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Game Technology To Watch In 2009
IGN has compiled a list of gaming technology they expect to have a significant effect on this year's products. Leading the list is the 3D technology being pushed in television and films. A number of popular games are already set up to handle this, and more are on the way. They also suggest that improved Blu-ray technology, which allows much more storage, will pave the way for even bigger and better looking games. IGN hopes that brain-computer interfaces, such as Emotiv's headset, will become responsive enough to be taken seriously, and notes that DirectX 11 and a broader adoption for PhysX are on the horizon.
I wasn't aware that we were hitting the 50Gb limit of today's BR-DL disks. To my knowledge, only one game has even come close (MGS4) and even then, it apparently only uses about 31Gb.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
nothing of interest in 2009?
how about casual games as fun as L4D?
The 3D glasses are cool.
But how many have a 120Hz monitor
And how many monitors today can run 120Hz, and still be a good size, and have good colours. And normal persons can effort?
proprietary...
Where's the inventions that have an Open Source-license?
...the year of the 3D Linux desktop!
You just got troll'd!
I predicted the article would be bollocks before I clicked, and I was right! Let me make some other predictions:
3D Gaming - these glasses have been around for years. Maybe they work better now that everyone has bigger screens with higher refresh rates, but they were useless before. Nobody wants to sit in front of a PC wearing glasses. Perhaps if it were released for consoles it may take off, but I don't think the penetration of 120Mhz TVs is large enough to justify it.
Blu-Ray Super Disc - do games really need that much storage? Nope. My prediction for the number of games released in 2009 using super discs? Zero.
Brain Computer Interfaces - I am sure they could sell a few as a gimmick but my understanding is that control is very limited - a few noisy axises at best. I have a hard time imagining a game that could be controlled by brain easier than by fingers. I put it in the Sounds-Good-to-Investors-Neat-Picture-For-Press-Release-Consumers-Don't-Care bucket.
OLED screens - on their way, but immature. It will take years before they are competitive with LCD. In any case, not really gaming related as such.
Wii MotionPlus - well duh, great scoop there, IGN! The MotionPlus opens up some additional options for games, I expect some neat things. But it won't be the game-changer that the Wii originally was. Nintendo have a history of adding stuff to consoles, none of their previous efforts have really set the world alight. A modest success, used by only a few games (but these may be classics).
Windows 7/DirectX11 - better faster, stronger, snore. Nothing revolutionary from the users perspective. Developers might be tempted if Windows7 takes off (which I think it will, if only because it will be shoved down our throats)
240Mhz TVs - good I guess, but this is not the time to launch an expensive piece of equipment. Its not like consoles are actually going to output at 240Mhz, so the motion-compensation filters had better be good.
Play-TV - could be a game changer if Sony pulls finger and markets it world-wide. Sony really needs to give the public a new reason to have a PS3, PlayTV could be the tipping point. But I think it might be too little, too late since PVRs aren't exactly rare at this point and it seems limited.
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
The limiting factor on game size really comes more down to the system it runs on and the economics of making a game. It basically is two interlocking parts:
1) You can only make a game so big, so involved, so varied, and still expect to make money on it. You cannot spend $1 billion on a game and ever hope to make any money. Thus there are limits as to how much can be in your game: How many different scenes, characters, etc. It costs money to have artists, animators, writers, etc work on all those assets. So no matter how much storage you are given, your world size and complexity are still going to be limited by economic factors. Now you might way ok, but there can be more detail right? Well that leads to...
2) The RAM on the platform you wish your game to run on. Everything you want displayed in a single scene must fit entirely in RAM. Now for consoles, this is a pretty tight limit. The Xbox 360 has 512MB of unified RAM. That means all your code, all your data, and all your graphics must fit in that space. The PS3 is perhaps even more restrictive. It again has 512MB of RAM, but split 256MB for CPU 256MB for GPU. So really all your visuals must fit in 256MB on that platform. On the PC it is better on the high end, there are 1GB graphics cards, but 512MB is common for performance mainstream, and may people have 256MB card, some less. Well this places hard limits on how detailed your assets can be. You can't have a single character with 100MB of texture data and then expect to have 10 characters plus other object plus backgrounds and such on screen. You just don't have the RAM.
