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FO3-specific nerd-rage thread, with extra lulzy quotes.
- Thread starter aweigh
- Start date
Edward_R_Murrow
Arcane
Kaiserin said:Keep in mind that 'evolution' doesn't produce the 'best' results, just the most 'fit.'(best selling)
Bingo. That's why I support eugenics....with games of course.....
MetalCraze
Arcane
Stop dissing FO3. It is pretty old-school and hardcore. When was the last time a game for black'n'white displays was produced?
Publishers take notice!
Skankster said:
True. As graphics become more realistic, the cost of every tiniest feature raises exponentially due to the necessity to code, model and animate everything related to it.
My favorite example: characters sitting on stools in Ultima 5 - probably a couple lines of code with some random variation, and 15 minutes of drawing a sitting sprite. Characters sitting on stools in whatever next-gay game is a flavour of the month now = many manmonths of fiddling with AI and pathfinding, many manmonths of adding relevant features to models and animating them.
That's how with every "gen" games become progressively smaller and feature-barren.
Uh-huh... Look where C64 and Amiga are now. Collecting dust in recycle bins. If not for modular design and gradual improvement, PC would rest next to them.
Problem is, those improvements went in a wrong direction. Probably thanks to windows 95 making PC a viable platform for idiot masses. That's why we have shaders 3.0 but still can't beat the amount of features some early 80s ASCII shit could boast (and are further away from beating it with every passing year).
Data4
Arcane
mondblut said:
One need only look at consoles to see this. Ever noticed how the games made during a console's maturity are usually better than the first releases? Of course, just when it looks like the technological ceiling of consoles is reached, a new models comes out that totally does away with the need to concentrate on gameplay mechanics. It's back to focussing on the shineys.
DraQ
Arcane
There is technical ceiling for PCs too, fortunately. Ever heard of photorealism?
When we reach photorealism they'll spend a dozen more years making the models "move" realistically to eliminate the "uncanny valley syndrome" which will rear its ugly head.
When we're old and gray, they'll finally have an engine that has photorealism and photorealistic movement, but then they'll have to take care of other properties of the photorealistic world, because players will naturally expect everything to behave as it does in the real world.
Give it another dozen years for a proper realtime physics/material properties simulation for that.
After we die of old age, they'll finally come up with an engine that pretty much mirrors the real world, but then they'll start working on passing the Turing test, pathfinding and humanlike speech audio generation.
A dozen years after we decompose, they'll reach complete photorealism, but then the interest in the whole thing will start to wane and people will go back to playing Pac-man and Max Payne.
But before that backlash, we will see the epidemic of "reality confusion syndrome". First symptoms include going outside and commenting on the realistic lightning and polygon counts of the swings in your nearby park... Followed by a mass-homicide interrupted by occasional "Wow" and "this blood is so realistic its awesome".
I need more blood sugar.
When we're old and gray, they'll finally have an engine that has photorealism and photorealistic movement, but then they'll have to take care of other properties of the photorealistic world, because players will naturally expect everything to behave as it does in the real world.
Give it another dozen years for a proper realtime physics/material properties simulation for that.
After we die of old age, they'll finally come up with an engine that pretty much mirrors the real world, but then they'll start working on passing the Turing test, pathfinding and humanlike speech audio generation.
A dozen years after we decompose, they'll reach complete photorealism, but then the interest in the whole thing will start to wane and people will go back to playing Pac-man and Max Payne.
But before that backlash, we will see the epidemic of "reality confusion syndrome". First symptoms include going outside and commenting on the realistic lightning and polygon counts of the swings in your nearby park... Followed by a mass-homicide interrupted by occasional "Wow" and "this blood is so realistic its awesome".
I need more blood sugar.
BethesdaLove
Arbiter
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2008
- Messages
- 1,998
"There is technical ceiling for PCs too, fortunately. Ever heard of photorealism?"
Please God, dont make Beth survive till that day of doom...
Please God, dont make Beth survive till that day of doom...
DefJam101
Arcane
shihonage said:
:shock:
Atrachasis
Augur
mondblut said:
I see your point, but why would aspects such as writing, quest design, multilinearity etc. have to suffer from advances in graphics? Even if developers prioritize graphics over writing, how many writers do you really need to come up with a good plot? Would a team consisting of dozens of artists and 3D modellers with multi-million dollar budgets really have no resources left to hire a few decent writers? I just don't buy the explanation that advance in graphics ==> deterioration in gameplay.
Aside from the other standard explanation - developers could come up with better things, but have their sights set on a larger and more mediocre target audience -, I'd also point fingers at the separation of programmers from designers. The 'construction set' approach tends to produce cookie-cutter quests. Just think of all the conditions that could trigger gains or losses of virtue in Ultima IV - I'm pretty sure you'd have a hard time replicating some of them with the TES construction set; there's just too much that needs to be hardcoded.
And the size of the teams itself brings new challenges. I'm playing through Martian Dreams right now, and once more find myself reminded how you can pull off a coherent plot in a free-roaming world: though almost the entire game world is accessible from the beginning, there are a few steps that need to be taken in a logical order, such as reactivating the power grid in order to lower the bridges. But to reactivate the power grid, you need to get into Olympus. To get into Olympus, you need to track down Iolo & Co... there are roadblocks, but you can walk up to any of them in any order, and they make sense. The large teams nowadays may be a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth, for unless your team is well-coordinated, reducing the plot to a linear series of loosely related quests becomes temptingly easier to do.
