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PC Games (Games) Programming Entertainment Games IT Technology

Localizing High-End Games for Low-End Machines 345

Posted by michael from the debian-still-compiling-for-386 dept.
CowboyRobot writes "Intel engineer Dean Macri has an article at ACM Queue listing the challenges in designing PC games that will run on very different processors. PCs vary widely in their performance, and if game developers design only for the high-end, they limit their market. The article lists specific tips on how to guarantee that even old slow machine can run new games, such as 'the number of triangles used to create the trunks and branches could vary based on the available processor and graphics hardware performance', 'replace the clothing on characters in a game with actual geometry that separates the clothes from the underlying character model', and for simulating ocean waves, having low-end systems rely on basic sine waves while higher-end machines use more sophisticated methods."
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Localizing High-End Games for Low-End Machines More

Localizing High-End Games for Low-End Machines

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  • frust post (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 14, 2004 @07:58PM (#8564361)
    'replace the clothing on characters in a game with actual geometry that separates the clothes from the underlying character model'

    This actually sound like a pretty good idea. Hey, I got one too. Perhaps they could just leave out the clothes completely on low end machines? .. come to think of it, I might be playing the next Tomb Raider on my Pentium 133. Half a frame a sec is fine if it gives me half a chance to ogle Lara's buttcrack.

    • Re:frust post (Score:5, Funny)

      by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:02PM (#8564388)
      This actually sound like a pretty good idea. Hey, I got one too. Perhaps they could just leave out the clothes completely on low end machines? .. come to think of it, I might be playing the next Tomb Raider on my Pentium 133. Half a frame a sec is fine if it gives me half a chance to ogle Lara's buttcrack.

      TechTV's X-Play show once had a funny piece of video from a pre-release build of a Tomb Raider game for a console. There was a bug in the camera-angle determination at a certain point that accidently put the camera inside Lara's head, about where the brain should have been. The resulting display proved that Lara's head is indeed hollow.
    • I played tombraider on a p166 fine. The secret was a vodoo1 card by 3dfx.

  • Graceful Degradation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Sunday March 14, 2004 @07:58PM (#8564363)
    It's easy to say what you want to do when you have unlimited processor resources. But when you don't, you'd rather your program not crash or totally freeze. Especially in a game environment, throwing the little things overboard first will leave the main gameplay elements in tact and still leave a playable game.

    Yeah, it means extra programmer work on the design side because you're going to have to design a "smart version" and a "dumb version" for the effects you want to downgrade. You'll also have to select how you're going to measure system resources, and at what level of resources will the changeover for smart to dumb happen for each element. It's work, but I think it's an investment with a payoff.

    The keyword is "graceful degradation". Take away the elements that contribute to the "wow factor" for the power user but the low-power user won't really miss. Background elements are the key thing you should be thinking about, especially ones that'll never have much direct impact on the outcome of game situations.

    It's all about raising the spread between your "minimum" and "looks best on" system requirements. You want to get the minimum as close to the floor as possible, while having the high-end features will create great demo installations and really sell your game to the high-end fans. The more people who can enjoy your game, the more copies you'll sell, and therefore the more money you'll make. You remember money, right? It's the whole reason games are written anyway...

    • Re:Graceful Degradation (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ergo98 ( 9391 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:07PM (#8564424) Homepage Journal
      The keyword is "graceful degradation". Take away the elements that contribute to the "wow factor" for the power user but the low-power user won't really miss.

      Of course there's a flipside to this -- people with low-end machines invariably crank up all of the settings and then complain when it runs at 5fps (this happens all the time with current games, many of which do have detail sliders setting various levels of detail. Some games, like Operation Flashpoint, let you set a desired framerate and it varies the geometry complexity to try to maintain it). Alternately if the visuals are totally automatic people will complain that it looks like crap on their machine but looks great on someone else's machine.
    • " you're going to have to design a "smart version" and a "dumb version" for the effects you want to downgrade"

      The main point I think the article is trying to make is, that rather then developers making the change, making it easier to do in the environment. (eg, DirectX knows it's going to flop performance so it opts for a different way to produce the effects). Which isn't built into current Graphic development environments.

      But needless to say hardware and software manufacturers are happy to sell multipl

  • woo (Score:5, Funny)

    by nomadic ( 141991 ) <`nomadicworld' `at' `gmail.com'> on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:00PM (#8564374) Homepage
    PCs vary widely in their performance

    This is why I come to slashdot, the deep technological information you can't get anywhere else.