Thus you find that when you take the amount of game you can design and hope to make money, and the amount of assets you can fit in RAM, you get a number that is your real limit, regardless of how much space you have. You also find that for the most part, a DVD is just fine. While you'll find some games on the PS3 that use more, it is with HD videos. That's nice and all, but not really relevant to the core of how good a game looks.
So I don't see this changing any this year. The 360 and PS3 are still the cutting edge in consoles. Since the console market is a large one, that's what many games are going to be designed to accommodate. That places limits on their on screen complexity and in turn on how much space is useful. I suppose the could make the PC version more detailed, but I'm not seeing a lot of money being spent on that.
Even if you take games that are PC only I don't know how much you'll see. While it is true that PCs at the high end have lots more power, I've got a system with 1GB of VRAM and 4GB of system RAM, that's the exception. There are plenty of people who have PCs with 256MB video cards, so you run in to the same kind of limits as consoles have.
After all, PCs have had the option of larger games for quite some time. DVDs are cheap, there's nothing stopping a company from shipping a game on 2 DVDs. Games used to (and still do some times) ship on multiple CDs. You can put them both on the harddrive. You do see it in very rare cases, but for the most part it just isn't done because it isn't needed. One disc holds all that data you need.
I don't think we'll start to see much bigger games until there's more development in video technology, possibly until the next generation of consoles. Even then, maybe not. Maybe instead of getting larger, games will start doing more procedural content. There's already been some of that going on. For example some games make use of SpeedTree. It's a library that generates trees in real time, procedurally. You provide it with basic data, it generates the information to be sent to the graphics card. So rather than having an artist design hundreds of different trees, and then a designer place them in a level, you generate the basic data, and do the rest in real time. This, of course, takes up much less disk space.
As an extreme example of this you can look at the demo Debris by Farbrausch. It's a 180k executable that generates a 3D world complete with motion
http://games.kikizo.com/features/50-hottest-things-in-2009-gaming-p1.asp
The 50 Hottest Things in Gaming in 2009
Here's another list, much more expanded, in case you don't like the watered down version IGN is offering.
Usually it's artwork that takes the bulk of the space.
:p.
How many artists and designers and how much time would you need to create 50GB of artwork/maps/levels? If you could programmatically create it quickly, you are unlikely to need all that capacity right?
The more artists and designers, or time taken (render time etc), the higher the costs of producing the game.
Whereas most game rules (and game play) seem to fit well within a few megabytes, if not just a single MB.
For example the quake executable itself is less than a megabyte in size. The textures, maps and other stuff use up most of the space.
After a while, the game looks good enough. I think we're hitting diminishing returns already. After all many PC games already have higher res and framerate than a DVD movie.
Some even have better plots and acting but let's not go there for now
Actually, it's not the only way. Unfortunately, though, the others are a lot more... limited.
1. For a start, there are the two Zalman 3D monitors which use simple polarizer glasses and don't need any particular frequency. Simply: odd rows are polarized in one direction, even rows in the perpendicular direction, so each eye sees only half of them.
Upsides: Every single frame is split into two like that, so 60Hz is enough. It works right out of the box with the Nvidia Vista drivers. No flickering because it's not shutter-glasses.
Downsides: needs Vista. Or the iz3d drivers in XP which honestly aren't that mature yet, and it's a pain in most games to get a neat 3D both afar and in the weapon you have in your hands. You get half the resolution either way. Any text which isn't in a huge font, _will_ be broken by seeing only every other line of it. But the worst is that the 3D effect only works in a vertical angle of +/- 8 degrees. You only need to slide in your chair a little or even move your head a bit if you're close to the screen, to just start seeing double instead of 3D.
2. The iz3d stacked tft monitor. Basically it's two monitors in one, and again it uses polarizer glasses to separate them.
Upside: works in XP too. No resolution loss. Angle is much less of a problem. No flickering because it's not shutter-glasses.
Downside: well, it's the iz3d drivers again. It takes a lot of fiddling for the 3D effect to work, and even then it doesn't seem to have the depth that the NVidia drivers manage out of the box. Trying to go any higher will just cause you to see double, as the brain just gives up. Again it's a big problem to have both good depth illusion _and_ not see your weapon doubled in a FPS. (E.g., in Hellgate London literally there's almost no setting except flat where the gun doesn't double in first person.)
Also see what Tom's Hardware had to say about it.
