Slashdot Mirror
What if Game Graphics Never Aged?
An anonymous reader writes "If you've heard of Procedural Synthesis, you already think it's amazing. It's been used to create some extraordinary visuals in tiny packages, like .kkrieger, which is less than 96 Kilobytes big but still has graphics that look like like a modern PC title. Beyond that, there's even more that Procedural Synthesis might be able to do; what if your old video games never aged, never looked out-of-date? Imagine putting Halo 2 into your Xbox 360 only to have it automatically upgraded to look like Halo 3 in graphical quality. This article examines the unexpected way that Procedural Synthesis might impact gaming in the generation after the Xbox 360, PS3, and Nintendo Wii."
When I read this Slashdot article, all the rules of software design came flooding back to me. Low coupling, high cohesion, encapsulated complex structures, all that jazz. Before you even started to program a complex FPS game, you might start by carefully separating the layers and keeping things like two dimensional surfaces rendered to be de-coupled from other things like the AI of the enemies. Separate the garphics from the rest of the gameplay. I completely buy into the possibility that games can be designed well enough to abstract their graphics to a point where the same exact graphics package can be used in even several different types of games.
.kkrieger's procedures.
When I read this article, it sounded like a classic example of someone going nuts with the design patterns that encourage encapsulation and separation of layers to improve modularity. Like someone had actually put in a lot of effort to the game to reduce the amount of effort that will be required later when new platforms and libraries come out for the game. On top of that, the imagery doesn't come from a data file but instead is derived on the fly from a library of procedures--something easily achieved by the strategy pattern. The funny thing is that if other games have abstracted their graphics packages sufficiently, they should be able to rework the libraries to be procedures instead or maybe even build adapters to
Why don't we see this more often in all games? Because I think most games today are disposable. They're built for one console or platform with the intent of only running on the current version of Windows or Mac and with no interest in coming out with new releases that support new hardware or software. They do this because games are construed as novelty software that expire as the user tires of them. Games like WoW or other MMOs might bring about a shift in the way game designers spend their efforts. Maybe games will start to take a longer time to develop but last a hell of a lot longer than they traditionally have?
My work here is dung.
this would eliminate much of the need for new versions of games. Unless game developers intend to move entirely to the subscription model, this will never happen.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Super Mario Brothers, Duck Hunt and Rad Racer still look just as awesome as the day I first got them!
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
Screw Halo 2 in your XBOX 360, I want to put Duke Nukem in my 360 and have it play with Duke Nukem Forever graphics.
Seems like upgrading the old games would be a waste of time and costs for the company. Why would they want me to upgrade Halo 2 if they're trying to sell Halo 3? Maybe if they charge for the upgrade...
There's all this hype on graphics and technology, but the heart of any game is still (and always will be) gameplay. Sure the games of old look "crappy", but in many cases they provided a great gaming experience. I for one hope that we just get to the point where graphics are real-life quality and we can focus on gameplay. Just my $.02
http://religousfreaks.com/It would be nice if they incorporated some of this technology into the Wii. The old games are great but they would be even better with the graphics turned up to today's standards. I've played with a few emulators that added Anti-aliasing to old SNES games and such. The games looked a lot better. I recently bought a new computer, and hooked up my old copy of Descent 3. It still looks amazing. This is because I was able to turn up all the effects to the max. Whereas before, I was stuck with everything at half. I'm sure the same thing still holds for video games. Most people can't play new games at full res and full effects. However, in 5 years when they buy a new computer, it will be able to pull it off easily.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
.kkrieger is certainly a feat of software engineering (pretty much anything .theprodukkt puts out is) but procedural synthesis can only go so far. When you get to elements of the game that should be static (such as specific characters) then a static model would probably be more efficient than an algorithm to generate the same.
Of course, I could be (and probably am) wrong.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Why don't we see this more often in all games?
Speed. Running algorithms to generate every damn thing takes a lot more processor time than loading a pre-rendered object file. Disk space is dirt cheap compared to processor cycles, so the appropriate trade study is made....
As the DNF team found out is this ageless technology is stillborn. The law of conservation of twilight zone posits that any attempt at software immortality will come with unforeseen downsides, one of which is that your timeless software can never come out of alpha.
FarCry has been upgrading the graphics for some time now just by changing the engine to support newer graphics chipsets.
---- aut viam inveniam aut faciam
That's an interesting thought. The article makes it out to be a bit like a magical cure, but some aspects of it sound good to me. You can often improve the "wow" factor by tossing in "more" of something. Denser foliage; more of the tiny rocks that make up the detail; and so forth. Procedural generation would mean that these wouldn't have to be placed by hand, so this could make it easier to scale the visuals with system power. Similarly, particle sprays are often done procedurally, so being able to tweak those "up" to create more complex fireworks for mysterious future hardware could also work.
:)
Some games are still played for years after they've fallen behind the curve on graphics; this might mitigate the future ugliness, adding longevity to a popular title. Keeping gamers interested in (and talking about) your game makes sense, whether you'll be producing different titles in the future or will be focusing on sequels.
