What if Game Graphics Never Aged? 398
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there's even more that Procedural Synthesis might be able to do; what if your old video games never aged, never looked out-of-date?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."
My graphics haven't aged... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns (Score:3, Insightful)
Speed (Score:5, Insightful)
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....
Will Happen for Select Games (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Waste of Resources for the Company (Score:3, Insightful)
The onus (real word ??) to improve and change the game then falls onto the model rather than the graphics.
A bit OT (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Waste of Resources for the Company (Score:2, Insightful)
Allow me to translate.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Makes sense, depending on your point of view. (Score:2, Insightful)
The gaming industry is like medicine, there's no money in the cure. Return customers are where they make their bucks.
Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Speed (Score:1, Insightful)
Good artistry can still make low-rent graphics pretty. System Shock 2 had primitive graphics for its time, but it had an anime-like quality to the graphics that made up for it. When you don't expect photorealism, you can get by with less detail when it's well stylized.
Still, there's not much to say about
Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Speed (Score:2, Insightful)
Huh? The procedurally generated models, textures, and animations are generated once, probably at the beginning of the level, and cached as... models and textures. They run just as fast as 'pre-rendered' content. Do you imagine that every time you see an actor that the geometry, animations, textures, and AI are being regenerated in every frame?
The slowdown for procedurally generated content is in long load times (like
Fear of aging... (Score:2, Insightful)
Procedural generation is still crap. (Score:5, Insightful)
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"
Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns (Score:5, Insightful)
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:One major reason (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't see this working for too long... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:I'm not convinced that this will work that well (Score:3, Insightful)
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 regardless of the fact that there arn't any graphical improvements.
Why?
It doesn't work for every game but it does work for quite a few. I can think of lots of games (mostly from the PS1/Saturn/N64 era) that I enjoyed a whole lot back then but can't stand to play now due to their horrid 3D graphics, if I could play them today with more modern graphics I'd buy them again, and new gamers would still be buying those titles.
Re:Speed (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not important which you do specifically, however, as a good layered implementation of this kind of thing should be able to switch between using cached resources and generating them on the fly pretty easily.
The point I was trying to make above (same AC as before) is that games made in this way can run just as fast as pre-rendered games, since you can also "pre-render" everything -- but do it on your machine so that the pre-rendered graphics are custom-tailored to your hardware capabilities and setup. Allowing you to make something that ages better and is more compact for digital delivery but has the same resource usage characteristics as a regular game, if those are really what you want in the first place. You can do it all on-the-fly if you want, but you don't have to.
Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns (Score:2, Insightful)
Nobody said anything about "automatically". This is about graphics being upgradeable manually by replacing the program that generates them, instead of having to replace gigabytes of textures. The point is that it would use very little bandwidth to upgrade everyone's game. It would not happen magically, and it would still require considerable time and expense to prepare an upgrade.
Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns (Score:2, Insightful)
The word average, btw is a fuzzy term which could stand for any of a number of ways of calculating a representative value for a data set. But I'm sure you learned all about means, medians, and modes, in your elementary statistics course.
http://dictionary.reference.com/help/faq/language
Re:Allow me to translate.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 wants to port a game then they will figure out how to port the API. Figuring out how to get around a legal contract is another story.
Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns (Score:4, Insightful)
Gameplay, THEN story and plot.
Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns (Score:2, Insightful)
However, this thread isn't the first time I've heard people say "if you want storyline, watch a movie" and this phrase has always grated me. Who's to say that a video game isn't ample enough medium for telling a quality story. A few games have been able to both tell a good story and create interesting gameplay, but they're rare. Either the storyline suffers, or the storyline detracts from the gameplay (through bad prioritization), so a sour taste is left in the mouths of gamers. But hey- if you want to make an omelette and all that jazz.
While we're on bad analogies, my xbox doesn't make me watch bad movies to play games, though some games do. If I don't want to pay attention to plot to play the game, I simply don't buy a plot-based game. Likewise, (assuming you meant if the re-release of say, "Citizen Kane" rather than the DVD player itself like I meant the game and not the game system) if I had to play checkers to watch "Citizen Kane," I would simply not buy the movie, and rather buy a movie that focuses on telling a story. But that's all movies can really do, while games are pretty open. Many things work for many different market segments, companies just have to learn to know which demographic they're targetting instead of trying to please everyone with one release. Anyway, I feel my analogies hold, as I am making an apples-apples comparison among emerging technologies through history used to tell stories and the public's reactions to said mediums.
if (storytelling == good) replay_value++; (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, I'm going to buy Escape Velocity Nova [ambrosiasw.com], not because I'm such a big fan of Elite clones but because in the demo I played halfway through the Vell-os storyline and I want to get that mind-control device out of my pilot's spine and then get back at the Federation. I'm not thinking in terms of "by getting rid of the device I can advance in the game", I'm thinking in terms of "just wait until I can free myself (and hopefully the Vell-os) and Fucking Kill(TM) you assholes". I want to get back at them. I am pissed about how they used me to hurt their enemies (getting those enemies to hate me in the process). That kind of passion is pretty rare with games; I usually reserve it for good books or movies.
Without the storylines (and modability; I love modding) EV Nova would definitely not be worth thirty US bucks to me. But I am willing to spend the money on a game that does such a good job at storytelling. The fact that I want to Summer Bloom the shit out of Commander Krane also plays into that.
When I think about truly good games with high replay value I usually think about games with a good story (off the top of my head: Fallout 1/2, X-Com 1 to 3, Final Fantasy Tactics (NOT Advance), most LucasArts games before Monkey Island 4, the Marathon series...); games that are great without a decent story usually are so because of great modability (Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Quake 3 Arena). The few games that have neither invariably have outstanding gameplay (Gunbound, the 2D Metroid games (Fusion even has a half-decently told story)).
A brilliant story might not be the best way to drive sales, but it is an excellent way of increasing replay value. If graphics really would become self-upgrading and more developers would focus on things like immersion that goes beyond the visual/acoustic level we'd probably see more memorable games.
Let's see... Presenting the name of the game, check. Linking to the game's website, check. Telling the price, check. Praising the game while giving away teaser-sized parts of the plot, check.
Getting paid for what amounts to a Slashvertisement... un-check. Damn.
Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Procedural generation is still crap. (Score:3, Insightful)
If I create armor in one game, I could use that same armor in each game, or use it as a template for the next set of armor.
This doesn't work to well today because of the very issues this would solve.
"If procedural generation is the solution to all our problems why haven't we sed it in everything? Why wasn't it discovered earlier?"
Thats you arguement? no one has done it therefor it can't be done? Yeah, people like you complained that man couldn't fly because it hadnt been discovered earlier.
First:
"It's not because of the power of computers"
then:
"If we had 10 processors, then yeah we can waste 4-5 working on generating the world, "
it seems to me that the power of the computer IS the limitation. at the very least create large scale games to see if it would work.
", it's because it's not going to save the world."
Dude we are talking about a game(where you might save the world!), not actually saving the world.
Just becasue YOU can't imagine how to do it, or lack the thought process to solve some of the incredibly simple 'problems' you meantion doesn't mean someone else can't.
Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Disposable Games Vs Design Patterns (Score:4, Insightful)
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.