The thing about the indie movie market is that I'm quite willing to watch a movie for 2 hours even if I don't like it that much, because it is only 2 hours and doesn't require constant user intervention. I can doodle, glance at a magazine, carry on an unrelated conversation, ridicule the movie, or try to find some redeeming quality about it (some actor I particularly like for instance). For this reason I can watch a wide assortment of movies, develop obscure tastes, and in general help the indie movies market continue to succeed.
I have a much lower tolerance for bad games than bad movies, every time the game requires user interaction I might reevaluate whether I want to continue playing or not, or at least every time I die, save the game, or otherwise get interrupted.
I set very high standards on what games I purchase- a mention in a slashdot article doesn't do it, it takes some combination of positive reviews, personal recommendations, a good demo, a good positive experience with a previous game in the series or genre, and even hype and marketing to even make me even consider playing it. I don't feel it's a big loss when I set my standards so high I occasionally miss good games- I know I'm going to miss good games because I just don't have time to play them all. If it's really good and successful, it will have imitators and sequels that may improve upon the original.
For that among other reasons I don't really think there will be a viable indie games market. Every once and a while there may be a breakthrough that results in a upstart company or dev-team or game concept being propelled into the mainstream, but otherwise probably not much of a self-sustaining niche outside of the main market in which many people could have a career in. But if you are going to try to prove me wrong, think niche- adult games, games for people with disabilities, or whatever you can come up with- and make the games short, cheap, and well-tested.
And what the hell was that blue box in "Mulholland Drive" supposed to represent, anyway? I've seen that movie several times hoping to find a clue (hell of a marketing scheme). Not much on the internet, either.
I recall the day after seeing it (in a university theater a week or two in advance of slightly wider release) googling some newsgroups and getting a run-down on the most prominent theories of who has what delusion/psychotic episode when, what's mostly real and what isn't, and what's just thrown in there because it was meant to be a tv show so lots of plot threads don't really mean anything because they needed multiple episode to begin to explore.
Re:Invasion of privacy...it better not be....
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throw them in the prison of total world exposure for being intentional unfair and supporting double standards.
This is probably only a few years off. Many cameras are going to have GPS devices, and wireless internet capability. Positioning sensors within the camera and advanced signal processing will be able to tell which way a camera is pointed and extract 3d features of a scene by combining information from multiple viewing angles. People will be able to immediately upload pictures of their choice to sites dedicated to maintaining up-to-date as possible information on any place in the world. Facial recognition software will get added into that mix so that people can be tracked. The most reliable information will be about places and events with the most people (festivals and sporting events etc.).
The thing is, even if the government cannot directly alter the data in these sites (e.g. require an API to make certain faces disappear from the databases), they will be able to apply great resources to field lookalikes or upload disinformation on at least a few people (and underground groups may be able to do the same on a lower level for more limited times). Public officials will experience a net loss in privacy, but the very top officials will probably be able to escape detection most of the time (or just rarely go out to public places), and of course ordinary individuals will have lost the most privacy of all (barring clothing etc. to severely reduce the quality of tracking when people don't want to be tracked).
In fact, what we are seeing now is nothing new, and much worse plagues have occurred in post-Biblical times:
I don't really understand the point of this post- historical precedent is no reason for complacency. Also, past pandemics have been aggravated by poor sanitation and medicine but simultaneously limited by poor transportation. So any contemporary repeat of the same kinds of plagues may have wildly different results.
My prediction: based on the BSE ``scientists talk nonsense to secure research funding'' debacle, the actual deaths will be about 1% of the lowest estimate.
Perhaps deaths will be 1% of the lowest estimate because people deal with the problem, having been motivated by large death estimates based on what may happen if they do nothing.
Remember SARS? Yeah, it's kind of hard to trust the doomsayers after that paticular fiasco.
You misunderstand the intent of 'doomsayers'- they don't want you to ignore their warnings and say I-told-you-so after the apocalypse (except for the bitter kind who believe that some certain personal trait or skill or belief they have and you don't will spare them from the danger), they want people to deal with the problem so that disaster is averted.
I call bull on the bird flu hype. It's likely this disease has been around for a much longer time that it has been fashionable to run frantic news reports on it.
If this were a rational world in which all people make rational decisions on how to allocate resources, then this may be an argument worth heeding. Sometimes people or governments need to have problems overhyped to them or else they won't do anything at all until it's already cost a lot of money or killed a lot of people.
Fatal Traffic Accidentitus. Now THERE'S a killer. 40,000 every year in the US alone. Are you scared to sit into your car every morning?