Ultimately, though, my hope is that algorithmic content generation will bring game development costs down for indies. Maybe I'm dreaming.
_______________________
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We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.
There's no way that video game companies are going to take the time to do this for every game, especially considering the fact that only some parts will be upgraded while some will look like the shitty blocks they were originally. You will definately see some of the classics re-released with this technology because it will be a way to actual increase revenue and profits without being too much work. People want to play classic games like Zelda with modern graphics, I doubt there will be the same interest in 'Echo the Dolphin'.
Despite what the article says, everyone sees the same trees in Oblivion. The trees were generated using procedural synthesis (SpeedTree) *once*, and then the whole shebang was saved as a huge map and put on the disk. It's an example of the opposite of something like kkrieger, which puts the math on the disk and lets the end-user's machine to the generation, rather than the developers' machines.
The grass, on the other hand, is randomly placed and might qualify. About all that could happen on better hardware in the future is "more grass," though.
It's just your perception that newer-flashier eye candy is superior and preferable to the simple, eligent graphics of yor. Honestly, Pac-man rendered with crisp graphics would actually look tawdry, losing it's original charm.
Was there already an article about Microsoft releasing classic arcade games such as Frogger and pac-man for the XBox 360? It's in the news anyway. All it really needs is PC emulation as the games have been on PC's for ages.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The portrait of Dorian Duke Nuke'm
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
From talking to artists I'm acquainted with, one major reason procedural rendering is moving so slowly is that it's difficult to exercise real creative control over it. All you have to work with are the inputs, and their linkage to aspects of the output may not be clear. It's very hard to tweak a procedural generator with any kind of strategy; all you can do is poke around at random values until the result looks pretty close to what you originally had in mind. Compared to the precise pixel/texel/vertex-level controls artists are used to, it's a step backwards and won't make game development easier or faster.
Exult was a good example of "procedural" "growth" of a game.
Ultima VII was a 2D RPG. Yet, all objects in the game world have height. One guy at Exult hacked up a version of Exult that runs Ultima VII in 3D mode - basically, mapping all 2D tiles around cubes as described by their dimensions and height data.
The results were quite interesting (buildings looked kind of good, creatures and many plants and natural formations not so good, so they are being replaced by 3D models).
But it is a good example and exercise in extracting more detail from the game than the original developers intended or envisioned.
I've often wondered if the bloat in modern games is somewhat intentional as a deterent to piracy. If a game is 96k (or 300 megs for that matter) it is easily moved, stored, downloaded etc. whereas a game that is 4Gb takes much more effort, bandwidth and energy.
what if your old video games never aged, never looked out-of-date?
Yeah, you don't really need complicated technology for that. All you need is competent art design.
Graphics that age poorly, paradoxically enough, mostly only occur because of an overemphasis on graphics. Or rather, they stem from trying to make graphics that look "impressive" rather than graphics that look good. A game which impresses because it has more polygons than anything you've ever seen before, or some fancy new graphical special effect, you'll love it the first time you see it-- but that's because it surprises you, it's better than anything you've seen before. But that won't last; five years from now it won't be cutting edge anymore, cutting edge will have moved onto something entirely other, and the game will fail on its own merits because it can't dazzle anymore. A game which impresses because it has legitimately attractive artwork doesn't have this problem.
Super Mario World still looks gorgeous over ten years after it came out; Katamari Damacy, simplistic even for its day, will still be visually great ten years from now.
But if you don't have that spark of imagination and cohesive vision... well, it doesn't matter, with time you're going to look dated, aged, and crappy, and no amount of fancy technology will help you-- no, not even if you use "procedural" as a buzzword. If anything this procedural thingy will be even harder to make ageless than normal, becuase it will take a fantastic amount of artistic vision to design things such that the procedures scale to hardware you don't even have around to test on.
the gaming industry finally stopped pushing bigger/better graphics as the magic cure-all for a stale market?
For those who want to try the 96 k game kkrieger : :http://kk.kema.at/files/kkrieger-beta.zip
Download here (beta version)
Wincopy
I think MMORPGs would improve immensely if users had greater control over the environment. Nowadays, the paradigm seems to be to hire quest designers who regularly churn out boring, unoriginal quests.
If avatars were allowed to amass power (i.e. labor) and wealth, they could build castles and form alliances to protect their wealth. They could dig dungeons and spike them with traps and seed them with moster populations. Of course, the greater the treasure, the greater the incentive to find it, and the greater the incentive to protect it, leading to ever more creative dungeons, more daring heroes and quests.
To carry the thinking out of the dungeons, if you have Kingdoms that control wealth, and royalty that commands armies, then you make for the kind of human drama that makes for interesting quests. People would form alliances, and break them and double-cross each other. Someone would try to make an ally look like an enemy.
I think for this to work, there needs to be some kind of lego-type feature for building new, creative things. You start with a basic, finite set of elements, and allow for their combinations to affect the world in novel ways. Put them in people's hands and you will witness creativity you never thought possible.
