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Cinematic Game Graphics
Posted by
timothy
on Sun May 02, 2004 01:42 PM
from the unfinal-fantasy dept.
from the unfinal-fantasy dept.
CowboyRobot writes "LucasArts engineer Nick Porcino has an article detailing what to expect from graphics in the next generation of game systems including the "influence of cinematic realtime rendering, the promise of advanced lighting techniques and high-dynamic range images, the uses of the rendering pipeline, and the future of multiprocessor-based rendering and advanced geometry."
These will allow run-time rendering of high quality backgrounds and characters, ultimately resulting in games that are closer to full-blown Pixar animations, allowing better narratives and more immersive user experiences."
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Storyline! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Storyline! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Storyline! (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever try one of those "choose your own adventure" books? They tended to be about 200 pages long, but the actual story would be at most 10 pages. It was dynamic in the sense that it gave you several different branches to choose from, but it was still static. You would often times come to a branch you had visited in the past. This could be done with games, but, just as it is with the book, the actual game play time to "beat" the game would be much less. With games, it is worse than a book, because as games get more sophisticated, the content becomes more time consuming to produce, and "dynamic" games become somewhat impossible.
But I have failed to adequetly discuss the main problem with dynamic plots. A "dynamic" plot ISN'T a plot. A plot is by definition a narrative... something that is being told, and not influenced. If you are asking for a dynamic plot you are asking for a game without a plot. That's fine if that is a type of game you like, but you shouldn't dismiss plot driven games as restrictive or unimaginative. Think of all the great movies or books you have read. Did you ever feel that you wanted to influence those in anyway? Why should a game be different? Games offer the ability to make player feel a part of the plot more than any other medium, but not necessarily in control of it. In a game with a good plot, the motivation should be finding out what happens next, just as it is when you are reading a good book or watching a good movie. The only problem is that very few games offer anything better than a different version of the same plot that has already been told in a million games already. What's worse, even when game developers actually do manage to make a decent plot, most gamers are so jaded by the 100 past poorly written games they have played that they just skip through the storytelling sections of the game. They are focused on beating the game, and not playing it.
I think it is silly that game developers, and players, have created so much hype about "interactive" and "dynamic" games. There's only a hand full of games that have been able to tell a fresh, interesting plot since the inception of games, and players and developers are basically throwing up their hands and saying, "well lets just not have a plot, and call it dynamic". Games need to figure out how to create and tell stories effectively before they start worrying about taking on ideas that are as man-power intensive as even a simple "choose your own adventure" type book.
Parent
Re:Storyline! (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Storyline! (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Storyline! (Score:5, Insightful)
Bridge Commander is the perfect example of how modern technology makes new games possible. Who *doesn't* want to captain a starship? Now if only other game makers would start building original and fun games instead of recycling the same old garbage.
Parent
Re:Storyline! (Score:3, Insightful)
"Simple" isn't synonymous with "bad". "Complex" isn't synonymous with "good".
Re:Storyline! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Storyline! (Score:5, Interesting)
The trick is going to be balancing the amount of graphical detail with story lines and such. We know that a game that combines the two in just the right amount is pretty damn rare, but I look forward to the days developers get it right.
Personally, tho, I feel that one of the more important aspects is game play. You can have a beautiful game with an interesting story, but if you can't even stand to work inside of the world in terms of control and rules, then what's the point?
Parent
Re:Storyline! (Score:5, Insightful)
Disclaimer: Good graphics does not a good game make. However, most of the great games have good graphics (compared to what is/was technologically viable at the time - Pong had good graphics, Mario, etc.)
Parent
Re:Storyline! (Score:5, Insightful)
But for games that have any replay value, it's gameplay that's most important. Half-life had a great story, but it stayed popular by offering a great multiplayer game as well. The most popular games, games like The Sims, SimCity, Roller Coaster Tycoon... all of these games have little to no story, and tons of fun gameplay. In short... Story is only important for certain genres.
As for graphics being the end-all be-all of gameplay... Meh. I'll still be playing Solitaire. Of course... with the newest and bestest graphics cards, my SolMark benchmarks will be way off the chart.
Parent
Re:Storyline! (Score:3, Insightful)
Kind of like how Pong was so popular because of its story? Then Ms. Pac-Man totally had a better story, which is why it was so popular. Super Mario Bros. had the best story yet. Then there was Doom... Man, that Doom story took at least a paragraph to tell. It owned.
