51–60 of 121 posts
Yeesh. It's "bokeh".
Yes, the skin rendering was very nice, and the lighting was great. Which brought into sharp relief how little progress has been made on procedural character animation. When the welder-guy walked across the roof and stopped on the edge, you could see a painfully clear walking loop and outro animation back to the standing position -- very familiar from the earlier Unreal engines (except for the residual swinging of the…
We've made a lot of gameplay progress into action-RPGs (Mass Effect and the like), and I for one would like to play a game where facial expressions and body language actually mean something (e.g., the character is lying, but instead of smacking you over the head with it, the game can be subtle about it).
The problem with these tech demos is exactly that--they're just tech. In-game graphics will never look this good because of non-cinematic camera angles, behind the shoulder viewpoint, and HUD elements mucking it up. It's nice looking, for sure, but I can get that from a Pixar movie.
Not to put too fine a "trolling point" on it--but after playing Final Fantasy XIII I'm inclined for game developers to take a step back in terms of their graphics aspirations to continue to deliver quality games. It's been speculated (and supposedly admitted to--though being at work I don't have time to dig up a link) that the incredibly linear world of FFXIII was a direct result of being overambitious with the graph…
Final Fantasy 13's failings were mostly due to a horribly dysfunctional studio environment and a broken development process. They released a surprisingly honest postmortem of the project in a recent issue of Game Developer (you can find a summary of it at http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/30640/Exclusive_Behind_Th... ), and 'overambitious with the graphics' pales in comparison to the other things that went wrong. My…
Possibly this suggests pg's minimum viable product + iteration strategy as being just as applicable to game development too, although I imagine the "minimum viable product" for FFXIII is a hugely significant amount of work in itself.
Until Mac support is on the table, I'll be sticking with Unity.
As beautiful as this demo is, I think the push for realism has harmed the game industry more than it has move it forward. One of the few developers in recent memory that has managed to focus on both visual fidelity and gameplay is Bioware with the Mass Effect series; for the most part most developers aren't this successful and end up producing beautiful but lifeless, dull games. Also consider that producing art asset…
As beautiful as this demo is, I think the push for realism has harmed the game industry more than it has move it forward. One of the few developers in recent memory that has managed to focus on both visual fidelity and gameplay is Bioware with the Mass Effect series; for the most part most developers aren't this successful and end up producing beautiful but lifeless, dull games. Also consider that producing art asset…
I bet more of the art will be procedurally generated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Content will have to be increasingly procedurally generated. I worry less about the practical size of the content - to be frank, I think games will likely trend towards being rendered in whole or in part remotely, with consoles being dumb clients - than the manpower and budget required to create it. I lament constriction - I haven't bought any of the latter games in the Call of Duty series owing to how constrained an…
I think a really strong FPS AI would be a technical achievement similar to automatic car driving; it has have a "real eyesight" algorithm, notice motion, understand varied terrain, etc. A basic LOS check is insufficient since there's lighting, smoke, semi-transparent items like fences etc. included in typical FPS environments. Even considering that the data structures for the world and rendering can be reused for AI…
I don't buy this for a moment. On multicore PCs, graphics horsepower is almost completely separate from CPU horsepower available for AI. Modern games rarely escape the 15..40% CPU utilization envelope on my machine (i7 920); there is bags and bags of concurrent room. Memory usage is barely noticeable (very rarely more than 2GB as most games are 32-bit, meanwhile I have another 10GB twiddling its thumbs). Meanwhile, it's the GPU that is normally limiting framerate, but only because I'm pushing up anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering and shadow quality.
I think consoles are the bigger issue: games are no longer designed to take advantage of modern PC hardware. Instead, they're developed with consoles in mind, with graphics parameters that can be turned up on the PC. But gameplay and AI doesn't get nearly the same tunable love as graphics - and in some ways it shouldn't as it would change the nature of the game - but it remains that modern PC hardware, outside of straight-line single-threaded performance and the GPU, is not particularly taxed by modern games.
Too bad all these beautiful effects will be covered up by the foreshortened perspective of a gun in one corner and a health bar in the other corner. I kid, but honestly, seeing this doesn't excite me anywhere near as much as a preview of whatever the team that made Mirror's Edge has in store next for current -generation consoles.
DICE made Mirror's Edge, but it was a commercial flop, so we are unlikely to see a sequel anytime soon :( Personally I loved it. Slightly OT but interesting: from what I hear from people at EA, it was a huge internal political war that year between the people who wanted to build more sequels and licensed franchises, and the people who thought that EA would die if it didn't innovate on its own IP. The latter won and w…
I wouldn't say it was a total failure. Mass Effect and Dragon Age are pretty good. =)