Basically, make the world creative, generative, and put people in charge, and you will have sustained, user-created content.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
We'd still be playing Half Life modds..
Nethack still looks as fresh and crisp as it did 20 years ago.
The whole concept of procedural creation in games has not been fleshed out as I would have hoped. Procedural methods can do much more then make great FPS graphics fit on 800K. Way back in 1986, I played a game called Starflight. Starflight used fractal algorithms to create a pretty diverse universe with about 200 star systems and 800 planets. You could land on and explore each planet. Close up. Let me say that again, you could land on each planet, collect it's life, find unique artifacts and rove your little tank around for hours. All of this fit onto two low density 5 1/4" floppies. Now, the CGA graphics and restrictive CPU power did no favors. Things got pretty repetitive, but the enormity of the game went unmatched for about 12 years.
In reflection, and now that I better understand it's design, it seems to me to be a microcosm of the real universe. You have a set of rules and a set of elements and by happenstance, (not by human hands in 3ds max) worlds are born.
For a long time, we've been stuck with with character models, human built maps, plot-lines on rails and worlds confined to the imagination of the story line department. Procedural graphics and world creation could make the universe out of a few megabytes.
There are a few games here and there that use this idea. Here is a game in development using procedural graphics and fractal planet creation: Infinity
"Console companies have gone ot such great lengths to make sure their API is so specific that we have to spend a year porting from one console to another, that we'll just come up with a way to make it all never change."
At least half the design time of a console these days is making sure it's HARD to port games to another console, so that it will be an exclusive title, and they can make more money.
I fyou think Microsoft hates things like OpenGL, you've never seen the fires of hell hatered that people like Sony, Nintendo etc have for anything that makes game development easier.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Though I have come across many 'makes' of super mario , i was stunned with one version - Its just 64 kb & it looks as good as the orginal nintendo console version!
That was when I came to know a whole nice looking game can be packed into 64 kb!
Wincopy
I know this will be marked off topic, but where can I tell people that there are errors in the RSS feed. It worked great till a few days and No I get to a wrong page with several articles.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
This game... created in the 1990's looks as good as ever. And in fact, recently went to a true 3d environment ("Spring"). All those tiny 1/2" objects were 3d objects from the beginning. As the 3d cards got better, the game got better.
Likewise, the AI engine and other aspects were forward thinking- table based, programmable and over the years the AI for the game and units and maps have all only improved with age.
It is the *only* game that I purchased back then that I still play and enjoy.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Man, I wasted like 4 whole seconds clicking on the parent!
More than likely, the money for creating the newest, coolest thing would drop off and you'd get fewer players in the field, and far fewer games. Technology is good, standards that allow technology to expand is better. But money drives it.
The games are disposable today. I don't know how many I own or have rented and played, but never finished - or just never picked up again. Yet again and again I go out and get these asinine games which I will not remember in the future, but merely use to burn up time. I think i'm going to start going to the library to get books more often, at least I will gain something from there, rather than wasting my time on pointless games. It's cheaper and healthier that way.
The gaming industry is like medicine, there's no money in the cure. Return customers are where they make their bucks.
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
...but let's say that it does. Why on earth would a company want to sell you a game that will never start to look dated? If Morrowind looked like Oblivion, a lot of people probably wouldn't have bought Oblivion. This goes double for games that lack any sort of story or plot, like basically any cookie-cutter sports title ever made.
So, in short, don't expect this to happen. As long as graphics continue to improve, game companies will use that to sell you new games, not improve the old ones for free (or even a small cost).
The game "Messiah" did this, released March 31, 2000. The character's poly counts would increase if you had enough hardware. Supposedly when the game was released, no video cards or pc's existed which could show the game in full detail. It would add detail until you get 30fps and try to keep it smooth. Of course, it didn't help that the gameplay was boring. Anyways, the problem with procedural generation is readily apparent, as can be seen using this game as an example. Gaming hardware changes, and the programs would have to be re-written to take advantage of this hardware. Sure, you can keep adding in polygons or textures, but procedural generation won't write a more detailed or efficient shader. It won't help with the physics or AI either. If your AI is handled by a neural net, you may be able to scale it up and down based on the hardware, however with neural nets there is an efficiency ceiling which is hit around 1000 nodes. Anyways, I think that the game Messiah was maxed out around 2 years after release.
Procedural synthesis has been around for quite awhile in the demoscene. These demos are computer programs that have been specifically engineeered to impress in both sound and graphics quality?
Check out FR-08, circa 2000, by Farbrausch...this demo goes on for nearly 15 minutes at 1024x768 graphics that certainly blew away anything of that time, and its 64KB.....64KB!!
Download Here[pouet.net]
Also, see FR-025, circa 2003, this "popular" demo absolutely blew my mind when I first watched it.
Download Here[pouet.net]
Heaven Seven, circa 1999, the demo completed by Exceed, is a journey threw time with beautiful textures and graphics. This is also a 64KB demo, so beautiful...
