Z on the Megadrive, and L (I think) on the SNES.bloid wrote:Which one's hard punch?
What would signify the arrival of the next games gen 4 you?
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strawdonkey
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Skah T
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Just got through reading the posts. Great stuff in here. My thoughts echo a lot of what's been said.
Graphics. For the near term, extensive use of proper lighting and, more importantly, shadows. Lighting has been used for a while - Doom did it exceptionally well. Shadows are what have made me go all wibbly with current games. Stuff like Splinter Cell made me sit up a think, now *this* is cool. And seeing the new Unreal engine demo just amplifies this. Give me a fully self-shadowed world and I'll know the next gen is here. Soft shadows would be icing.
Control. I've always wondered why there isn't a mouse-like input device that works in 3D. Thank you, Bog for finally articulating why that is.
AI. I've had this idea for an AI accelerator card for years. I mean it makes sense right? We have accelerators for graphics and sound, why not pick another part of the game pipe and stuff it in hardware (physics would be great too). The problem I see is that there isn't a standard method for implementing AI. Neural nets? Expert systems? A* path searching? Everyone does it differently and it'd be hard to come up with a standard API that everyone would use. Still, I think it's possible - even inevitable as the demands for recreating human behavior increase.
Perhaps the GPU as it's known today will become a more general purpose coprocessing device that can be used for AI & physics. That's straying into Sony's idea for the Cell processor.
So I guess I haven't really answered the original question.
Moderately deformable environments would do it, too. I'm not asking for individual bricks here. I just want objects that are less rigid. Swipe my sword at a tree and I want to see a notch (or even get my sword stuck). Fire a rocket at a building and I want something besides a perfectly smooth wall afterwards.
Graphics. For the near term, extensive use of proper lighting and, more importantly, shadows. Lighting has been used for a while - Doom did it exceptionally well. Shadows are what have made me go all wibbly with current games. Stuff like Splinter Cell made me sit up a think, now *this* is cool. And seeing the new Unreal engine demo just amplifies this. Give me a fully self-shadowed world and I'll know the next gen is here. Soft shadows would be icing.
Control. I've always wondered why there isn't a mouse-like input device that works in 3D. Thank you, Bog for finally articulating why that is.
That being said I think it's still possible. Just because past efforts were not successful doesn't mean we won't come up with something some day (that argument can be applied to today's nausea-inducing VR too).Re: 3D mice. CF: SpaceBall. It's a lovely idea, but there's a good reason the Mouse is the Controller of the Gh0ds: Stability. With joysticks, your hand's generally leaning against the stick (in most "normal" home conditions), and it's not very stable because of the weight of your arm hanging out of it, unsupported. Same with a spaceball: No matter how light it is, your hand will be shaking a little because of the mass of your own arm, let alone that of the controller. With a mouse, your hand (and, with my rig, my entire forearm) is resting on the desk, so it's all supported. No wiggle. Good show.
AI. I've had this idea for an AI accelerator card for years. I mean it makes sense right? We have accelerators for graphics and sound, why not pick another part of the game pipe and stuff it in hardware (physics would be great too). The problem I see is that there isn't a standard method for implementing AI. Neural nets? Expert systems? A* path searching? Everyone does it differently and it'd be hard to come up with a standard API that everyone would use. Still, I think it's possible - even inevitable as the demands for recreating human behavior increase.
Perhaps the GPU as it's known today will become a more general purpose coprocessing device that can be used for AI & physics. That's straying into Sony's idea for the Cell processor.
So I guess I haven't really answered the original question.
Not to jump on the bandwagon, but halfway intelligent crowds would definitely do it for me. I hate how sparsely populated game worlds can be.With all the puff and hyperbole around games hardware right now, I was wondering what thing would make you say 'oh blimey, it's tomorrow today!'
Moderately deformable environments would do it, too. I'm not asking for individual bricks here. I just want objects that are less rigid. Swipe my sword at a tree and I want to see a notch (or even get my sword stuck). Fire a rocket at a building and I want something besides a perfectly smooth wall afterwards.
-Skah T- Order of Magnitude Games
what about if the npc's could spot cheaters and use the same cheats and hacks to protect the system kinda like agents in the matrix, then part of the fun could be trying to cheat and getting away with it, so for example the system would keep track of everyones money in a bank and if you was spending more than you had the agents would apear and start investigating, or if you can run faster jump higher etc than you should be able too, same thing happens agents start popping up and looking for the cause of the disturbance, so then you gotta start acting normal and turn your cheats off. and of course it wouldnt just be the agent npcs that cheat but regular ones too. ok im gonna shut up because now i want to play thisAnders wrote:'imagine gaming as ive described, with 100s of people wordwide sharing your gameworld too, but its so advance you cant tell the real people from the game world generated characters on your console...'