Traffic accidents are not a communicable disease, even if you give it a silly name which suggests that it is. A person's driving skill and attitude correlates very strongly, as well as the degree in which the government maintains roads, warnings, prosecutes traffic law violators, etc- both of those things change very slowly over a period of years. The problem is well-understood and has a stable feedback system which keeps the number of fatalities from spinning out of control. When one argues about the number of fatalities being too much, you are in effect participating in that feedback system- perhaps people will listen to you and be more willing to sacrifice tax dollars or driving freedoms and then vote different and so forth.
Diseases which spread very rapidly and are potentially fatal are scary because we don't have systems in place to deal with them, or we do have systems but don't really know how effective they are. Worse yet, our systems may be superb but if an another country is asleep at the wheel then their inattention may create a problem so big it will get past our defenses too.
Once you start down the dark path, forever will it consume your destiny.
That's one of the most melodramatic slippery-slope arguments I've every seen. I would have gone further and suggested that the gates of hell might be breached and all would be consumed by demon hordes, but that's just me, I like to overdo things.
There's also the CSA going through congress, requiring a huge expansion in government registration and regulation to include things like sex-scenes in regular non-porn movies.
Remember Aeris? The video game character people actually cried over? How many polygons were in that model? How involved were her facial expressions and her body movements?
For the pre-rendered cut-scenes (which includes the scene that people cried over), her polygon count was probably pretty respectable.
Digital or no, there's only one thing that will always make a good character: compelling writing.
I agree, but 'good writing' isn't very interesting to me as a technology (unless we're talking about computer generated good writing, but that's probably further off than reaching some minimal definition of photorealism).
Also, when I say that human realism makes a game more accessible, I mean immediately accessible- seeing a few seconds or a single still frame from the game should be extremely compelling- seeing a person that has an incredibly unique and beautiful or interestingly weathered face, a look in their eyes, an expression on their face that captures you- and then when they move, the expression changes- a facial tic when the character is holding back their anger, someone breaks into a smile and you can't help but smile back. Film can capture that sort of thing, I'd like to see it done in games.
If you sit down to read a thousand page novel, or play a 40-hour rpg, the reader or player has a chance to create longer term attachments to the characters, which is a different thing than the the short term I'm talking about.
Y'know, other than US control, I don't see any real legitimate beef that the EU/UN could have. As far as I know, (which isn't much, as a casual internet user) the internet has been run fine under US control.
Individuals and nations have this desire for self-determination. Ghandi said something to the effect that no people on Earth would prefer the good government of foreigners over the bad government of their own. We can try to influence the rest of the world to do things in a way that does not put up barriers to communication and commerce, but it's up to those other countries whether to listen or not.
What I don't understand is where all these vehement posts are coming from, and why they feel so strongly opposed to this- I imagine some harm may come of it, very little to myself personally. If other countries try to levy taxes on internet related things that impacts U.S. companies, then the U.S will respond by raising tariffs on something imported from that country- a perfectly mundane trade war, or they'll sue them in the WTO. The internet is just going to be more integrated into international trade and politics, rather than being some kind of special case artifact in which entirely different sets of rules apply.
When mesh networks come along that can supersede the internet because they don't require any expensive infrastructure or central administration, we can revive all those hacker manifestos from the 1990's that went on about making national governments obsolete et cetera.
_If_ there is a point at which you can actually mistake them for a human, could you still do those things and look yourself in the mirror in the morning? Some grown men have been known to cry at Aeris's death in FF7. What would happen if that scene happened in a Star Trek holodeck setting that's indistinguishable from reality? Could you bear being mind-controlled, gutting her like sardine and watching her bleed on the floor in that realistic a setting? I suspect a lot of people would get permanent psychological damage there.
Basically, could it be that we're better off staying on the current side of the valley? That theory does say that the best stories intentionally stay around the peak on the left side.
I still think the valley concept is more fluid than the graph suggests. A person's ability to distinguish fantasy from reality adapts to their culture's ability to produce fantasies that mimic reality, and people who immerse themselves in certain art forms are going to have more refined senses of what looks real and what doesn't compared to outsiders.
Extreme violence is sort of interesting to think about in terms of the uncanny valley- one of the reasons that extreme violence is so repulsive when shown realistically is because in real life it puts people into the uncanny valley- the valley is about comparison to a living normally-functioning person, people suffering major trauma are not going to look natural either due to the direct consequences (like being hit or hitting something at high velocity, or being so damaged they can't move properly) and as a reaction (extreme pain causing unnatural bodily motions).
