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

limb_clock · Post by **limb_clock** » Sun Jun 13, 2004 8:02 pm 0

now i know!

Monsters shooting Lazors!

matt303 · Post by **matt303** » Sun Jun 13, 2004 8:14 pm 0

ThetaReactor wrote: Ray-tracing. 3D graphics now are all about elaborately faking lighting effects and surface texturing. Make dedicated raytracing hardware part of the DirectX 9.1 specification or something. Anything to get it out there. Real-time raytracing is quite possible, I think, and makes so damn much sense when ya think about it...

Oddly ray-tracing on it's own does not produce very realistic looking results. It tends to be good at the specular parts of lighting but does but is unable to do defuse or radiant lighting without the computation costs spiraling out of control. Ray-tracing as a method of rendering a scene is not the best way to go, hence professional (non realtime) rendering packages taking more efficient and better routes for their rendering.

korruptor · Post by **korruptor** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 12:13 am 0

I've tasted the future. It was sweet, and I didn't pay for it...

XBox Live, is the start of next gen for me.

The most time I spend gaming, is in my lounge, with spectators bawling, piss taking, winding up, psyching and occasionally cheering.

Competitive gaming, in the comfort of your own home with a fridge full of stella, is the highlight of shared living. Have this on broadband, with voice, taking the piss out of yanks and driving backwards on PGR2... It's where it's at.

I want lazy saturday afternoons with 64 (or more) llamasofties, hacking, slashing, shooting, jumping and generally pissing about in n random online games... I want the arcade in my lounge, the hi-score table real time, the eye-toy beaming out my look of sheer joy, as I spank one of you at SFII Uber 20th Anniversary Edition.

Networks baby. Networks...

arron · Post by **arron** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 12:17 am 0

I want a gaming experience that I can build entire worlds inside a computer that presently live only in my head, and have the fun of allowing people to explore them whilst I watch.

Orangy Tang · Post by **Orangy Tang** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 12:25 am 0

After spending the last couple of days going through Deus Ex again, it becomes painfully obvious how little choice you actually get in games.

I like being able to choose between shooting it out with someone or talking to them (possibly as a precursor to violence). I like how many people there are to interact with, and I love how choices you make actually effect the game world, and the people that live in it.

'Choice' it seems for most games is not much more than "shotgun or the rifle?". When really it could be so much more...

Rod_S · Post by **Rod_S** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 1:04 am 0

korruptor wrote:I've tasted the future. It was sweet, and I didn't pay for it...

XBox Live, is the start of next gen for me.

What's your Gamertag K, have we played on Live before? Mine's The Human Fly and I'll be on for another hour tonight if you're around.

I totally agree about Live, online features are always the first thing I look for in a game now, especially if it's any kind of shooter or racer. Driving against and shooting at AI bots has totally lost its appeal for me, recently I found the single player career in Rallisport 2 quite dull compared to hairing around the courses against other players and only stuck with it to unlock some of the better cars and tracks.

The next gen will have truly arrived for me when I'm playing Halo 3 and GTA4 over a stupidly fast wireless connection, none of the other predictions so far have had me grinning like a loon or bouncing with excitement but I think online is definitely the way forward, for the kind of games I enjoy, at least.

Rod_S · Post by **Rod_S** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 2:39 am 0

And to qualify the online argument - it's two fucking thirty a.m now and I'm still having "one more go" on Rallisport 2 and I have to be up at 8. I've been on the same track all night called Hydro Lane which is nice and muddy and slidey with very aggressive driving, we're doing 10 of the short laps around the circuit and it's probably the most fun I've had since the last time I banged on about Live.

