Forums | MacLife

Leonard Nimoy wrote:

I'm not entirely convinced that "Moving forward" = Better graphics.

I mean, you're still using a stick to aim!

ScifiterX wrote:

Yup, game play is important too and the lets face it, unless VR gets implemented and seriously improved, there always gonna be limits on how immersive a game can be, particularly if the story is lacking.

You've both not been doing your required reading. Levi would take issue with UT3 requiring 'stick-aiming' on PC (or PS3, I think), and Halo 3 PC will not only look better but play better with m/kb control- not just more precise aiming, but enough keys to eliminate that maddening control heirarchy (one control controlling multiple functions, a seldom-mentioned drawback of complex games on console... e.g. press 'x' to do a b, or c when you're positioned to have all three happen, such as trying to pick up a weapon, but picking up equipment instead. Maddening and often fatal).


H3 has tons of story, even if much backstory is buried in the terminals; but more than a certain lack of polish damages immersiveness. The AI is one of the best out there, but still has many drawbacks, which is where the reading and new tech come in.

The other problem, and this is a very complex one, is that in some sense we have maxed out the current generation of graphics architecture ideas. There's a fundamental failing point for the way graphics have happened, or evolved, in the past. I got into 3D graphics back in the 80s when it was something only mathematicians and academics went to SIGGRAPH for. And in that era, the model for creating rendered 3D graphics was a technique called ray-tracing. If you go watch a modern movie like Beowulf, that movie's all ray-traced graphics; they had supercomputers pounding away, and they could maybe produce a frame every several hours.

Those techniques produce extraordinary realism. In order to achieve real-time rendering, modern graphics chips make a lot of compromises. They fake 3D. They fake the physics and light very aggressively. And so modern 3D chips are not so much real-time 3D simulators of light, as much as they are a really rich, complex bag of tricks for producing realistic-looking 3D without actually doing all the calculation.

We've reached a point where it's pretty hard to get better without changing the way we do the rendering. And to illustrate the point, if you look at a modern game, let's say they are really fantastic artists. You have a problem when an eyeball looks at a 3D character that looks perfectly real, and they act woodenly.

ET: True, right.

ASJ: They don't move properly; their motions are all limited to rails, they don't collide with the environment naturally. Making the pictures look better fails when the physics and the interactivity with the environment isn't realistic as well.

And that is the result of not having a very close integration for real-time vector processing, for complex collision, calculations, and complex lighting calculations—very close to the rendering of the real-time environment. What happens is the CPU sets up the world, and hands it to the GPU to render. That produces a very wooden interaction with a 3D rendered world.

To solve that, you really need the CPU and GPU to be sitting very close together and to be closely integrated, so that they can really share the work on physics, on lighting, and on vector calculations along with rendering in parallel. And what that causes is you can start imaging games where the CPU and GPU are closely integrated that are real-time ray-traced, whichlooks like the movies. For example, Monsters Inc. or Beowulf have extremely realistic physics, environmental interactions, and AI as a result of close integration.

But that has a fundamental shift in how you author a game.

ET: Sure, that completely changes the architecture.

ASJ: Tim Sweeney has to throw away everything he knows and start again. In a sense, he probably knows that and he's expressing that. DirectX 10 is about the limit of the way you can do things in this kind of graphics paradigm before the human mind explodes trying to cope with it.

And so, what you see, is one of the reasons that games that have 40 million dollar budgets, wheras are 80 percent of the cost of the game is art now, and the art replaces, or fakes, the absence of good 3D or realistic 3D physics. Because instead of having a realistic interaction with the [game] world, what I do instead is create a lot more animations, for every possible scenario in the game…

That's become too burdensome for big publishers to sustain. So I think you're at a point where, from DirectX 10, it's pretty hard to make anything but incremental performance without a radical change in architecture.

ET: Do you see that happening?

ASJ: Yes. [..]

Now go read the rest. Part 1, Part 2

Rasterization will likely be with us for years, but new possibilities are emerging.

Things not passing through others is more of a physics issue than graphics. Graphics have no idea about the placement or interaction of any object. The only graphics issue that you may have is transforming the mesh if you wish to animate it, but that's not a huge deal. The biggest part is using the CPU to decide where each vertex should be, which is once again a physics problem.

So you probably could make an argument that graphics don't effect gameplay at all. Some arguments seem to get the point where they say graphics quality and game quality are inversely proportional. If the graphics are completely horrible, I'd say it detracts from the enjoyment from the game. My opinion is that graphics do not by themselves make the game, but they can certainly break it. You might as well have as good of graphics as you can have. Though you don't necessarily have to have realistic graphics to be immersed in a game (case in point: Wind Waker or Okami), they have to be pleasing to the eye. It's just as much part of a truly great game as the gameplay or storyline. Though the Wii is behind in graphics, you can still have some farily nice graphics, and the unique control system helps compensate from that loss. It's a tradeoff, especially if you have a game on all the consoles. You might have more enjoyable gameplay on the Wii, depending on how they utilized the remote, but you should also have improved graphics on the PS3 and XBox 360, unless they screw up and do things like have everything be bloomed etc. (there might be some other differences, such as physics quality due to the weaker processor on the Wii) It's a toss-up based on personal preference.

akb825 wrote:

Things not passing through others is more of a physics issue than graphics. Graphics have no idea about the placement or interaction of any object. The only graphics issue that you may have is transforming the mesh if you wish to animate it, but that's not a huge deal. The biggest part is using the CPU to decide where each vertex should be, which is once again a physics problem.