Download Here[pouet.net]
The demoscene is alive and well, publishing the most beautiful and interesting works of art in modern days. Even the largest demos (~50MB), blow away HL2 and any other 4GB+ game. Check these out at http://www.pouet.net
How would EA sell you the same game again next year if they couldn't at least point to the better graphics?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Betrayal at Krondor
Some of the best RPG fun that can be had on a computer. Graphics are good enough, gameplay is just well... AWESOME!
Where did I put that spider... I want to poison my blade again!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
One word: MAME
As proof, here are some Duke Nukem Forever screenshots:
.
I'm too dumb to capitalize on this idea so go ahead and rake in my would-be millions, fellow Slashdotters.
3D games look great as-is, but they look even better with antialiasing, right? But AA is a huge tax on the GPU, slowing frame rate considerably.
So why have the GPU do AA at all? Why not put a dedicated antialiasing CPU into monitors? GPUs would push polygons and shaders which is what they do best, and the monitor could use some kind of algorithm to pretty-up textures, reduce jaggy edges, and smooth fonts. It could work in games and on the desktop. Maybe it could scale up a video card running at 800x600 to appear smooth at 1600x1200.
What say you all? Feasible?
they cannot create art. And graphics don't make a game.
This will never do. No company it their right mind would deploy a game that is capable of keeping up graphically with technology. Doing this effectively extends the playability of a game right on up to the infinity threshold.
Limiting cash flow like that would be the corporate equivalent of chopping of your own two legs.
Didn't Diablo (released in 1996) dynamically generate dungeons? Was that "procedural"?
no comment
Does this mean I cam make my paddle look like Serena Williams??
Firstly, there is the question to how much effort a company would want to put into making a version of their game that gets better with age. Using current models of "create a game, sell a couple hundred thousand copies, then make another game" it doesn't really make sense. The key is that the graphics can improve as hardware improves, and the only sorts of games that really come close to fitting that sort of lifecycle today are the MMOGs. Like I wish Ultima Online had graphics that had improved over time. The game is almost 10 years old and is largely unchanged. Other games (like the soon to be serialized Half-Life 2 and SIN series) might also benefit from improvements, though HL2 is already incorporating improved graphics with each new episode (according to the developers commentary). Secondly, the procedural systhesis method is much more compute intensive. They use as a prime example the forest scenery in Oblivion. As we all know, Oblivion is a performance-killing game on the PC, and the Great Forest part of it is the slowest part by far. So if you go too far with procedureal synthesis today, your game can turn out to be a real pig. So there's a definite balance that you have to strike between performance today and upgraded visuals tomorrow.
Imagine a 2D game like this...pop it in your GBA, yay 2D! Pop it in your 360, yay 3D! The possibilities, the possibilities (too bad this is most likely NOT possible [the 2d-3d thing])
If history repeats itself, why can't we study the future?
It already does that to a limited extent. Doesn't look like Halo 3, but it definately does look quite a bit better than on the old XBOX.
"pn001.exe has encountered an error and needs to close"
Perhaps all games are really 96k and the rest is error handiling? this seems to be optional with this version.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
What is with this constant fear of aging? People (mostly girls?) are scared to get some history on their body, and now videogames?? I think it is quite charming to dust off my old video games, and play them like "the good old days"
When walking through any content generated procedurally, I find it lacks something. Without knowing how content came about, the elegance is in the cohesive nature of the layout. The realism begins to derive from the logical connsistency of the map, not the beauty of the textures and variations achieved when compared to size.
For example, when someone built a map in (say) the Thief series, most recent release included, I felt as though I was in a planned setting. The pathways and places had an appeal that a Endless Dungeon(TM) format didn't. Dating myself even more, the maps of 2D Mario or pov-style Myst games probably wouldn't be as interesting if created procedurally.
That said, the landscapes created via Terragen are indeed astounding, but they too require quite a bit of work to detail well. Overall, I'd say procedural generation of content is a great way to save space, but it cannot achieve the "suspension of disbelief" that many FP games desire, once you start learning the character space.
why wait then?
Nobody forces you to buy a game absed on its graphics engine. Companies like Matrix games or my own don't compete on graphics, but on gameplay. Nobody is forcing you to buy cutting edge visual games, there are plenty of indie titles, or small budget retail titles that are out there waiting to be discovered.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Eve is actually an interesting case study in how a game can retain relevence by maintaining current graphics standards. Over 5 years old, Eve is at a high point in its membership with over 100,000 players (and still growing), and the game looks as current as possible. In the dev blog, they say that the next patch will include high dynamic range rendering (which will be particularly applicable in a space environment where an asteroid can unmask a nearby star, for example).
Granted, there's nothing procedural about this, and the fact that Eve is a MMO means that it's in an ideal position to keep the graphics at current standards. It still demonstrates that games don't have to age past relevence, and makes on wonder why Everquest didn't tyr to keep up. Especially for MMOs, there's no reason they have to fall behind.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Hmmm. Yes, procedural "generation" - not just graphics - but behaviour, physics, and (basically) the rules of the game!