3. The eDimensional glasses and drivers.
Upside: they work in XP (and _only_ in XP.) They work with non-Nvidia cards. And eDimensional claims that they work with TFTs too. No refresh rate restriction: if you don't mind a _lot_ of flickering, you can even run their drivers on a 60Hz screen, effectively getting only 30Hz to each eye. It's much cheaper than the nVidia glasses it will work with the Nvidia drivers too, if you have Vista and an 120Hz display.
Downside: it will only work as well as the nVidia drivers if you actually get the nVidia drivers to use it. I.e., you're back to needing 120Hz and Vista.
Downside: The eDimensional drivers, to put it mildly, suck. First of all there's the issue that it makes the image interlaced if you use them instead of nVidia, and probably only Loki knows why they needed that on a CRT. Worse yet, it stays interlaced even on the desktop once it went interlaced. So it's all the disadvantages of a Zalman display, but it flickers and it has a bunch of other own disadvantages. Like that they've crashed more than once on me. Or that a lot of the time they just make the image interlaced, but not actually 3D. E.g., WoW, the porster child of the "we support 3D glasses" generation, just goes interlaced and starts flickering the glasses, but is otherwise just as flat as ever.
Upside: if you have a CRT, you can use a combination of the iz3d drivers and an eDimensional utility which just activates the glasses. The iz3d drivers don't know how to use the pin that controlls the shutter-glasses, but will happily render alternate frames for them if you activate the glasses otherwise. This actually doesn't have the interlaced effect, and actually works with more games.
Downside: the iz3d drivers still have the same downsides as before in rendering 3D. With an extra nasty twist I found out the hard way. If your fps drops below a limit (about 40 fps), the image starts just jumping between left eye and right eye, for no obvious reason, making the game unplayable. So basically you have to give up virtually eye candy in any game to have enough of the reserve so that doesn't
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Whilst cut-secenes rendered by game engine became more popular, pre-rendered are still common. All that extra space could be used to store different variations of character's gear instead of sticking to the default. E.g. in RE4 cut-scenes the character is always rendered in the starting cloth even if you are wearing some other vest.
This does not require that much more effort to create, it would add a little to the immersion and a DVD release could use one version as current games.
Money's tight, people aren't going to shell out megabucks on the latest and greatest games - or the hardware to run it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Informative + Interesting.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I'll say to you what I'll say to the guy below - if this were the case, then why do 360 games typically have similar or shorter loading times as their PS3 counterparts?
Why do (certain) PS3 games NEED to be installed?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Wow... the ONLY interesting thing in this list is the Larrabee. 3D glasses from nVidia? Been there, done that. It was lame back then, and I don't image it will be any better this time 'round. People just don't want to wear things on their heads to play games... Which leads me to the brain controllers... Nobody wants to wear stupid shit on their heads to play a game.
I'm excited over OLED displays because CRTs are too bulky, even if I do love them to death. I just don't have the space for them in my tiny apartment. LCDs are everywhere in here. But OLEDs are supposed to allow for higher displayed frame rate from games (counter-strike comes to mind) and less display lag.
As soon as I can afford a Larrabee CPU (thinking 30 cores?), I'm going to put it to good use. Mass virtualization of games comes to mind (undetectable bots anybody?).
This article is mostly a waste of a read.
You don't win a prize for being the biggest idiot in a console gaming thread retard.
And the Oscar goes to... Anonymous Coward, for his post "Butthurt Fanboy Wharrgarbl"!
"Thank you! Thank you! I couldn't have done it without Cheatos, obesity, and shame. I didn't win this just for me, I won this for everyone who attaches their identity to a corporation to derive some semblance of self-esteem. Thank you!"
Oh if only I still had mod points! That was classic!
Developers who use DirectX are locking themselves up into Windows and Xbox.
Developers who use OpenGL are locking themselves up into Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Playstation 3, Wii, Nintendo DS (?), PSP (?).
Guess which one has more total marketshare?
Hint 1: both choices include Windows, so choose carefully.
Hint 2: over 25% of students on campus use a Mac. Grandma using her old Windows 98 PC at home to check email isn't a gamer yet is counted as part of the total Windows Marketshare.
"Butthurt Fanboy Wharrgarbl"!
LOL! That's exactly what I was thinking...
This is why the mod system needs to be more descriptive. The above post should by Score 5, 0wn3d.
I'll say to you what I'll say to the guy below - if this were the case, then why do 360 games typically have similar or shorter loading times as their PS3 counterparts?