Oh, but I think the real people would be very easy to spot. They would be the ones cheating, team killing, spamming, insulting each other, and generally trying to ruin the game for everyone else.
We tend to have this dreamy vision of massive multiplayer games where everyone plays nice together like a big happy online family, but the problem is that a lot of people don't want to do that. I've played in a couple of MMORPG's and you'd be surprised at the number of people who don't want to play with others and when they do, have enormous difficulties getting along and interacting.
The problem with multiplayer isn't graphics, connection speeds, revenue systems or anything like that, it's the players themselves.
better graphics would increase a games playability if it was done right, examples that we are seeing at the moment are real shadows, i remember reading that this was what quake was meant to have when it wasnt a shooter, so you could see someones shadow before you saw them. so take this up a few levels and make the whole world more detailed so things get scratched and marked by other objects, for example if you was playing a detective game a murderer could have a tiny blood stain left on their clothes and and a thief would leave fingerprints at the scene of the crime etc.
'...then part of the fun could be trying to cheat and getting away with it...'
Don't think that would work. Encouraging cheating would drive away those who wants to play fair and eventually the cheaters too, because being able to disrupt the gaming experience for someone else is a big part of what they do. It's like trolling on the net, what's the point if no one gets pissed?
One major factor in every MMORPG and RPG I've played is the ambition to customize your characters in unique ways and become famous (or infamous) within the game world. Any designer of MMORPG's would do well not to treat those areas lightly.
Something so simple as dropping a handful of unique items (and I mean really unique, only one piece of each item exists) into the game world once a month would have players intrigued. Most of them would never see those items, but just knowing that they're out there would set imaginations on fire.
Sorry for going OT.
Don't think that would work. Encouraging cheating would drive away those who wants to play fair and eventually the cheaters too, because being able to disrupt the gaming experience for someone else is a big part of what they do. It's like trolling on the net, what's the point if no one gets pissed?
One major factor in every MMORPG and RPG I've played is the ambition to customize your characters in unique ways and become famous (or infamous) within the game world. Any designer of MMORPG's would do well not to treat those areas lightly.
Something so simple as dropping a handful of unique items (and I mean really unique, only one piece of each item exists) into the game world once a month would have players intrigued. Most of them would never see those items, but just knowing that they're out there would set imaginations on fire.
Sorry for going OT.
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ThetaReactor
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Algorithmically generated worlds. Randomization. Fractal forests.
I want a world as real as Shenmue, constructed by a machine.
I drive down a road, and I see realism. Rusted signs, gnarled trees, weeds, decay, uneven pavement. We can't expect developers to accurately recreate this. It's impractical, if not impossible. I want a game that's merely a seed. A set of instructions on how to build a world. Give me the DNA of a city, so that the machine might build it for me. A forest grown by the system in a matter of seconds. This is how you build a hardwood. This is a pine. This is a creek, and the ferns grow by it. Some of these trees house squirrels. The forest comes to a road. Random cracks have broken through, and weeds force their way through.
Here is a street. Build a town around it. We need a certain ratio of housing to commercial. The housing goes here. Define a poverty level. Degrade the houses, add debris. Flag the AI. This is a slum. The occupants dislike intruders. On the other side of town, condos. The streets are well-maintained. Grass is short. People are inisde their homes, not loitering in the street. Traffic patterns. This type of intersection is acceptable. Place it here. The condos get a light, the slums get a 4-way stop.
The world is all about rules. Strip them down, choose the essential ones. Teach the hardware how to build a world. How to be a god.
We've reached a point where real-time rendered graphics look nearly as good as pre-rendered images. The next logical step is real-time modeling.
I want a world as real as Shenmue, constructed by a machine.
I drive down a road, and I see realism. Rusted signs, gnarled trees, weeds, decay, uneven pavement. We can't expect developers to accurately recreate this. It's impractical, if not impossible. I want a game that's merely a seed. A set of instructions on how to build a world. Give me the DNA of a city, so that the machine might build it for me. A forest grown by the system in a matter of seconds. This is how you build a hardwood. This is a pine. This is a creek, and the ferns grow by it. Some of these trees house squirrels. The forest comes to a road. Random cracks have broken through, and weeds force their way through.
Here is a street. Build a town around it. We need a certain ratio of housing to commercial. The housing goes here. Define a poverty level. Degrade the houses, add debris. Flag the AI. This is a slum. The occupants dislike intruders. On the other side of town, condos. The streets are well-maintained. Grass is short. People are inisde their homes, not loitering in the street. Traffic patterns. This type of intersection is acceptable. Place it here. The condos get a light, the slums get a 4-way stop.
The world is all about rules. Strip them down, choose the essential ones. Teach the hardware how to build a world. How to be a god.
