What if Game Graphics Never Aged?

An anonymous reader writes "If you've heard of Procedural Synthesis, you already think it's amazing. It's been used to create some extraordinary visuals in tiny packages, like .kkrieger, which is less than 96 Kilobytes big but still has graphics that look like like a modern PC title. Beyond that, there's even more that Procedural Synthesis might be able to do; what if your old video games never aged, never looked out-of-date? Imagine putting Halo 2 into your Xbox 360 only to have it automatically upgraded to look like Halo 3 in graphical quality. This article examines the unexpected way that Procedural Synthesis might impact gaming in the generation after the Xbox 360, PS3, and Nintendo Wii."

Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

When I read this Slashdot article, all the rules of software design came flooding back to me. Low coupling, high cohesion, encapsulated complex structures, all that jazz. Before you even started to program a complex FPS game, you might start by carefully separating the layers and keeping things like two dimensional surfaces rendered to be de-coupled from other things like the AI of the enemies. Separate the garphics from the rest of the gameplay. I completely buy into the possibility that games can be designed well enough to abstract their graphics to a point where the same exact graphics package can be used in even several different types of games.

When I read this article, it sounded like a classic example of someone going nuts with the design patterns [wikipedia.org] that encourage encapsulation and separation of layers to improve modularity. Like someone had actually put in a lot of effort to the game to reduce the amount of effort that will be required later when new platforms and libraries come out for the game. On top of that, the imagery doesn't come from a data file but instead is derived on the fly from a library of procedures--something easily achieved by the strategy pattern [wikipedia.org]. The funny thing is that if other games have abstracted their graphics packages sufficiently, they should be able to rework the libraries to be procedures instead or maybe even build adapters to .kkrieger's procedures.

Why don't we see this more often in all games? Because I think most games today are disposable. They're built for one console or platform with the intent of only running on the current version of Windows or Mac and with no interest in coming out with new releases that support new hardware or software. They do this because games are construed as novelty software that expire as the user tires of them. Games like WoW or other MMOs might bring about a shift in the way game designers spend their efforts. Maybe games will start to take a longer time to develop but last a hell of a lot longer than they traditionally have?

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

Maybe some of them will even invest in these silly radical concepts called "storyline" and "plot."

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

There's more probability of that if the graphics automatically upgrade on new hardware. It would make the graphics less of a selling point.

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

Nobody said anything about "automatically".

From the article summary:

Imagine putting Halo 2 into your Xbox 360 only to have it automatically upgraded to look like Halo 3 in graphical quality.

Congratulations - you've taken the /. standard of "not reading the article" to "not reading the summary".

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

Procedural p0Rn, that's the way to go. hehe

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

What a silly progression. Games aren't nessecarily stories. PacMan was no less a classic for it's shallow plot, nor Tetris less addictive. I'd much rather see them focus on innovative gameplay than improving the plotline in "The next epic quest where a lone boy finds some friends and saves the world." It's a lost cause; if you seek a story, read a book, watch a show. Games are not storytelling.

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

You seem to forget that pen and paper games, one of the origens of computer gaming, was all about story telling. There is still substancial room for story and plot in modern video games.

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

Ah yes, modern RPGs couldn't be further from their origins. Playing with story, ie roleplaying, is largely missing from modern games. I don't believe that adding "plot" and "storyline" fixes the problem. The goal here should be allow the player to play wit

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

So what, we all played Flight Simulator with pen and paper. Well, paper anyway. No big deal.

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

You're right, games aren't storytelling. That's what the poster above you said, that they should work on it.

By your same argument, graphics have nothing to do with games, and thus shouldn't be worked on either. Pong was 2 lines and a box. When books were first written, I wonder if anyone said "paper isn't for writing on, if you want a story, listen to your father's." When film first came out, I know many people said "it will never take off, no one wants to watch pictures on a screen," but here we are today, with people on the Internet telling others to turn to film for storyline because it doesn't belong anywhere else than the two established mediums.

