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Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

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Re: Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

#101

Post by wladimir »

LiraNuna wrote: post #99
wladimir wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Procedural generation doesn't automatically mean that the artist has no control. There will still be inputs guiding the generated content. Artists will still have the final say as to what will get into the game. You have to make the GUI artist-friendly though, inputting some numbers and hitting a button won't do. The tree generation company (SpeedTree) is actually a good example. Their program is very easy to work wi…

"Procedural generation doesn't automatically mean that the artist has no control" - It means they have less control, and they always bitch and moan about that.

Sure, some people will always bitch and moan about change. But look at it positively: it allows them to do more impressive things in less time. If they can make a good-looking forest in a day instead of three months, it means they can do more interesting things then hand-design trees.

Re: Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

#102

Post by vilya »

daeken wrote: post #77
icefox wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anyone in the game industry comment on this? Why type of problems are game companies paying for? I have seen at least one company that sells procedurally generated trees and am curious how good of an idea this is. Being customer oriented, what are the problems game companies have today?

I'm not in the industry at all, but I've followed it for a long time and done a good deal of random game dev. The biggest pain point is how much it costs to produce a large world these days. As it stands, this is not a technical problem, but a business one: artists are expensive and art for modern games is insanely detailed. Procedural generation is, IMO, the way to go here, but it's an unsolved problem. I've been th…

Your first idea is exactly what Autodesk's Mudbox does. I can't speak for the games industry but it's a reasonably successful product in the VFX industry. See http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?id=13565063&#3... for more details.

The second idea is also already being done by software like Terragen from Planetside Software: http://www.planetside.co.uk/ I don't know how widely used this is; I have the impression lots of game companies build similar tools in-house, tailored to their particular games.

Re: Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

#103

Post by barrettcolin »

georgemcbay wrote: post #81
icefox wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

potatolicious mentioned animation systems http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2303453 Is this an area that is just not very important (wont buy) or one that just is low on the list of todo items? speedtree begs the question of what about speedFOOBAR such as buildings, cities, caves, worlds, fish or how about speedanimal (generating animal + animation)? Is the big place to find a nitch in Art or are there better place…

Animation? Granny. Audio? Miles Sound. If you want to know what sorts of libraries the game industry wants to license, take a look at RAD Game Tools, they are the masters of this stuff. Some of the stuff they are currently focused on are large data-set compression/decompression (Charles Bloom) and I would guess some sort of tool/library to generically handle sparse virtual texture rendering (Sean Barrett) which is si…

Spot on, I think; I would add that as well as being a subject matter expert, you will also need to be intimately familiar with the hardware architectures of the Xbox 360 and PS3, since 'optimized' solutions for these platforms will need to be one of your selling points.

Re: Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

#104

Post by idonthack »

malkia wrote: post #87
icefox wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anyone in the game industry comment on this? Why type of problems are game companies paying for? I have seen at least one company that sells procedurally generated trees and am curious how good of an idea this is. Being customer oriented, what are the problems game companies have today?

I'm in the industry, in a tool group. I guess you talk about SpeedTree. We used in some of our games, but not in our latest. One of the problem of using middleware, especially one generating content is how to integrate it with the rest of the pipeline. If our pipeline sees that as just another model/texture like the rest of the provided, then no problem - e.g. An artist uses the tool to generate the geometry. But if…

>For example if this is an multiplayer game you would have to synchronize the tree generation to look exactly the same for each player, and have the same collision box, or collision model (usually low-poly bounding convex or set of). This means you would have to communicate synchronize this with the clients.

They just have to use identical seed values for their random number generators.

Look at dwarf fortress: a few worldgen parameters and a single number are all you need to generate a fantasy world with complete with procedurally generated geography, population with traceable lineage, governments and other entities, and history, including artifacts and artwork that portray said history.

Re: Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

#105

Post by Qz »

johnyzee wrote: post #100
Qz wrote: post #48

To give a bit of historical context, this is the very same company that put out such classic shareware hits as Jill of the Jungle, Jazz Jackrabbit, and my personal favorite One Must Fall: 2097.

