Technological Advance Stalled In Gaming?

[jaysus]

point clouds are very nice if you want to generate objects procedural, for example this microdip example of collecting images from the internet and then have a program assemble a model from those is one of those

so far however i cant see how it would create a real surface but a bunch of point floating in midair with reasonableperformance load, youd still need to "coat" the point with a surface and add a texture

but agreed, its one of those techs that culd be further developed yet and probably will advance eventually to generate aceptable 3d models from cave, building, landscape scans and so on, maybe even get applied to games with procedural environments one day when we can compute trizzillion of points and wont need to add edges between them to create a surface, this would also remove the need for additional textures as it would just ork like polypainting but instead of polies we could use pointpainting :P

 

crappy baked textures have atm 2 main problems, the size of the texture they get baked on and the projection from high to low poly,

the texture size is self explanatory as creating "blurry" images as bitmaps obviously loose detail when you make them smaller, if you get up close to such a texture then it appears pixely and if you use antisoptry it becomes blurry,

the distortion originates from the alghorythms programs like zbrush or mudbox use to project details from the high poly polypainting onto the low poly mapping, they require you to basicly model your object using only perfect quadrats which is not always possible of course, if ou have adiagonal line in your edgeflow or god beware triangles or ngons youre seriously running into trouble as the texture will "break" at these edges and get distorted

then there is the rather minor problem of geometrical differences between high poly and low poly (sry if i missa key or two from time to time, my keyboard is soaked in bug blood atm... damn trees :P), this problem can be easily cicrumvented however by reexporting the lowst subD layer of your model back into max/blender/maya and uv mapping it after the high poly sculpt or if that is not feasible to retopologize the low poly model after the high poly sculpt directly onto the high poly (thats what i did with my witchblade and im rather happy with the results tho the polies could be more quadratic in som places), that way you keep most of the detail alive and the texture still fits.

thatit looks still as bad on low res as on high res is he problem this thread is bout, theyre optimized for low end consoles which can only utilize so much of texture space, woudl these games be developed for pcs the main tex could easily be 4096x4096 pixels in size and use mip maps to lower the res for low end mashines, just like they often do for low and high texture settings, they could go up a notch tho, just not on consoles

 

as for tiled textures, yes you can try to split your object into smaller ones but you would for performance reasons probably use a generic texture for most elements, for example would you ust rotate or mirror a texture for different board in that wooden plank wall example of yours as not to overload the gfx cards vram (1gb is not that much and everything else goes onto your hdd, ssd and ram) and it would appear kinda tiled again, however you could add details like scratches and the like much more easily, its being used for example in the steel cupboard in fallout

the whole rivet city carrier however uses only about 4 or 5 textures, tiled over and over again, still looks rather descent if you ask me even tho the texture isnt that high res either if oyu get close up, but in comparision to my submarine which uses no tiling its still much better

 

@sino

 

true, i forgot the liscence fees in this assumption...

but do consoles truly have customer support? EA at least doesnt offer any to my experience :P

 

by "tooling customers to understand the products they use" i meant to make them understand them without actually handing a manual out to them which they wont read, no idea how to accomplish that but maybe by incooperating it in the usual mandatory classes in school or maybe giving them an incent to do it themselves, i learned shitloads while trying to get wing commander to run in dos with only 64k cache for example...

 

safe and predictable is the way to defeat... and stop whining bout the economy, thats the news and the bloody govs we have who screw up the financial market (FED, EZB, etc are a bunch of morons), however on a personal level its not that bad at all, i still live by around 700euro per month atm and im not suffering at all and the cost of living is like 3 times higher in europe than it is in the US (for reaons i could rant about for days... damn imperialsm :P), but ya agreed if you have to eat 3 instead of 4 cheezburgaz a day it can seriously make you depresed :D

 

im talking bout the time shortly before the original xbox came out, games were still mainly developed for pcs back then and we saw some advances everywhere, everyone wanted to dish out the craziest, newest, most awesome thing (think duke nukem forever) but eventully had to bow down to the mighty xbox and her buddies in the console kindergarten and the fixture of tech one was "allowed" to use by the publisher

 

i hope your estimates on how much a game costs (25 and 10k) was an imaginable number lol... the actual price is more like 25mil, we dont have any comparable numbers atm since no rescent game was developed for pcs which would allow us to estimate the dev costs to some extend in comparision of the two systems, x3 is the last i know of which was worthwhile and didnt come for consoles and its dev costs were much lower (a few 100k) than say oblivion (a few 10mil), if thats due to the different system is hard to say however due those games different nature though

 

as to why make somin innovative?

-advance in tech, science, etc

-creation of awe base of future customers who think of your company as "the company" who creates the most up to date and most awesome stuff

(you wouldnt go to a doctor who uses stone age medicine ifyou could choose between him and one from a star trek vessel i assume) (take apple as an example and how they survived with just fans for nearly 2 decades before comin out of the dark and stomping microdop into the ground)

-be the first, be the king effect

-tech patents which bring in additional funds once picked up by others

 

would you rather like to play on a holodeck or on an atari? (rethorical question)

 

anyway i need nu coffee...