So you probably could make an argument that graphics don't effect gameplay at all. Some arguments seem to get the point where they say graphics quality and game quality are inversely proportional. If the graphics are completely horrible, I'd say it detracts from the enjoyment from the game. My opinion is that graphics do not by themselves make the game, but they can certainly break it. You might as well have as good of graphics as you can have. Though you don't necessarily have to have realistic graphics to be immersed in a game (case in point: Wind Waker or Okami), they have to be pleasing to the eye. It's just as much part of a truly great game as the gameplay or storyline. Though the Wii is behind in graphics, you can still have some farily nice graphics, and the unique control system helps compensate from that loss. It's a tradeoff, especially if you have a game on all the consoles. You might have more enjoyable gameplay on the Wii, depending on how they utilized the remote, but you should also have improved graphics on the PS3 and XBox 360, unless they screw up and do things like have everything be bloomed etc. (there might be some other differences, such as physics quality due to the weaker processor on the Wii) It's a toss-up based on personal preference.

I did say it was a physics issue. I also said it was one what affected graphics. It's kind disturbing to see thinks like head, arms, legs or other appendages sticking a wall will playing a games. Physics is the cause and smurfed up graphics are a symptom. Graphics do affect gameplay but only up to a point. Looking good is the point. Past that point it's sort of a pissing contest.

ScifiterX wrote:

I never claimed Halo didn't have a decent story or that their were shooters that didn't decent gameplay.

I didn't think you were saying, or thought, that. I used H3 as an example of a game that could be more immersive with more advanced, coming tech.

I just feel story and gameplay affect how well you immerse yourself in any given game at least as much as quality of graphics, particularly when the argument of realism comes up. After all, how real do you need for stylized characters looking? You want to improve graphics in a game make it it so things like enemies don't pass through solid structures as if they were air when you lay the  smackdown on them. I know physics engine issue but it does affect graphics.

That's just the point addressed in the long quote. One of the related ones, anyway.

akb825 wrote:

Things not passing through others is more of a physics issue than graphics. Graphics have no idea about the placement or interaction of any object. The only graphics issue that you may have is transforming the mesh if you wish to animate it, but that's not a huge deal. The biggest part is using the CPU to decide where each vertex should be, which is once again a physics problem.

So you probably could make an argument that graphics don't effect gameplay at all.

Per se, no. Thru the lack of tighter integration with physics and its effects on AI e.g. pathfinding, yes. Graphics, physics, immersivity... all related.

We've reached a point where it's pretty hard to get better without changing the way we do the rendering. And to illustrate the point, if you look at a modern game, let's say they are really fantastic artists. You have a problem when an eyeball looks at a 3D character that looks perfectly real, and they act woodenly.

ET: True, right.

ASJ: They don't move properly; their motions are all limited to rails, they don't collide with the environment naturally. Making the pictures look better fails when the physics and the interactivity with the environment isn't realistic as well.

And that is the result of not having a very close integration for real-time vector processing, for complex collision, calculations, and complex lighting calculations—very close to the rendering of the real-time environment. What happens is the CPU sets up the world, and hands it to the GPU to render. That produces a very wooden interaction with a 3D rendered world.

To solve that, you really need the CPU and GPU to be sitting very close together and to be closely integrated, so that they can really share the work on physics, on lighting, and on vector calculations along with rendering in parallel. And what that causes is you can start imaging games where the CPU and GPU are closely integrated [..]. For example, Monsters Inc. or Beowulf have extremely realistic physics, environmental interactions, and AI as a result of close integration.

But that['s a] fundamental shift in how you author a game.

That came much to mind recently when trying out some new tricks in H3. I focus on getting a certain weapon (and enough ammo for it) in a certain tough fight; with it, and aiming a certain way, I can bring down one or both of two large dropships bringing in enemy reinforcements (Leonard Nimoy saw me do this a few days ago, as well as a thing or two else he didn't know were possible or practical, and he has every Achievement the game awards). Anyway, that generates mucho wreckage. Survivors have a very difficult time coping; their pathing nodes limit their movements, your own subsequent reinforcements sometime find vehicles (Halo's iconic 4WD Warthogs) dropped on top of the wreckage. Makes for some amusing play (and great screenshots I need to take soon).

ASJ, Alex St. John, was the primary (of 3) architect of DirectX back in '95 and has a fine handle on the theory & practice. He used to do a column for the PC cousin of this mag.

glotsy wrote:

Yeah all thats nice and all but your forgetting the bottom line...........the wii rocks!!!!!!Its got so many good games for it and plus it allows you to access the entire internet for free!You can't beat that:).

Yeah, because I'd obviously buy a Wii just to brows the internet. It's soooo much better at it than the computer, with a standard definition TV and controllers meant for gameplay rather than surfing. Man, my computer would be collecting dust.

I do plan on getting a Wii, since there are some games I want. However, you can accomplish much more on the other systems in terms of physics, AI, and graphics, which can definitely improve the quality of many types of games and make them more immersive. Please, stop being such a fan boi.

Over the long Memorial weekend I finally got to play on the neighbor's Wii with a projector and a 12 foot screen. Sorry I'm with Mike and don't feel like I'm missing much not owning one...maybe for the kids later. Watching a 5 yo clober everone in bowling was funny in a way. Playing baseball with the weeble wobble family didn't turn me on either. WTF N couldn't spend an extra week and give the players some legs? NTM the one arm batters. Couldn't just have taken RBI Baseball and polished it more. I guess that is one way to save rendering space. Mario Cart was fun. However not much different from the previous versions.

Yeah the Wii rocks...something...cribs maybe?