It's more than possible for a game to have good graphics, good storyline and plot, and innovative gameplay. Unfortunately, the past few years have been fueled by video card manufacturer's pumping out graphics technology faster than most software producers have been able to keep up with, and so audiences became captivated with "oooh shiny water"...gameplay and storyline dropped by the wayside while pushing eye candy to the limit flourished. Like all things, though, people got tired of all glitz and no substance, and we're seeing that curve level out.

With mobile devices becoming more and more popular, we're beginning to see gameplay-based games gain some popularity again, and focus will probably shift there for the next few years as portable technology gets smaller and faster. At that point, computers will be what PCs are today, we'll see a shift back to storyline for a few years as RPGs gain popularity on the Nokia Futura in the Japanese market (and some may make it Westward), just in time for the next big graphics push, this time cell phones (if they're still called cell phones at this point) will be included.

Yes, I play the occassional game on my cell phone while waiting for class to start, or when the power goes out (as it tends to do often this time of year in Tampa, FL).

My point is, some people play games as digital puzzles, brain-teasers if you will. Some play them for the graphics. Some play them for story. Yeah, you can find brain-teasers in the back of the Sunday paper, you'll never beat the graphics of the real world, and story can be found in books and movies. That doesn't mean those are the only mediums "allowed" to do such things. Games, in the end, are about having fun, and what's fun to you isn't always going to be fun to me. Diversity is king. No, games are not storytelling, they are not graphics, and their not gameplay. They're any of them, and a smart publisher will offer all three, and then some.

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

some people play games as digital puzzles, brain-teasers if you will. Some play them for the graphics. Some play them for story

Right. But it's worth looking at what many people have to say about story telling and I think you'll find your post's parent, considered in context, is more directed at these comments rather than a general criticism of storytelling.

Some game companies (including my employer) seem to think that their games are poor quality (oops...better not reveal my employer's name) because the storytelling isn't good enough. These people look to the movie business and see that many big effects movies suck because they have a weak story and assume that the same criticism carries over. It doesn't. Games and movies have a whole lot of different ways in which they can suck that don't relate to each other.

The game business seems to look to the movie business as a kind of more respectable big brother. So many game developers have now got it into their heads that they must try to develop things like movies. And hence they feel pressured into developing a story even though they may end up wasting resources that might better have been used for gameplay.

A nice example of the latter is the old adventure game business. Because these game developers felt that somehow what they were doing was lowbrow they renamed the genre to "interactive fiction" denying their games heritage.

Make games and be proud to make them, whether they have great graphics, great stories or great gameplay. Don't feel that somehow you have to compete with other art forms like literature and cinema on their own turf.

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

Games aren't and shouldn't be storytelling. Games are more toycrafting with narrative metaphor.

Story games always have finite possibility. The great games are those that combine fully independant elements so that game possibility is the exponential sum of its parts. Tieing all elements to a linear (or at best, a few linear) stories vastly reduces the number of gameplay possibilities.

The most extreme example of this is the cutscene. Cutscenes are dead gametime, the equivalent of having static on the radio. Personally I blame anime (which also has long pointless exposition between the parts one generally cares about) If it takes more than 1 minute to get from powering up the game to get from powering on to playing a real (not training) level, then the designers are doing something very wrong. These are games, not movies, or something we should have to *train* for.

I think geeks are killing gaming. In the early 90s PC gaming was full of countless genres of odd, off-the-wall games. Most dads I knew (I live in a University town) had Civilization, Lemmings, Kings Quest, etc. on their office computers. These days games are increasingly fast paced, increasingly involved, increasingly require dozens or even hundreds of hours of play to uncover content (locking content is a very cheap way of artificially creating interest in otherwise dull aspects of the game), increasingly require the simultaneous use of 12 buttons. Games are increasingly only for hard-core gamers, and as a working adult with very few video game playing friends it pisses me off. I don't want to play a game for ten hours before I get to the meat. I'm not going to slog through 100 hours of repetitive menu based battles to watch some cutscenes. I want simulations, things that are fun to play with the first 15 minutes you're in the game, and won't lose interest once the game runs out of script. Or if it's a scripted game, I want something more like the old adventures and american computer RPGs, where the story was revealed along the sides as a fun *game* progressed, and the reward for getting further was getting to a cool level, not getting some non-interactive cgi cartoon of 13-22 year old's idea of "hot."