  • Old Hardware... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:00PM (#8564379)
    Like the X-Box?

  • Good old Atari... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by vbdrummer0 ( 736163 )
    I dunno...I'd still rather play Pong or Frogger than huge overdone games.

    • Re:Good old Atari... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by screwballicus ( 313964 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @09:57PM (#8564979)
      I dunno...I'd still rather play Pong or Frogger than huge overdone games.

      Extremely obvious and predictable appeals to nostalgia seem to be really popular with mods on Slashdot.

      You'd rather play Frogger?

      Then my question is, for every person who claims they'd rather play Atari or any given classic system than a present day one, how many serious gamers who own both ACTUALLY spend more hours per week playing 1970s/1980s games than post 1990 ones over long periods.

      It's often said, but it's an extremely few who can back up their whistful nostalgic ponderings by citing that as the absolute reality of their gaming behaviour. Heck, I'm a serious collector of TI 99/4A parts and games, owning and coveting some virtually non-existent or prototype carts, and even I spend far more time on my newer systems than on the TI 99/4A (although I played Parsec for the TI 99 a bit this afternoon).

      I don't play it because it's better than my newer systems. It's not because it can compete. It's nostalgia.

      I don't have a problem with nostalgia, but I do contend against the idea that something like Super Monkey Ball 2 or Metroid Prime can be outdone in general by something like my favourite TI 99/4A games. The technology simply did not allow all the things that a new game can allow us to do. And some of those new thing are fun, and immersive. So I refuse to believe that absolutely all new computer/gaming technologies and techniques developed since the 2600 have been completely irrelevant to the advancement of gaming entertainment, and that, Frogger being just as much fun as present day games, we may as well just go back to coding CGA games in BASIC for all it matters.
      • how many serious gamers who own both ACTUALLY spend more hours per week playing 1970s/1980s games than post 1990 ones over long periods

        This, of course, assumes that the enjoyment of a game can be measured by number of hours played. If this were the case, Everquesties must live in a state of constant orgasm.

  • Gosh. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:02PM (#8564394)
    I remember when games were about gameplay.

    • Re:Gosh. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by miu ( 626917 )
      I remember when games were about gameplay.

      Good AI, effects, music, and so on will not make a game fun to play by themselves, but which was more immersive and memorable: a 'M' rushing at the your '@' in Angband or Diablo announcing your doom and hitting you with a lightening blast followed by an explosion of flame?

      The rogue-like games and Diablo are basically the same game, but Diablo is more fun because of the addition of graphics and sound to a core fun game. Some games (Dungeon Siege) have the graph

    • Re:Gosh. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by sniepre ( 517796 )
      What the hell is that supposed to mean? This whole thread is about "gameplay" ... when you purchase a game, you want it to perform adequately for proper interaction and playability.. Like on a SNES or any other console system, you have a unified platform for which to develop so you know you are not producing a product which will not function properly on some home machines, but.. for PC development, you really have to cover alot of bases in order to get your product playable on a majority of your customers m

    • Re:Gosh. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by frankthechicken ( 607647 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:35PM (#8564592) Journal
      I remember when games were about gameplay.

      I swear this is the biggest fallacy ever.

      Have you actually gone back and played those old games recently?

      For me games are very much like old comedy shows and jokes, because they're old, I've heard all the jokes before. In games, I've played all those old school games, I've heard the joke done to death and only gain enjoyment from the reminiscence.

      Game genres have gone through evolution after evolution, each generation extracting and developing upon succesful ideas until we are at the current state.

      Look at Pole Position, compare it to Outrun, and then Burnout, the evolution is obvious. Each game has kept the same gameplay fundamentals and expanded/improved upon them. Of course the increase in hardware performance has helped, but I would say that if the hardware was available at the time of Pole Position was made with none of the history of the racing game, we would have seen Pole Position simply with flashier graphics.
    • I remember when people gave examples to back up their assertions rather than just repeating that single sentence.
    • I remember when games were about gameplay.

      Just accepting your assertion for the sake of argument, I'm going to ask,

      What is gameplay, and is it all there is to a game?

      Is gameplay just mechanics? Because if so, I disagree that gaming should be "about mechanics" to the implied exclusion of other things.

      Many a nostalgic geek likes to claim that graphics are unimportant. I disagree.

