What would signify the arrival of the next games gen 4 you?

[f0zz]

When I have total freedom in a game, but am bound by my actions having a consequence (bit like real life really) So as tempting as it is to blow that random tart in the street away, then exploit her ragdoll physics with my toe-end so I can get a good look up her skirt as she goes lumpy-bump up the town hall steps, the sight of open-mouthed strangers pointing and the sudden silence of stopped traffic and distant sirens sways me to exercise prudence, at least in public.

[arron]

Hmm, I'm not sure that freedom in a game should then immediately entail the player to live a consequence-free lifestyle of rape of anything living or dead, murder and destruction, plus anything else that the might find turns them on..

Sounds a bit dull to me.

[Orava]

When I have total freedom in a game, but am bound by my actions having a consequence (bit like real life really) So as tempting as it is to blow that random tart in the street away, then exploit her ragdoll physics with my toe-end so I can get a good look up her skirt as she goes lumpy-bump up the town hall steps, the sight of open-mouthed strangers pointing and the sudden silence of stopped traffic and distant sirens sways me to exercise prudence, at least in public.

Did you ever blow up the scientists with trigger mines in half-life? Ie. setup lots of mines in one place then scare off scientist by hitting him. He then runs into the mine field, bang-bang-bang, huge chain explosion.

I always felt a bit guilty afterwards...

[f0zz]

Hmm, I'm not sure that freedom in a game should then immediately entail the player to live a consequence-free lifestyle of rape of anything living or dead, murder and destruction, plus anything else that the might find turns them on..

Sounds a bit dull to me.

It is dull, my point was that it soon gets old, no matter how many times you butcher innocents - there's always a germ in my mind that I shouldn't be doing this - but so what - who or what's to stop me?. Postal2 is a classic example of this, you can even piss on your victims for crying out loud - it plumbs the depths of tastelessness whilst not being a particularly inspiring fps. I'd like to have the restraint that prevents me from doing this in real life incorporated into my gaming experience. In other words, to know the victim of my senseless attack is a thinking, feeling being. To know the consequences of my actions would be to the displeasure/shock/vengefulness of other thinking, feeling beings. I know I didn't convey it very well but - yeah, that would be next gen for me

Did you ever blow up the scientists with trigger mines in half-life? Ie. setup lots of mines in one place then scare off scientist by hitting him. He then runs into the mine field, bang-bang-bang, huge chain explosion.

I always felt a bit guilty afterwards...

Of course! - didn't everyone ? This was second only to pushing the hostages in front of the window in Counterstrike, so the sniper would pick em off and lose money

[koworld]

I know I didn't convey it very well but -

Well I got it.

[Bubba]

I've been thinking about this for a while now, what with wanting to work in the games industry. It's interesting reading the views of others here as crowds has always been something I've been very interested in. What I always found strange was the way that people went "Aww look at the people in GTA - aren't they so realistic!" to which my blunt answer was "Err... No, not really". The two scenes I've set as a benchmark have already been mentioned - the matrix "against the crowd" scene and the street chase in bladerunner. To be able to generate a world to that kind of depth would take a long time, but produce an immersive and innovative gaming environment.

Another is explosions and buildings. Long before 9/11, I got chatting with some friends at school who also wanted to program computer games. We all expressed our disatisfaction about current game engines of the time (basically Quake 2 / Unreal kind of time - well before any information had come to light on the Geomod engine used in Red Faction) and the fixed, rigid and quite frankly boring nature of the buildings. Basically, we wanted to tie in a physics system to the construction of buildings so that you could blow bits up and stuff would fall down, or explode. Current advances in processing power should mean that a system like this could be implemented, and I think would be really fun, as well as pretty to look at.

Another thing is the scale of the environment. Far too many games are enclosed in little level sized portions - Both Deus Ex titles are a fine example of this. I love both of these games, and have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours playing the first, but the size constraints of the engine do show terribly - it can become a loading screen hell, especially if you have to back track. Two games that really made me smile with regards to this are Halo and Far Cry. Both engines / games have enormous environments with micro loading times between each little section. Nobody would mind a slightly longer loading time between a large change, it's just frequent loading delays really does distract from the game - you don't open your front door and wait 30 seconds while the outside loads up (at least unless you really are quite hung over!).