And get the hell offa my lawn ya damn hooligans.

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

It's not a fundamental conflict, it just means that the storyteller needs to adjust their art for the medium. Instead of telling one story, the storyteller needs to figure out how to tell 500 stories which still allow the necessary components to come together. And there are well-known tricks for doing that sort of thing. Break the story up into modules which are mostly independant but have threads connecting them in the events that occured before the player arrives. Create some changes of dialogue to acknowledge the player's actions, or even separate branches though you have to be conservative about doing that lest the possibilities balloon. Don't think 'what do I want the villian to do to get the story moving' but rather 'how would the villian react to A? to B? to C?' given that the villian will have some set goal that he/she needs to accomplish, so it will eventually come back to the same things...

And so on. Now perhaps your complaint is 'but then I can't do anything I want to at all'. Thing is, you never could in any game. Each game is a finite universe. Clever designers have figured out how to make it look large, but they can't simulate everything you'd want to do any more than storytellers can create branches for everything you'd want to do. The problems that the gameplay designers face and the problems that the storytellers face are rather similar beneath it all in that way.

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

"Maybe some of them will even invest in these silly radical concepts called "storyline" and "plot."

Gameplay, THEN story and plot.

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

I am not talking about adding more movie clips. I am sometimes as annoyed with them as you are. I would like to see, however, more reason provided as to why, exactly, you are killing the red dragon to save the blue one.

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

Red dragons are bad...blue dragons are good.

C'mon, EVERYBODY know that one.

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

"Red dragons are bad...blue dragons are good."

And green dragons mean you need to adjust your monitor.

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

What the hell are you smokin'?

A magic dragon?

OBPennyArcade

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/10/07 [penny-arcade.com]

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

Plot != 2-3 minute cut-scenes. Half Life 2 and the ongoing story of what is effectively HL3 (the episodes) has one of the finest game plots ever (even though it only gets about 7/10 in pure originality stakes), yet hasn't got a single cut-scene, just a few pauses in gameplay in Dr. Kleiner's lab early on (during which you have enough to do), and a quick note from the man in black.

An adventure game (FPSs and RPGs, the likes of GTA games) that does not have a plot may be fun and may satisfy the visceral need to shoot at stuff, but the lack of a soul, a central concept, a dramatic tension will mean that the game's design and construction will suffer as a result; there's no motive for anything. Plot done properly is an essential part of a really satisfying game experience.

That's not to say that games that lack plot can't be good, or fun, or interesting. It just means that if you're lobbing bullets at someone, it's nice to know why. Makes you aim for the head/crotch a bit more.

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

I would say that GTA actually has way more "plot" that HL2. HL2's plot consists of "make your way to point y to meet person x, killing lots of zombies along the way". It's fun stuff, but it's not exactly an involved plot. Although I'm only a small bit o

Speed

Why don't we see this more often in all games?

Speed. Running algorithms to generate every damn thing takes a lot more processor time than loading a pre-rendered object file. Disk space is dirt cheap compared to processor cycles, so the appropriate trade study is made....

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

Why don't we see this more often in all games? Because I think most games today are disposable. [snip] Games like WoW or other MMOs might bring about a shift in the way game designers spend their efforts.

Bingo. Game developers aren't interested in technology that will extend the life of games (unless people are paying a subscription). This technology is very cool and we'll certainly be seeing more of it in select areas (notably open-source games), but it doesn't really make business sense on a wide scale.

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

I would think the main reason to do this wouldn't be to "future proof" your game. That's the last thing you want to do. If games kept getting better by themselves, you'd undermine your own future revenue, either from upgrades or from new titles.

But I can think of several reasons to do this, none of which is about doing the consumer a favor in the future at your own expense.