      As an example, Chrono Trigger is regarded as one of the greatest RPGs of all time, if not the greatest.

      You know what the f

  • WooHoo! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Now my brand-new computer will have a usable life of more than 3 weeks, think of all the money I'll save, and thus spend on new games!

    • Re:WooHoo! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by afidel ( 530433 )
      I've had my PC for over 3 years now, and with an upgrade to the video card it still plays everything I've thrown at it. Of course I can only play Silent Storm at 1024*768 with no AA and medium graphics quality, but that's the point, allow gracefull degredation and even 3 year old PC's can play. The same game will bring todays fastest processors and GPU's to their knees at max quality, so the engine should still look good in a couple years. With game development times as long as they are today you have to de

  • No market for this (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ars-Fartsica ( 166957 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:03PM (#8564398)
    This would require an incredible amount of engineering support for practically no payoff.

    • Re:No market for this (Score:5, Insightful)

      by eggstasy ( 458692 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:14PM (#8564460) Journal
      You need to go and play some more games. Most modern games run fine on my 3 year old computer... if I play at 640*480 with all the bloated eye candy turned off. OTOH, really ancient games such as the first Unreal, which I've only recently played through, looked as good as new! I could turn on all the eye candy available in the game and then some more in my graphics card settings.
      Modern games have amazing scalability even if they arent programmed in a special way. Simple graphics options like resolution, anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing can be turned on and off according to how well your PC's horsepower matches the resources demanded by the game, and that doesnt even require any programming effort.
      Having said that, a number of modern games automatically adjust LOD as needed. Sacrifice, Black & White, Second Life... dynamic LOD is not exactly rocket science and it can bring dramatic improvements to how much stuff you can cram into a scene.
  • use openGL
    open the source
    maybe folks itching to play the game without spending money will figure out how to port it to their machines.
    • "open the source"

      Or you could just go out of business right away and save time.

  • Doom 3? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Trejkaz ( 615352 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:04PM (#8564404) Homepage
    Next generation games like Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 will allegedly scale to meet these sort of demands. And as long as the engine and development tools are written with scaleability in mind, the challenge should be far less for the game developer (assuming they can afford the engine!)
    • I would expect that DOOM 3 will be better optimized than Half Life two. OpenGL just has a better tinker factor, and Carmack and Co. excel at tinkering. HL2, on the other hand, will rely on whatever scaling DirectX can offer, such as lowering the shader specs. DirectX is getting tighter, but it still depends on the programmer to optimize it properly, and since the HL2 programmers have been having problems already...

    • Re:Doom 3? (Score:5, Funny)

      by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:14PM (#8564461)
      Has anybody seen the minimum system req's for Duke Nukem Forever?
      • It'll run on most any computer made after Judgement day with no problem. The issue will be os support. It will only support Windows NTLCL (No two combinations left), Mac OS XXX, with a linux 2.154.x (or higher) port "in the works"

      • Re:Doom 3? (Score:4, Funny)

        by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:29PM (#8564556) Journal
        Yes it requires Gnu/Hurd stable 1.0 when it comes it out.
      • It was a Pentium 75 with 16 mg RAM and 8mg of Video Ram.

        I think the Matrox Millenium was right in the zone for DNF graphics.

        Jeez, I remember back in the day that all the game mags, and the online community were talking about the race between DNF and Unreal (Quake had been released at this point). Which game had what feature, who's level editor would be better, yadda, yadda, yadda.

        Looking back, it seems that all the fuss (while great, I really liked the hype and the speculation), was for nothing. Unreal c

        • Re:Doom 3? (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Bender Unit 22 ( 216955 )
          "But it'll be out "when it's done dammit."
          Someone at their office should stand up and say, "It's dead, Jim"
          • >>Someone at their office should stand up and say, "It's dead, Jim"

            I can't figure out why they carry on this charade. It's been 7 whole years. Perhaps they should kill DNF, and announce a new game using whatever tech it is they're building on these days. Make the game good, earn some respect in the community (which they are lacking), and earn a couple of bucks to keep the company going. In parallel to this, they should rethink the next Duke game, using new technology, and set some realistic goals for
      • A time machine, to take you to 2110 when it comes out.
      • You can be sure they will be posted here [ebgames.com] when they are avaliable. (for the record I think DNF is a joke)
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • As a programmer... (Score:4, Informative)

    by SisyphusShrugged ( 728028 ) <me@@@igerard...com> on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:04PM (#8564407) Homepage
    As a game programmer and developer http://igerard.com, I have worked with a number of systems that scale to the specs of the system. Most recently I have worked with the Torque Engine, which has some scaling capability, and with my own engines (although they usually dont require so much processing power).

