As beautiful as this demo is, I think the push for realism has harmed the game industry more than it has move it forward. One of the few developers in recent memory that has managed to focus on both visual fidelity and gameplay is Bioware with the Mass Effect series; for the most part most developers aren't this successful and end up producing beautiful but lifeless, dull games.
Also consider that producing art assets for an engine like this is a huge undertaking and adds a substantial cost to development. Publishers are less likely to take risks with innovative concepts given film like budgets, increasing the tendancy to stick to formulas that they know offer a good ROI. The "hollywoodisation" of the games industry hasn't had much to offer me as a gamer, and increasingly I find more enjoyment with wee indie offerings like Minecraft over the AAA titles.
I think another great exception is the elder scrolls series by bethesda. Every time I see new physics engine, better AI, or better graphics, I think, 'What can Bethesda do with this?'
I agree with Bonch here: Oblivion is one of the worst examples of this very trend: it was stunningly beautiful (especially if you had a monster machine), but for that it traded animation (crappy, especially the faces), scenario, originality, gameplay (though I'm sure the consoles objectives helped there), …
Apart from the graphics, the shipped game was lifeless and uninteresting, Morrowind was orders of magnitude more original, more interesting and (even though it was on a half-dead continent) more full of life than Oblivion.
You think Besthesda is an exception? Oblivion was pretty crippled in features and gameplay compared to Morrowind and Daggerfall despite having physics and "realistic" faces. The AI was embarrassing. Bethesda is one of the main culprits in trading gameplay for graphics as well as latching onto "next-gen" marketing hype.
Indeed, I see Besthesda as a not-so-shining example of the case that squidsoup is making. Morrowind was brilliant - it had great freatures, great gameplay, a great storyline etc.
Then Oblivion came along and they switched their development focus (or at least a fair amount of it) onto the graphics. And the result? Poor gameplay with a cop-out 'auto levelling' system, a 'fast travel' system which was 'click this button to travel anywhere in the game World', etc.
Sure it might have looked pretty and thus sold well, but it was a step backwards in terms of gameplay.
Crysis 1 is another example of this. Amazing graphics, amazing physics. But the storyline was non-existant and at times the gameplay was poor.
Totally agree. Oblivion was 80% hype and pretty graphics.
Beneath the eye candy, Oblivion was an extremely boring game really. Sure, the world was huge, but it was empty and repetitive. Each cave looked like every other cave[1]. Each dungeon, castle and fort looked the exact same[1]. Every tomb, crypt or ruin looked the exact same[1]. Each oblivion level looked the exact same[1]. The rest of the world was more or less filler to link these places together. Also, sometimes I found an interesting area only to be disappointed that there was no history, no reason for it being there, nothing. (Eg, if I find a ruin waaaay out in the middle of the mountains, I wonder why its there, why is it a ruin, what happened to the people etc etc - Oblivion made no attempt at answering any of these questions).
Besides that, each quest was written as if it was the only quest in the game (ie, the world may as well be paused until you finish the quest) and, besides the hype about the AI, everything revolves around the main character - if you stop and sit on the side of the road for three days, the world is pretty much paused until you do stuff again (besides trivial NPC schedules).
Having said that, the world was quite beautiful and some of the quests did interest me (eg, the assassin quest where you get locked into a house), but overall, the game was dull, lifeless and, besides its grand size and scale, empty.
[1] On the inside. Sometimes there would be a really cool looking (from the outside) structure that got me excited, only to be shown the exact same interior level that I'd seen a hundred times already yet another time.
I feel like we need a "library" of freely available hi-res textures and models that can be adapted for a given game. From what I understand, a huge part of the development costs go into the art, and having a huge library to draw from seems like it would mitigate that somewhat.
It's not that simple. There is more to a game artist's job than just creating a generic model and texture. The art has to be in a specific art style, it has to be within a certain budget, it has to be made in a certain way to work in the game engine. The textures have to be made to work with the shaders that it will be using and look good in the game's lighting system. Physics might need to be setup. Destruction states. Lightmaps generated. It might need to be created so that it can be rigged and animated. There are places like cgtextures.com for textures, and there are artists who turn those textures textures into the art you see in the game. You can't replace the game artist.