Other person knows One Must Fall! I played that for months with friends on a 386. It is easy to grouch about how gameplay rules over shiny effects, but I am quite impressed and uplifted that the company that made those games is still around and on the cutting edge of games.

I used to rack up a bit of a phone bill secretly playing One Must Fall multiplayer via some BBS. I wonder if i can find it and load it up on Dosbox...

Re: Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

#106

Post by MrScruff »

KeithMajhor wrote: post #65
malkia wrote: post #7

Problem is how to handle worst-case scenarios. With pre-rendered movies that might or might not be a problem, and even if it is - it's production one (e.g. you can't predict how many well for how many days you would render your movie) But for a game - this means dropping the frame rate, making it visually unappealing. That's why Ray-casting would never pick up for real-time games (Unreal most definitely is not doing…

Why is real time ray-tracing infeasible?

It's not infeasible, obviously you could ray trace a fairly simple scene in real time with modest hardware. The question is, can ray tracing ever produce a better result than rasterization in the same amount of time? The answer at the moment is no, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. Even in high end film work, ray tracing is used sparingly where needed.

Re: Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

#108

Post by dkersten »

bonch wrote: post #92
Lost_BiomedE wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think another great exception is the elder scrolls series by bethesda. Every time I see new physics engine, better AI, or better graphics, I think, 'What can Bethesda do with this?'

You think Besthesda is an exception? Oblivion was pretty crippled in features and gameplay compared to Morrowind and Daggerfall despite having physics and "realistic" faces. The AI was embarrassing. Bethesda is one of the main culprits in trading gameplay for graphics as well as latching onto "next-gen" marketing hype.

Totally agree. Oblivion was 80% hype and pretty graphics.

Beneath the eye candy, Oblivion was an extremely boring game really. Sure, the world was huge, but it was empty and repetitive. Each cave looked like every other cave[1]. Each dungeon, castle and fort looked the exact same[1]. Every tomb, crypt or ruin looked the exact same[1]. Each oblivion level looked the exact same[1]. The rest of the world was more or less filler to link these places together. Also, sometimes I found an interesting area only to be disappointed that there was no history, no reason for it being there, nothing. (Eg, if I find a ruin waaaay out in the middle of the mountains, I wonder why its there, why is it a ruin, what happened to the people etc etc - Oblivion made no attempt at answering any of these questions).

Besides that, each quest was written as if it was the only quest in the game (ie, the world may as well be paused until you finish the quest) and, besides the hype about the AI, everything revolves around the main character - if you stop and sit on the side of the road for three days, the world is pretty much paused until you do stuff again (besides trivial NPC schedules).

Having said that, the world was quite beautiful and some of the quests did interest me (eg, the assassin quest where you get locked into a house), but overall, the game was dull, lifeless and, besides its grand size and scale, empty.

[1] On the inside. Sometimes there would be a really cool looking (from the outside) structure that got me excited, only to be shown the exact same interior level that I'd seen a hundred times already yet another time.

Re: Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

#109

Post by dkersten »

johngunderman wrote: post #58
rorrr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet more of the art will be procedurally generated.

I feel like we need a "library" of freely available hi-res textures and models that can be adapted for a given game. From what I understand, a huge part of the development costs go into the art, and having a huge library to draw from seems like it would mitigate that somewhat.

Great, yet more games that look exactly the same. That is not the answer.

Re: Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

#110

Post by rbanffy »

I would be surprised if the next Xbox didn't represent a big leap in rendering performance. Microsoft has a tendency to throw its near-infinite resources to brute-force problems.

I, however, am not sure whether Sony will do the same or learn from the lesson Nintendo taught: that gameplay is more important then rendering performance. The fact Cell is more or less a dead end doesn't help it much. The chip was too expensive to develop, is too expensive to use and devilishly hard to program effectively.

Higher rendering performance is inevitable - just like almost every netbook on the market is a multi-threaded 64-bit beast. I question whether every console maker will emphasize it by the same measure.

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