    As a gamer, I have always had a laptop, as I move around so much, and I am very impressed by the scaling capability I have seen in recent games (Medal of Honor: Call of Duty, Morrowind) which have worked fine on my meager 32mb Mobility Radeon graphics card)
  • This sounds good, until the low-end people realize they are missing out of many of the important graphics that others are seeing. Sure it would be nice for everyone to be able to run the game, but I think most people would want to fully experience the games. I think this idea would fall apart on online multiplayer games. In a FPS, I would prefer to have as much detail as possible. Of course the low-end machine gamers will be shooting at the moving block instead of seeing a fully rendered opponent.

    --
    • but I think most people would want to fully experience the games.

      And to do that, they'll buy a better PC.

    • that might just lead to realizing it sooner if the game is pure crap gameplay wise.

      most people that play all day long have the gfx quirks turned down anyways on online games, since most of the time they're just extra eyecandy that doesn't matter and sometimes even gets in the way of that perfect sniping shot.

      most people want to fully experience games sure, but most people would rather not use another 600-1000$ to upgrade their box from few years back just because games manufacturers don't want to do any g

  • Why would they? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kenshin ( 43036 ) <kenshin@lunarworks . c a> on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:06PM (#8564416) Homepage
    Why would they bother optimising games for low-end hardware? We all know that software drives sales of hardware.

    Hell, look at most of the hot games coming out: they have marketing deals with the graphics card makers.
    • Because your game would have to meet the Killer App threshhold... your application is so good it justify not just the purchase of itself but the hardware platform needed to run it. By being willing to run on low-end hardware, you don't have to drive the sales of hardware anymore, and your actual cost to the consumer goes all to you.

    • Re:Why would they? (Score:2, Informative)

      by tono ( 38883 )
      You just answered your own question without realizing it. They program scalability in games so that someone with a slow computer can still play it, and then turn up all the graphics options and see how very beautiful it was on a high end machine. Consumer will then want said high end machine to play said game with all options turned on at more than slideshow rates. Think about when quake3 came out and most people could play the game at it's minimum requirements fairly well, but then you bought new hardwa

  • Obvious? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tarzan353 ( 246515 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:06PM (#8564417)
    Isn't this stating the obvious? Of course you could do this to speed games up, but all of these factors require longer development time.

    With the rushed nature of game development, I don't think game companies are that worried about this. It raises development costs without paying out much- most gamers keep up with the latest video card, processor, etc., and won't benefit from this.

    The type of computer user that doesn't upgrade their system very often is the same user that doesn't buy very many games.

    If these games were open source projects, these sorts of enhancements could be possible. Since the code is open and shared, some guy with a low-end machine wants better performance, so he writes simpler algorithms to emulate the real ones. When you build your own copy, you just pick which optimization level you want to be at.

  • Make it configurable (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tcopeland ( 32225 ) * <tom AT thomasleecopeland DOT com> on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:07PM (#8564423) Homepage
    Instead of trying to do super-duper processor detection degradation stuff, let the player choose levels of detail and such-like.

    That way he can choose whatever's important to him... if he's a big fan of realistic trees, let 'em have it at the cost of slower AI or whatever.

    • Make it auto-configure (Score:5, Insightful)

      by roystgnr ( 4015 ) <roy&stogners,org> on Sunday March 14, 2004 @09:57PM (#8564976) Homepage
      Instead of forcing me to make individual choices about every single optional CPU or GPU taxing feature, try and detect the capabilities of my computer and give me the best picture quality I can get at a smooth framerate.

      That way I don't have to study the impact of every single optional feature... if my computer can handle two pixel shader passes, 100 MB of textures, and models which have been decimated to 10000-20000 triangles each, I still won't have to know what a "pixel shader" is before playing.

  • User tuning. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by eddy ( 18759 )

    Don't forget to expose these options to the user. Games a pretty good at this nowadays, but it's pretty important that there's some way for the user to actually decide these things, they shouldn't all be left up to 'timing loops' and 'hardware IDs'.