Believe me, I'm not trying to replace game artists or belittle their work in any way. I'm just musing about whether or not there is a way to streamline an artist's job, to make it easier for them to create content. Which, when phrased that way, seems like it is more an issue with the available tools rather then the library of previous works.
Most companies have lots of in-house tools and scripts they have written to help artists do their job. A company like Bungie will have people dedicated to working on tools for artists. The positions are called tech artist or tools programmer. Some companies have much better tools than others.
Can anyone in the game industry comment on this? Why type of problems are game companies paying for? I have seen at least one company that sells procedurally generated trees and am curious how good of an idea this is. Being customer oriented, what are the problems game companies have today?
I guess you talk about SpeedTree. We used in some of our games, but not in our latest.
One of the problem of using middleware, especially one generating content is how to integrate it with the rest of the pipeline.
If our pipeline sees that as just another model/texture like the rest of the provided, then no problem - e.g. An artist uses the tool to generate the geometry. But if we have to put some control over it, and integrate it deeper so far into the rendering system, then other problems arise:
- Speed of rendering
- Memory usage
- Collision support
- Can it reuse existing shader techniques, or new are required.
- others
And since you've talked about procedural - this would entail more variations:
For example if this is an multiplayer game you would have to synchronize the tree generation to look exactly the same for each player, and have the same collision box, or collision model (usually low-poly bounding convex or set of). This means you would have to communicate synchronize this with the clients.
Then some animatiors might've adjusted certain cut-scene to look very good, but the TREE has changed and now it's weird.
For an open world RPG, or strategy game this might not be a problem - more variation there for the better.
But all in all, if the price is right, and artists and coders agree - why not?
>For example if this is an multiplayer game you would have to synchronize the tree generation to look exactly the same for each player, and have the same collision box, or collision model (usually low-poly bounding convex or set of). This means you would have to communicate synchronize this with the clients.
They just have to use identical seed values for their random number generators.
Look at dwarf fortress: a few worldgen parameters and a single number are all you need to generate a fantasy world with complete with procedurally generated geography, population with traceable lineage, governments and other entities, and history, including artifacts and artwork that portray said history.
I'm not in the industry at all, but I've followed it for a long time and done a good deal of random game dev. The biggest pain point is how much it costs to produce a large world these days. As it stands, this is not a technical problem, but a business one: artists are expensive and art for modern games is insanely detailed.
Procedural generation is, IMO, the way to go here, but it's an unsolved problem. I've been thinking about this for a long time and I've had two specific ideas in mind for how to ease the cost of content development. Please, steal these!
Idea one is for the creation of individual assets. You start with what is, in effect, a block of clay. You (programmatically) cut away at it, apply materials to it (which could, in turn, do things like cut a wood grain into it), add on to it, etc. So let's say you want to build a sign generator for shops in your town. You'd start with a block of clay roughly the size of your sign, cut it into the (2d) shape you want, emboss the logo into it, then apply a wood material to the sign, and paint the raised areas. This allows you to quickly create unique assets in your world.
Idea two is for the high-level creation of a world. You have an editor where you can create a landscape. You start by setting the size of the area, drag points up and down to affect terrain, etc -- all stuff that's been done before. The key, though, is in world brushes. For instance, you select a 'forest' brush. This brush, when painted onto an area, creates trees, rocks, bushes, etc as appropriate based on elevation, angle of the ground, etc. So you paint part of your area with a forest brush, then go in and paint in a river, paint in paths, etc. Once you've created the high level look, you can go in and add features like signs to cities, unique quest/story-related assets, etc. This allows you to create large areas with completely unique geometry very quickly and cheaply, without sacrificing quality; after all, you're starting off with unique objects and then adding specific touches.
The latter idea has been implemented to a certain extent in the past, but it's been entirely via instanced geometry. The problem there? Everything looks the same. Procedural generation lets you get a unique world, then you can go in and actually make it feel real.
