want to see things dent, explode, flop down stairs/over balconies etc...
As long as you have the option of turning down the detail level on games to play them on older hardware, I don't think you have any cause for your whining.
It is not the industry's fault that you can't afford the latest and greatest bleeding edge hardware. I can't either.
Or do you bitch and whine that a 5 year old Ford Taurus can't keep up with a the latest Ferrari, either?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I am really, really tired with the amount of focus that is put on graphics in video games. Yes the eye candy is nice but I would rather have awesome gameplay with average graphics over awesome graphics with average gameplay any day.
A prime example of this is "Wreckless" for the Xbox. That game was absolutely beautiful. Unfortunately the gameplay sucked. Yes for a good half hour it was fun to gaze at the beauty of the game, but at the end of my five day Blockbuster rental period I happily chucked it back into the return bin and wished for my half hour back...
The point is graphics don't make the game. I play my Gameboy Advance SP more than my Xbox and Gamecube combined. Part of that is because I'm never home, but I wouldn't bother if the games wern't totally awesome. Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga, Metroid Fusion, and Wario Ware Inc. don't hold a candle graphically to the stuff on my GameCube and Xbox, but they're awesome, fun to play games. What happens a few years down the road when 2D games and games that aren't photorealistic are scoffed at and ignored? There are going to be a ton of awesome games overlooked.
I think that game developers need to stop wasting time trying to shove just one more polygon on the screen and start working to make gameplay the best possible. The majority of the games out there suck. It's because most developers are too high and mighty. They would rather make a beautiful looking game with average gameplay than to make an average looking game with awesome gameplay.
Look at Wario Ware Inc. Not just Sprites, but jagged ugly crude sprites that serve just enough purpose to function. The game includes a crude grayscale nose and finger, and you have to pick the nose with the finger in under three seconds... Yet the gameplay is amazing. I've had more fun with that game than the last Tony Hawk release.
The industry could use a few more nose-picking developers and a few less wannabe Picasso's.
That game they released called "final fantasy the spirits within" had lovely graphics, but it more gameplay than the other ones in the series. After all in Final Fantasy X (on PS2), you could only pause and continue, but with The Spirits Within (DVD) you could rewind and speed it up as well, just using your remote control!
This kind of news makes me a little sad.
All this can do (at least, in the short term) is push big-name game budgets ever more skyward, pricing the independent developers further and further out of the arena.
It's getting ridiculously expensive to develop a vaguely "competitive" game for the mainstream market on a non-mobile platform.
For some reason, I massively enjoy manga-esque RPGs on my PC even though I have to put up with bad translations, shoddy console ports, storylines more linear and predictable than ... something very ... linear 'n predictable and plotholes big enough to fly a 747 through. It's just a certain kind of charm, rocking voice acting and cool drawn graphics. Don't need a bloody P5 6ghz, 2gb DDR PC5400 RAM with a nVidia Geforce X-treme 20k 512mb for that. Anything capable of rendering above 4096 colours would suffice, really.
Sadly, being both a PC gamers and European, I find myself severely limited in said games... :(
Hate me!
I only glanced across the front article and noticed that it was focusing pretty much on some claims of Sony, particularly the fact that the PS3 is supposably going to be able to do 1TFLOP. This is thanks to the Cell design, but what does this leave for XBox2 and whatever Nintendo has up their sleaves? I haven't heard a thing from either companies as to whether they'll have multiple processors or not. So...
Are Nintendo and Microsoft bound to lag behind if their next generation consoles don't run multiple processors and can't push near-supercomputer speeds? In short are the two going to have to innovate like Sony or be pushed out of the competition?
...developers probably have an easier time gauging graphics engine and how powerful they are then the strength of a plot. In order to gauge how well a graphics engine performs, you can get hard measurements from benchmarks. To see how good something looks, you can just show pictures to anyone off the street and they'd be able to tell. Now, compare this to story, or gameplay. How do you measure that? While screenshots will reveal how good the graphics are, you can't get something similar for story and gameplay, other than the reviewer describing it with words. Perhaps there needs to be more artistic people in some of these game studios, and I mean people with aesthetics in higher levels of management than the normal game artist positions.