(Violence aside, the initial revulsion people have to various afflictions that cause motor dysfunction or distort facial features is another example of the uncanny valley in real life, but people can overcome those feelings)
The media usually self-censors (the camera always cuts away even if there is a gross sound effect) or gets very stylized when it comes to depicting that sort of thing fictionally (e.g. the limb severing in Kill Bill being very bloody but in a cartoony sort of way). High-profile games are mainstream enough they will conform to societal norms just like big budget movies, some like GTA will push the envelope but still probably go the stylized route (which still is disturbing to some people).
If you gave a monkey a dual CPU G5 with Photoshop and gave a charcoal briquette to Picasso, I'm putting my money on Picasso, who gives a crap about the medium. Now what you'd be saying here is, give the G5 to Picasso. What the OP is saying is, you don't have Picasso, you have a monkey. We all want the Picasso plus the G5, but we got the monkey.
Either way you're still better off with the G5- part of my point is that you don't necessarily know what your dealing with on the monkey-picasso spectrum, but the having the better tools very rarely hurts you (except it costs more...).
I.e., even without Moore's law slowing down (and it does), we're talking about another century or more worth of valley in front of us.
_If_ that theory is correct, then rying to push straight through it the hard way is IMHO suicide for the industry.
I've never seen the uncanny valley discussed in such apocalyptic terms, but I think the market will take care of it as your comment about EQ2 hints at: customers will avoid the uncanny and go for the stylized- but they will still be attracted by more sophisticated graphical techniques either way, even if those techniques are used in non-photo-realistic ways.
And we have a helluva chasm in front of us, seein' as even the Final Fantasy movie, with its _insane_ polygon counts (by computer game standards) and physics/mimmics simulation still was in that valley of weirdness.
I thought the physics of The Spirits Within were a big reason why it was so off-putting- characters rarely ever interact with each other or the scenery in ways that require much physical simulation. Have you ever thought about why they did it all SF instead of edged weapons combat? I thinks it's because edged weapons combat requires a helluva lot more animation skills/physics modeling to look convincing than characters shooting or being hit by energy bolts (and energy bolts are way easier to simulate than bullets, explosions that destroy an object completely are easier than explosions that sort of mangle part of something and causing intricate failures etc.).
Also, the facial animations of the characters were very rigid, because facial animations are hard (but very important for the sake of empathy).
I suspect the uncanny valley flattens out if you are exposed to a certain graphical technique enough- I'm sure after many of hours of play that the characters look wierd and plastic/wooden/whatever doesn't bother you anymore and you accept them as nominally human.
Isn't the problem that as the games become more photo-realistic, your suspension of disbelief is jarred every time the same character model reappears?
I've never really had a 'suspension of disbelief' while playing a game, I wonder if you mean more along the lines of a game breaking 'the fourth wall' or similar kinds of inconsistencies- if a game does that continually through the game then you get used to it, it's the games that do it a handful of times or once that are most jarring (e.g. using the second controller to evade Psycho Mantis in MGS).
There has to be a resource balance there in terms of both artist time and real-time processing resources. You should make as much of a variety of objects and characters as possible if your game is going to have a lot of them, even if that means decreasing the quality per individual object- it's harder to render more varied objects, and it takes more time for artists to develop that content, so you've got to trade off with quality.
Another route that needs to be explored more is more parameterized characters like in the Sims 2, where facial features and skin color can be varied incredibly (but annoyingly, height and weight and etc. cannot be varied at all), and two characters should never look identical, although everyone may sort of look like they came from the same character generator.
I mean, GTA is all well and good, but didn't everyone look kind of similar?
Generally each of the installments has increased the number of character models, so that at least you don't see as many identical people walking next to each other on the same sidewalk anymore. But they were only able to do that because they have lots of resources at their disposal for making hugely successful games...
Some frown upon this recycling of objects, stating that games will look samey - but if you treat the "stock" objects as a virtual props department, you can achieve a great deal of aesthetic variety through lighting, environment design, animation, oh, and of course the game itself - which should be the real focus of any title.
I agree, but we're only now reaching the stage where you can differentiate a game through lighting and the amount of props in a scene. When a room could only have a handful of objects, and one or two lights, then games that reuse objects are going to look 'samey'- but if you can put hundreds of objects in a scene then it can be more unique, and subtle lighting effects will completely change the character of an area.
Animation needs libraries too, but the developers can focus on differentiating certain animations that are key moves in the game.