You bring good points, but you forget one things - artists love control. Take that away from them and they cry like babies who lost their candy.
Procedural art is really cool if you can think about your asset as a programmer - but you need to remember artists do not think like us. If you are willing to replace your artists with tech artists though, that's a different story (note: normally those people are rare, and stay in one field programming shaders).
"The problem there? Everything looks the same." -- Yes, that's exactly the desired consequence by artists, and as mentioned, will cry if their flexibility is revoked by tools they are not familiar with (in house model/texture generators).
While you as a programmer think of a texture of "noise and color", artists think about it as brush strokes, materials and emotions.
Procedural generation doesn't automatically mean that the artist has no control. There will still be inputs guiding the generated content. Artists will still have the final say as to what will get into the game.
You have to make the GUI artist-friendly though, inputting some numbers and hitting a button won't do. The tree generation company (SpeedTree) is actually a good example. Their program is very easy to work with even for artists and you can generate a large scala of realistic-looking trees.
Also, with procedural generation you can achieve a more varied look. For example: If artists have to design every tree, you get a few specimens that you place everywhere. With automatic generation, every tree can be different,
"Procedural generation doesn't automatically mean that the artist has no control" - It means they have less control, and they always bitch and moan about that.
Sure, some people will always bitch and moan about change. But look at it positively: it allows them to do more impressive things in less time. If they can make a good-looking forest in a day instead of three months, it means they can do more interesting things then hand-design trees.
The second idea is also already being done by software like Terragen from Planetside Software: http://www.planetside.co.uk/ I don't know how widely used this is; I have the impression lots of game companies build similar tools in-house, tailored to their particular games.
I'm peripherally in the industry, but even I can say middleware is huge. Speedtree, as you mentioned, shows how niche the suites can be. You also have FMV players (especially on mobile) and of course physics engines are huge. Look for Havok and you'll see it powers most AAA games. I don't know specific pain points you can ease, but if you can generalize it, game companies will probably pay for it.
Also, middleware has to be a node on the outside of the graph. It has to substantially all of a problem, not just most of it.
So a fully functional physics engine, a complete procedural tree generator, a self-contained front-end system, a reasonably complete animation package, that's fine, that's great stuff.
Sixty percent of a solution plus an API is not okay.
A complete solution to a problem (no matter how niche) with the smallest integration surface is key.
potatolicious mentioned animation systems http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2303453 Is this an area that is just not very important (wont buy) or one that just is low on the list of todo items? speedtree begs the question of what about speedFOOBAR such as buildings, cities, caves, worlds, fish or how about speedanimal (generating animal + animation)? Is the big place to find a nitch in Art or are there better places to invest such as physics engines?
What about audio? Is that an area that is uncharted or an area that is low on the list of items?
If you want to know what sorts of libraries the game industry wants to license, take a look at RAD Game Tools, they are the masters of this stuff. Some of the stuff they are currently focused on are large data-set compression/decompression (Charles Bloom) and I would guess some sort of tool/library to generically handle sparse virtual texture rendering (Sean Barrett) which is similar to id's megatexture technology... though the SVT guess is more speculation on my part than public knowledge.
In any case, this market is probably not a great one to get into unless you are a deep subject matter expert in one of these areas (or you want to become one and have a lot of time to spend doing so), the bar is set pretty high already and few game development studios are willing to put any effort into exploring solutions that aren't either well-proven or from people they already know and trust (the game industry is still rather incestuous).
Spot on, I think; I would add that as well as being a subject matter expert, you will also need to be intimately familiar with the hardware architectures of the Xbox 360 and PS3, since 'optimized' solutions for these platforms will need to be one of your selling points.
Also consider that producing art assets for an engine like this is a huge undertaking and adds a substantial cost to development. Publishers are less likely to take risks with innovative concepts given film like budgets, increasing the tendancy to stick to formulas that they know offer a good ROI. The "hollywoodisation" of the games industry hasn't had much to offer me as a gamer, and increasingly I find more enjoyment with wee indie offerings like Minecraft over the AAA titles.