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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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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low-impact game players like me are out of date in 3-6 months and can not play games until we upgrade our computers!!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
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.
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").
...cause with all the fans making noise you're not going to understand a word of the story.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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...
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.
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?
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
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
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.