When you're led to expect a certain level of detail, you start noticing (even subconsciously) all the places where it's missing.
I think you're talking about the uncanny valley. It's a problem, but it's not insurmountable- there's no reason why we can't push through to positive reaction side. You're sort of right, EQ2 could avoid the problem by going for a more stylized approach, but that doesn't necessarily mean it needs less detail, less shaders, etc- you can have high detail and not go for absolute realism.
The problem is that what could be solved with better concept art and design, is often solved by push towards more polygons per model or normal maps on the walls.
I'm always a little suspect of solutions that suggest trading the quantifiable and readily obtainable to the more abstract. It's usually a false dichotomy anyway: good art design is going to benefit you at any level of detail.
More polygons and normal maps make the characters and surfaces look more realistic under a wider range of lighting and viewing conditions- where previously that information was encoded more statically, it looked okay at first but then the illusion fails as soon as the light changes or you walk around an object or get close-up and it gets a lot less convincing. The inadequacies of phong shading are solved by reprogramming the GPU, not better concept art and design.
I believe that the more human-seeming the characters in games become, the more accessible and emotionally involving the games may become. Graphics are a significant component of this, though increasingly important is facial and bodily expression- and the interactivity is key, cut-scenes don't count and also canned animations etc. within the game get old once they are seen too many times (remember lame canned death animations before rag-doll physics?). The more nuanced and detailed and subtle a character can be, the more compelling they can be- one side effect is that games may no longer have to hit you over the head with over-the-top violence and skimpy outfits.
It's going to take increasing amounts of money and artists to handle all that extra detail though, I don't see any way around that, except through simplified scanning-in of real world objects and people.
yeah, serenty is ok, but it's no alien or blade runner
I think the more useful comparison would be to recent would-be franchise SF movies like Chronicles of Riddick.
Serenity opened second place in the box office, with only $10 million, which probably means it'll be lucky to make $30 million. Supposedly the budget was $50 million, so I guess all the slashdot fans better buy up the DVDs that'll be out in a few months if they want it to make a profit (which is not to suggest that if a movie made more in the box office than its budget then it will have made a profit, but making less is a good indication of the opposite).
(Here goes my karma) I tried to watch an episode of Firefly when it was on tv, and although maybe it was just the portion of the particular epsiode I was watching, I found the 'western in space, no really literally we mean it's an actual western in space, costumes and all' angle too painful to bear. Friends I have with the complete DVD sets of Buffy and Angel and who think Whedon is a genius have no interest in Firefly/Serenity either.
These tiny arrays of dishes aren't going to show us much. We need arrays spread out across the entire solar system if we really want to see some interesting stuff. Like SWINE and OLGA
I sometimes wonder if they don't purposefully create scenes with the intent of only putting them into a DVD release to entice people to buy them.
I think there's more back-and-forth interaction between directors, producers, studios and etc. during the creation of movie. There is no monolithic 'they' who has a complete vision of a film prior to filming along with the authority to make it happen (though George Lucas may be an exception), and who knows before a scene is shot what works and what doesn't. If you were making a movie, and the studio said they didn't want a certain scene in the script, you might be able to convince them to spend the money to shoot it anyway so it would be a cool dvd extra- and then perhaps once having shot it you can change there minds and actually get it into the movie. Before dvds, the scene would have never been shot.
It's much cheaper to advertise for one blockbuster than several regular movies.
It's also much more effective and takes less works. One could suggest that the advertising and production budget of one large movie be split between 10 smaller movies (as people frequently do). Ten smaller movies may take smaller production crews individually, but there's 10 times as many directors and producers etc. to manage. Sure it's 1/10th the risk per-movie, but it still is more effort to get all those movies made. If you take a an advertising budget and slash it to 1/10th, then a large part of your potential audience may never even see a preview or other ad- when they saturate the media with advertisements for a single movie, that gaurantees the people who may like the movie but don't watch TV (or whatever) every night are going to know about it even if some people who watch too much TV get tired of see the same ad over and over again.
When you have finite resource, you probably want to focus on a smaller number of projects so you can ensure the quality (whether the people currently doing that are succeeding is another question) rather than dilute yourself with lots of small projects. The great thing is is that there are independent movie makers out there who make movies on their own and then you can simply buy those movies when they are already done only if they turned out well- no risk of investing in an unknown and ending up with complete garbage.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing about the indie movie market is that I'm quite willing to watch a movie for 2 hours even if I don't like it that much, because it is only 2 hours and doesn't require constant user intervention. I can doodle, glance at a magazine, carry on an unrelated conversation, ridicule the movie, or try to find some redeeming quality about it (some actor I particularly like for instance). For this reason I can watch a wide assortment of movies, develop obscure tastes, and in general help the indie movies market continue to succeed.
