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On The Trendiest Concepts In Game Design
Thanks to the Guardian Gamesblog for its post discussing some of the 'trendiest' concepts currently infusing the world of videogames. The author notes: "Like every other entertainment sector, the videogame industry is prone to sudden fads and fashions that seem to spring out of nowhere, take the scene by storm, and then disappear only to be replaced by more advanced technologies, or better ideas, or something really silly", before pointing out trends such as 'sandbox gameplay' ("Sandbox is the new 'non-linear' - a favourite buzzword for open-ended game design... the dole office is full of unemployed end-of-level bosses") street racing games ("All the big driving genres - arcade, rally, F1 - have been done to death, so developers, already fascinated by crime and edgy urban themes, have turned to street racing"), and 'historical accuracy' ("Once the preserve of sad PC strategy titles, history has become a major videogame theme.")
Not all trends are bad! Remember full-motion video? That sure revolutionized the game industry.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
Most of the items on the list seem to be the inevitable result of our current progress with respect to graphics technology...we are advanced enough for moderately complex real-time physics, but not so advanced that we can swing real-time ray-tracing, etc.
I'd say the real trends are things like episodic gaming, MMORPG's, the leveling treadmill, the limits of player interaction, etc. In short, the things that we actively choose, not those that are dictated to us by the limits of our technology.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
Wikipedia to the rescue
Of course it's going off the rails. How else is it ever going to fly?
Is sandbox really a good term to use for video games? Maybe it's just me, but when I think of sandboxes, I think of something that's gritty and irritating to my eyes, usually full of crap, and that after you're done playing in it you haven't accomplished anything.
Bump mapping is used to make a surface look more 3D by making the small details get light differntly (like the grout between bricks). It gives the illusion of depth. The problem is if you view across the surface, it's still just a flat surface.
Normal mapping actually changes the geomety of the object when it's rendered. So while the effect might end up looking the same (probably not, but they could be used for the same kind of thing), when you look across the surface, this time it's not flat, it's actually 3D.
Now that's a lousy way to use it if all it does is the same as bump mapping. Do the little tiny bumps (like on bricks) really matter that much? Wouldn't bump mapping be faster? Yes. But normal mapping lets you do more. You could edit the normal maps on the side panels of a car in-game to "bend" it so that it is dented because it was hit by another car. You could use slightly different normal maps on all the soldier in a game so that they are all the same model, but seem to have slightly different faces, body structures, etc. It allows some interesting stuff, which bump could, at best, hint at.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The biggest buzzword at the annual Game Developers Conference this year was "Innovation".
Actually you're half right.
Normal mapping isn't doing the geometry stuff, that's displacement mapping. Something that isn't yet available (I don't think) in hardware (No, not even on a 6800 GT ULTRA SUPER DUPER). This is not to be confused with Virtual Displacement Mapping, or Holographic Mapping, or Virtual Holographic Displacement Mapping (all of which are the same thing). They involve offsetting texture coordinates based on the camera position and angle to make textures APPEAR as though the actual geometry is being displaced, when in fact it isn't (see the cool Unreal Engine 3 video for an example).
AFAIK normal mapping and bump mapping fall under the same category. I think there is a "simple" bump mapping based on just a single value (heightmap), with normal mapping being an extension of that.
Someone with more knowledge than I can expound...
Bump maps are textures that use only black and white (for lower / higher values, respectively). These textures give a small illusion of depth on an object, like the previous posters example of the grout between bricks. It cannot be used for anything large, because the lighting information is very basic.
Normal Maps are an extension of bump mapping in a way. Instead of using simple black and white images they use the red, green and blue channels of a color texture to capture the directions that varying surfaces on an object face. A "normal" is the direction that a polygon faces outward, and the term Normal Mapping comes from the Normal information contained in the texture. When a light hits a normal map it takes into account the direction that some surfaces were facing on the original, higher-detail model, and shades the pixels to create the illusion that the flat surface is actually composed of many different faces.
Both Normal Maps and Bump Maps use flat polygons for the most part (or as low detail as possible).
Displacement mapping is actually used in games today, but usually in the form of height-maps for terrain. Displacement mapping will probably never be used on actual models for the most part, because unlike Normal and Bump maps it can actually create more polygons when applied to a surface, and therefore would not be a good idea for fast and efficient real-time rendering.
I hope that answers your questions and I hope I got everything right.
Ever hear of a game called Tresspasser? It was released back in 98 (same year as HL), and had a far more detailed "physics engine" than anything at the time. Only problem is, the game was a horrible, buggy, steaming pile of dog feces (i've seen it on more than one "worst games ever" list). But physics were semi-possible back then.
The crappy thing is, Tresspasser kind of scared developers away from doing physics engines, lest they pull another tresspasser and completely fuck up their game. It wasn't until recently (starting with UT2003, AFAIK) that the big boys of the industry said "no, we can do this right". Suddenly, physics is a buzzword and a 'new thang' instead of being 5 years old and still evolving.
I suppose the only good news is that detailed physics are probably here to stay now, and should get better as the industry keeps fueling their evolution.