Story is sometimes important, but it is possibly the most overrated element (maybe graphics are). Look at the FMV games that focused on story and Square's Bouncer [gamecritics.com]. These are games that worried about story. Chris Crawford has been focuse
And AI! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And AI! (Score:3, Informative)
When you hide for cover, the AI actually tells the enemies to change positions and then when you think you'll just pop out and hit where the enemies were, you'll be baffled to see they are actually hiding somewhere else!!!
More than that, the same friend was in front of some werehouse and
Re:And AI! (Score:3, Informative)
Apart from the HL2 video, no 3D world has really made me think "that's a step forward" until I played Far Cry. I mean, I read about bump mapping, multiple textures, particle systems, and Far Cry has all that, and it rocks! The wave effect on the beaches is one of the best in game 3D effects I've ever seen.
But you're right, it's the AI that sets it apart. There's no telling what people might do. And that even includes jeep and helicopters - the drivers respond int
at the rate PC games are pushing the market (Score:5, Insightful)
this is insane and why I like consoles.
I mean I had a monster Fusion 3d card from the day it came out and it worked flawlessly until Black and white came out. after that I had to upgrade to a Gforce 2 GTS.
in recent years, the gaming industry is moving to fast for me to keep up anymore.
Re:at the rate PC games are pushing the market (Score:3, Interesting)
But if one looks into Moore's Law for Software (Googled [google.com]) you find a different analysis. In short it looks like algorithm development has lagged sufficiently behind the computational power.
So what does this mean for gaming? It seems developers are hanging onto old ideas and relying on the growth in proc speeds (and bus
Re:at the rate PC games are pushing the market (Score:4, Informative)
No offense intended, but you really have no idea at all what you are talking about. We're not holding on to old ideas; we're still waiting for hardware to catch up to the ideas we had 30 years ago. Almost all of the algorithms and processes used to do cutting edge rendering today are based on academic papers from the 1970s.
Parent
Re:at the rate PC games are pushing the market (Score:4, Insightful)
The simple reason you are able to keep a console for 2 or 3 years and continue to play new games on it is because the graphics just simply suck. I'm sure if you play Doom 3 at 640 x 480 with half of the detail options turned off, it'll run fine too. But when you are comparing how well they run, you have the XBox running 640 x 480 with half of the detail options turned off, while you have the computer running at 1600 x 1200 with EVERYTHING turned on. You better see a difference in running performance... If you want your computer to last 2 or 3 years without upgrading, just keep turning the graphics levels down with each new game generation - problem solved!
Parent
Re:at the rate PC games are pushing the market (Score:3, Insightful)
Technology versus Design (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess... (Score:3, Insightful)
Lots of REALLY overdone camera-swoops of battlescenes, taking up lots of player time when they are expecting a chance to actually exert some control the events of the game.
Hey - it's what happened to the Final Fantasy Series, and several other console games once designers got the power. There's only so many bullet-time-style uses of cinema-style art that is compatible with player freedom.
Ryan Fenton
Where are the "Sound Acceleration" cards? (Score:5, Interesting)
ok, so we've been able render Toy Story in real-time for a while...
But, where are the cards that can generate the sound of one arbitrary object hitting another? I don't just mean positional sound of pre-recorded samples, but really create the sounds from scratch (or an "audio-enabled model").
Re:Where are the "Sound Acceleration" cards? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
raytracing? (Score:3, Informative)
Also, sound echos based on 3d geometry have been possible since the release of the Aureal Vortex 2 chipset several years ago. But that was not creating audio, just simulating its propagation through a 3d space by tracing the soundwave paths.
Re:Where are the "Sound Acceleration" cards? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ask people if they'd rather be blind or deaf and 99 percent would choose deaf. The visuals are the most noticeable element of any computer game, because you damn well see them!
I'd rather they mastered photo realistic graphics first before putting any energy into 'sound generaion'. That's not to say I wouldn't want both the graphics and sound to be perfect, I just belive that sound should take second priority
Parent
Maybe I'm the 1 percent (Score:3, Insightful)
I can almost never play Smash Brothers Melee with the sound off. I listen for things like items being thrown (ok, time to dodge), moves with large execution times (ok, time to strike while they're vulnerable), etc. That way I don't have to keep my eye on the opponent at all times, I can focus on using the environment t
Re:Where are the "Sound Acceleration" cards? (Score:5, Informative)
O'Brien, J.F., Cook, P.R., Essl, G., "Synthesizing Sound from Physically Based Motion," In Proc. SIGGRAPH 2001, Los Angeles, CA, August, 529-536, 2001
and other pubs by O'Brien.