    Not only do some gamers perfer framerate over display details or vice-versa, but it's also important for the future where the same game might meet with hardware that is literally 10 times as fast as the state-of-the-art at the time it was released.

    • Nah, users will expect to be able to turn on all of the checkboxes and still have it work on their system. Some switches are best left behind the curtain, even at an interactive show.

  • Shooting for the middle (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I dunno, it seems like making more generic algorithms -- ones that will draw quickly on diverse platforms -- would tend to limit the optimizations for the fastest machines. I.e., once you start coding algorithms with decisions based on processor speed you'll lose all the specific tweaks.

    Games already have a lot of features to make them playable on older hardware including resolution options, fog, shadows, detail level, etc.. Hardware also moves pretty quickly. By optimizing in the general case you'll also

  • UT2004 Software Renderer (Score:3, Informative)

    by Xenolith ( 538304 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:14PM (#8564459) Homepage
    There will be a software renderer built into UT2004. This means you don't need a 3D capable video card installed to play UT2004. It does help if you have beefy CPU if you use this mode, since that will be doing all the work. It isn't pretty, but at least you can play.

  • Valve Survey (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MiceHead ( 723398 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:16PM (#8564469) Homepage
    Valve has been conducting and publishing system specification surveys [steampowered.com]. It's interesting to see that the majority of their respondents are using GeForce 4 MX cards; I would have thought higher specs.

    The most annoying thing about detail controls in games is that it's unclear what you (the end-user) are changing when you tweak the knobs. As a developer of 3d applications, (who's guilty of same), I think I'll approach this in the future by giving users immediate feedback: "Here's what your scene will look like with low shadow detail. Here's how smoothly it'll run, on average."
    • It's not too suprising. I'm still running a p3 700 which I upgraded the video card to a 9100 last year. I don't play a lot of games but really I've not seen anything that has actually been released that would make me upgrade. I currently intend to buy a new system when halflife 2 comes out, but until that actually happens I have no need to drop the cash. I know a few others that are in a similar situation. Nothing has come out that was impressive enough to demand an upgrade.

  • Methods (Score:5, Funny)

    by morganjharvey ( 638479 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:20PM (#8564488)
    and for simulating ocean waves, having low-end systems rely on basic sine waves while higher-end machines use more sophisticated methods.

    It looks better if you just use a cosine...
  • I lead the graphics effort on The Sims, and for us, there was a lot of luck involved. Most people don't think of The Sims as terribly cutting edge graphics-wise, but at the time we were trying to do something that a lot of people told us wouldn't work (software 3d rendering into a rich z-buffered background). I put a huge amount of effort in to making the game playable on a 200MHz MMX PC, which it barely was. In the end I think we got lucky...by the time it shipped, that was a definite sweet spot in the

  • Graphics cieling (Score:2, Interesting)

    by TheAxeMaster ( 762000 )
    Don't forget the article on slashdot the other day that was a rant from a guy who said that games were approaching the graphics cieling in terms of quality. At some point the required PC specs will nearly stop moving upward, then people will catch up . So maybe then in the near future when games can't be much prettier than Doom 3 is supposed to be, the developers will be able to basically stop designing for such things and concentrate on game content. I mean, if you've played or seen the Doom 3 alpha dem

  • It's The Graphics Card Stupid (Score:5, Informative)

    by Belgand ( 14099 ) <belgand@planetfo ... m ['s.c' in gap]> on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:23PM (#8564515) Homepage
    Increasingly I've seen the reliance on a better graphics card to significantly improve frame-rates the most. Take my current box, in the past few months I just upgraded my PIII 450 from '99 to a P4 2.6 800Mhz FSB. RAM went from an initial 128MB to 320 MB SDRAM last year into 512 MB DDR dual-channel now. The overall improvement in gaming has been limited though. Yes, things do run much better than they did in the past. Massive numbers of units and other computationally intensive tasks have obviously seen the most improvment, but the graphics card is holding everything back.

    I'm using a GeForce2 GTS from '00 at present and I certainly feel it. Vice City can drop to a crawl at times and other games need the graphics options knocked back quite a bit in some cases. While the $300 I spent on motherboard and processor upgrades are noticed the same amount of money needs to be put into a graphics card to really notice an improvement in frame rate and for almost all intents and purposes, actual improved performance.

