I'm talking about both. Level design definitely suffered from efficiency loss after transition to 3d. Gameplay design is a different issue. It didn't get much overall progress since 1990s and is treated as afterthought compared to graphics currently.
Employing a 3d engine imposes some limitations on design stemming from assumptions made by engine's author. They tend to be oriented for first person shooter games. And most game programmers don't have resources or skill to roll out own engine. Besides, requirements for artwork ARE a limitation too. They definitely limit the amount of gameplay elements allowed. Say, if you decided to avoid models and use 2d sprites instead you could save some work for artists. Which could lead to more creatures and objects and larger, richer locations. And GPU work itself isn't free either. It still requires assets such as textures and amount of those is limited by GPU memory. Reducing detail level of models and textures would lead to ability to have more different objects on screen at the same time.
All in all, AAA game companies given up on doing anything else than flashier graphics and I given up on AAA companies in response.
What does arbitrary geometry have to do with level complexity? My Nintendo 64 featured games with arbitrary geometry, and games with complex level geometry usually feature invisible, lower-resolution collision boxes; from a design perspective, those "are" the level.
Having more regular geometry allows the program generate more geometry itself and level designer to specify less.
Wrong. There's absolutely no reason that the developers couldn't tack on a graphics-based display of the content in the game world, with nearly arbitrary-detail tiles, and there's no way that doing so would limit the underlying game logic. "More triangles per frame" is primarily a function of GPU power, and DF's world runs exclusively on the CPU. The world's CPU-heavy; the graphics are CPU-light and GPU-heavy.
No reason except the requirement to maintain a reasonable framerate. There exist some graphics frontends to DF but they definitely don't use photorealistic graphics. And probably they wouldn't be able to get enough art assets for more detailed graphics anyway. Another option would be to move some processing to GPGPU because DF manages to kill framerates in some cases even if you use ascii graphics only.
You can never know for sure what really happened there and for what reason. But both Ukraine and Russia make themselves known as democratic states. I have no reason to believe one of them is more truthful than other. All people seem to have different visions of what democracy and freedom is so any such statement is close to being a truism. Even China has People's democratic dictatorship.
But it's evidently true that Ukraine repeatedly failed to establish a government that satisfied both eastern and western parts of it. Both of those parts want democracy and freedom. They profess their love for democracy and freedom to implicitly assert that the other side isn't democratic. This is bullshit sophistry.This conflict isn't about democracy and freedom but between two groups that hate each other and have different pet political ideas, and it just got violent. Russia would never get an opportunity to meddle like that if not for this conflict.
Level design doesn't become more difficult, but you have to pay for more artists to design and build the higher-detail game resources (or spend more time with the same number of artists). Difficulty of using the models doesn't necessarily scale up with the complexity of the model geometry.
It's quite obvious that a level based on tiles is easier to design than a level based on arbitrary geometry. Designing levels in Blender or whatever is definitely not the way to go. Too much workload.
Name a game mechanic that you'd like to see that can't be made purely because the code running the GPU has been optimized. I'll wait.
How about the entirety of, say, Dwarf Fortress? It allows infinitely more complex gameplay systems just because it's based on tiles that are displayed by ascii characters. There are compromises possible too, say you settle for graphics complexity last gen but focus on making huge worlds with complex and interesting rulesets. Nobody is trying to work in this direction much. It's only matter of time before people will get tired of glorified interactive movies. I already did, and that's the reason I ended up becoming a retro gamer. When some game weighs dozens of gigabytes, takes ages to start up, provides less not-trivial gameplay than some similar titles of last millenium I really feel cheated.
Where did you get this idea that I thought it was OK for the boss' wife to poke her nose into company affairs? It most certainly is *NOT* OK and nowhere in my post did I imply that it was.
And why should her co-worker have pulled her code due to sexism? That's her interpretation of the situation. It could have been entirely unrelated, either because it was crappy code, or it was a mistake or any other reason.
I wonder if such situation would be thinkable if wife's and founder's genders were reversed? Would it considered to be normal for some random guy to hang around the building and interfering with company's operations just because he's one of high level manager's husband? Perhaps it was just allowed in case of wife due to stereotypes of women being meddlesome meddlers of little practical importance..
This is not a fact but some moron's fantasies. And if it were true it wouldn't justify Georgia's fail either.
And what does it have to do with Vova? Are you insane? Disagreeing with your lunacy doesn't constitute dick-sucking to Putin. Your double standard against current Russian Government is ridiculous. And I would know it for sure because I'm not a Putin supporter, I merely agree with this particular action. So why do you emphasize Russia's fails over other former Soviet republic fails and diminish Russia's successes? What's the point?
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