I have a much lower tolerance for bad games than bad movies, every time the game requires user interaction I might reevaluate whether I want to continue playing or not, or at least every time I die, save the game, or otherwise get interrupted.
I set very high standards on what games I purchase- a mention in a slashdot article doesn't do it, it takes some combination of positive reviews, personal recommendations, a good demo, a good positive experience with a previous game in the series or genre, and even hype and marketing to even make me even consider playing it. I don't feel it's a big loss when I set my standards so high I occasionally miss good games- I know I'm going to miss good games because I just don't have time to play them all. If it's really good and successful, it will have imitators and sequels that may improve upon the original.
For that among other reasons I don't really think there will be a viable indie games market. Every once and a while there may be a breakthrough that results in a upstart company or dev-team or game concept being propelled into the mainstream, but otherwise probably not much of a self-sustaining niche outside of the main market in which many people could have a career in. But if you are going to try to prove me wrong, think niche- adult games, games for people with disabilities, or whatever you can come up with- and make the games short, cheap, and well-tested.
And what the hell was that blue box in "Mulholland Drive" supposed to represent, anyway? I've seen that movie several times hoping to find a clue (hell of a marketing scheme). Not much on the internet, either.
I recall the day after seeing it (in a university theater a week or two in advance of slightly wider release) googling some newsgroups and getting a run-down on the most prominent theories of who has what delusion/psychotic episode when, what's mostly real and what isn't, and what's just thrown in there because it was meant to be a tv show so lots of plot threads don't really mean anything because they needed multiple episode to begin to explore.
throw them in the prison of total world exposure for being intentional unfair and supporting double standards.
This is probably only a few years off. Many cameras are going to have GPS devices, and wireless internet capability. Positioning sensors within the camera and advanced signal processing will be able to tell which way a camera is pointed and extract 3d features of a scene by combining information from multiple viewing angles. People will be able to immediately upload pictures of their choice to sites dedicated to maintaining up-to-date as possible information on any place in the world. Facial recognition software will get added into that mix so that people can be tracked. The most reliable information will be about places and events with the most people (festivals and sporting events etc.).
The thing is, even if the government cannot directly alter the data in these sites (e.g. require an API to make certain faces disappear from the databases), they will be able to apply great resources to field lookalikes or upload disinformation on at least a few people (and underground groups may be able to do the same on a lower level for more limited times). Public officials will experience a net loss in privacy, but the very top officials will probably be able to escape detection most of the time (or just rarely go out to public places), and of course ordinary individuals will have lost the most privacy of all (barring clothing etc. to severely reduce the quality of tracking when people don't want to be tracked).
In fact, what we are seeing now is nothing new, and much worse plagues have occurred in post-Biblical times:
I don't really understand the point of this post- historical precedent is no reason for complacency. Also, past pandemics have been aggravated by poor sanitation and medicine but simultaneously limited by poor transportation. So any contemporary repeat of the same kinds of plagues may have wildly different results.
My prediction: based on the BSE ``scientists talk nonsense to secure research funding'' debacle, the actual deaths will be about 1% of the lowest estimate.
Perhaps deaths will be 1% of the lowest estimate because people deal with the problem, having been motivated by large death estimates based on what may happen if they do nothing.
Remember SARS? Yeah, it's kind of hard to trust the doomsayers after that paticular fiasco.
You misunderstand the intent of 'doomsayers'- they don't want you to ignore their warnings and say I-told-you-so after the apocalypse (except for the bitter kind who believe that some certain personal trait or skill or belief they have and you don't will spare them from the danger), they want people to deal with the problem so that disaster is averted.
I call bull on the bird flu hype. It's likely this disease has been around for a much longer time that it has been fashionable to run frantic news reports on it.
If this were a rational world in which all people make rational decisions on how to allocate resources, then this may be an argument worth heeding. Sometimes people or governments need to have problems overhyped to them or else they won't do anything at all until it's already cost a lot of money or killed a lot of people.
Fatal Traffic Accidentitus. Now THERE'S a killer. 40,000 every year in the US alone. Are you scared to sit into your car every morning?