    The graphics card is increasingly becoming a major (not to mention expensive) bottleneck that needs to be upgraded on a much faster path than the rest of the system to stay competitive. The only advantage here is that in many cases a weak processor can be enormously helped in some cases by a cutting-edge graphics card.

    While the article has a lot to say on this topic and it's certainly one of the easiest changes to implement scalability in it can still be a problem in many cases and should perhaps be addressed more seriously. Graphics technology, moreso than any other part of the computer is really what's driving gaming these days and should be watched closely to keep it in check.

  • Some games do this (Score:3, Informative)

    by activesynapsis ( 706402 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:24PM (#8564525)
    Rise of Nations [riseofnations.com] already does this, so maybe this trend is already starting. In RoN, the video card, memory, and CPU get grades (A, B, C, D, F) and the details/# of polys used is throttled down based on the grades. Of course, even with most things down the game still uses 256 megs of ram due to the sheer amount of content.

    Not bad for a game by Microsoft (and Big Huge Games.)

  • This is why they left for the consoles (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:26PM (#8564539) Journal
    I use to play computer games since the late 80's. It was a different time.

    Computer games were always better then the console ones, were first with 3d, first with networking, you could use mods etc.

    But now all the small gaming companies no longer like the pc. Id software and a few others are still around but most people use consoles for games and work on pc's. This leave even less incentive for a small gaming company to consider the limited pc market.

    I was hoping Microsofts Xbox would bring in new games to Windows. It did not and now they are leaving the intel platform so that hope is gone.

  • Fractals (Score:5, Interesting)

    by VoidEngineer ( 633446 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:29PM (#8564553)
    One method of making scalable games is to use recursive based algorithms to generate the graphics. Basically, code up a 'for' loop, and vary the number of iterations depending upon the architecture of the machine it's running on. For things like trees, water, snowflakes, clouds, grass, hair, and so forth, this optimises rather well.

    For example, refer to Koch's Snowflake [ctc.edu]

    On a low end machine, only two or three iterations would be needed to create a decent snowflake. On a high end machine, you could iterate this function a hundred times with various compounding affects such as rotate, copy, resize, diff, transparency, and so forth. With high end machines, you can do close ups of snowflakes without any resolution loss... And most all of this is using the same algorithm as the lower-end machine would use...

    Granted, the fractal algorithms have to be well designed and thought out to achieve this effect. A basic Koch's Snowflake algorithm at high iterations doesn't look too much different from lower iterations... Some transforms would need to be introduced to the algorithm, but those could also be scalable...

    Anyhow... $0.02 cents

    • Re:Fractals (Score:5, Informative)

      by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @09:00PM (#8564710) Homepage Journal
      A fractal is defined as whole from the very beginning. Pick a set of parameters, apply to equation, you have whole fractal. Change one parameter, whole fractal is changed. Unlike mgreat most of objects in game, where they are defined point by point, changing one of them changes a single piece of the object. You can't apply the same simplifications to koch's snowflake and to human's head, just because human's head isn't a fractal. True you can drop points, but then results suddenly become really awful. Drop every fourth point and suddenly teeth become random sharp spikes, nose becomes a pinokio'ish point, ears get asymmetric... It's not math, it's art. Get an artist miss out every fourth note in a song and you get about the same result.

      And don't mention MP3. MP3 optimizes for size, not for simplicity, eating up way more CPU time than uncompressed WAV.
    • That works fine for snow, trees and stuff like that, but it doesn't apply to character models and buildings, effects like smoke, reflection, etc.

      Also, I would think a snow flake is actually a flat square polygon with a texture being used to picture the ice crystal. It would be rather foolish to make a complex polygon for each and every snow flakes ... ! In fact, look at the trees and you will see they do exactly that for foliage.

  • Different Code = Different Bugs (and exploits) (Score:5, Insightful)

    by grondak ( 80002 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:34PM (#8564579) Homepage
    Okay, so imagine we've got a FPS set on the water (just for kicks, call it Waterworld). You have the sine wave water and I have the sophisticated uberalgorithm water. When you shoot me, your client-side model for water thinks I am in spot A, while my uberalgorithm water thinks I'm in B. You shoot me -- but from my perspective (pun intended!) you couldn't have seen me.

    Sounds like about 10 million "he hacks!" calls waiting to happen.

    I remember people turning the smoke off in their Halflife clients because they wanted to see through it. At one point, my graphics card driver wouldn't even /render/ the smoke.