Super Bombad Racing
Start Wars: Bounty Hunter
RTX: Red Rock
Not extactly an industry leader in graphics....
...this is all terribly obvious. Why wouldn't graphics get better, rendering techniques refined and improved and advances in computing not result in more immersive, real and cinematic environments? Did you expect it to return to Mode-7 scaling or something?
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Just imagine how much cooler Tetris could be with cinematic backgrounds and lighting. Or maybe an updated version of everyone's favourite Windows game, "Free Cell." Graphics rule forever!
It's about time high dynamic-resolution imaging was supported in hardware. It's not only simple to use, but makes many many things easier--no more worrying about hitting the 8-bit limit, picking colors to avoid saturation/overlighting, or struggling with realistic compositing. For compositing alone it's priceless. Debevec even has a light stage for compositing real-life objects into computer-generated scenes (instead of vice versa).
I've been working for a while now on HDRI solutions for things like POV-Ray--even if it is a pseudo-solution. (Or you can get the ml-POV patch for more native HDRI support.)
All of this is neat, but if we're talking about console gaming systems, a standard television resolution isn't going to cut it. Remember WebTV and how crappy websites looked, since they were designed for screens with 800x600, 1024x768, or even greater resolutions? HDTV is nice, and supposedly required by the FCC pretty soon. But when is the average console consumer going to be able to afford it?
I find it amusing that despite the indutry push for practical IMAX quality in the home, with controllers that have 35 buttons (you know, twelve isn't enough!), Atari games still sell quite well. My friend works at a GameStop, and he says the 80 Classic Game collection is a big seller among all generations, and it's ranked as 222 on amazon. Have they ever stopped to wonder why this is so???
1. Better physics. An explosion should produce
dust and this dust should float in air and follow
air currents and obscure light. Me having a
crowbar means I should be able to make dents in
walls and (with enough persistence) climb those
walls. When I pick up a heavy object, I should
get tired and not be able to run as fast. The list
goes on.
2. Better AI. Many FPS games keep their baddies
dumb but make them harder to see to make it
challenging. This is no good. Do the opposite
and it gets more fun. The persistent universe
concept really isn't realized very well in games
that try, again for lack of good AI.
3. More realistic sound. It doesn't have to be
phonon-level realistic but it does have to
reflect the media it passes through AND where it
comes from. If I hit a guy in the neck it should
sound different from hitting his stomach. I am
not aware of any game that features realistic
echoes.
4. Much much higher polygon count. This is
especially evident when a game features vegetation.
Take Far Cry. It is supposed to be the newest
engine with all the goodies but you know what,
you'd never mistake any of the plants in that
game for a real plant. The leaves don't move with
the wind - that's physics lacking. Me not being
able to see twigs and identify trees by shape of
their leaves - that's polygon count lacking.
5. One of those days, someone will do smell. That
will revolutionize gaming if done right.
Unfortunately to do smell right you need to get
physics right first because smell diffuses and
rubs off.
So to conclude, wake me up when the above five
are taken care of. Until then, it'll be same
crappy experience and still everyone will go
oooh and aaah with littlest steps forward
(photon counting anyone).
Too much story makes a game suck. They need to seriously CUT BACK on the amount of filler material - like plot, voiceovers - and put in more game.
I was actually thinking that Ulimate's KnightLore had quite impressive graphics (circa 85). We were very impressed. Isometric 3D, in your own home. On hardware that had two years earlier been at best running Rogue-alike games (a brave W pursued rapidly by an evil Z etc.) Finding something impressive has something to do with knowledge of technical constraints and context in which it appeared. I agree with the poster that the Quake 3 engine seemed like a big jump forward at the time. At your tender years you should be outside, climbing trees and riding bikes, no posting to web boards anyway.
And, this is probably the reason why cinematic guys start making in-roads at /.
This is available in PDF here. Interesting read!
"I'm no technical luddite, but to me, the current graphical position we're in is, I feel, sufficient to do almost anything a game creator would want to do. Realistic shadow and light effects, faces that look realistic enough to convey who the character is supposed to be (in the case of a game like Buffy where the character is supposed to be Sarah Michelle Gellar), explosion and fire effects that actually look convincing, etc."