Obviously a lot of things we thought about have already been done - better lighting (The lighting in games like Deus Ex, Doom 3 and Farcry simply looks gorgous), higher poly count models, better audio support for both music and samples, more expressive character models with better lip sync (Half life 2 looks particularly good in this regard, as do the unreal 3 engine shots). I just hope that the unreal engine 3 features more than a vast increase in polygons and more fancy pixel shaders - don't get me wrong, I love it when games look pretty but I feel that prettyness and technological advancement need to go hand in hand - I'd love to be able to fire off my high polygon count machine gun into a pixel shader 3.0 tunnel support, but I'd love to see the tunnel behind me collapse, trapping off the bad guys who are following me without any scripting - it just happens because the physics / graphics engine knows that tunnels don't stand up on their own.

Cheers - apologies for the long post, but I was more than a little shocked that others were interested in something like this, especially the crowds. I'm just far too used to the nodding and smiling (in the "just nod and smile and he'll shut the hell up" kind of way) of my offline friends when I start talking about this crap.

Cheers

Bubba

[Kemper_Boyd]

Oooh I sort of disagree with that. Physical effects are arguably
even more intractable than graphics effects, graphics is easier
to fudge in a pleasing way, physics can end up looking bloody
stupid when you cheat. Personally I expect to see things that
look real long before I see things that behave realistically.

To be honest as much as I am wowed by cool graphics, kick-ass
physics impresses me more. The collapse of Barad-Dur in Return
of the King was by far the best effect in the whole film.

Some smart Alec will now tell me it's a minature shot.

[Bubba]

Oooh I sort of disagree with that. Physical effects are arguably
even more intractable than graphics effects, graphics is easier
to fudge in a pleasing way, physics can end up looking bloody
stupid when you cheat. Personally I expect to see things that
look real long before I see things that behave realistically.

To be honest as much as I am wowed by cool graphics, kick-ass
physics impresses me more. The collapse of Barad-Dur in Return
of the King was by far the best effect in the whole film.

Some smart Alec will now tell me it's a minature shot.

Yeah I see what you mean with that - I'd really like to see good physics rather than just bodged stuff. I think Next Gen consoles / machines are going to have enough horsepower to really tighten up physics implementation within games. Ragdoll character deaths can look very stupid at times, although the first game I've really seen which has impressed me with this is Far Cry - while you get the occasional blip in that a gunned down body can take a rather crazy position, the majority of them drop and "crumple" pretty well.

While implementing this kind in demolishing buildings might still be a bit too much of a far flung goal, I'd love to see more reaction with the environment. To use Far Cry again (not that I have a particular preference to this game - It's just one of the few "next gen" PC titles I've played), it would be quite cool if when driving into a tree at high speed, the tree took damage. These little touches would help to immerse the player in the environment, and would also show a good use of next generation hardware in that as well as high poly count it would also do something with the rest of that CPU grunt. I guess this is partly the ramblings of someone who knows remarkably little about constructing video games though - sadly my imagination is let down by my programming skills.

Cheers

Bubba

[arron]

The problem with adding lots of realistic destructable content is that it needs a lot more effort in both programming and artistic effort, which then makes more expensive to do.

I did a presentation today about meta-generation of models for dosimetry as these are getting more and more complex, whilst the implementation gets harder and harder. We only have a limited programming staff, and we are already too busy

Having the software create not only the data but also the code based on a specification of what results are required means that the time required for implementation is less, as instead of building it, you only build a plan, and then the computer does what you tell it to do.

The same technology is used for poly model generation in a way with curved surfaces being used to develop poly meshes. The program decides where the best place to subdivide the model and generate what is required, rather than tweaking every last detail..

[EDIT] I have a routine that builds a tower block from an outline. The outline is fitted using parametric functions to a bitmap of the letter X, so it can be scaled. If you can specify some data about rooms, doors, windows, number of floors etc..and some random elements..you could probably build an entire city from some fairly random shapes that was realistic, but without needing lots of tweaking.

