Comment Real reasons hardware sells (Score 3, Insightful) 345
This is why hardware sells, and why the article is 50% off the mark:
1. The article is old news/looking at eye candy. Trees are a good point, but some games already do it for scaling into the distance. Simple enough to re-use this code for scaling with performance. Cloth etc are just eye candy. Be interesting to see cloth as a gameplay feature, but the biggest use these days is in the flags of Capture the Flag game mode. Heck, Unreal Tourney did that years ago on my humble 300MHz MMX.
2. Implement that super cloth sim, and then you need a Prescot to run it! Good news - more hardware sales.
3. Multiple sets of models is fine for EA, as they can have a serious art budget - but need to buy lots of Maya platforms - more hardware sales - to make that artwork on. It's impractical for most second tier software houses. They stick with the one or two tiers of target platform, as that's all they can AFFORD! The article does not help them, and the first tier developers know most of what is in it already.
Now don't want to just bitch and moan, so constructive suggestions. One look at Doom 3 and I'm writing a check for a faster machine. It's the character skinning and lighting that sells me on the hardware. That Alien like monster in one of the preview screenshots gave me the creeps. I think the article is a good idea, with one good example (trees) and other poor examples. If he'd given a ref to scalable character skinning techniques I'd appreciate it more.
1. The article is old news/looking at eye candy. Trees are a good point, but some games already do it for scaling into the distance. Simple enough to re-use this code for scaling with performance. Cloth etc are just eye candy. Be interesting to see cloth as a gameplay feature, but the biggest use these days is in the flags of Capture the Flag game mode. Heck, Unreal Tourney did that years ago on my humble 300MHz MMX.
2. Implement that super cloth sim, and then you need a Prescot to run it! Good news - more hardware sales.
3. Multiple sets of models is fine for EA, as they can have a serious art budget - but need to buy lots of Maya platforms - more hardware sales - to make that artwork on. It's impractical for most second tier software houses. They stick with the one or two tiers of target platform, as that's all they can AFFORD! The article does not help them, and the first tier developers know most of what is in it already.
Now don't want to just bitch and moan, so constructive suggestions. One look at Doom 3 and I'm writing a check for a faster machine. It's the character skinning and lighting that sells me on the hardware. That Alien like monster in one of the preview screenshots gave me the creeps. I think the article is a good idea, with one good example (trees) and other poor examples. If he'd given a ref to scalable character skinning techniques I'd appreciate it more.