Traffic accidents are not a communicable disease, even if you give it a silly name which suggests that it is. A person's driving skill and attitude correlates very strongly, as well as the degree in which the government maintains roads, warnings, prosecutes traffic law violators, etc- both of those things change very slowly over a period of years. The problem is well-understood and has a stable feedback system which keeps the number of fatalities from spinning out of control. When one argues about the number of fatalities being too much, you are in effect participating in that feedback system- perhaps people will listen to you and be more willing to sacrifice tax dollars or driving freedoms and then vote different and so forth.
Diseases which spread very rapidly and are potentially fatal are scary because we don't have systems in place to deal with them, or we do have systems but don't really know how effective they are. Worse yet, our systems may be superb but if an another country is asleep at the wheel then their inattention may create a problem so big it will get past our defenses too.
It is the same H5N1 string of flu virus that has infected humans in South East Asia
Am I the only one who first tries to interpret 'H5N1' like 'l55t' or the other retarded misspellings people chat/post with?
Once you start down the dark path, forever will it consume your destiny.
That's one of the most melodramatic slippery-slope arguments I've every seen. I would have gone further and suggested that the gates of hell might be breached and all would be consumed by demon hordes, but that's just me, I like to overdo things.
There's also the CSA going through congress, requiring a huge expansion in government registration and regulation to include things like sex-scenes in regular non-porn movies.
Remember Aeris? The video game character people actually cried over? How many polygons were in that model? How involved were her facial expressions and her body movements?
For the pre-rendered cut-scenes (which includes the scene that people cried over), her polygon count was probably pretty respectable.
Digital or no, there's only one thing that will always make a good character: compelling writing.
I agree, but 'good writing' isn't very interesting to me as a technology (unless we're talking about computer generated good writing, but that's probably further off than reaching some minimal definition of photorealism).
Also, when I say that human realism makes a game more accessible, I mean immediately accessible- seeing a few seconds or a single still frame from the game should be extremely compelling- seeing a person that has an incredibly unique and beautiful or interestingly weathered face, a look in their eyes, an expression on their face that captures you- and then when they move, the expression changes- a facial tic when the character is holding back their anger, someone breaks into a smile and you can't help but smile back. Film can capture that sort of thing, I'd like to see it done in games.
If you sit down to read a thousand page novel, or play a 40-hour rpg, the reader or player has a chance to create longer term attachments to the characters, which is a different thing than the the short term I'm talking about.
Y'know, other than US control, I don't see any real legitimate beef that the EU/UN could have. As far as I know, (which isn't much, as a casual internet user) the internet has been run fine under US control.
Individuals and nations have this desire for self-determination. Ghandi said something to the effect that no people on Earth would prefer the good government of foreigners over the bad government of their own. We can try to influence the rest of the world to do things in a way that does not put up barriers to communication and commerce, but it's up to those other countries whether to listen or not.
What I don't understand is where all these vehement posts are coming from, and why they feel so strongly opposed to this- I imagine some harm may come of it, very little to myself personally. If other countries try to levy taxes on internet related things that impacts U.S. companies, then the U.S will respond by raising tariffs on something imported from that country- a perfectly mundane trade war, or they'll sue them in the WTO. The internet is just going to be more integrated into international trade and politics, rather than being some kind of special case artifact in which entirely different sets of rules apply.
When mesh networks come along that can supersede the internet because they don't require any expensive infrastructure or central administration, we can revive all those hacker manifestos from the 1990's that went on about making national governments obsolete et cetera.
_If_ there is a point at which you can actually mistake them for a human, could you still do those things and look yourself in the mirror in the morning? Some grown men have been known to cry at Aeris's death in FF7. What would happen if that scene happened in a Star Trek holodeck setting that's indistinguishable from reality? Could you bear being mind-controlled, gutting her like sardine and watching her bleed on the floor in that realistic a setting? I suspect a lot of people would get permanent psychological damage there.
Basically, could it be that we're better off staying on the current side of the valley? That theory does say that the best stories intentionally stay around the peak on the left side.
I still think the valley concept is more fluid than the graph suggests. A person's ability to distinguish fantasy from reality adapts to their culture's ability to produce fantasies that mimic reality, and people who immerse themselves in certain art forms are going to have more refined senses of what looks real and what doesn't compared to outsiders.
Extreme violence is sort of interesting to think about in terms of the uncanny valley- one of the reasons that extreme violence is so repulsive when shown realistically is because in real life it puts people into the uncanny valley- the valley is about comparison to a living normally-functioning person, people suffering major trauma are not going to look natural either due to the direct consequences (like being hit or hitting something at high velocity, or being so damaged they can't move properly) and as a reaction (extreme pain causing unnatural bodily motions).
