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."

Comments

Storyline!

[BWJones]

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?

Re:Storyline!

[a rabid platypus]

Storyline is all well and good, but I hate a gmae that locks me into a plot. Instead of dynamic graphics, I'd rather see dynamic plotlines. I'd much rather shape the progression of the story than be a mere rider on the train that goes down the rail of the plotline. That being said, I believe better graphic capabilities can lead to more interactive environments, which in turn can lead to more interesting ways of changing, or progressing the plot.

Re:Storyline!

[AKAImBatman]

What was the "storyline" fot Mario? Or Space Invaders? Or PacMan? Storyline is only important depending on the type of game. The real focus should be on FUN. If you find the game tedious, it doesn't matter whether it has the best storyline since War and Peace. Thankfully technology can provide us with more interesting simulations, larger expolosions, better feedback, and other adrenaline pumping features.

Bridge Commander is the perfect example of how modern technology makes new games possible. Who *doesn't* want to captain a starship? Now if only other game makers would start building original and fun games instead of recycling the same old garbage.

Re:Storyline!

[MistaE]

I agree with ya dude, but one thing that must be taken into consideration is that developers can't be carried away with a game focusing on narrative too much. I really don't think that gamers would like to play "interactive movies" like Xenosaga (I enjoyed the game, but geeze, the cutscenes were way too long and plentiful).

The trick is going to be balancing the amount of graphical detail with story lines and such. We know that a game that combines the two in just the right amount is pretty damn rare, but I look forward to the days developers get it right.

Personally, tho, I feel that one of the more important aspects is game play. You can have a beautiful game with an interesting story, but if you can't even stand to work inside of the world in terms of control and rules, then what's the point?

Re:Storyline!

[Hogwash McFly]

I'm not directing this at the parent, but I'm fed up of this whole Graphics vs Gameplay debacle. The two are not mutually exclusive people! For most people graphics would be a subset of gameplay. In most cases graphics are part of the gameplay. You see, with more realistic graphics, one can believe that they are actually there, driving that Goliath tank or commanding a massive army, hence the gameplay is improved. Graphics and Gameplay is not oranges and apples, more like clementines and tangerines.

Disclaimer: Good graphics does not a good game make. However, most of the great games have good graphics (compared to what is/was technologically viable at the time - Pong had good graphics, Mario, etc.)

Re:Storyline!

[Randolpho]

You know... Story is great for some games... *story* driven games.

But for games that have any replay value, it's gameplay that's most important. Half-life had a great story, but it stayed popular by offering a great multiplayer game as well. The most popular games, games like The Sims, SimCity, Roller Coaster Tycoon... all of these games have little to no story, and tons of fun gameplay. In short... Story is only important for certain genres.

As for graphics being the end-all be-all of gameplay... Meh. I'll still be playing Solitaire. Of course... with the newest and bestest graphics cards, my SolMark benchmarks will be way off the chart. ;)

Re:Storyline!

[James Lewis]

I hear this from a lot of people and, no offense, but they don't know what they are asking for. The only way to have a truely "dynamic plot" in the way you speak of it, is to have a world you are plopped in to in the way that many single player RPGs are done. In that case, there really isn't a plot, you are making it up yourself as you go.

Ever try one of those "choose your own adventure" books? They tended to be about 200 pages long, but the actual story would be at most 10 pages. It was dynamic in the sense that it gave you several different branches to choose from, but it was still static. You would often times come to a branch you had visited in the past. This could be done with games, but, just as it is with the book, the actual game play time to "beat" the game would be much less. With games, it is worse than a book, because as games get more sophisticated, the content becomes more time consuming to produce, and "dynamic" games become somewhat impossible.

But I have failed to adequetly discuss the main problem with dynamic plots. A "dynamic" plot ISN'T a plot. A plot is by definition a narrative... something that is being told, and not influenced. If you are asking for a dynamic plot you are asking for a game without a plot. That's fine if that is a type of game you like, but you shouldn't dismiss plot driven games as restrictive or unimaginative. Think of all the great movies or books you have read. Did you ever feel that you wanted to influence those in anyway? Why should a game be different? Games offer the ability to make player feel a part of the plot more than any other medium, but not necessarily in control of it. In a game with a good plot, the motivation should be finding out what happens next, just as it is when you are reading a good book or watching a good movie. The only problem is that very few games offer anything better than a different version of the same plot that has already been told in a million games already. What's worse, even when game developers actually do manage to make a decent plot, most gamers are so jaded by the 100 past poorly written games they have played that they just skip through the storytelling sections of the game. They are focused on beating the game, and not playing it.

I think it is silly that game developers, and players, have created so much hype about "interactive" and "dynamic" games. There's only a hand full of games that have been able to tell a fresh, interesting plot since the inception of games, and players and developers are basically throwing up their hands and saying, "well lets just not have a plot, and call it dynamic". Games need to figure out how to create and tell stories effectively before they start worrying about taking on ideas that are as man-power intensive as even a simple "choose your own adventure" type book.

Re:Storyline!

