Plan for Greg Szemiot
by GJS · 05/14/2005 (11:17 pm) · 8 comments
I love getting reactions from some of the people involved in the buisiness/admin part of my team. You show these guys a wireframe of a complete level and their mouths say foolish things because their brain doesn't understand what it's seeing.
A few of us on the art/tech side of our main project Orb showed the guys Timothy Aste's video he recently posted, and their jaws almost hit the floor... then we showed them what wethought we could to on TSE with normal mapping and everything (we pulleda few concept renders off) and they freaked!
one of the guys came up to me later and asked "Doyou think we can get UE3 level detail from Toruqe?" I said he was nuts (washe? I don't know actually... I'm just a level designer, notreally ahuge tech guy), but I said we could get something that looked damn good and he then askedif we could get stuff that looked FFX good. I said "hell yeah... that should be no problem. One of the techs already has some stuff that looks better than that did."
But something has been buggin me recently... in terms of the videogame industry... I'm getting kinda sick of graphics being updated and every Joe and Jen Gamer going out and buying a console for better graphics when nothing new is introduced. They are releasing shots of Xbox360 games and all I can say is I feel very underwhelmed. It looks nice... but it's such a small upgrade in most parts (WOW! OMG, that characters pants have real wrinkles in them!!! Xbox360 is teh l33t!...
A few of us on the art/tech side of our main project Orb showed the guys Timothy Aste's video he recently posted, and their jaws almost hit the floor... then we showed them what wethought we could to on TSE with normal mapping and everything (we pulleda few concept renders off) and they freaked!
one of the guys came up to me later and asked "Doyou think we can get UE3 level detail from Toruqe?" I said he was nuts (washe? I don't know actually... I'm just a level designer, notreally ahuge tech guy), but I said we could get something that looked damn good and he then askedif we could get stuff that looked FFX good. I said "hell yeah... that should be no problem. One of the techs already has some stuff that looks better than that did."
But something has been buggin me recently... in terms of the videogame industry... I'm getting kinda sick of graphics being updated and every Joe and Jen Gamer going out and buying a console for better graphics when nothing new is introduced. They are releasing shots of Xbox360 games and all I can say is I feel very underwhelmed. It looks nice... but it's such a small upgrade in most parts (WOW! OMG, that characters pants have real wrinkles in them!!! Xbox360 is teh l33t!...
About the author
#2
I'm afraid I've drunk the kool aid... :)
05/15/2005 (12:57 am)
Microsoft truly believes that the future is in online gaming, and that innovative gameplay with online games has just barely been tapped. While the Xbox 360 might not impress you, what should impress everyone is the online community that they are building with Live, and the increased ease in developing online games that they are promoting FAR more than any other console. Actually the most impressive feature of the 360 to me is simply that Live will be free to everyone on the weekends. That is sure to increase their community greatly.I'm afraid I've drunk the kool aid... :)
#3
05/15/2005 (8:54 am)
You should read my blog @ http://cathodetan.blogspot.com ... I've been saying this for years now. I kinda hope that one of the consoles catches to the idea that smaller, less graphic intensive games, would be good for downloadable content ... but we'll see.
#4
I like the idea behind live, but I also believe that live is not the future. While its great and all having a centralized system, it also poses tons of limits and restrictions on content and creativity. The worst part of this is the plan to sell upgrades for games, I fear the corruption that is to come.
05/15/2005 (10:50 pm)
Quote:Microsoft truly believes that the future is in online gaming, and that innovative gameplay with online games has just barely been tapped. While the Xbox 360 might not impress you, what should impress everyone is the online community that they are building with Live, and the increased ease in developing online games that they are promoting FAR more than any other console. Actually the most impressive feature of the 360 to me is simply that Live will be free to everyone on the weekends. That is sure to increase their community greatly.
I like the idea behind live, but I also believe that live is not the future. While its great and all having a centralized system, it also poses tons of limits and restrictions on content and creativity. The worst part of this is the plan to sell upgrades for games, I fear the corruption that is to come.
#5
Completely agree that Physics and AI are the things that in the future need to move the industry along like graphics once did.
05/16/2005 (5:38 am)
Quote:Now there's definitely some potential with the new physics chips
Completely agree that Physics and AI are the things that in the future need to move the industry along like graphics once did.
#6
05/16/2005 (6:16 am)
I agree with you completly. I've been looking at some of the 360 games and it seems, the graphics finally depend on how good your artists are (Being an artist, I like this). The problem I see now is they have to hire so many artists, that all we'll be seeing now are EA sports games and FPS's. The artists will get payed crap and the end users will get unfun games... but they'll look pretty.
#7
05/16/2005 (12:56 pm)
One of the things we preach to all new CSE staff is we want the games to look good... but we want them to be simpleto play and easy to get into. What we want to holdthe gamer is a rich storyline, dynamic characters, great atmosphere. We will reach a pointin the industry where everything you can doon a TV/Monitor has been done... and when that time comes it will be all about the content the game has and how you play it.
#8
1. emotioneering, (thank you gdmag), why do we love alyx? why do i often not care when my ai teammate goes down?
2. physics with regard to interactivity. who the hell cares about ragdolls and levers to get the key to the next area? I want something where cause and effect is integral to the story. save the base from being destroyed/demolished! breach a hull, and infiltrate a ship!
3. intuitive systems of teamwork. the command screen concepts are great, but never immediate. what can be done to optimize these?
4. new interfaces in general, 3rd person, 1st person, there has to be more.
there are many many options and ideas to continue exploring, quite frankly I still think we are miles from what can be accomplished with the medium. obviously graphics has been the obvious way to expand up to now, but like jay says, there's a level at which it seems less important to do so...
05/16/2005 (1:33 pm)
I think there are several critical directions to begin exploring in much greater detail1. emotioneering, (thank you gdmag), why do we love alyx? why do i often not care when my ai teammate goes down?
2. physics with regard to interactivity. who the hell cares about ragdolls and levers to get the key to the next area? I want something where cause and effect is integral to the story. save the base from being destroyed/demolished! breach a hull, and infiltrate a ship!
3. intuitive systems of teamwork. the command screen concepts are great, but never immediate. what can be done to optimize these?
4. new interfaces in general, 3rd person, 1st person, there has to be more.
there are many many options and ideas to continue exploring, quite frankly I still think we are miles from what can be accomplished with the medium. obviously graphics has been the obvious way to expand up to now, but like jay says, there's a level at which it seems less important to do so...
Torque 3D Owner Jay Barnson
In terms of graphics tech, we're definitely hitting the law of diminishing returns. Now there's definitely some potential with the new physics chips - if we can get some good, reliable rigid-body units and things like inverse kinematics & so forth all on hardware, then we can get these beautifully rendered objects to actually interact with each other and their world believably, things may get interesting along a new axis.
But for graphics - a 2X improvement in graphics quality is now unnoticed by most gamers. This isn't the old days where going from 500 polygons in a scene to 1000 polygons in a scene brought huge cheers and accolades.