    Let's try an alternate approach: let's market the games for the sophisticated gamer and that will get more people to buy better machines. Not everyone is rich, but (see above) It's the Graphics Card, Baby!

  • localizing?? (Score:5, Funny)

    by corian ( 34925 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:34PM (#8564582)
    I do not think that word means what you think it means.

  • scalability is king (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Wellmont ( 737226 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:49PM (#8564654) Homepage
    While the industry specialists are worrying about compatability (which is a valid problem) Microsoft is selling single use machines such as the Xbox at a loss. Maybe it's time to produce similar architectures and even homoginize the processor/chipset platforms into something recognizable as one system. Unfortunately most people get linux for free, don't support open source projects, and then expect the world to cater to their minority preference of alternative environments.

    As far as keeping in line with the article I do believe that instead of a diverse platform on which to design games, we are going to instead have more specialized products such as the Xbox and the TiVo that are going to destroy the computer's list of abilities one by one. In the end i see more and more Dell's and HP computers turning into conversation pieces instead of being diverse, which is in direct support of the premise of the article. Diversity in this field currently leads to an inability to produce games that sell well to an uninformed culture, instead you are developing games like GTA which was developed separately for 4 different systems instead of all at once like Sonic Heroes.

  • Don't check architecture! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:50PM (#8564659) Homepage Journal
    Just pick minimum FPS and replace heaviest algorithms with lighter versions whenever FPS drops too drastically. Just look up "Morrowind FPS Optimizer" for example of a program that does similar thing - shortens view distance whenever it causes speed problems. It allows several other hacks too: Remove far, small objects, shorten view distance (better FPS) in battles and much more.

    • Re:Don't check architecture! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Frobnicator ( 565869 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @10:24PM (#8565105) Journal
      Um, no. That's not quite what the article was saying. It mentioned three basic types of techniques, you pointed out ONE of them.

      The first one does not allow you to take advantage of many new techniques. You have one version of everything, and takes advantage of a few 'eye candy' features, if present. The second one, which is what many games already do, is have many performance classes. For example, the machine falls into a bin of "Base Requirements Version (bad graphics, slow CPU)", "Version 1 (3-year old expensive system)", "Version 2 (1-year old expensive system)", and "Version 3 (today's $4000 system)". They then develop between two to four different algorithms, and a *LOT* of glue code so the displays don't look too different. The third option is to have both of the above options, plus global CLOD, procedural and implicit surfaces, and more advanced processing that takes so much math that a 3-year-old CPU can't handle it.

      For example, page 6 discusses using high-quality water on faster machines, and low quality water on slower machines. They only touch on why it might be a problem, stating "fluid simulation will have to be either devoted entirely to ambient game effects or simple enough to run on the minimum system specs without any scalability to higher systems. Most likely, the introduction of fluid simulation to actual game-play, not just ambient effects, will require the combination of both, so the visual quality may be scalable but the simulation quality will be fixed."

      Let's try to consider what the article REALLY means for this type of case.

      First, we'll assume that water is critical to the game, and not just some fancy external thing. Maybe players are all riding around on jet-ski's or moterboats or battleships or something. The developer now has a choice. They can either:

      1. Use a slow simulation that takes a lot more power, such as Navier Stokes equations. Doing this eliminates much of your target audience.
      2. Use a fast simulation that can run on slower PCs (maybe Perlin noise or Fourier Synthasis). Doing this dramatically reduces the physical realism of the game.
      3. Develop some new system that is both convincing in physical reaction, and easy enough to run on the system problems they describe (not just slow CPU).

      This isn't just an issue of adaptive level of detail or swaping algorithms. Because this represents basic game states, it must be kept in sync on all clients, meaning it's an all-or-nothing decision. Do you want realistic ocean waves in your water game, or do you just want waves?

      Let's look at another issue they bring up on page 1 -- Integrated Graphics Cards. (just typing that makes me shudder.)

      Many integrated graphics cards don't have dedicated memory. Just looking through a Dell catalog will have little footnotes next to laptop and 'economy' computer memory numbers, system memory will be shared with graphics and audio processing. The board might have a fancy nvidia or ATI processor on it, and the card might be able to do all of the algorithms just fine; but the moment you run some combination of algorithms at the same time, they fight for the same CPU and memory spaces, and grind to a halt. In this case, the system stats themselves could be more than enough for the game, it's the motherboard or some other component that's the bottleneck.