Actually, no we haven't. Not even close. Oh, we've gotten good compared to what was before, but the really good stuff is still beyound real-time consumer equipment. And even professional equipment has to strain. Go look at some of the graphics that are cutting-edge(1). Is it live or is it model? Only a careful inspection will tell you that. Throw in the "raytraced" sound that someone mentioned above, and a PPU (Physics Processing Unit) and we are so there.
(1) I have a small film that has to be seen to be believed. No people, but then people are very hard to do convincingly.
"Would I like more? Eh, I guess it would be cool if a face really could be made up of 15,000 polygons instead of the entire model of the body."
Procedural geometry will be seen more and more. Scales well with increasing processor capabilities. Fractals and waves.
for the love of all things, make the game/engine/whatever spit out exactly one frame per screen refresh!
It used to be trivial on console and DOS-based systems, and now it's not hard on multi-tasking systems either, now that we have 1ms timer resolution.
Video driver writers take note. This needs to be supported at the driver level.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I'm studying the Disney brand right now and Pixar of course came up. We've discovered that Toy Story and such would have had a very high probability of being successful without the CG animation becaus the characters were so strong.
Thus, the point I'm trying to make is that the graphics capabilities do not give you better narratives or stories. They are just graphics.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE graphics, and I can't wait till we have true photorealistic virtual reality, but graphics will NEVER be a substitute for a good story and solid gameplay.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
An RPG were your a silent-film star, trapped in a dime store detective novel. No sound, and no dialog. Body language has never been tested this much.
You're damn right. Accurately synthesizing sound is a fierce exercise in Computaional Fluid Dynamics. On the other hand, I believe game devs will come out with something that reasonably resembles reality, even if it's not physically accurate by a large margin; mainly due to the fact the we do pay much more attention to what we see than to what we hear, as somebody else have already pointed out. Doom 3 is said to have a believable sound engine. humm... does anyone remember Trespasser? ;b
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
It has always been and will always be about the gameplay . . .
when is this going to make its way into pr0n?
You cant fight in here, its a war room!
This document still talks about hacking away at one object at a time, rendering transparent objects last, and so on. That means they're still talking about using a bunch of ad-hoc techniques to fake reality, rather than using raytracing and raycasting to simulate physics.
I won't be impressed until they can manage that in real time.
They talk about the next generation having 'Cinematic Graphics'. Isn't that what THIS generation of graphics cards claimed to have?
DirectX still requires games to use verticle sync which reduces frame rate about 50%. You can try to force it off, but then the game is unplayable because user input is somehow timed to the framerame and mouse sensitivty for example, becomes completely inconsistent.
Am I the only one who has noticed this?
I found the treasure of Monkey Island and all I got was a lousy T-shirt.
All of these new developments share the same flaw: in the end, games are not about what you see, they're about what you DO.
Innovation in graphics is easy, since you know exactly where to go with it. The amount of work required to create the content goes up, but making prettier graphics is conceptually not hard... more computing power + better optimization = better graphics.
To be perfectly honest, I could care less how photorealistic games look. It's impressive, yes. But in the end it's not the important part. If I wanted to see really amazing computer graphics I wouldn't need to play a game to do so.
What about innovation in gameplay? Shinier widgets do not a more fun game make. Unfortunately, innovation in gameplay involves risk... will people like it? And the problem is that because of the higher development costs (due to the better graphics; see also the games story from a few days back), publishers are less likely to take a risk on a new idea... they'll go for what sells: a sequel to an established franchise, a sports game, a movie franchise... something they know people will like.
Games, as an art, are really not about the shiny things on your screen. Yes, you need them, but at this point quadrupling the detail of the picture is really not going to significantly augment your gaming experience.
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
How much power will it draw? How are you going to cool it? The laws of physics appear to present certain obstacles, these are starting to become real problems. But even if you can make this kind of power happen in a game console -- will it make the game drastically better? Will it even make the graphics drastically better? I have doubts.
It looks to me like we've reached a point of diminishing returns with 3D graphics. Each new generation of hardware is resulting in less dramatic improvement to the images we're seeing. Continuing to throw more hardware at games and calling it a "revolution" will lead only to disappointment.