(Violence aside, the initial revulsion people have to various afflictions that cause motor dysfunction or distort facial features is another example of the uncanny valley in real life, but people can overcome those feelings)
The media usually self-censors (the camera always cuts away even if there is a gross sound effect) or gets very stylized when it comes to depicting that sort of thing fictionally (e.g. the limb severing in Kill Bill being very bloody but in a cartoony sort of way). High-profile games are mainstream enough they will conform to societal norms just like big budget movies, some like GTA will push the envelope but still probably go the stylized route (which still is disturbing to some people).
If you gave a monkey a dual CPU G5 with Photoshop and gave a charcoal briquette to Picasso, I'm putting my money on Picasso, who gives a crap about the medium. Now what you'd be saying here is, give the G5 to Picasso. What the OP is saying is, you don't have Picasso, you have a monkey. We all want the Picasso plus the G5, but we got the monkey.
Either way you're still better off with the G5- part of my point is that you don't necessarily know what your dealing with on the monkey-picasso spectrum, but the having the better tools very rarely hurts you (except it costs more...).
I.e., even without Moore's law slowing down (and it does), we're talking about another century or more worth of valley in front of us.
_If_ that theory is correct, then rying to push straight through it the hard way is IMHO suicide for the industry.
I've never seen the uncanny valley discussed in such apocalyptic terms, but I think the market will take care of it as your comment about EQ2 hints at: customers will avoid the uncanny and go for the stylized- but they will still be attracted by more sophisticated graphical techniques either way, even if those techniques are used in non-photo-realistic ways.
And we have a helluva chasm in front of us, seein' as even the Final Fantasy movie, with its _insane_ polygon counts (by computer game standards) and physics/mimmics simulation still was in that valley of weirdness.
I thought the physics of The Spirits Within were a big reason why it was so off-putting- characters rarely ever interact with each other or the scenery in ways that require much physical simulation. Have you ever thought about why they did it all SF instead of edged weapons combat? I thinks it's because edged weapons combat requires a helluva lot more animation skills/physics modeling to look convincing than characters shooting or being hit by energy bolts (and energy bolts are way easier to simulate than bullets, explosions that destroy an object completely are easier than explosions that sort of mangle part of something and causing intricate failures etc.).
Also, the facial animations of the characters were very rigid, because facial animations are hard (but very important for the sake of empathy).
I suspect the uncanny valley flattens out if you are exposed to a certain graphical technique enough- I'm sure after many of hours of play that the characters look wierd and plastic/wooden/whatever doesn't bother you anymore and you accept them as nominally human.
Isn't the problem that as the games become more photo-realistic, your suspension of disbelief is jarred every time the same character model reappears?
I've never really had a 'suspension of disbelief' while playing a game, I wonder if you mean more along the lines of a game breaking 'the fourth wall' or similar kinds of inconsistencies- if a game does that continually through the game then you get used to it, it's the games that do it a handful of times or once that are most jarring (e.g. using the second controller to evade Psycho Mantis in MGS).
There has to be a resource balance there in terms of both artist time and real-time processing resources. You should make as much of a variety of objects and characters as possible if your game is going to have a lot of them, even if that means decreasing the quality per individual object- it's harder to render more varied objects, and it takes more time for artists to develop that content, so you've got to trade off with quality.
Another route that needs to be explored more is more parameterized characters like in the Sims 2, where facial features and skin color can be varied incredibly (but annoyingly, height and weight and etc. cannot be varied at all), and two characters should never look identical, although everyone may sort of look like they came from the same character generator.
I mean, GTA is all well and good, but didn't everyone look kind of similar?
Generally each of the installments has increased the number of character models, so that at least you don't see as many identical people walking next to each other on the same sidewalk anymore. But they were only able to do that because they have lots of resources at their disposal for making hugely successful games...
Some frown upon this recycling of objects, stating that games will look samey - but if you treat the "stock" objects as a virtual props department, you can achieve a great deal of aesthetic variety through lighting, environment design, animation, oh, and of course the game itself - which should be the real focus of any title.
I agree, but we're only now reaching the stage where you can differentiate a game through lighting and the amount of props in a scene. When a room could only have a handful of objects, and one or two lights, then games that reuse objects are going to look 'samey'- but if you can put hundreds of objects in a scene then it can be more unique, and subtle lighting effects will completely change the character of an area.
Animation needs libraries too, but the developers can focus on differentiating certain animations that are key moves in the game.
When you're led to expect a certain level of detail, you start noticing (even subconsciously) all the places where it's missing.