Parent
Re:Where are the "Sound Acceleration" cards? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to put too fine a point on it, but... we don't know how to do that
Even what you may have heard of is wild, wild cheating compared to what you describe.
I've given some (intelligent, educated) thought to this issue, and here's the problem. Light is adequately simulated with a line in the macroscopic world. It is, technically, a wave, but it is so high frequency that we can ignore it unless we're trying to simulate at quantum scales. This keeps the complexity down to merely polynomial, and some smart people have figured out how to shrink that polynomial down to a surprising degree.
Sound is not so friendly. Imagine some reasonably complex object, like, oh, a chair. We'll even cheat and make it all out of one material and go ahead and make it as geometrically simple as you like, as long as it's a chair, which is to say, at least three legs and a sitting surface, preferably with some sort of back support. Now, mentally give the chair a tap.
Now, odds are you're not too practiced at this sort of mental visualization, but here's what happens. For the sake of argument, let's tap it on the direct middle top of the sitting surface. Let's cheat some more and assume that one impact is what makes the sound, rather then an oscillation at the tap point. (See how much we're cheating, and we'll still end up with an uncomputable scenario.) So the tap radiates outward from there and starts wiggling the legs. The sound partially bounces off the legs, and goes back, and some of the sound wiggles into the legs. The sound bounces all around in the leg, and every time it bounces off of the edge, it loses some of the sound to the atmosphere and some of it bounces back. By the time it hits the bottom, it's bounced several times. (See, sound can't turn except at one of those boundaries, where it is essentially absorbed and re-emitted.)
Meanwhile, the same thing is happening in the back of the chair. Plus, on the sitting surface, we have reflections of reflections of reflections to deal with, and thanks to the wonders of resonance, we absolutely have to track each and every one of them until they hit a really low level. In a fraction of a second, we have hundreds upon hundreds of seperate waves to track, and they aren't even rays, they are "wavefronts".... imagine a wavefront hitting the edge of the chair at an angle, like an ocean wave bouncing off the beach. It doesn't bounce like a particle, it is two entirely new waves, the one that reflects and the one that continues on.
Basically, we can't even simulate this horrid simplification, the real world is even worse. Sound is highly, highly parallel. Ultimately, sound simulation is firmly exponential and the constants are very, very high. Maybe if those magical quantum computers come online we'll get this, but we'll quite possibly never get it with conventional technology; we're always going to have to cheat.
(One can try to imagine a transformation of the chair where the sound travels in a straight line in some space, but I'll be damned if I know what that actually looks like in real code, nor am I sure that it would be any easier to compute then a straight-forward simulation anyhow. Bright ideas in this regard should probably not be posted on Slashdot and saved for your PhD thesis in Mathematics/Physics/Computer Science; they'll all be waiting with bated breath.)
Parent
Re:Where are the "Sound Acceleration" cards? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think they need many textures/samples though. What they need is a more generic way to reproduce uniqueness using a small subset of samples. Such as having multiresolution layered textures or procedural textures, and increasing the number of simultaneous voices to allow for the combination of several samples to simulate
Silent games (Score:3, Funny)
Unng (Score:3, Funny)
No thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Additionally, any real game player knows that playing the bloody game is *much* better than watching mindless mini-sequences.
Sunny Dubey
Oh (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh bullshit.
How do better graphics translate into better narratives, or immersive user experiences?
There's always going to be a "Woah!" factor with each new generation of consoles, but people get over it rather quickly. And once they do, you better hope your games have substance or they'll litter store shelves. Permanently.
Re:Oh (Score:3)
How do better graphics translate into better narratives, or immersive user experiences?
I totally agree. It might seem strange, but one of the most immersive games I've ever played has been Civilization 2. It has tile-based graphics, no lighting effects, no animation except for unit attacking, which consists of a sprite simply moving across the screen and an accompanying explosion animation, and had an odd limitation where the world leader portraits would be incorrect when playing scenarios with custom ci
Please Don't (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm no technical luddite, but to me, the current graphical position we're in is, I feel, sufficient to do almost anything a game creator would want to do. Realistic shadow and light effects, faces that look realistic enough to convey who the character is supposed to be (in the case of a game like Buffy where the character is supposed to be Sarah Michelle Gellar), explosion and fire effects that actually look convincing, etc.