The amount of data (Duh). The 360 is loading smaller/more heavily compressed textures, the PS3 not so much.
Why do (certain) PS3 games NEED to be installed?
Pulling from the HD is faster than from the BR drive, so they install on the HD what they need quickly and keep on the BR what they can spend some time loading
I've been hearing about some of the newer games going to a "progressive install" kind of methodology, initial install is small, but as the game progresses it continues to copy stuff from the BR to the HD.
DEMETRIUS: Villain, what hast thou done?
AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
Shakespeare invents 'your mom'
"why do 360 games typically have similar or shorter loading times as their PS3 counterparts?"
The XBox 12x DVD is about 16 MB/s and 2x Blu-ray is only 9 MB/s.
"Why do (certain) PS3 games NEED to be installed?"
To speed up loading.
PS3 2X BD-ROM = 9MB/s
360 12X DVD-ROM = 15.75MB/s
It's not just corporations teh fanbois are attaching their identity to- it's also teh FOSS.
To discount the hundreds of hundreds of FOSSies in the world is to do a huge disservice to rabid, vapid fanboiism and associatative identities.
360 DVD is only 12x on single layer DVDs (how many games come on single layer DVD, answer: just 4), for everything else, it's 8x.
360 is also CAV, so it's only 8x at the very edge of the disc, everywhere else it's all downhill from there.
2x BD is 71Mbit/Sec constant across the entire disk surface.
8x DVD is 86.4Mbit/sec only on the outer edge, and then peak transfer speed.
From a different AC Post
We aren't talking a huge difference in speed (single layer outer edge 360 VS PS3 BR) therefore we must be talking about a huge difference in the amount of data.
DEMETRIUS: Villain, what hast thou done?
AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
Shakespeare invents 'your mom'
Were you aware that a significant amount of content was cut from Chrono Trigger? Including at least one dungeon? A beta ROM that had been distributed to magazines before the original SNES release leaked to the Internet a few years back. In it was accessible this extra dungeon; it was removed from the game before release. Many other threads were left hanging. The game's ROM was crammed full to capacity. Coincidence?
If it was that simple, then why don't they just use the same textures on the PS3 version? Both the PS3 and 360 are very similar in terms of texture fill rates (in fact, I believe the 360 has the edge here). Most multi-platform games look about the same and if there is a noticeable difference, more often than not the advantage lies with the 360.
People can keep on quoting read speed statistics all day long, but the end results speak for themselves.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
The PS3 texture compression support may be worse that that of the texture compression methods in the 360. Some places it may crop up would be in rendered quality of the texture, size of texture file, number of texture files required, or in memory footprint when loaded. Microsoft may also offer and force developers to use better software development tools than the tools used for PS3 games. While there are optional Sony supplied PS3 software development tools, they are rarely used in production games due to their poor usability, their difficulty to use, and poor performance. Consequently, many devs write their own tools, which may end up working even worse than the Sony tools. Or, they use middle-ware like UE3 from Epic, and the licensing fees might make those devs wish they hadn't.
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
If you use a PS2 controller then all you have is a seriously large and power sucking PS2.
A PlayStation 2 console can only run major-label games. A PC running Windows can run major-label games, run indie games, and surf the web.
Since it is the control scheme that separates the PC gamers from the PS2 gamers in the first place.
Is it really the control scheme, or is it the selection?
Developers who use DirectX are locking themselves up into Windows and Xbox.
Developers who use OpenGL are locking themselves up into Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Playstation 3, Wii, Nintendo DS (?), PSP (?).
Let's restrict this to only those platforms that don't use a lockout chip to completely prevent indie teams from developing games:
Developers who use DirectX are locking themselves up into Windows and Xbox.
Developers who use OpenGL are locking themselves up into Windows, Mac OS X, Linux.
Xbox 360 has XNA Creators Club and Community Games, a similar licensing model to that of the iPhone SDK and App Store. I would wager that there are more people who play games on Xbox 360 than play games on Mac OS X and GNU/Linux combined. So some indie game developers are tempted to go the XNA route because XNA can reach more customers than Mac or Linux.
A. It's not FSAA. It's interleaving.
I thought it was drawn as two 1680x525 images with the ordinary AA that that entails, and then those images were interleaved. But if that's not the case, and the driver is actually dropping lines, then the driver is doing it wrong. If the driver were free, on the other hand, there would be a bug report and then a patch.