The New Difficulties In Making a 3D Game

eldavojohn writes "MSNBC spoke with the senior producer of a new stereoscopic 3D game called Killzone 3 and highlighted problems they are trying to solve with being one of the first FPS 3D games for the PS3. The team ran into serious design problems, like where to put the crosshairs for the players (do they constantly hover in front of your vision?) and what to do with any of the heads-up display components. Aside from the obvious marketing thrown in at the end of the article (in a very familiar way), there is an interesting point raised concerning normalized conventions in all video games and how one ports that to the new stereoscopic 3D model — the same way directors continue to grapple with getting 3D right. Will 3D games be just as gimmicky as most 3D movies? If they are, at least Guerrilla Games is making it possible for the player to easily and quickly switch in and out of stereoscopic 3D while playing."

Comments

Interface, biggest problem

[D J Horn]

I played WoW in 3D at the nVidia booth at Blizzcon last year and the game looked fantastic, it really did. However the interface was a huge problem. In 3D-WoW, the interface is closer to you than the game world, so if you're focusing on something in the world, your interface elements all split into 2. This is particularly weird when trying to click on things in the game world. If you focus on the creature or whatever, you have 2 mouse cursors. If you focus on the cursor, there are two creatures.

After a while you do get used to it, but it is definitely a huge gameplay issue that will keep 3D gaming in the gimmicky realm unless a game is designed to address it, either by having no interface or having an in-the-world interface, like Dead Space for instance.

But seriously, games do look amazing with properly calibrated 3d glasses (shutter or polarized, not red/blue lenses!) but it will most likely never be anything more than a neat gimmick.

Re:If you can turn it off

[blincoln]

When was the last time you could turn 'color' off in a game?

You mean like how televisions allow the viewer to reduce or remove the amount of color on-screen, whether the viewer is watching traditional programming or a videogame? Or like how during the transition from greyscale to colour broadcasting, it was important for most stations to make sure their content was useful to people with both types of television?

3D is a gimmic, and the fact they offer you the ability to turn it off WHILE playing means it's not required to immerse you in the gameplay.

3D isn't for everyone, at least in its current incarnation. That doesn't necessarily make it a gimmick. Is surround sound a gimmick just because it's not actually required in order to appreciate most films and games?

The developers in this case are smart enough to realize that not everyone who plays their game is going to have a 3D display. Therefore they have to make the game playable in 2D. Making a big-budget game that *required* 3D today would be commercial suicide.

I don't have a 3D TV, and I probably won't for quite awhile. But I do think it's an interesting technology.

Experiences: 3D adds a new dimension

[LongearedBat]

I had 3D glasses for my old games computer a few years ago. (The drivers only worked with CRT's.) Some people had no problems, while others got headaches after just a few moments. I was fine for an hour at a time. I think newer tech makes 3D much more comfortable though.

Anyway, stereoscopic gaming was great! A couple of experiences:

WoW
Wandering in a cave, cave walls are made up of mottled bitmaps...
Monoscopic: Even though the map shows a branch in a cave, it can sometimes be hard to find it, and one walks back and forth to see if it's there.
Stereoscopic: You simply cannot miss the branch. The cave now looks like a proper shape, that just happens to be patterened with mottled bitmaps.

Rome: Total War
- You get a better feel for distances, so you can see exactly when to tell the archers to unleash a volley of arrows against advancing troops for maximum effect.
- You get a better idea of how well catapults will be able to shoot over the crest of a hill, or whether the rocks will hit the hill/fly over the enemy.
- Also, position the camera among those being shot at, and see the cloud of arrows coming at you. Awsome! =)
Basically, with a sterescopic view, you get a much better idea of the lay of the land, and distances (and therefore timing).

To me, 3D vision helped so much, that it almost felt like an unfair advantage. Almost.

Sterio vision is NOT 3D

[Required Snark]

When you view the world with your regular (hopefully) pair of eyes, your brain creates a "3D" experience of what you see. It does this using many cues, including parallax (both horizontal and vertical), occlusion, shading of objects, shadows, and lots of other stuff. Many people with PhDs have spent a lot of effort trying to understand this process and they still have a long way to go.

If you are watching a "regular" movie, be it photographic or CGI, the 3D world is mapped onto the 2D screen When your eyes see this 2D image, you brain is able to use all the cues that are available in the mapped 2D image and it reconstructs the 3D world that was used to create the 2D image. Therefore, a "regular" move IS IN 3D.

When you see a stereoscopic "3D" image, even if it is an old ViewMaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viewmaster, all that you are getting is extra horizontal parallax that is provided by having different 2D images for the left and right eye. You are not even getting vertical parallax, so you can't see the top and bottom of things, just some extra details on the left and right of objects. Although this is noticeably different then the 2D picture image, it is still not the same as natural real world vision. So in a basic way stereographic images are not much closer to 3D then a regular image.

Because of the very limited and specialized nature of the stereo information, it is easy to create situations that cannot occur in the real world, resulting in a very confusing experience. Breaking frame is one example. This is when the "3D" object crosses the edge of the image, and it can completely destroy the illusion. Also, normal "flat" cinema uses foreground/midground/background to organize the visual composition of shots, and this becomes much more complicated when stereo is involved.

In some ways "flat" 2D is better, because it uses a uniform transformation to map from 3D to 2D. In doing stereo, the scene composition has to include intra-ocular distance information, and this adds difficult decision making for composing the scene. (Yes, the stereo mapping is mathematically uniform, but the composition restraints are different depending on the shot set up.)

There is a massive body of knowledge in how to use "flat"images that goes all the way back to he introduction of perspective in the Renaissance, and has been further developed with the invention of photography and moving pictures. Stereo has yet to prove that it really provides any kind of advancement for image presentation.