[Jimaroid]

I guess this is partly the ramblings of someone who knows remarkably little about constructing video games though - sadly my imagination is let down by my programming skills.

It's all doable, but how do you put it into the environment of a game and still retain control over the path a player takes through that environment?

Games need rules, both in terms of how we play and how we interact with them. Without tightly defined rules games simply fall apart and end up lacking `fun'. Would we play Monopoly without rules and restrictions of the gameboard? Have all the cash you want, drive through hotels, teleport across the board? There's no challenge, there's no fun.

What would Tetris be like if you could choose the next block pattern? What would Doom be like if you shoot through a wall instead of finding the correct key to a door? Having a fully interactive and reactive environment is a design nightmare, because it's impossible to define the rules that the player has to adhere to.

I'm curious to see some seriously interactive environments and I'm certain it will happen, but I don't think it'd be much fun to play.

To take my point to a silly extreme, we live in the physical world where everything is possible. We could knock down buildings and change our environment, so why then, do we still desire to play games when we have this completely interactive environment around us?

[Krunk]

Did you ever blow up the scientists with trigger mines in half-life? Ie. setup lots of mines in one place then scare off scientist by hitting him. He then runs into the mine field, bang-bang-bang, huge chain explosion.

I always felt a bit guilty afterwards...

Doing that never made me feel too bad. What really got to me was the time I clipped my mouse against the edge of the keyboard, pressing the right mouse button just as I walked up to a scientist. With a shotgun.

I was in shock for about 5 seconds! Even then, it wasn't the fact that I couldn't get into the next area that bothered me, but that I was waving this shotgun around carelessly and killed a poor innocent mad scientist

[NoVisAnima]

I can see physics as the next step that games seem to be heading towards. In fact my housemate is going to be doing his Phd on the physics of virtual worlds. But my problem with putting so much physics and so on into a game or allowing the freedom to do anything is that some of those things will be the wrong thing.

Being able to destroy the scenery in such a way that it blocks off the people chasing you is great uptil the point where you realise you left something in that now blocked off area. Or the plot of the level / game requires that you go back (something you might not have realised due to plot twists and the like)

Since i'm a fan of the storys that are being presented to me and my interaction with them to push them forward, i would be worried about having a world not confined enough to have a story work. Being confined to only a certain range of abilities does give a greater rise to puzzles too.

I would like to see in 'the future' a plot that manages to handle you not saving people and it make a difference. On the crowd theme, yeah people that actually did something would be good more of a feeling that the world still worked while you weren't there.

[strawdonkey]

To take my point to a silly extreme, we live in the physical world where everything is possible. We could knock down buildings and change our environment, so why then, do we still desire to play games when we have this completely interactive environment around us?

Consequence? I'm certainly not going to knock over a towerblock - I could die, or I'd at least get put in prison and/or killed. In a game I can just turn it off, and start again.

[Kemper_Boyd]

[EDIT] I have a routine that builds a tower block from an outline. The outline is fitted using parametric functions to a bitmap of the letter X, so it can be scaled. If you can specify some data about rooms, doors, windows, number of floors etc..and some random elements..you could probably build an entire city from some fairly random shapes that was realistic, but without needing lots of tweaking.

There's loads of research in this area and some commerical products.

Check out the sample images:
http://www.centralpictures.com/ce/index.html

[Max_Sterling]

I really want improved playability or controls for my games. I want my games of the future to "feel right." The current generation systems all have dual analog sticks and mostly analog buttons, but I think the controllers can be vastly improved upon.

The controller that feels best to me right now is the large Xbox controller. Yes, I've said it. I like the big Xbox controller. Now that I've used it for a while, every other controller just feels so cramped in my hands. That big thing just feels happily natural. (As a side note, my friends and I are tracking down what ever large controllers we can find and buying them up so once they are all gone, we will still have something "good" to play with.)

I'm waiting to see what kind of controller innovations they will come out with next. Konami was doing kind of interesting stuff with DDR and their boxing game, but it seems any thing else has kind of stopped. And although the Eye toy seems kind of cool, I just can't get into it.

I hope to wait and see something interesting