Data4
Arcane
Atrachasis said:
My thoughts are that it creates a vicious circle. If the developer is already hedging its bets on shiny graphics, the story has to fit within the limitations of the graphics budget. So, if the story requires an NPC to perform a certain action, the artists then have to dedicate resources to producing the action. Keep the story simple, and you can keep the scope of the visuals simple in terms of variety.
Vaarna_Aarne
Notorious Internet Vandal
I'd say that photorealism would suck ass as a universal art style for games.DraQ said:
EDIT: Though it will probably end in that, because the world is full of retards who think polygon count = quality.
DraQ
Arcane
Once the ceiling is reached, companies will have to resort to all kinds of tricks to attract the players. Unique, different art styles will be a viable option again.Vaarna_Aarne said:
Skankster
Novice
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2008
- Messages
- 97
Data4 said:
This has been done since Garriot. His idea on creating the storyline actually fit around what he could create for the game. A piano that worked? Make it a quest line. A magic carpet that flew? add it in as a story point and part of a quest line.
PorkaMorka
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 19, 2008
- Messages
- 5,090
Atrachasis said:
You are leaving out a key factor.
As graphics (and sound) increase, so do development costs, and this increase is quite dramatic.
Today's games like Fallout 3 are vastly, vastly more expensive in development costs than the games of yesteryear. But game prices only have increased a little, if it all.
So to make a profit, devlopers need to sell more units. Luckily for them, gaming is a much more mainstream hobby today than it was 10-15 years ago. Most mid 20s types now play video games, it's not just confined to nerdy types who self identify as gamers.
But, when marketing to a mass audience, the games need to change. The mass audience has different tastes than the nerdy core gamer demographic. They like pretty graphics, easy wins, fully voiced dialog, big explosions. They don't care for plots as much, and they certainly don't want a game where you need to read huge paragraphs.
Now that games can't be profitable just selling to the core gamer demographic, they must market themselves to the mass audience of retards. And that entails doing away with niche stuff like PS:T and focusing on other aspects of the games than those that appeal to the core nerdy gamer demographic.
In short, games had to become Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster movies.
If they still had to spend peanuts on graphics and sound, this wouldn't be the case, although it'd still be the most profitable option.
TL,DR version: games now need to be marketed to the lowest common denominator, they didn't always need to be, heck originally those guys didn't even like games.
Atrachasis said:
Because designers, coders and modellers get their salary from the same budget. And every additional modeller means one designer less.
And pretty much everything a designer works at also consumes time of other specialists. Even mere dialogues call for a scripter to implement them and a tester to test them. And anything more that a few paragraphs of text also involves programming some new functionalities, artists to model new characters, items and interactive objects, and so on.
Well, first of all, writing and gameplay hardly have anything in relation. Second, multi-million dollar budgets are a privelege of select few, who have reasons to expect their product to sell in a multi-million print. But most importantly, unless you are making an ASCII interactive fiction game, everything the few decent writers came up with will have to be modelled, animated and coded in afterwards. Using 1 model for 50 different characters and pop-up windows for object interaction just doesn't work today.
Designers don't work with construction sets. They write the quest down for a scripter to implement it, and hand down the instructions for whatever new functionality must be coded in and whatever characters and objects should be modelled for this quest to programmers and artists. And more often than not are told to fuck off because those programmers and artists already have their hands full enough to last a lifetime
Deleted member 7219
Guest
People were saying Far Cry was photorealistic and was near the pinnacle of computer graphics.
Admiral Rimjob POOBUM
Arcane
1998:
2008:
2018:
Sorry, I mean, we might have reached photorealism ten or so years from now... at least in some aspects. Faces will probably still be a bit "uncanny valley", and up-close textures might not hold up, but in the likes of the above shot? Maybe.
2008:
2018:
Sorry, I mean, we might have reached photorealism ten or so years from now... at least in some aspects. Faces will probably still be a bit "uncanny valley", and up-close textures might not hold up, but in the likes of the above shot? Maybe.
Admiral jimbob said:
I don't find that photo-realistic at all. It shares more features with a realistic (as in artistic stye) painting than a photograph.
Also, I still find Crysis better in graphics. FC2 may run better on weaker machines, but there's some kind of rawness to the whole thing, and I think it's just the artwork than whatever technical zamazingos are going behind the scene. I guess it's lacking the variation of details found in Crysis.
St. Toxic
Arcane
denizsi said:
Isn't that an improvement? To shape the graphics of the game more with the artwork and direction than engine technology?
Personally, I was wholly unimpressed with the graphical aspect of Crysis. With the lackluster gameplay and story set aside, apart from the various particle effects for explosions and flames and the like, there was a minimum of one eyesore wherever you turned. The dynamic soft shadows weren't optimized to fall on 2d foliage and grass, and often broke into pieces. Terrain and objects seen at a great distance were visibly simplified and assigned with lower resolution of textures, not that the practice isn't repeated in FC2, but it is a more polished and unnoticable process. There were loads of unaligned textures, and detail texturing was quite often repetative and formed patterns. Hiding in a bush still looked like being surrounded by 2d planes, much like it did in FC1. It was a cripple on the tech side alone, with major graphical miscalculations and instabilities, and a major resource hog. Yet, at best it still only managed to achieve a rather hand-drawn look, albeit with lacking art direction.
FC2 makes it look easy to recreate and improve upon, and looks like it has done so quite well.
denizsi said:
Like what?
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