Technological Advance Stalled In Gaming?

[evilneko]

You're confusing XP and ME. XP runs on the NT kernel. Vista and 7 are also NT, versions 5.1/5.2, 6 and 6.1, respectively. The 9x kernel--and MS-DOS--died with ME.

[Sinophile]

So how greatly does an OS affect gaming? I remember when I lived with my dad, our gaming computers always had older Windows 2000 or 98(this was back in the days of XP. He might've used these since he got them free from work). If anything, it seems more recently released versions of windows(because everyone knows that no one games on a Mac) hinder gaming, rather than help it.

[ub3rman123]

Hasn't Microsoft been in a rut before because of them stealing coding? Something involving Word, but I don't recall the exact circumstances.

 

I've played with 7 before, my only complaint actually is that the buttons on the bottom to show open windows don't show names and aren't separated out.

[Vagrant0]

I've played with 7 before, my only complaint actually is that the buttons on the bottom to show open windows don't show names and aren't separated out.

You can change that, kinda easily too.

[RedVexHK]

ok... I hope this isn't a TOS violation.. but I'm not hyping or flaming so bear with me please... A game I used to play Entropia Uinverse a year ago did a MASSIVE engine upgrade to the CryEngine2 by Crytech. I know the change was awesome even on my card... ATI Radeon 4350 HDMI Silent. 512 megs GDDR2. however I know a HUGE userload was lost due to that very update.. lots of gamers simply couldn't meet the minimum system requirements anymore.

SO I agree that going all out may alienate some gamers as to meet the minimum reqs of some of those powerful new games might be beyond what some gamers can meet... true it's a narrow line between performance and can't meet it...

 

I'd personally like to see games keep pace with technology and technology keep pace with reasonable costs...

we can all dream.... and yes.. money does grow on trees.... but the evil bosses all own them.

[jaysus]

ah cool, coming back after a week and seeing alot of sensemaking comments :P

i kinda agree with most ;)

really comprehensive and nice ones by vagrant like usually too...

i like that we got both sides of the pond too...

 

thing is i recently upgraded or rebuildt my pc, cost was about 1.7k euro including anything fancy i ever dreamed of as a kid except for one of those hardware calibrated monitors ill surely get one day when i get a hasselblad cam :P, i just kept the mouse and my dvd drive...

before that i had a rather fast but outdated pc wich couldnt play newer games since my gfx card only supported pixel shader 2 but not 3 and hence i couldnt play mass effect and the like which need it for... well what for? HDR? seriously? wtf lol... i can live without that

anyway i thought now i have this beast and i can do what i want, bought a bunch of new games too and cranked em up to max settings, what do i see? well a slightly better resolution than on my old pc... nothing fancy new, no better water, no better physics, textures still look like a kid drew somin with crayons

 

lets take dragon age:

only the faces are high quality due to the cinematics, but the armor bits you see around the neck are like 10 times less fancy yet, it has no LOD, the water is a joke, proportions of objects are totally out of sense, the environment is as crappy as it can get, it feels static and unrealistic

the same goes for mass effect (1 and 2), but to be fair both games come from the same company

 

now lets take modern warfare 2:

weapons look very well as do the uniforms even tho their textures are low quality again, but take a look at the environment... crude... go inside a room and battlefield 2 offered the same

not to speak of the crazy as ass retarded story and its shortness

 

now since i make models and stuff myself too and also needed that pc upgrade to use for example zbrush with more than 6 million polygons (i can now use up to 25mil) i know that this is not even the fault of the developers who create the assets needed for games, their high poly models and textures look wicked... there are some talented basterds out there for sure, but what they have to do to get them ingame,

the armors of mass effect for example prolly use 512x512 textures or 1024 ones but only one and hence of course look blurry, there simply arent enough pixels in such a bitmap. this is the fault of the people who decide on which kind of system a game is supposed to run, allow the artists to make their stuff for a pc which came out, lets say a year ago, and youd see a dramatic rise in overall quality of many kinds as i mentioned earlier.

 

k so we have:

 

from a consumer standpoint:

 

consoles:

-price (even for nuts*) (*uninformed people who cant be bothered to understand their tools)

-ease of use (even for nuts)

-availability of game titles

 

pcs:

-price/performance ratio (if you know your tech... which honstly is easier than learning about fishing or baseball)

-ease of use (for more advanced programs which need other input devices but a hand held controller, gfx tablets, joysticks, keyboard and mouse, etc... no wonder noone lets ego shooters on a console play vs the same on a pc, theyd get pwned badly)

-availability of non gaming programs

from a developer point of view:

 

consoles:

-more consumers as even nuts can use a console

-cheaper assets needed to create a game (rendering a 512 AO texture for example takes less time than a 2048 ...much less)

 

pcs:

-ability to make awesome games

-ability to use the artists full imagination

-more freedom in terms of gameplay design

 

the question seems to be if consumers can be tooled into learning more about products they want or need to use

and also if devs want to lead and innovate or rather follow other companies in safe and predictable footsteps

 

in the past companies chose the prior, leading, innovating, nower days they try the safer route to wealth it seems