[a rabid platypus]

Good points! Perhaps I should clarify what I mean by "dynamic". Dynamic as in there is a war going on, the actions of my armies influence the direction of the war and the types of missions I can under take. Note there is a general plot: war; however, I can work within the war to influnce and change it's outcome. Just becasue the game changes according to my actions doesn't mean it doesn't have a theme or "plot". It just means I have more control over the eventual outcome. Games that make me run the same missions, over and over are quite frankly, boring. Replay value is nill, and there is no real sense of accomplishment. In the type of game I just described replay value would be pretty good, as there are many ways to win a war. An example of a game that is too well defined would be Mech Commander 2. Pretty and a good premise, but the same missions. It would be better if the missions were generated according to my actions, and if I could do things inside of missions that would affect future missions. Just becasue a game changes, doesn't mean it doesn't have a theme or an overall plot. It just means I can reach those end goals MY way.

And AI!

[metalmario]

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. ;)

at the rate PC games are pushing the market

[the_2nd_coming]

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.

Technology versus Design

[401k]

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.

Where are the "Sound Acceleration" cards?

[Jezral]

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").

Re:Where are the "Sound Acceleration" cards?

[Hogwash McFly]

Well, personally I've never played a game where I've thought 'Hmm, it would seem more realistic if the sound of the rocket changed according to the surface that I've shot it at'. However, I have thought many a time, 'This would look so cool if there was better lighting and a higher polycount'.

Ask people if they'd rather be blind or deaf and 99 percent would choose deaf. The visuals are the most noticeable element of any computer game, because you damn well see them!

I'd rather they mastered photo realistic graphics first before putting any energy into 'sound generaion'. That's not to say I wouldn't want both the graphics and sound to be perfect, I just belive that sound should take second priority :)

Re:Where are the "Sound Acceleration" cards?

[duckpoopy]

It's in the works... Very CPU intensive.

O'Brien, J.F., Cook, P.R., Essl, G., "Synthesizing Sound from Physically Based Motion," In Proc. SIGGRAPH 2001, Los Angeles, CA, August, 529-536, 2001

and other pubs by O'Brien.

Re:Where are the "Sound Acceleration" cards?

[Jerf]

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").

Not to put too fine a point on it, but... we don't know how to do that .

Even what you may have heard of is wild, wild cheating compared to what you describe.

I've given some (intelligent, educated) thought to this issue, and here's the problem. Light is adequately simulated with a line in the macroscopic world. It is, technically, a wave, but it is so high frequency that we can ignore it unless we're trying to simulate at quantum scales. This keeps the complexity down to merely polynomial, and some smart people have figured out how to shrink that polynomial down to a surprising degree.

Sound is not so friendly. Imagine some reasonably complex object, like, oh, a chair. We'll even cheat and make it all out of one material and go ahead and make it as geometrically simple as you like, as long as it's a chair, which is to say, at least three legs and a sitting surface, preferably with some sort of back support. Now, mentally give the chair a tap.

Now, odds are you're not too practiced at this sort of mental visualization, but here's what happens. For the sake of argument, let's tap it on the direct middle top of the sitting surface. Let's cheat some more and assume that one impact is what makes the sound, rather then an oscillation at the tap point. (See how much we're cheating, and we'll still end up with an uncomputable scenario.) So the tap radiates outward from there and starts wiggling the legs. The sound partially bounces off the legs, and goes back, and some of the sound wiggles into the legs. The sound bounces all around in the leg, and every time it bounces off of the edge, it loses some of the sound to the atmosphere and some of it bounces back. By the time it hits the bottom, it's bounced several times. (See, sound can't turn except at one of those boundaries, where it is essentially absorbed and re-emitted.)

Meanwhile, the same thing is happening in the back of the chair. Plus, on the sitting surface, we have reflections of reflections of reflections to deal with, and thanks to the wonders of resonance, we absolutely have to track each and every one of them until they hit a really low level. In a fraction of a second, we have hundreds upon hundreds of seperate waves to track, and they aren't even rays, they are "wavefronts".... imagine a wavefront hitting the edge of the chair at an angle, like an ocean wave bouncing off the beach. It doesn't bounce like a particle, it is two entirely new waves, the one that reflects and the one that continues on.

Basically, we can't even simulate this horrid simplification, the real world is even worse. Sound is highly, highly parallel. Ultimately, sound simulation is firmly exponential and the constants are very, very high. Maybe if those magical quantum computers come online we'll get this, but we'll quite possibly never get it with conventional technology; we're always going to have to cheat.

(One can try to imagine a transformation of the chair where the sound travels in a straight line in some space, but I'll be damned if I know what that actually looks like in real code, nor am I sure that it would be any easier to compute then a straight-forward simulation anyhow. Bright ideas in this regard should probably not be posted on Slashdot and saved for your PhD thesis in Mathematics/Physics/Computer Science; they'll all be waiting with bated breath.)

No thanks

[phoxix]

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

Please Don't

[UserChrisCanter4]

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.

No way

[Have Blue]

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.

this is getting wierd

[Wellmont]

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.

Environment Processors?

[Aphrika]

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...

FF6

[i0wnzj005uck4]

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.