I think you're talking about the uncanny valley. It's a problem, but it's not insurmountable- there's no reason why we can't push through to positive reaction side. You're sort of right, EQ2 could avoid the problem by going for a more stylized approach, but that doesn't necessarily mean it needs less detail, less shaders, etc- you can have high detail and not go for absolute realism.
The problem is that what could be solved with better concept art and design, is often solved by push towards more polygons per model or normal maps on the walls.
I'm always a little suspect of solutions that suggest trading the quantifiable and readily obtainable to the more abstract. It's usually a false dichotomy anyway: good art design is going to benefit you at any level of detail.
More polygons and normal maps make the characters and surfaces look more realistic under a wider range of lighting and viewing conditions- where previously that information was encoded more statically, it looked okay at first but then the illusion fails as soon as the light changes or you walk around an object or get close-up and it gets a lot less convincing. The inadequacies of phong shading are solved by reprogramming the GPU, not better concept art and design.
I believe that the more human-seeming the characters in games become, the more accessible and emotionally involving the games may become. Graphics are a significant component of this, though increasingly important is facial and bodily expression- and the interactivity is key, cut-scenes don't count and also canned animations etc. within the game get old once they are seen too many times (remember lame canned death animations before rag-doll physics?). The more nuanced and detailed and subtle a character can be, the more compelling they can be- one side effect is that games may no longer have to hit you over the head with over-the-top violence and skimpy outfits.
It's going to take increasing amounts of money and artists to handle all that extra detail though, I don't see any way around that, except through simplified scanning-in of real world objects and people.
yeah, serenty is ok, but it's no alien or blade runner
I think the more useful comparison would be to recent would-be franchise SF movies like Chronicles of Riddick.
Serenity opened second place in the box office, with only $10 million, which probably means it'll be lucky to make $30 million. Supposedly the budget was $50 million, so I guess all the slashdot fans better buy up the DVDs that'll be out in a few months if they want it to make a profit (which is not to suggest that if a movie made more in the box office than its budget then it will have made a profit, but making less is a good indication of the opposite).
(Here goes my karma) I tried to watch an episode of Firefly when it was on tv, and although maybe it was just the portion of the particular epsiode I was watching, I found the 'western in space, no really literally we mean it's an actual western in space, costumes and all' angle too painful to bear. Friends I have with the complete DVD sets of Buffy and Angel and who think Whedon is a genius have no interest in Firefly/Serenity either.
These tiny arrays of dishes aren't going to show us much. We need arrays spread out across the entire solar system if we really want to see some interesting stuff. Like SWINE and OLGA
The editor or submitter is just throwing that in there as a troll, there was a heated discussion the other day on slashdot about that.
I sometimes wonder if they don't purposefully create scenes with the intent of only putting them into a DVD release to entice people to buy them.
I think there's more back-and-forth interaction between directors, producers, studios and etc. during the creation of movie. There is no monolithic 'they' who has a complete vision of a film prior to filming along with the authority to make it happen (though George Lucas may be an exception), and who knows before a scene is shot what works and what doesn't. If you were making a movie, and the studio said they didn't want a certain scene in the script, you might be able to convince them to spend the money to shoot it anyway so it would be a cool dvd extra- and then perhaps once having shot it you can change there minds and actually get it into the movie. Before dvds, the scene would have never been shot.
There isn't a game on 360 that you can't play without a hard drive
I can't not misunderstand this sentence because it doesn't have not too many un-un-negatives...
It's much cheaper to advertise for one blockbuster than several regular movies.
It's also much more effective and takes less works. One could suggest that the advertising and production budget of one large movie be split between 10 smaller movies (as people frequently do). Ten smaller movies may take smaller production crews individually, but there's 10 times as many directors and producers etc. to manage. Sure it's 1/10th the risk per-movie, but it still is more effort to get all those movies made. If you take a an advertising budget and slash it to 1/10th, then a large part of your potential audience may never even see a preview or other ad- when they saturate the media with advertisements for a single movie, that gaurantees the people who may like the movie but don't watch TV (or whatever) every night are going to know about it even if some people who watch too much TV get tired of see the same ad over and over again.
When you have finite resource, you probably want to focus on a smaller number of projects so you can ensure the quality (whether the people currently doing that are succeeding is another question) rather than dilute yourself with lots of small projects. The great thing is is that there are independent movie makers out there who make movies on their own and then you can simply buy those movies when they are already done only if they turned out well- no risk of investing in an unknown and ending up with complete garbage.