Ha, I say! Ha! This is the kind of drivel I've heard from game industry pundits going all the way back to the mid 1980s. Somehow it never seems to happen. We've got plenty powerful enough hardware today, and advanced enough AI algorithms, if only there was a serious push to use them. Yet, this article seems to be implying that a deeper and more sophisticated story is somehow tied to better graphics.
I was recently looking at screenshots from upcoming games: Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft. EQ2 definitely has highly advanced graphics, from a technical standpoint. Tons of polygons, massive detailed texturemaps, advanced lighting effects, yadda yadda. . . So why does WoW often look more attractive? I think it's because Blizzard focussed on art with a sense of style rather than flogging the technology.
Blizzard are also working hard to create a well-designed, well-balanced game that's fun to play. Sony, on the other hand, are bragging about their voice acting and how cinematic everything is. Is it a game, or is it a movie? I'd like to play a game, please. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned that way?
After the introduction the article dives into a lot of technical subjects that I'm not qualified to comment on. At the end it wraps it with a surprising admission. .
The author implies that this is a problem to be overcome -- probably by borrowing techniques from film and television. I'm thinking instead: Maybe this is the point where we should take a step back and ask if we're even on the right path, if this is the direction videogames (and computer games) should even be going? Is this real progress?
except that we haven't. Wake and smell the marketing bullshit!
I personally react much better to sound than sight. Sight requires I actively be looking around, with sound, I just have to listen. Deer don't look around, they listen for a twig to snap.
I can almost never play Smash Brothers Melee with the sound off. I listen for things like items being thrown (ok, time to dodge), moves with large execution times (ok, time to strike while they're vulnerable), etc. That way I don't have to keep my eye on the opponent at all times, I can focus on using the environment to my advantage.
- spiff
From the article:
...sounds like Machinima to me.
The graphics revolution that is upon us will be a creative one; present work methods are too labor intensive to scale to the volume of data that we will need to create to support the medium. We will need new production methodologies blending techniques from games, film, and television.
You know, with all the recent game developments and my newly-purchased computer, I have to admit that better graphics does, at times, produce a better game. I've been absolutely loving Beyond Good and Evil, and that's in great part due to how immersive and overly-detailed the world is in the game. How you can walk around the orphanage and see little child drawings of the pig-man on the walls -- these are things that most games miss, these little details. However, as a game it succeeds as a whole; without the story and the gameplay, as many other people have been saying, it would have been a failure despite the beautiful graphics engine. (This is the reason I hated the new Prince of Persia: the fights just weren't all that well-thought-out.) Anyone else here remember being drawn into FF6 (FF3 US) for extended periods of time? Or how ultimately playable FF7 is even now, despite the fact that its graphics are severly outdated and it always runs at a low resolution with a low framerate? Right now I'm living in Japan. I have Beyond Good and Evil, the new 4 Swords Zelda game, and FFXI. Wanna know what I'm playing most, though? The original Zelda on GBA, second quest. That should say something about the current state of games and immersion.
- Cloud
What's the game industry's incentive to make all these high-detail, high-requirement games? I don't see anything but a very small subset of gamers (most of which seem to pirate most of their games anyway) who give that much of a damn about this and that new graphic feature anymore.
If anything, it's a pain in the ass and disliked. It's almost always the case that at LAN parties there's someone or multiple someons that don't have fast enough systems, enough memory, or fast enough video cards to handle the game that 75% of the people want to play. So the result? The game doesn't get played.
It seems to me that they'd get more of a client base if they were to make stories that are immersive, and gameplay that is immersive. I can only take so much repetitive running around and shooting. Give me some variance to that, and I'll be happy - as will many other gamers that are similarly bored with games.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
much. Unless you are trying to simulate reality I don't understand the continued obsession with improved graphics. With the Dreamcast hadn't we reached the golden age where any game imaginable can be created? What about using stylized graphics like Jet Set Radio instead of realistic graphics? Would The Simpsons be funnier if it had more realistic drawings or real actors instead of voice actors and simple drawings which look less real than Disney's Snow White from the 1930s?