There has been alot of hype about "Spore" recently...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_(game)
And the official site is just recently online:
http://www.spore.com/
Now, I'm personally rather excited about this. I think it'll really bring out the "open-ended" nature of gaming to a whole new level...
One that, lets face it, has been around a while - "user based asset creation". AKA modding (but, with the twist of doing this while actually playing the game!!!)
Think I'll have a sit down...
I know one better than that in 8K.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Raiders
While TA is a highly extensible game, it does not use the full power of our modern computer technology. Be happy, Chris Taylor impress us once again with the unofficial (thanks to copyright) sequel to Total Annihilation in 2007.
It is available at www.longnow.org (previous months lectures). Its not the same topic, but it is a talk with brian eno entirely about 'generative content'.
This generation or next.
The problem with the idea is instead of creating larger high quality unique images, or large quanity of images, the idea is to generate your images on the fly through code.
Ok that would work. And it does. However it doesn't work in large scale games. First off if you look at Procedural generation you have to code the way the system works very carefully. It's like explaining to an alien what my DDR pad is. "it's a large pad with four buttons on it, It has lights." oops forgot it's metal, forgot this and that. And what's worse, every single time you use it you'll have to create a new way to describe the texture, or you'll get the same texture for everything.
But do you realize how long it would take to design the ENTIRE world of Halo with that tool? How about Prey? how about GTA? It wouldn't take 3 years between games, it'd take 10 years, or it would cost vastly more.
Xbox 360 fanboys (not that I hate the system) tout this as the reason they don't need blu-ray. The theory is sound. (It does work, it will work, it will always work) But at the same time, the developed a small game for it. Did they have trees, multiple people with tons of different clothes, flowing textures. Did their game sell a couple million copies?
Some companies do use procedural generation, for stuff that's inconsiquencial. Trees is the big one currently, Speed tree save tons of time, but that's the only widespread use of the technology so far.
It boils down to this. If procedural generation is the solution to all our problems why haven't we used it in everything? Why wasn't it discovered earlier? It's not because of the power of computers, it's because it's not going to save the world. We arn't going to see well made games using procedural generation for graphics because it just bogs down the processor, and it doesn't give any noticable improvement in graphic quality. If we had 10 processors, then yeah we can waste 4-5 working on generating the world, but even with 6 processors, 1 is for graphics, 1 or 2 is for physics (a must have in most games now), and the rest is for your gameplay components, we don't have the extra power no matter what ivory tower scientists want use to believe.
This is all "what if" the answer though is "it can't"
Like almost everything else in the world, sometimes one is better; sometimes the other. When it comes to video games, the ends justify the means. Whatever works is what is best!
Regular Meta Moderators are not more likely to get mod points.
Sounds like getting something for nothing, which never seems to turn out in real life as well as the theory promises.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'm probably stating the obvious, but procedural textures (as well as models) are a lot harder to make than bitmap-based. For bitmaps, you need a digital camera or an artist. To make a complete 3D model, you'll need a person who knows Photoshop and 3ds max. For procedural models, you'll need someone who knows advanced math (including matrices, linear transforms etc.) and has some artistic value AS WELL.
I can't see this working for long...
Eventually when memory (RAM & HD) are nearly free and nearly infinite, visuals in games may come close to paralelling reality (i.e. a tree in a game may look more like a real tree than it does today). A game that is developed today even with the most advanced mathematical algorythms applied in a graphics platform to be expandable to future, will not be imediately upgradable (from an end-users's perspective) to benefit from an instant graphics upgrade. I.e. you can't just shove the game in the latest new console and expect it to have graphics magically upgraded to the latest high standards. Somebody will still have to go through the entire game and add granularity to each wall, floor, and animated characters in the game which mathematics can not auto-magically generate with accuracy enough to come close to paralleling the randomness & beautify of reality. So the only alternative, I can see is to have the games of today allow future artists to ADD new graphic content into the old game with some newer gaming technology... but somebody still has to put in the effort to create & import all the new graphics.
So I think perhaps the article is misleading. Again, from an end-users's perspective, the game can't just magically upgrade all its graphics and have it equal in looks to whatever the latest high benchmark of impressiveness might be. At best, the end-user plugs in the CD/DVD into the new console (assuming it even accepts older formats) and over the internet, for a fee, newer graphics are downloadable... will users pay a small fee for this service? And more importantly, will gaming companies bother to re-create nicer graphics for old games? Is this a sustainable business model? I would venture to guess that only the most popular addictive games of all times might justify this kind of effort in a gaming company's project list.
Having said all that, I'm all for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Reality
Adeptus
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
So can I drop Windows 3.1 in to the PS engine, and have it come out looking like Windows Vista?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Starflight used a similar process to render planets, but their goal was to repeat the same pattern each time. This allowed them to cram nearly 800 unique worlds on two 360k diskettes. Of course they managed to make a good looking Earth as well.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
game titles that can justify a cost of $500.00. eep.