The first is to cut down on marginal development expenses. I don't know much about game development, but IIRC artwork is a large expense. Perhaps by having the artists work at a more abstract level, setting ranges of values for scenery and character generation, you could reduce the amount of hand detail they deal with. So, if you have the resources to create a world a thousand hectares in area, perhaps you could machine generate a million hectares.

The second reason I can think for doing this is to have the game automatically expand and adapt to the player. If you liked dungeon crawls, it could make more dungeons for you. If you preferred outdoor play, it would create more terrain for you. You would never finish exploring the world of the game because it would expand as you explored it.

The third reason I can think of for doing this is that you might want to deliver the game on line.

In any case, the result would not be, artistically speaking, as good as if a team of talented artists was given the time to do things by hand. The screenshots confirm this: they are cliched and uninteresting. But even Miyazaki uses some computer generated effects these days, although he strictly limits the amount.

Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns

Before you even started to program a complex FPS game, you might start by carefully separating the layers and keeping things like two dimensional surfaces rendered to be de-coupled from other things like the AI of the enemies.

This is ludicrous - cloud cuckoo land. My texture mapping code is intimately bound up in the AI of the enemies.

It's simply not possible to separate these two deeply entwined concepts.

My graphics haven't aged...

Super Mario Brothers, Duck Hunt and Rad Racer still look just as awesome as the day I first got them!

Re:My graphics haven't aged...

If those old NES games looked like modern games, I wouldn't play video games at all! What we need is the opposite, something that makes current games not look crappy and 3D.

Duke Nukem Forever

Screw Halo 2 in your XBOX 360, I want to put Duke Nukem in my 360 and have it play with Duke Nukem Forever graphics.

What about gameplay quality?

There's all this hype on graphics and technology, but the heart of any game is still (and always will be) gameplay. Sure the games of old look "crappy", but in many cases they provided a great gaming experience. I for one hope that we just get to the point where graphics are real-life quality and we can focus on gameplay. Just my $.02

http://religousfreaks.com/ [religousfreaks.com]

scalable?

.kkrieger is certainly a feat of software engineering (pretty much anything .theprodukkt puts out is) but procedural synthesis can only go so far. When you get to elements of the game that should be static (such as specific characters) then a static model would probably be more efficient than an algorithm to generate the same. Of course, I could be (and probably am) wrong.

The Good?

That's an interesting thought. The article makes it out to be a bit like a magical cure, but some aspects of it sound good to me. You can often improve the "wow" factor by tossing in "more" of something. Denser foliage; more of the tiny rocks that make up the detail; and so forth. Procedural generation would mean that these wouldn't have to be placed by hand, so this could make it easier to scale the visuals with system power. Similarly, particle sprays are often done procedurally, so being able to tweak those "up" to create more complex fireworks for mysterious future hardware could also work.

Some games are still played for years after they've fallen behind the curve on graphics; this might mitigate the future ugliness, adding longevity to a popular title. Keeping gamers interested in (and talking about) your game makes sense, whether you'll be producing different titles in the future or will be focusing on sequels.

Ultimately, though, my hope is that algorithmic content generation will bring game development costs down for indies. Maybe I'm dreaming. :)

_______________________
Indie Superstar - A video webcast for gamers who play indie games [indiesuperstar.com]
Dejobaan Games - Indie games for people who watch video webcasts [dejobaan.com]

Oblivion is a bad example

Despite what the article says, everyone sees the same trees in Oblivion. The trees were generated using procedural synthesis (SpeedTree) *once*, and then the whole shebang was saved as a huge map and put on the disk. It's an example of the opposite of something like kkrieger, which puts the math on the disk and lets the end-user's machine to the generation, rather than the developers' machines.

The grass, on the other hand, is randomly placed and might qualify. About all that could happen on better hardware in the future is "more grass," though.