Look how anime gets away with simple "graphics", but is able to quickly communicate emotions. Same with "South Park." We need to be more worried about what we do in games and how we do it (look at the success of novelty items like the eye toy) instead of only trying to push visuals.
I understand the excitement over new graphics when they enabled new games. Pong->Space Invaders->Pac Man->Super Mario->Street Fighter II->Super Mario Cart->Virtua Fighter, but I just don't see the point any more.
Here are three screen shots; which looks most fun? :) But even the fake far cry screen shot, which won't happen until far in the future, doesn't really look more fun than the real far cry screen shot.
fake far cry
real far cry
gish
Personally after watching the gish movies I think it looks the most fun
I have yet to find a more immersive game than Tetris. I guess other games are less immersive because their graphics are far worse.
Oh, wait a second, I know why: because the developers spend too long on stupid graphics.
(Of course, I should mention exceptions to the rule, such as Viewtiful Joe, anything Mario, and Half-Life...)
Whoa... Pretty...
"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." - Denis Diderot
Indeed. In my opinion they got it totally wrong.
You're right. I never understood this whole Star Wars hype, but I guess that the despotism apotheosis propagating agenda is more important for Lucas than giving us good games (or movies, for that matter).
I would kill for even a regular Ultima 8 (or even 7) with Doom 2 (or even 1) engine. I believe such a game might totally kick arse, mightn't it?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
C-64 Paradroid. I still play it today using an emulator and I enjoy it more than any of the monster 3D first person perspective cinematic tours de force that these modern game writers keep churning out. It doesn't look so cool at first glance but it offers compelling gameplay.
And I'm fairly certain that the most frequently played computer game in the western world is solitaire.
Now wash your hands.
The most immersive game I ever played was the original NES Metroid. The most immersive I've ever watched someone play was Resident Evil. In both cases, I think the sound and gameplay/plot had everything to do with it and the graphics very little.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
Massive parallelism is helpful to a physics engine, as are lots of fast FPUs. (Preferably double precision. Single precision in a physics engine requires workarounds for the low precision, if the world is at all big. You lose precision when far from the origin. The PS2 has single precision floating point only, which is a headache.) You do lots of 4x4 matrix multiplies, so the same kind of hardware that appears in the geometry-acceleration part of a GPU is helpful. There's not much use for the back end of a GPU, with the frame buffers, Z buffers, and fill engine.
The hardware requirements for a physics engine look much like those for a number-crunching supercomputer. That's not surprising; the calculations are quite similar. Amusingly. the biggest supercomputer today, the Earth Simulator in Japan, has a architecture that looks vaguely similar to a PS2.
that's all I wanted to say really.
Yes I know Factor 5 did a good job, but they are the only ones. Don't you DARE bring up Knights of the Fucking Shitty Plot and Uninspired Gameplay. Game of the year my ass. More like game Microsoft paid Gamespy to say it was game of the year.
SW
Everyone seems to be saying "but what we really need is better gameplay (and better stories)." I for one would like to post that I WELCOME THIS CONTINUED IMPROVEMENT IN *GRAPHICS*. People are making the mistake that developers have to pick ONE of good graphics, sound, storyline, or gameplay. But they are NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE! You're looking at the game the whole time you're playing it, graphics cannot possibly hurt the gameplay. Nice graphics create better immersion -- which ties into the story. Focus on the graphics AND the gameplay. It can easily be done. Obviously the graphics programmers and artists are going to be working on the graphics, but the other members of the team (like designers) will take care of the gameplay, sound, and story. Don't go the way of Nintendo and believe people are not interested in technological innovation. They are, and they are ALSO interested in gameplay, story, and sound. We can have excellence in all four.
You realize that you don't have to spend that much money to play HL2.
Everyone runs around acting like they need TEH UB3R COMPUTER to play these games.
The fact is you can play the game, you just can't turn on every crazy detail.
I've heard Valve talk about several times that HL2 will scale very well down to low-end systems. While you can't play it on a Voodoo 3d card, you can't play a PS2 game in a PS1 console.
So no, they're not screwing the customer. The customers are just generally too stupid to realize that, higher numbers don't mean better automatically, and that games can be enjoyed without every whizbang feature turned on.