Would I like more? Eh, I guess it would be cool if a face really could be made up of 15,000 polygons instead of the entire model of the body. The downside is the amount of time and effort required at that point. Gran Turismo 2 had something on the order of 600 cars, each of which were made up of ~350 polygons. Now many of these were nothing more than pallette swaps, with nothing more than a graphics set and spoiler added onto the base car, but many were unique vehicales that had a distinct manner of driving that would interest some people. Gran Turismo 3 bumped the number of polys per car up to ~3,000 (IIRC), and thus bumped the number of cars down to 150, because there simply wasn't enough time for the team of artists to create more than that.
And therein lies the rub: Ever-expanding graphics place a burden on smaller dev teams that will eventually become too large to bear. Gran Turismo's popularity lies in (at least as far as I'm concerned) its realistic (sans damage) physics, almost RPG-ish approach to car collection/upgrading, and the "real" cars. Arguably, such a game could be done 10 years from now in HD with all kinds of crazy effects, and legitimately, the game was done 6 years ago on a 33mhz MIPS processor. But 10 years from now, when someone wants to create something that captures a similar subset of cool features (maybe a fun arcade-y dogfighting game a la Crimson Skies, maybe the new and revolutionary fighting game that introduces some unique quirk to make things fun), they're going to have a hell of a time competing visually in a market where 1,000,000 poly models require a single artist to work for almost a month to make a single character look halfway decent.
My point, thusly, is that we've reached a plateau in graphics similar to movie effects. Lord of the Rings, or X-Men, or Spiderman would suck 10 years ago because of the lack of effects houses and hardware capable of doing justice to the storylines. That burden is off of the film producer, and now they can legitimately tell any fanciful story they wish. The same holds for game developers; outside of being limited to 64 simulataneous players for want of RAM/processor cycles, a game developer isn't really heavily limited in the graphics/physics/speed department from telling his or her story, or producing his or her experience. But at the rate things continue, that developer may be limited in the monetary department because of the expenditures necessary for future games.
Re:Please Don't (Score:3, Interesting)
Most game models these days are modelled as
Toy Story didn't have to wait on the CPU (Score:3, Insightful)
No way (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny. That is exactly the same what gaming technology engineers were talking about when the first consumer GPUs were hitting the market in the nineties. Meanwhile, the best games ever made by LucasArts are successfully emulated by ScummVM [scummvm.org] on 486. Cinematic realtime rendering, advanced lighting techniques and high-dynamic range images and multiprocessor-based rendering and advanced geometry my arse.
this is getting wierd (Score:5, Insightful)
Master gaming machine,
Master processing machine,
Master rendering machine,
Best priced machine,
Most useful and fun machine.
Hey don't get me wrong, if this means computer's and technology is going to get cheaper and look cooler (see, xbox design) I'm all for it. But if this also means microsoft and Sony can beat the crap out of hardware manufacturers like ATi, Asus, Abit, and others then count me out, I'd rather not participate in the destruction of companies that have provided me with high quality long lasting products in favor of a DRM gaming machine like computer.
Graphical Lust May Kill the Industry (Score:4, Insightful)
As technology advances and visuals on that scale become expected by the consumers, only the richest companies will be able to produce games. This will limit the number of titles being put out, and eliminate smaller studios completely (we see this happening every day).
My hope is that simple, but not ugly, graphics will become a more popular style. Colourful, cartoony designs made of large shapes, and the like. Artistic environments will replace realistic ones. There are plenty of great games that have skirted high production costs by limiting graphical prospects. Chu Chu Rocket, which I was just playing, did that. The graphics do no more than they need to, and as a result, I'm sure it was an affordable game to produce.
I wouldn't want some great puzzler to be rejected by a publisher who doesn't want to spend the money to bump map the scales on its dinasaurs.
Environment Processors? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've always wondered if this is going to yield some kind of environment processor - kind of like a GPU, but one that solely handles physics - physics of liquids, solid, gases, and their interactions. Sure it's nice to write your own, but there's got to be so much overlap between engines it makes sense to model the world properly on hardware. Why not?
I mean, pretty pictures are all very well, but I want to see things dent, explode, flop down stairs/over balconies etc...