Call it

The portrait of Dorian Duke Nuke'm

One major reason

From talking to artists I'm acquainted with, one major reason procedural rendering is moving so slowly is that it's difficult to exercise real creative control over it. All you have to work with are the inputs, and their linkage to aspects of the output may not be clear. It's very hard to tweak a procedural generator with any kind of strategy; all you can do is poke around at random values until the result looks pretty close to what you originally had in mind. Compared to the precise pixel/texel/vertex-level controls artists are used to, it's a step backwards and won't make game development easier or faster.

Re:One major reason

This sounds just like when artists go from print to the web. The first thing they want is for the entire site to be one huge JPG so this foofah can be 32 pixels from the gajooble and "it HAS to be 3pt comic sans otherwise it just won't work!!". It took s

Since we're on the subject... Exult 3D!

Exult [sourceforge.net] was a good example of "procedural" "growth" of a game.

Ultima VII was a 2D RPG. Yet, all objects in the game world have height. One guy at Exult hacked up a version of Exult that runs Ultima VII in 3D mode - basically, mapping all 2D tiles around cubes as described by their dimensions and height data.

The results were quite interesting [sammatthews.com] (buildings looked kind of good, creatures and many plants and natural formations not so good, so they are being replaced by 3D models).

But it is a good example and exercise in extracting more detail from the game than the original developers intended or envisioned.

A bit OT

I've often wondered if the bloat in modern games is somewhat intentional as a deterent to piracy. If a game is 96k (or 300 megs for that matter) it is easily moved, stored, downloaded etc. whereas a game that is 4Gb takes much more effort, bandwidth and energy.

.kkrieger download

For those who want to try the 96 k game kkrieger :
Download here (beta version) :http://kk.kema.at/files/kkrieger-beta.zip [kk.kema.at]

Don't they already ?

Nethack still looks as fresh and crisp as it did 20 years ago.

Allow me to translate....

"Console companies have gone ot such great lengths to make sure their API is so specific that we have to spend a year porting from one console to another, that we'll just come up with a way to make it all never change."

At least half the design time of a console these days is making sure it's HARD to port games to another console, so that it will be an exclusive title, and they can make more money.

I fyou think Microsoft hates things like OpenGL, you've never seen the fires of hell hatered that people like Sony, Nintendo etc have for anything that makes game development easier.

Re:Allow me to translate....

Great theory but no.

If you want an exclusive title then you have your lawers draw up a contact with their lawers. The fact that two APIs are different might just be due to the fact that they were *gasp* designed by two different design teams.

If someone wa

Total Annihilation

This game... created in the 1990's looks as good as ever. And in fact, recently went to a true 3d environment ("Spring"). All those tiny 1/2" objects were 3d objects from the beginning. As the 3d cards got better, the game got better.

Likewise, the AI engine and other aspects were forward thinking- table based, programmable and over the years the AI for the game and units and maps have all only improved with age.

It is the *only* game that I purchased back then that I still play and enjoy.

A couple of points

Firstly, there is the question to how much effort a company would want to put into making a version of their game that gets better with age. Using current models of "create a game, sell a couple hundred thousand copies, then make another game" it doesn't really make sense. The key is that the graphics can improve as hardware improves, and the only sorts of games that really come close to fitting that sort of lifecycle today are the MMOGs. Like I wish Ultima Online had graphics that had improved over time. The game is almost 10 years old and is largely unchanged. Other games (like the soon to be serialized Half-Life 2 and SIN series) might also benefit from improvements, though HL2 is already incorporating improved graphics with each new episode (according to the developers commentary). Secondly, the procedural systhesis method is much more compute intensive. They use as a prime example the forest scenery in Oblivion. As we all know, Oblivion is a performance-killing game on the PC, and the Great Forest part of it is the slowest part by far. So if you go too far with procedureal synthesis today, your game can turn out to be a real pig. So there's a definite balance that you have to strike between performance today and upgraded visuals tomorrow.

Wil wright talks about this is a recent lecture

It is available at www.longnow.org (previous months lectures). Its not the same topic, but it is a talk with brian eno entirely about 'generative content'.

Procedural generation is still crap.

This generation or next.

The problem with the idea is instead of creating larger high quality unique images, or large quanity of images, the idea is to generate your images on the fly through code.