      In that case, dynamic algorithm selection is basically required, and is something many games already do.

      But how long can we keep it up? Right now we already have to code for:

      • bad graphics card
      • accelerated graphics card with no programability
      • Graphics card with 4 major versions of programability, and varying amounts of memory (varying by orders of magnitude)
      • Graphics cards with various levels of programability, but no dedicated memory.

      When is it too much? Already, we have to test dozens of different configurations.

      That's what the article was asking. How can we have the third option (infinite scalability) without ignoring all the lower-end 'budget' PCs?

      The question is still open.

      frob

  • Seperate the clothes from the character.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Artifakt ( 700173 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:59PM (#8564705)
    and you get:
    Quake 2 with nekid Stroggs galore.
    Wolfenstein with a nude Adolph Hitler
    GTA 2 with realistic squeeky vinyl bucket seat sounds.
    Silent Hill's "playdead" of the month.
    Warcraft 3 expansion - Frozen Cajones

    and Frodo still says "I am naked before the wheel of fire" in LotR, but he's grinning.

  • Moot point really... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Aphrika ( 756248 )
    as they are already developing for low end hardware - tomorrow's low end hardware.

    The net result of spending thousands on making your game engine run on machines that are old when you release it is a totally false economy. Games development needs to take into account the future and scale upwards, not downwards. I want my software to run better in the future, not better in the past!

    I suppose the only point at which this might be useful is when portable and phone hardware is capable of running what we'd con

  • Yeah, except (Score:4, Insightful)

    by WasterDave ( 20047 ) <davep AT zedkep DOT com> on Sunday March 14, 2004 @09:01PM (#8564714)
    That the economics of PC gaming are already starting to look a bit "touch and go" for most titles. Add another mill or so for additional art and development to support bottom end processors and you're starting to have a bit of a problem justifying the investment. Not to mention the schedule risk.

    Hopefully PC gaming will turn into a proving ground for the up and comers...

    Hopefully.

    Dave

  • How much do graphics affect multiplayer? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Entropius ( 188861 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @10:52PM (#8565244)
    We all like purty graphics for aesthetic reasons, but many of us play games for other purposes. To lots of people, online gaming is enjoyable because it's competitive, like football or chess.

    I'd be interested to see how much both lack of detail (lower resolutions, turning off dynamic lighting, and the like) and bad framerate influence players' performance. My guess is: not much, and quite a bit once you go under 25-30 fps or so.

  • Make 2 engines (Score:4, Insightful)

    by randomErr ( 172078 ) <.ervin.kosch. .at. .gmail.com.> on Sunday March 14, 2004 @11:18PM (#8565346) Journal
    It sounds like this guy wants us to write 2 engines: A high end engine and a low end engine.

    Why not just write a good low end machine engine that will be killer on a high end machine?

  • This is an Intel commercial (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Monday March 15, 2004 @01:20AM (#8565922) Homepage
    About the author: DEAN MACRI is a staff technical marketing engineer in the Software and Solutions Group at Intel.

    This guy is not a game developer. He's an Intel marketeer.

    Notice what he talks about: Hyperthreading and Intel instruction set extensions. There's no discussion of the graphics subsystem, programmable shader pipelines, multipass rendering, lighting, Z-buffering, or texture memory - the things that concern graphics programmers for games today, and things that Intel doesn't do very well.

  • The Problem is not in the hardware being too slow (Score:4, Insightful)

    by shatteredsilicon ( 755134 ) on Monday March 15, 2004 @06:30AM (#8566926)
    The problem is that the hardware has gotten faster and now the developers can slack of more on their coding because 'by the time the game is released, there will be faster hardware available'. The progress in game 'speed' has nothing like kept up with the hardware speed. How else do you explain that the likes Descent and Terminal Velocity with their full 3D features ran just fine on a 486/66, and ran perfectly on a Pentium 66 with the full textures and details cranked up? Hardware speed has gone up by a factor of at least 50 (possibly even close to 100) since the first Pentiums were released. How come we now need this new high-end hardware to run all the new games when the technical advances have not been all that great? Original Quake worked just fine in 1024x768 on a Pentium 66. See how far you get with the recent first person shooters on hardware like that. Bottom line - hardware has long become the replacement for the skill of developers. How else do you explain the difference in resource consumption between, say, Windows 98 and Windows XP? Does it really do sufficiently more to justify a 10 fold resource use increase?

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