Too much focus on graphics! (Score:3, Insightful)
A prime example of this is "Wreckless" for the Xbox. That game was absolutely beautiful. Unfortunately the gameplay sucked. Yes for a good half hour it was fun to gaze at the beauty of the game, but at the end of my five day Blockbuster rental period I happily chucked it back into the return bin and wished for my half hour back...
The point is graphics don't make the game. I play my Gameboy Advance SP more than my Xbox and Gamecube combined. Part of that is because I'm never home, but I wouldn't bother if the games wern't totally awesome. Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga, Metroid Fusion, and Wario Ware Inc. don't hold a candle graphically to the stuff on my GameCube and Xbox, but they're awesome, fun to play games. What happens a few years down the road when 2D games and games that aren't photorealistic are scoffed at and ignored? There are going to be a ton of awesome games overlooked.
I think that game developers need to stop wasting time trying to shove just one more polygon on the screen and start working to make gameplay the best possible. The majority of the games out there suck. It's because most developers are too high and mighty. They would rather make a beautiful looking game with average gameplay than to make an average looking game with awesome gameplay.
Look at Wario Ware Inc. Not just Sprites, but jagged ugly crude sprites that serve just enough purpose to function. The game includes a crude grayscale nose and finger, and you have to pick the nose with the finger in under three seconds... Yet the gameplay is amazing. I've had more fun with that game than the last Tony Hawk release.
The industry could use a few more nose-picking developers and a few less wannabe Picasso's.
It's the gameplay, stupid. (Score:3, Insightful)
Innovation in graphics is easy, since you know exactly where to go with it. The amount of work required to create the content goes up, but making prettier graphics is conceptually not hard... more computing power + better optimization = better graphics.
To be perfectly honest, I could care less how photorealistic games look. It's impressive, yes. But in the end it's not the important part. If I wanted to see really amazing computer graphics I wouldn't need to play a game to do so.
What about innovation in gameplay? Shinier widgets do not a more fun game make. Unfortunately, innovation in gameplay involves risk... will people like it? And the problem is that because of the higher development costs (due to the better graphics; see also the games story from a few days back), publishers are less likely to take a risk on a new idea... they'll go for what sells: a sequel to an established franchise, a sports game, a movie franchise... something they know people will like.
Games, as an art, are really not about the shiny things on your screen. Yes, you need them, but at this point quadrupling the detail of the picture is really not going to significantly augment your gaming experience.
This seems bogus in many ways. (Score:3, Interesting)
How much power will it draw? How are you going to cool it? The laws of physics appear to present certain obstacles, these are starting to become real problems. But even if you can make this kind of power happen in a game console -- will it make the game drastically better? Will it even make the graphics drastically better? I have doubts.
It looks to me like we've reached a point of diminishing returns with 3D graphics. Each new generation of hardware is resulting in less dramatic improvement to the images we're seeing. Continuing to throw more hardware at games and calling it a "revolution" will lead only to disappointment.
Ha, I say! Ha! This is the kind of drivel I've heard from game industry pundits going all the way back to the mid 1980s. Somehow it never seems to happen. We've got plenty powerful enough hardware today, and advanced enough AI algorithms, if only there was a serious push to use them. Yet, this article seems to be implying that a deeper and more sophisticated story is somehow tied to better graphics.
I was recently looking at screenshots from upcoming games: Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft. EQ2 definitely has highly advanced graphics, from a technical standpoint. Tons of polygons, massive detailed texturemaps, advanced lighting effects, yadda yadda. . . So why does WoW often look more attractive? I think it's because Blizzard focussed on art with a sense of style rather than flogging the technology.
Blizzard are also working hard to create a well-designed, well-balanced game that's fun to play. Sony, on the other hand, are bragging about their voice acting and how cinematic everything is. Is it a game, or is it a movie? I'd like to play a game, please. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned that way?
After the introduction the article dives into a lot of technical subjects that I'm not qualified to comment on. At the end it wraps it with a surprising admission. .
The author implies that this is a problem to be overcome -- probably by borrowing techniques from film and television. I'm thinking instead: Maybe this is the point where we should take a step back and ask if we're even on the right path, if this is the direction videogames (and computer games) should even be going? Is this real progress?
FF6 (Score:5, Insightful)
Graphics DO Matter (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nice (Score:3, Funny)
Progress only hurts those on the cutting edge (Score:3, Funny)
Progress only hurts those on the cutting edge, everyone else benefits from your lust to have the latest and greatest.
Having said that...I'll be grabbing Half Life 2 the day it comes out.