[Vagrant0]

lets take dragon age:

only the faces are high quality due to the cinematics, but the armor bits you see around the neck are like 10 times less fancy yet, it has no LOD, the water is a joke, proportions of objects are totally out of sense, the environment is as crappy as it can get, it feels static and unrealistic

the same goes for mass effect (1 and 2), but to be fair both games come from the same company

The reason for the crappy textures is because the game is made using EA's method of baking textures on meshes... The same crap they did with Spore and Sims 3. While it does allow for a wider range of objects to use the same exact texture, and can be used to apply different materials, and while it supposedly uses fewer resources when rendering, the fact of the matter is that on any system, it looks like utter crap, especially when textures related to clothing/armor don't reach the edges of said clothing/armor, leaving bits of flesh colored clothing/armor. It's nothing about technology, it has everything to do with the horrible engine EA is pushing and cutting of corners.

[jaysus]

do you mean tiled textures?

well EA has no say over that at all, its the developers who do that and usually you have to use tiled texes for large things

for example if you make an aircraft carrier you cant just bake the thing, you have to use tiled textures or the texture would be somin along the ranges of 32k x 32k pixels if you dont want a large difference between small object quality and large object quality.

this kinda sucks as you cant give your large objects the detail you want in most cases without making seperate objects for bumps, scratches, logos, etc

 

the changing color option is simply done by telling the engine to use a map of some kind as the pattern layer which can change its color according to a simple hue slider, some games even use the diffuse map for that and simply change anything thats not black and white like X3 does for example

 

but maybe i get it all wrong and you mean somin else ;)

[Sinophile]

from a consumer standpoint:

 

consoles:

-price (even for nuts*) (*uninformed people who cant be bothered to understand their tools)

-ease of use (even for nuts)

-availability of game titles

You forgot lower tech support costs. As mentioned earlier in this topic by me and others, all consoles have exactly the same hardware. The same is not true for PC gamers. Likewise, a PC game does not have to be licensed, thereby saving on licensing fees. I have no idea what the licensing fees for releasing a console game are, or what tech support costs. Although I am sure both would be available in Bioware's annual statement, which I am too lazy to look up.

 

the question seems to be if consumers can be tooled into learning more about products they want or need to use

What do you mean by "tooled"? Video games themselves are luxury items. You can't force consumers to learn anything.

 

and also if devs want to lead and innovate or rather follow other companies in safe and predictable footsteps

Safe and predictable is the way to go in this economy. For example, how many sports and racing games are released for every roleplaying game that is released? Even the roleplaying games are rather uncreative, they are all mostly based around Dungeons and Dragons.

 

in the past companies chose the prior, leading, innovating, nower days they try the safer route to wealth it seems

How far back in the past are you talking about? If you are talking about the 90s, everyone had a lot more disposable income back then. After 2001, things have changed. Then again, I am mainly talking about America. I didn't pay much attention to other countries' economies back then. Again, look at it from the perspective of a shareholder or a CEO( some of whom may have no background whatsoever in computers, let alone gaming). Why spend $25,000 to make a game which only a few consumers can afford, when you can spend $10,000 on something such as Mario that has a larger fanbase?

I have but one question, why make something innovative and original if it isn't going to make money?

[Vagrant0]

do you mean tiled textures?

No, I was meaning baked, low resolution, muddy textures which often don't stay in the lines of what is being painted and generally look rather crappy when you look at them close. Some of the full platemails in Dragonage suffer from this. Spore and The Sims 3 use this as well, but on a much larger scale to get around the complications of individually mapping textures on complex objects. It looks decent when you are dealing with distant or middle range scenes, but up close, it just looks bad. As far as I've been able to determine, it has nothing to do with the graphics load since the quality of these objects is virtually the same regardless of graphic settings, but instead it's just that the technology behind the texturing that just sucks. I can see why they're doing it, can see the potential benefits once it all gets sorted out, but until then we have to deal with rubbish.

 

For texture size and tiling, I actually see this as being less of an issue once computers can handle more detailed models. The more polygons a surface has, the more you can add variance to what textures are mapped to those polygons. For example, a wooden wall comprised of boards. In the simple model, the wall would exist of just 2 triangular polygons in a squareish shape, and require a large texture mapped over those two polygons to give detail to the individual boards. In a more complex model, where the boards themselves exist of 2 polygons each, with the polygons meeting one another where the seam of the board is, you no longer need a large texture to span the whole wall, and instead can use 3-4 smaller textures which span just the individual boards. This means that while the model becomes more complicated, it also allows both more detail, and more variation within a single member and an overall smaller texture size since you're no longer texturing the whole wall, but individual members of that wall. The problem however is that it means more time spent building the model, and a graphics card which can handle exponentially more polygons just for the sake of detail. A tiled texture is just cheaper to do and get away with in most cases.

 

Shaders provide one possible answer, since they can add extra layers to a texture, but also require more and more advanced videocards and programming.

 

The ultimate solution to all this is probably a combination of pointcloud and voxel displays, where the object which is shown does not consist of a bunch of polygons with a texture, but instead with numerous points or bits of pixel information which have colors attributed to them. The problem however is that is many years away from having reasonable application, and companies aren't too keen on buying into new, unproven, technology which visually looks like a step back.