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The Hard Science of Making Videogames
twoblackeyes writes "PopSci delves into the 10 greatest technical challenges faced by game developers today, and the technology that will hopefully make them a thing of the past. At the top of every dev's wish list is increased realism: realisitic fire, water, enemy AI, material physics, etc. Here directly from the developers where the tech stands today, and where it will likely be tomorrow. '4. Artificial Intelligence - Problem: Once upon a time, the bad guys in videogames wandered around mindlessly, shooting at you while they waited to die. That doesn't cut it anymore. Players demand sophisticated enemies to fight and reliable in-game allies with which to fight them. Thing is, it's freaking complicated, and it eats up processor speed. "We're faking just enough smarts to make it work," says Mathieu Mazerole, lead engineer on Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed. Status: Imbuing characters in a game with lifelike decision-making ability involves employing the kind of high-level logic theories--learning decision trees, mobile navigation, finite-state machine models--used by top robotics engineers.'"
would rank the importance of realistic water simulations above the importance of good artificial intelligence in games.
And to think, I used to subscribe to popsci...
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The article should be renamed from "10 greatest technical challenges faced by game developers today" to "10 greatest technical challenges faced by first person shooter game developers today" Contrary to popular belief, not all game developers are striving for photorealism.
Dance Dance Revolution is goofy as can be, and I don't play it, but as a "game" it's a lot more fun and interesting than the anti-utopian fascist horseshit that passes for fun these days.
In fact, the Wii opens up a whole 'nother wonderful can of possibilities, as does Guitar god games an similar things. THAT'S where the creative action is, and that's wher ethe REAL innovation is going on. Not in stupid 12 year old boy shoot 'em up bullshit.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
would place the importance of graphical detail as shown inside above gameplay. If you don't have a good gameplay, you can have 1000000000000 triangle per square inch of pixels, it won't make your gamer more happy. The Primary challenge of a good game is not graphism. it is a good idea which translate to a good technical gameplay.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
The article claims "hard science" but instead is a collection of blurbs that read like half-assed filler written by someone without a clue as to the subject.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
Well, for one, motion capture is more important than plot in, say, most sports games. Also, it would be really fucking cool if you could play a game like Zork but where nearly every puzzle doesn't have a single, contrived answer.
Then maybe you could be in an environment where, as the hulking barbarian with the double-bitted axe, you encounter The Locked Door and, instead of having to find The Key, you can just break the damn thing in. Simplistic example, but hopefully it illustrated the point: a better physical simulation can allow for more creativity in the game.
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat? -C. Palahniuk
This list is about making games more real, which doesn't necessarily mean better. There more to it, such as balance, game play, user interface, premise, and plot.
I'd still rather play NetHack than any MMO game, and I enjoy the early Final Fantasy games more than the later ones.
And her processing power is pretty dim compared to a computer.
Your cat is smarter than you realize. Brains do image processing, task/goal tracking, fine and coarse motor control, and a myriad of other complex processes simultaneously. Many of these require advanced (but not abstract) mathematics and ability to react to the result. Example: if I'm moving this speed and the dog is chasing me at that speed, will the dog catch me before I reach the house and bite off a chunk of my tail? If so, run up the nearest suitable tree.
It's been said repeatedly that "the most powerful supercomputer in the world is approaching the complexity of X". Currently, X is somewhere between a snail and a housefly. When it gets to housecat, you won't be able to win the games at all anymore.
I find it amusing that an entire piece about the "hard science" challenges in game development doesn't even deal with the development process itself. I mean, when you code in a higher level language, dealing with strings is now easy, whereas it was tedious in C. There's no library sharing like in every other language. There's no #include , whereas there's really nothing new to moving a bitmap anymore.
Even with something like OpenGL, you're still basically given a pile of bolts, beams, and sheet metal and asked to make a car. If I had a nickel for every time game developers reinvented the wheel, I'd be Bill Gates. Heck, I'm still coding font routines and sprite handlers for companies. I heard that even the Wii doesn't have a system level call for the main menu stuff...it leaves that up to you.
Someday, the tools will come along enough that people will be able to work with something higher level like Python or Ruby and not have to worry about twiddling their own framebuffers. We're still in the dark ages in game development this way. Having a CPAN for games is DECADES off. Instead, game developers are stuck trying to make a rock fall or a torch look right, and when they're done tweaking that crap, THEN they remember they have to make a game, not a shadow simulator. Thus: Doom LXXXVIII.
All animals, man included, spend their whole existence building up "logic trees" which give us our reactions in certain situations. Someone throws something at you, you block it, dodge it, catch it, or let it bounce off your head. We categorize, extrapolate, and induce...It's all logic trees.
Cats are cursory hunters; they lack stamina, and they hunt by stealth and lightning attacks. This being the case, knowledge of their range is critical to their success as hunters, therefore they spend most of their non-sleeping time engaged in exploration. That's why cats are always into stuff. Startle a cat, and he's gone, under something, up something, behind something. Do you ever see them stop and think about where they're going? They already know.
And the processing power isn't dim. Jesus, just because it's not sitting there doing philosophy its not a highly specialized and successful hunter? You're talking about an animal with enough instinct and reflex control (and that is brain power, just as much as problem solving) to do acrobatic things that people strive in vain to accomplish, calculate a thousand variables while flying through the air to snatch something, or land on its feet after a drop of meters, and we can't even get robots to accurately match the range of mere human dexterity. It's like the DARPA robot challenge; it took years to get a robot through that course, and it's not because the vehicles couldn't make it, its because the processing power wasn't up to making the decisions needed to get across the terrain.
You can't look at intelligence in pure terms of math. When you take them out in the world, and tell them to apply that computational power to walking, talking, and chewing gum at the same time, you see how far we still have to go.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
"It was a cheat that only looks good close up if nothing much is happening. But why don't you get the wakes from the patrolling boats out there rolling in or making it hard to stay in your own boat? If you blow up a helicopter and the pieces fall in the water, where are the waves from that? That's right, they're not there. And that's because the physics of water is Really Really Hard."
Who cares about that level of Water physics? I mean seriously. It adds practically nothing to gameplay, the physics in many games are merely gimmicks, take Bioshock for instance. The water EFFECTS are very beautiful and interesting but you don't need to model the physics of water for it to be immersive. The art, color and sound, and atmosphere built up by the game is far more important then the physics of water.
I mean really... look at all of the best games we've ever played... Take God of war for instance, basically an action-platform game, one of the best games I've ever played who's AI was not overly complicated, but a game that allowed a lot of freedom of action and had well built combat system, tight control, withimmersive camera angles while fighting, all set in a fantastic 'plastic' world in which you were for the most part 'on rails'.
The game EXPERIENCE is most important, what kind of emotions and stimulation you're giving the player matter more then something totally irrelevant to the experience...
When we think of the best games we've ever played, we're not thinking about -- woah, the water physics in that game was 'awesome', we're thinking about something ENTIRELY different, unless the game is based around someone having figured out a way to make it integral to the FUN and enjoyment someone gets out of a game.