[ub3rman123]

Well, if anyone does feel like making PC's more like consoles, they could do them like Macintoshes (God forbid). I remember two distinct scenarios: 1, I had to move my Wii downstairs for a larger living room. Took me more time to carry the 3 or so cables, console, and controllers than to set it up. 2, I had to move my computer downstairs to do some testing on the router. Took me 30 minutes to arrange all 30 or so of the cables, set them up, and figure where they go. Computers really need less cables. If you look at them, each and every single cable on it is required. There's the power cable, the monitor cable, the mouse cable, the speakers cable, the headset cable, the second monitor cable that connects to the video card, and now 'cable' sounds like a funny word to me after thinking it so many times.

[evilneko]

Laptops are computers with less cables. ;) Also, don't forget your network cable! :biggrin:

[Sinophile]

true, i forgot the liscence fees in this assumption...

but do consoles truly have customer support? EA at least doesnt offer any to my experience :P

Why offer something that console gamers don't need? The worst that can happen is the physical media is damaged(E.G. defective disk), which is remedied by taking it back to the store, or the hardware itself is defective(Such as the Xbox360's red ring of death).

 

Took me 30 minutes to arrange all 30 or so of the cables, set them up, and figure where they go.

Where do you get 30 cables? I count speakers, monitor, power, mouse, keyboard, and networking.

 

 

Laptops are computers with less cables. ;) Also, don't forget your network cable! :biggrin:

Laptops also consume less resources(I.E. power, space). Pretty much every peripheral has an affordable wireless version of it(Wireless headphones etc), excluding perhaps power and monitor.

 

 

by "tooling customers to understand the products they use" i meant to make them understand them without actually handing a manual out to them which they wont read, no idea how to accomplish that but maybe by incooperating it in the usual mandatory classes in school or maybe giving them an incent to do it themselves

Which scenario is more likely, that Sony and Microsoft are brainwashing their customers, or that customers simply prefer a product that is easier to understand(albeit less advanced))? Again, look at it from a marketing perspective, rather than a technological one. Judging from your mods, as well as your other posts in the forums, your understanding of technology and computers is well above average. However, as Vagrant pointed out earlier, the same is not true for the "average" consumer, who most likely aren't as patient.

 

but ya agreed if you have to eat 3 instead of 4 cheezburgaz a day it can seriously make you depresed :D

There you go, Americans prefer to spend all their money on junk food and anti-depressants instead of video games. I don't know about Europe, but most American PC gamers aren't exactly health nuts.

 

and stop whining bout the economy

According to this Wikipedia article. The video gaming industry has grown rather significantly since 2007, thereby poking holes in my economy argument. However, it is still worth noting that the costs of developing a game has significantly increased as well, and that most games take 2-4 years from conception to market. This means that the average game was designed for hardware several years old by the time it is even released.

 

i hope your estimates on how much a game costs (25 and 10k) was an imaginable number lol... the actual price is more like 25mil

twenty five thousand wouldn't even cover the salaries of the playtesters. Those numbers were meant only as examples.

 

x3 is the last i know of which was worthwhile and didnt come for consoles and its dev costs were much lower (a few 100k) than say oblivion (a few 10mil), if thats due to the different system is hard to say however due those games different nature though

All of the Elder Scroll games had staggering budgets, which is each sequel takes half a decade to make. One hundred thousand dollars probably didn't even cover their QA budget. If you want to find out, you could go to the Bethesda website, and request their annual report(which a friend of mine did for accounting class). I;d do it myself, but I am too lazy to do it for the sake of a forum debate.

 

(you wouldnt go to a doctor who uses stone age medicine ifyou could choose between him and one from a star trek vessel i assume) (take apple as an example and how they survived with just fans for nearly 2 decades before comin out of the dark and stomping microdop into the ground)

First of all, I, like many Americans, don't even have health insurance, so that is somewhat of a moot question. Apple has prospered over the past few years not because of their technological advancements or their fanbase, but because they shifted away from desktops and operating systems, and towards other consumer products, such as MP3 players and cell phones. Heck, even the Iphone and Ipad really aren't that cutting edge compared to their competitors.

 

 

would you rather like to play on a holodeck or on an atari? (rethorical question)

Again, you have to look at cost. The most technologically advanced games aren't neccesarily the highest selling.

[evilneko]

I donno man, Atari had some hella-fun games. Games from the days before games in general started putting on airs. (with apologies to Yahtzee :tongue: )

[Sinophile]

http://www.resourceinvestor.com/News/2008/12/Pages/-Blood-Tantalum--Profiteers-in-Congo-Set-to.aspx