You know how irritated and psyched you get when you fumble a section of a game that you should have walked through without blinking? Imagine the same feeling but hearing someone thanking you for messing up and laughing as they speed past you, spraying you with mud and maybe clipping your bumper just for the hell of it. It's just a great laugh, I played the original Rallisport for a while and soon got bored but I can't get enough of the sequel, the addictive qualities are totally off the scale. I can't wait to see how they develop this for the next gen

korruptor · Post by **korruptor** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 5:55 pm 0

Rod_S wrote: What's your Gamertag K, have we played on Live before? Mine's The Human Fly and I'll be on for another hour tonight if you're around.

Been using various mate's accounts atm. Once I've moved and the ADSL is reinstalled I'll be up and Live!ing it about in double quick time...

Can't wait to nudge you off track...

Kemper_Boyd · Post by **Kemper_Boyd** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 6:04 pm 0

matt303 wrote: Oddly ray-tracing on it's own does not produce very realistic looking results. It tends to be good at the specular parts of lighting but does but is unable to do defuse or radiant lighting without the computation costs spiraling out of control. Ray-tracing as a method of rendering a scene is not the best way to go, hence professional (non realtime) rendering packages taking more efficient and better routes for their rendering.

Ray-tracing (casting) is a great way of determining visibility and a great way
to generate a shader tree for a particular pixel, but as you say it's not the
final word in shading. My guess is that over time today's GPUs will morph
into general stream processors, be sucked back into the CPU, and ray
tracing will be a common way of handling visibility, but computation will be
dominated by complex shaders. We'll still be preprocessing and cheating
like mad to hit 30 fps too.

IMHO at some point either the CPU or the GPU
goes, and is replaced by the other. Intel or Nvidia? Hmm.

Sir_LANs-a-lot · Post by **Sir_LANs-a-lot** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 6:10 pm 0

A big hike in Crowd AI, almost to the level of independent thought.

Kemper_Boyd · Post by **Kemper_Boyd** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 6:38 pm 0

Sir_LANs-a-lot wrote:A big hike in Crowd AI, almost to the level of independent thought.

Hmmm, nope. Independent thought?

AI is the big problem, it's not even something that'll be solved
by having VERY BIG COMPUTERS, which will almost
certainly be necessary, it requires some real breakthroughs
in understranding biology, genetics, evolution, schemas,
conciousness, brain function and structure, learning and
on and on. AI is the arguably the biggest failure in computer
science.

IMHO the difficult tasks would be ranked:

1. AI
2. Physics
3. Graphics
4. Audio

Gameplay might be somewhere between 0 and 5.

I'd really expect AI to improve the least generation to generation
of games.

Sir_LANs-a-lot · Post by **Sir_LANs-a-lot** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 6:40 pm 0

Kemper_Boyd wrote:
Sir_LANs-a-lot wrote:A big hike in Crowd AI, almost to the level of independent thought.
Hmmm, nope. Independent thought?

AI is the big problem, it's not even something that'll be solved
by having VERY BIG COMPUTERS, which will almost
certainly be necessary, it requires some real breakthroughs
in understranding biology, genetics, evolution, schemas,
conciousness, brain function and structure, learning and
on and on. AI is the arguably the biggest failure in computer
science.

IMHO the difficult tasks would be ranked:

1. AI
2. Physics
3. Graphics
4. Audio

Gameplay might be somewhere between 0 and 5.

I'd really expect AI to improve the least generation to generation
of games.

Well... I did say *almost* - I doubt you would ever get true independent thought through AI as it's following a determined path of rulesets, but something approaching it would be nice...

Post by **Jedburgh** » Fri Jun 18, 2004 1:35 pm 0

Are we all done here, then?

Will archive in half an hour or so unless I hear otherwise

koworld · Post by **koworld** » Fri Jun 18, 2004 1:39 pm 0

Jedburgh wrote:Are we all done here, then?

Will archive in half an hour or so unless I hear otherwise

Could you write the notes for me too please? All cross-referenced and annoted wherever relevant.

Post by **Jedburgh** » Fri Jun 18, 2004 2:00 pm 0

NOTES

People said stuff about games. It was nice. I archived it. The end.