-- http://www.criticalassets.com
I'm going to have to disagree. Lets take a look at something like Grand Theft Auto..
...because people are interested in the story or the characters involved. They're interested in new scenarios. If you created a version of those games who's graphics were procedurally generated and upgraded with whatever hardware the games were played on franchises like GTA would get lots of people buying the old versions after playing the new versions long after the game was "past it's prime". As it is right now when GTA4 comes out for the next generation consoles GTA3, VC, and SA will be left in the dust because they'll be graphically crap by comparison. But if their graphics updated procedurally someone who's first experience with the franchise is GTA4 might be interested in picking up the older titles without being turned off by their bad graphics.
Grand Theft Auto III graphically looks the same as Vice City graphically looks the same as San Andreas. Those games sell incredibly well when new "versions" come out regardless of the fact that there arn't any graphical improvements.
Why?
It doesn't work for every game but it does work for quite a few. I can think of lots of games (mostly from the PS1/Saturn/N64 era) that I enjoyed a whole lot back then but can't stand to play now due to their horrid 3D graphics, if I could play them today with more modern graphics I'd buy them again, and new gamers would still be buying those titles.
Collector's Edition
Been there, done that (SimLife). Spore might have the answer, but it's not the first attempt and the others have been spectacularly unsuccessful despite following the same apparent formula.
Wow, that brings back memories. I had the 5200 version.
game!=movie
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
.kkrieger is impressive but NOTHING is as excellent as BLAZEMONGER.
Do your best, hope for the best, suspect the worst.
Not really related to Procedural Synthesis at all, but there's also Evolvable Hardware in which an FPGA (field programmable gate array) can be reprogrammed on the fly as well, essentially giving you, say, a custom co-processor.
Then we could replay games like system shock 2 and requiem: avenging angel.
I think graphics are the main reason why I don't replay old games.
They really were fun, but going backwards visually doesn't appeal to me.
Half-Life: Source is a great example of how dificult it is to keep games fresh looking.
I think studios have learned a great deal about this and now make high-poly models to start with.
One of the tricks now is scaling graphics down to work with current systems.
LOD is the easiest way to do this, but great advances recently with 3d techniques like normal mapping have made it easier to keep games looking fresh on future hardware.
The greatest impact is in texture quality. even low-poly models look better with high-quality textures
They're using their grammar skills there.
Those saying that games companies would hardly want to create a game that never went out of date and more easily facilitated piracy through reduced size make a good point. This makes me wonder about other things game companies might do to reduce the replay value of a game. Is this partly why many titles (mostly FPS) are so densely plotted? Just like any narrative based media you rarely digest it more than once or twice before tiring of it, so then you shell out some more dosh for the latest and greatest.
like duke nukem?
A cool Icelandic company, CCP, has created a game that exemplifies your concept.
EVE Online takes a basic set of concepts (space, ships, weapons, mining, market), and allows the player to expand on it. Al most all of the "News" ingame is player-related, and things such as espionage, trickery, and invention are allowed and even encouraged in the world. There are no classes, no limits on what a character can be/can't be.
A few years in the future there is going to be a bump. As soon as we can make non reality look as good as reality on a IMax screen, while tracking trillions and trillions of pixels. When that happens graphics probably will not go further, untill we all step outside the box, that we call a monitor and move twards holograms..
I don't know if developers are taking advantage of it, or to what extent it supports it, but I'm fairly sure the Xbox 360 already has Procedural Synthesis capabilities.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/10/07
I can see good and bad here. Yes, it would be nice to fire up, say, quake 1 and getting brand new fancy graphics on my faster computer. It would also be a travesty to start up an old classic like pac-man, loadrunner or commander keen and find that the "classic" graphics had been overwritten by new stuff, making it just another game. Remember, part of the fun of old games is the quirky old graphics.
Well let's see what the prevailing meme is for this story.
"Bingo. Game developers aren't interested in technology that will extend the life of games (unless people are paying a subscription).""
Don't tell him about mods
"Maybe some of them will even invest in these silly radical concepts called "storyline" and "plot."""
What's insightful about saying the same thing in every game post? Let alone there are examples that disprove it's premise
"At least half the design time of a console these days is making sure it's HARD to port games to another console, so that it will be an exclusive title, and they can make more money."
Let's pretend that consoles are architecturally different underneath, and that smoothing out those differences involve sacrifices, be they economic, code size, or speed. Or we could simply go with the above and pretend we're more enlightened than before
"I would think the main reason to do this wouldn't be to "future proof" your game. That's the last thing you want to do. If games kept getting better by themselves, you'd undermine your own future revenue, either from upgrades or from new titles."
Or we could go with the simplist explaination possible. Procedural synthisis isn't ready for a majour role
"What we need is the opposite, something that makes current games not look crappy and 3D."
This poster was thoughtful enough to buy every "crappy and 3D" game, then post on slashdot about his terrible experience. Thanks dude!