Ok that would work. And it does. However it doesn't work in large scale games. First off if you look at Procedural generation you have to code the way the system works very carefully. It's like explaining to an alien what my DDR pad is. "it's a large pad with four buttons on it, It has lights." oops forgot it's metal, forgot this and that. And what's worse, every single time you use it you'll have to create a new way to describe the texture, or you'll get the same texture for everything.

But do you realize how long it would take to design the ENTIRE world of Halo with that tool? How about Prey? how about GTA? It wouldn't take 3 years between games, it'd take 10 years, or it would cost vastly more.

Xbox 360 fanboys (not that I hate the system) tout this as the reason they don't need blu-ray. The theory is sound. (It does work, it will work, it will always work) But at the same time, the developed a small game for it. Did they have trees, multiple people with tons of different clothes, flowing textures. Did their game sell a couple million copies?

Some companies do use procedural generation, for stuff that's inconsiquencial. Trees is the big one currently, Speed tree save tons of time, but that's the only widespread use of the technology so far.

It boils down to this. If procedural generation is the solution to all our problems why haven't we used it in everything? Why wasn't it discovered earlier? It's not because of the power of computers, it's because it's not going to save the world. We arn't going to see well made games using procedural generation for graphics because it just bogs down the processor, and it doesn't give any noticable improvement in graphic quality. If we had 10 processors, then yeah we can waste 4-5 working on generating the world, but even with 6 processors, 1 is for graphics, 1 or 2 is for physics (a must have in most games now), and the rest is for your gameplay components, we don't have the extra power no matter what ivory tower scientists want use to believe.

This is all "what if" the answer though is "it can't"

I can't see this working for too long...

I can't see this working for long...

Eventually when memory (RAM & HD) are nearly free and nearly infinite, visuals in games may come close to paralelling reality (i.e. a tree in a game may look more like a real tree than it does today). A game that is developed today even with the most advanced mathematical algorythms applied in a graphics platform to be expandable to future, will not be imediately upgradable (from an end-users's perspective) to benefit from an instant graphics upgrade. I.e. you can't just shove the game in the latest new console and expect it to have graphics magically upgraded to the latest high standards. Somebody will still have to go through the entire game and add granularity to each wall, floor, and animated characters in the game which mathematics can not auto-magically generate with accuracy enough to come close to paralleling the randomness & beautify of reality. So the only alternative, I can see is to have the games of today allow future artists to ADD new graphic content into the old game with some newer gaming technology... but somebody still has to put in the effort to create & import all the new graphics.

So I think perhaps the article is misleading. Again, from an end-users's perspective, the game can't just magically upgrade all its graphics and have it equal in looks to whatever the latest high benchmark of impressiveness might be. At best, the end-user plugs in the CD/DVD into the new console (assuming it even accepts older formats) and over the internet, for a fee, newer graphics are downloadable... will users pay a small fee for this service? And more importantly, will gaming companies bother to re-create nicer graphics for old games? Is this a sustainable business model? I would venture to guess that only the most popular addictive games of all times might justify this kind of effort in a gaming company's project list.

Having said all that, I'm all for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Reality

Adeptus

Already Supported by the Xbox 360

I don't know if developers are taking advantage of it, or to what extent it supports it, but I'm fairly sure the Xbox 360 already has [arstechnica.com] Procedural Synthesis capabilities.

Re:Waste of Resources for the Company

Not really - the game remains exactly the same... it just gets "prettier" when you pop it into the XBox "720".

The onus (real word ??) to improve and change the game then falls onto the model rather than the graphics.

Re:Never

This would be AMAZING, though, as an open-source project. Get an amazing, constantly-updating engine down, and let people release all the content they want for it. It would be like Doom WADs on steroids.

Re:I'm not convinced that this will work that well

I'm going to have to disagree. Lets take a look at something like Grand Theft Auto..
Grand Theft Auto III graphically looks the same as Vice City graphically looks the same as San Andreas. Those games sell incredibly well when new "versions" come out rega