Game Technology To Watch In 2009 123
IGN has compiled a list of gaming technology they expect to have a significant effect on this year's products. Leading the list is the 3D technology being pushed in television and films. A number of popular games are already set up to handle this, and more are on the way. They also suggest that improved Blu-ray technology, which allows much more storage, will pave the way for even bigger and better looking games. IGN hopes that brain-computer interfaces, such as Emotiv's headset, will become responsive enough to be taken seriously, and notes that DirectX 11 and a broader adoption for PhysX are on the horizon.
Another list of 50 things for 2009 from Kikizio... (Score:4, Informative)
http://games.kikizo.com/features/50-hottest-things-in-2009-gaming-p1.asp [kikizo.com]
The 50 Hottest Things in Gaming in 2009
Here's another list, much more expanded, in case you don't like the watered down version IGN is offering.
It's not the only way (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it's not the only way. Unfortunately, though, the others are a lot more... limited.
1. For a start, there are the two Zalman 3D monitors which use simple polarizer glasses and don't need any particular frequency. Simply: odd rows are polarized in one direction, even rows in the perpendicular direction, so each eye sees only half of them.
Upsides: Every single frame is split into two like that, so 60Hz is enough. It works right out of the box with the Nvidia Vista drivers. No flickering because it's not shutter-glasses.
Downsides: needs Vista. Or the iz3d drivers in XP which honestly aren't that mature yet, and it's a pain in most games to get a neat 3D both afar and in the weapon you have in your hands. You get half the resolution either way. Any text which isn't in a huge font, _will_ be broken by seeing only every other line of it. But the worst is that the 3D effect only works in a vertical angle of +/- 8 degrees. You only need to slide in your chair a little or even move your head a bit if you're close to the screen, to just start seeing double instead of 3D.
2. The iz3d stacked tft monitor. Basically it's two monitors in one, and again it uses polarizer glasses to separate them.
Upside: works in XP too. No resolution loss. Angle is much less of a problem. No flickering because it's not shutter-glasses.
Downside: well, it's the iz3d drivers again. It takes a lot of fiddling for the 3D effect to work, and even then it doesn't seem to have the depth that the NVidia drivers manage out of the box. Trying to go any higher will just cause you to see double, as the brain just gives up. Again it's a big problem to have both good depth illusion _and_ not see your weapon doubled in a FPS. (E.g., in Hellgate London literally there's almost no setting except flat where the gun doesn't double in first person.)
Also see what Tom's Hardware had to say about it.
3. The eDimensional glasses and drivers.
Upside: they work in XP (and _only_ in XP.) They work with non-Nvidia cards. And eDimensional claims that they work with TFTs too. No refresh rate restriction: if you don't mind a _lot_ of flickering, you can even run their drivers on a 60Hz screen, effectively getting only 30Hz to each eye. It's much cheaper than the nVidia glasses it will work with the Nvidia drivers too, if you have Vista and an 120Hz display.
Downside: it will only work as well as the nVidia drivers if you actually get the nVidia drivers to use it. I.e., you're back to needing 120Hz and Vista.
Downside: The eDimensional drivers, to put it mildly, suck. First of all there's the issue that it makes the image interlaced if you use them instead of nVidia, and probably only Loki knows why they needed that on a CRT. Worse yet, it stays interlaced even on the desktop once it went interlaced. So it's all the disadvantages of a Zalman display, but it flickers and it has a bunch of other own disadvantages. Like that they've crashed more than once on me. Or that a lot of the time they just make the image interlaced, but not actually 3D. E.g., WoW, the porster child of the "we support 3D glasses" generation, just goes interlaced and starts flickering the glasses, but is otherwise just as flat as ever.
Upside: if you have a CRT, you can use a combination of the iz3d drivers and an eDimensional utility which just activates the glasses. The iz3d drivers don't know how to use the pin that controlls the shutter-glasses, but will happily render alternate frames for them if you activate the glasses otherwise. This actually doesn't have the interlaced effect, and actually works with more games.
Downside: the iz3d drivers still have the same downsides as before in rendering 3D. With an extra nasty twist I found out the hard way. If your fps drops below a limit (about 40 fps), the image starts just jumping between left eye and right eye, for no obvious reason, making the game unplayable. So basically you have to give up virtually eye candy in any game to have enough of the reserve so that doesn't
Re:Bigger and better games? (Score:1, Informative)
Bingo. We have a winner.... Idiot prize of the week.
I wondered how long it would be before someone mentioned the Microsoft fueled PS3 BD drive is slow FUD/Bile.
Get some education please..., whilst you are at it, also learn how to separate FUD from FACT. The internet is full of people that want to trick you into believing their last-gen technology is somehow better..
FACT:
360 DVD is only 12x on single layer DVDs (how many games come on single layer DVD, answer: just 4), for everything else, it's 8x.
360 is also CAV, so it's only 8x at the very edge of the disc, everywhere else it's all downhill from there.
2x BD is 71Mbit/Sec constant across the entire disk surface.
8x DVD is 86.4Mbit/sec only on the outer edge, and then peak transfer speed.
Re:Stop using DirectX already! (Score:1, Informative)
The part of DirectX that is nice in any respect is Direct3d.
Really, the two hardest things in game development are A) The Renderer and B) The simulation code.
Direct3d and OpenGL are used for the renderer and simulation is typically API independent/proprietary (aside from some things like physics libraries).
The rest of game technologies development takes much less time than the two part listed above.
Re:Retro (Score:3, Informative)