Can't wait to see that one happen.
w s w s w s w s w s w s
Don't mistake lack of talent for genius
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
...the game I'm most addicted to at the moment, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, there's absolutely no dynamics in the plot whatsoever. In fact, there's only one path at all.
A good story needs some guidance. Nothing is more boring than a freeform game where you keep doing the same tactic, as is usually the case with "dynamic" games. Usually they involve leveling up until you're strong enough to advance said plot. If you're not ready for that yet, go back and explore some more "dynamic" plot (read: sub-quests) until you do...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Oh but you can!
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http://slashdot.org/articles/04/05/03/0147232.s
Yes, my first thought was that the new games will let you run around shooting things in higher-resolution. Wow.
I still think Sam and Max is a great game, but wouldn't call the graphics "minimal". That's a term I'd reserve for, say, King's Quest I or Maniac Mansion. Sam and Max actually looks pretty good if run with ScummVM with one of the scalers turned on.
forget cinematic! I want Legends of Kesmai back!!! :) :)
I recently re-played Final Fantasy X for the PS2. Still a pretty game to watch. The CG sequences are excellent. But the one thing that stuck out like sore thumb was the spotty delivery of dialouge in that game. From a critical perspective, you can see how this game could have been so much more immersive and intresting if the characters didn't pause during are in between sentences, sound synch was perfected, and maybe a bit of touchup for the script. The speech pausing in particular destroys the mood and frustrates the gamer.
Overall, FFX as a story was pretty good, with some obvious problems. Those problems could be solved if the developers concentrated more on story delivery than making superior graphics. But we all know what sells mass volumes of games.
I am optimistic that gamers will begin to demand better story-telling from the game makers after playing games that do an exceptionally good job of it (example: Sly Cooper, Jax and Daxter 2, Onimusha 3).
EXTRA: Onimusha 3: Can you belive that opening sequence! Dear Lord, that ROBOT team is good.
Go Gusties
[Off topic]
To the 400 guys who answered "graphics are not important X are more important!" the article was about GAME GRAPHICS only. Thats like a discussion where someone announced "lets discuss about the best books of our era" and answering "TV sitcoms are more important than books!". Try to stay on the actual topic please.
[/off topic]
IMO one of the biggest problems with today graphics is that new "features" are always treated as "only available in the newest most expensive 3d cards" per example effects like ambient "glow" (I cant remember the actual name right now) realtime shadowing and even normal mapping can only be done if you have certain version of a GPU to do it. This is in fact not correct, some of this effects are possible (even at a good framerate) without such hardware, the new hardware only makes easier to pull the effects thanks to it becoming a feature or due to some exploit. Per example the ps2 does not feature antialiasing, yet several developers have found how to "emulate" the effect with several methods, some of them very apropiate. John Carmack's "realtime shadowing" in doom 3, does not necesarily use vertex shaders(although it is vastly improved using pixel shaders) , but a very ingenuitive and optimized algorithm wich requires the stencil buffer (available since the riva tnt2) and prince of persia SOT "glow" effect (which has a pc version that wont run with anything below a ATI 9200) can even be done without any vertex or pixel shading at all by using bitmap overlays. (is slower but a good processor can help to keep the framerate) It seems sometimes that card/hardware manufacturers can be a bit intrusive in deciding which features are to be used and which ones are not in game developing. or perhaps game developers should ask themselves if having a certain feature in hardware means theres no way to implement it without it.
Kudos to ID who are developing doom3 with a geforce 1 minimum spec, and to the Ut 2004 team, which needs a riva tnt2 as a minimum spec, we know that wasnt easy and we apreciate it.
Additionally you have to remember theres no "look good" button in max3d or photoshop, a great artist can create stunning visuals even with lesser hardware and smaller poly count, while a crappy one can make a single cube use up to 6000 polies and still manage to make it look awful. Good artists are more important to graphics that any hardware feature (even one as impressive as HDRI)
It would be interesting to hear Carmacks Opinion on this topic. Unfortunately I think he's rather busy adding doom 3 finnishing touches.
Go ahead MOD my day!
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