"I for one hope that we just get to the point where graphics are real-life quality and we can focus on gameplay. Just my $.02"
I think we know were the previous poster got his seed money. Thanks to you too
Well I'm certainly glad I'M not creating games. All the above should certainly give one pause before going into game creation. Wouldn't want to create another "crappy and 3D" game that's "future-deficient", now would you?
--
"Games are not storytelling.""
Don't tell him about the Max Payne series
Even if somebody comes up with a way to make this feasible on a large scale, it just won't matter at all.
Starting the generation after next, eh? Right. Look, the graphics for NES games are clearly old. Yes. Absolutely. Anybody who can't tell an NES game from an SNES game from an N64 game from a Gamecube game has something wrong with them. But that's over now. The systems are now, in this new generation, powerful enough to make distinctions like that a thing of the past. The system power no longer matters. If Resident Evil 4, as it was on the Gamecube (best looking version) came out exactly as it is on the PS3, it wouldn't look out of place at all despite the massive difference in power.
And yet some games still look bad. It happens. The reason isn't the fault of the system, it's the fault of the creators. Bad programming, lack of attention to detail, bad ART. And that's the key to making games pretty now -- art. Algorithms can't pull that off like humans can, they probably never will. Humans know what's pretty to humans.
I can imagine an argument that the power differences do still matter at current power levels. That's fine, it's not something that's really an arguable point. There can be disagreement but no rational argument. To the people who would disagree, though -- this isn't something that would start this generation. It would start next generation. And I think that by then, the difference in graphics will have shrunk to nothing.
The next big jump in graphics probably won't even work on a 2D screen.
They used a three word system to generate maps and you could go to some different cool maps and there were almost an inifnite number or world maps and dungeons to explore.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
...security through obesity?
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
(maybe a bit OT) Pandromeda make a procedural world generator called Mojoworld which creates very complex worlds with layered fractals mapped onto a sphere, they look quite amazing. I would like to see something like their engine in a game world, and it looks as though Spore will be fractally generating their worlds too.
But it is true that most mainstream games are either really shallow or have a plot you just don't care about. However, a game that tells a captivating story is one that you might want to replay later just to experience the story again.
For example, I'm going to buy Escape Velocity Nova, not because I'm such a big fan of Elite clones but because in the demo I played halfway through the Vell-os storyline and I want to get that mind-control device out of my pilot's spine and then get back at the Federation. I'm not thinking in terms of "by getting rid of the device I can advance in the game", I'm thinking in terms of "just wait until I can free myself (and hopefully the Vell-os) and Fucking Kill(TM) you assholes". I want to get back at them. I am pissed about how they used me to hurt their enemies (getting those enemies to hate me in the process). That kind of passion is pretty rare with games; I usually reserve it for good books or movies.
Without the storylines (and modability; I love modding) EV Nova would definitely not be worth thirty US bucks to me. But I am willing to spend the money on a game that does such a good job at storytelling. The fact that I want to Summer Bloom the shit out of Commander Krane also plays into that.
When I think about truly good games with high replay value I usually think about games with a good story (off the top of my head: Fallout 1/2, X-Com 1 to 3, Final Fantasy Tactics (NOT Advance), most LucasArts games before Monkey Island 4, the Marathon series...); games that are great without a decent story usually are so because of great modability (Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Quake 3 Arena). The few games that have neither invariably have outstanding gameplay (Gunbound, the 2D Metroid games (Fusion even has a half-decently told story)).
A brilliant story might not be the best way to drive sales, but it is an excellent way of increasing replay value. If graphics really would become self-upgrading and more developers would focus on things like immersion that goes beyond the visual/acoustic level we'd probably see more memorable games.
Let's see... Presenting the name of the game, check. Linking to the game's website, check. Telling the price, check. Praising the game while giving away teaser-sized parts of the plot, check.
Getting paid for what amounts to a Slashvertisement... un-check. Damn.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
then people would play cs for litereally ever
not that they arent already.
I was put off on how great the concept is after watching the Spore presentation and having to sit through an entire speech by Will Wright where "procedurally generated" was uttered by him over 50 times...
It's nice that they have a system that can pretty much think itself out, but please do us all a favor and just say "procedurally generated" and leave it at that
Rescue on Fractalis distributed by Epyx (actually created by Lucasfilm Games) used procedural terrain generation (hence the name Fractalis for fractals) and it ran just fine on a Commodore 64 or Atari 800 back in the 80s. If the same source code were recompiled for a modern PC it would look just like a terrain generator in OpenGL. The catch is: Where is Epyx now? This game would have outlasted its company if it had been written for other operating systems now. Furthermore it wouldn't hold people's attention nowadays since all the modern games look like that with the 3d polygon renderned graphics and such.
the way games are built designed, and sold.
Games would consist of several smaller piece that you buy to add on too.
so you buy a 10 dollar game, which has a mini story, as well as pieces of an over-arching plot line.
If they gameplay is good, and the game is fun, people will want to buy the next piece.
