Game Technology To Watch In 2009

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.

Re:My Predictions

[grumbel]

Somebody please correct me when I am wrong here, but I was under the impression that technology like those 240Hz TVs are meant for movies, not for games. As far as I understand it, they take a handful of frames and then calculate inbetweens to reduce the jitter when the camera is panning in a film. So far so good, the problem however is that they actually need the last frame before they can start displaying the first one, meaning they will generate plenty of lag, which is a non-issue for movies, but makes them unusable for gaming.

Bigger and prettier games

[aerton]

Whilst cut-secenes rendered by game engine became more popular, pre-rendered are still common. All that extra space could be used to store different variations of character's gear instead of sticking to the default. E.g. in RE4 cut-scenes the character is always rendered in the starting cloth even if you are wearing some other vest.

This does not require that much more effort to create, it would add a little to the immersion and a DVD release could use one version as current games.

Re:Content

[Creepy]

yes, Mipmapping is one technique to help prevent aliasing - it really is pre-computed anti-aliasing on the texture itself. Ripmaps provide better anti-aliasing (since they do perspective oriented scaling), but they also use a lot more memory.

For mipmapping, you may have something like this

using the convention 0x=hexidecimal (base 16, where letters A through F represent numbers 10-15 - FF below is the number 255 [15*16+15]) A=alpha (transparency - 0=fully transparent, FF means fully opaque), R=red, G=green, B=blue

0xAARRGGBB
0xFF000033 0xFF000000
0xFF444444 0xFF000000

the mipmap averages these for the next level (this is called isotropic filtering)

0xFF111119

then depending on the distance, either the higher resolution or lower resolution is used. There are a number of extensions to this idea that give better results (i.e. trilinear filtering, anisotropic filtering, ripmaps), but that is deep ending a bit.

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