This means quicker content, and could lead to a place where developers aren't working 60-80 hour weeks to meet a milestone that could be planned well due to the sheer amount of work a large game needs. That is a potential problem with all large projects, BTW.
The game industry really needs to get some managment that know how to schedule a projects, and can learn PM techniques from other industries.
Project managment is horrible in the game industry. Usually it's people with no formal project management training. i.e. we will make Bob a project manager becasue he is a kick ass programmer! Hello Peter principle.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Seriously, you should see Zork in an anti-aliased TrueType font!
Origin solved this once about 13 years ago in a game called Strike Commander. It's not quite the same, but the solution would work all the same.
Strike Commander generated its maps using a terrain generation program after install. It took ~45 minutes on the machines of the day, but saved the amount of space the game actually needed on install media significantly. This was very important in terms of floppy space back then.
So, what you do is to include a pregenerated set of meshes, textures, and so forth for a modern machine as of the time of launch, but ALSO include the generation tool so that as time goes on, you can regenerate things to match your machine.
I loved the first Max Payne for story telling. Dark as hell. Awesome voiceovers. Didn't detract from the shoot them up action in any way, it only inspired more!
ISO certified == THX certified
I'm just posting to undo some stupid moderation I did. I hate when I do that.
Has anybody actually been able to run this game? I've tried it on many different computers, with different specs that all meet the requirements listed on the site, yet every time it crashes when I try to run the EXE. On one of the machines here at class, however, it attempts to load and then crashes. Is there anybody out there who's actually played this game, or do I just have the worst luck in the world?
One has to not look far in the whole Procedural Synthesis business than the character creation for Oblivion.
So many inputs for the face YET after hours you simply can not come up with a good enough looking character. So instead you opt for some orc or beast race so they'd look ugly anyway!!!!
Yeah. Procedural synthesis should be where it's at. The XBox 360 apparently is geared to "generate" content on the chip (for instance subtley modify trees so you don't end up with 100 of the same tree in the forest. All the branches and leaves would be procedurally generated).
Pixel and Vertex shaders are also the BIG THING that comes to mind, which kind of came out a damp squib. With pixel and vertex shaders (and whatever unified model comes out next) you can change the look of any surface, including bumpiness, shininess, the colour, wood grain, metal brush, blah blah, procedurally. With a procedural function in the pixel shader or vertex shader. How come people aren't using it that way?
It just seems that the cool thing to do is to slap a texture on a polygon and then use vertex shaders to make it glint in the sun. HDR came along and took the light away (narf!) from all the cool things they SHOULD have been doing.
There's one big reason procedural generation works: everything in nature is procedurally generated.
Here is some more info.
http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/NEUBAUER.HTM
I sw this on an Atari 400 in 1980. After that I got an 800XL, I stopped dropping quarters for good then.
Macromedia flash is similar in design to this. Moreover, it requires much less CPU horse-power, so mobile phones won't drain their batteries displaying 1 min of processed code.
Hmmm...documentary game...interesting idea...
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
If graphical updates were no longer a reason to produce a new game, the game developing industry would probably produce about 75% less games. Think of all the titles of games that really don't add anything new other then updated graphics and physics.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
Each new console has its own downloadable game shop similar to iTunes or Napster. The time to transfer a DVD-9 (8000 MiB) of material over a 1024 kbps link is 64,000 seconds, or nearly a day.
Congratulations! You two have discovered what I like to call "Personal Preference".
Marky Mark Killed Jason Bourne!
AVG Free gives a warning that the this download contains a trojan downloader called "Downloader.Zlob.AFD". AVG might be wrong about this, but if not, that download or maybe the hole story is a hoax to spread computer viruses or own your computer.
Imagine putting Halo 2 into your Xbox 360 only to have it automatically upgraded to look like Halo 3 in graphical quality.
... would I have the same motivation to buy the latest greatest? On the other hand, it might allow developers to put more effort into overall design and playability and worry less about the quality of the graphics. I dunno. But this sounds like a disruptive technology to the current way games are produced and marketed, and we know how much established business love disruptive technologies.
Well, given that sales in the gaming industry have been driven by generational improvements in graphic quality, it's hard to imagine that this would be considered a good development by publishers. If I can take my four-year-old game, drop it into the latest hardware and have it look as good as something that came out last week
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This might actually work, from a commercial and technologickal point of view. Lots of comments did point out that procedurally generating graphical information (shadowmaps, textures, reflection maps, whatever) requires a lot of processing juice. But you can solve this by only running the procedures once and storing their output in the HD (which is, as has been pointed out, way cheaper than proc. cycles). Lots of comments did also point out that game developers do not want a game to last unless they can charge for it. And, what would prevent them to charge users for the revamping of the game's graphics? You set the procedures to run only if the user payed for it, while allowing them to download (previous payment) a new version of them... It seems to be a good and sound way to a) allow users to improve their gaming experience and b) allow game publishers to charge for an actual service. --krahd
mod me up scottie!