We've reached a point where real-time rendered graphics look nearly as good as pre-rendered images. The next logical step is real-time modeling.
i was gonna say this but couldnt think of how to put it.ThetaReactor wrote:Algorithmically generated worlds. Randomization. Fractal forests. etc etc...
far cry sort of does this with the forests, you just pick a bunch of objects and paint it on the landscape, can you imagine if all the trees were placed scaled and rotated individually by hand
this same sort of thing could be expanded to characters in the world so individual people would be instantly recognisable in a game but still not stick out like a special character among hundreds of generic space filler characters. that would be cool. 
yeah i guess that will only work in a matrix type game anyway, so maybe just better anti cheating stuff should be usedAnders wrote:Don't think that would work. Encouraging cheating would drive away those who wants to play fair and eventually the cheaters too, because being able to disrupt the gaming experience for someone else is a big part of what they do. It's like trolling on the net, what's the point if no one gets pissed?
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Kronos
has it been that long since i posted?!?!, just finished reading everything *phew*
i think we all kind of agree on certain stuff, my point about characters and people in game world being indistinguishable is not coz i love online games (actually ive never played one myself since windoze took over our lives!) but just that AI has sooooooooo far to go its unbelievable. on a similar note so does mechanical interfaces to gaming too really....i mean we all agree apart from the silicon there hasnt been a revolution in much really imho. you know what? sometimes i wonder if it will ever come, processing power evolution has been incredible, no! a miracle, but even that will fail us soon and the world will be back to slow technological progress....i mean computers are probably more powerful than the ones in star trek right? just sod all else towards science fiction has become science fact....there aint no non combustion based space craft engines and even a tri-corder is unthinkable ;o) (im not a trekkie b4 u ask either!! just observations of progress of technology)
the multi processor idea struck a rose tinted cord in my heart, but hasnt multi processing been around for ages as an idea? the c64 on a primitive level? or maybe the amiga's gfx core of copper + blitter on DMA doin there own thing? i mean that Amiga 1000 was a revolution. It lived and breathed in 1985 when my c64 was only 2 yrs old or less!! ive always said in hardware terms we need something as radical as that.....the competition was the original mac h/w (haha good try) and the good ole pile of crap IBM compatibles with ega and 286 for 3000 quid....then a lil company launched a lil machine whose blitter alone was equivalent to a 70mhz 68000 and the 68000 was light yrs ahead of 8086 hardware. thats what made me look up and take notice. sure the xbox is nice but its a pc really with cards melted onto the mobo really <sigh> effective but not really radical in thinking really. anyway max usable increase in processing performance is about 25% if u double the cpu content on the silicon too, so thats probably a dead horse already
as for true immersion, thats not what i was trying to describe, just a stepping stone between sittin infront of my lightbox and a "matrix" style experience. even my grandchildren (when i find an avril lavigne look alike!!) wont see neuromancer style jackin in before they die, or bio ports, just aint gonna happen. 3000 yrs on we still shit in a hole and bathe with running water systems in fancy packaging after the romans ;o)
one thing no-one has really gone into tho is that gaming has become maintstream and i dont think mainstream console and pc gamers are hankering for the head units, the immersive 3d sound fed direct to your head or the natural control systems to interface into the game world (like a vr glove) atari dumped the jag head unit idea and nintendos glove thing was a joke and the virtual boy is a nice antique for future years. put it this way i want the next ford focus to look like the cars in the film minority report, kinda ironic that im in the minority, most ppl are happy with a lil more mpg bigger wheels and bigger interiors with softer plastic..whoopee doo!!, anything more would scare them off and so my friends would the kind of game system we describe alienate a multi billion pound customer base, society isnt ready for immersive gamin neither do the companies with the resources to start designing them have a mass market waiting yet. so roll on xbox 3 with same shit different polygons route of progress. thats the saddest part, its no more likely in the foreseable future as flying cars coz the market just isnt there *sigh*
but even at the silicone level i think something radical MUST happen, time to wheel out our dusty university papers on neural network creation in silicon me thinks, something totally alien in its working and its abilities will guarantee in itself radical new possibilities (although im sure EA will just use it to make the footballers monthly choice of haircut/style more realist hahaha)
but before u all put me down as a misery guts id like to point out im pissin myself holdin out for outrun 2 on the xbox, *2 fingers*@ gran tourismo, that game is unrealistic but fun as hell, and at the end of the day its the fun of games and the feeling of wonderment that addicted us 100s of moons ago right? cant say ive sat and wondered how the grass sways in colin mcrea 4 reallllyyyyyyyyy hmmmmmmmmm
i think we all kind of agree on certain stuff, my point about characters and people in game world being indistinguishable is not coz i love online games (actually ive never played one myself since windoze took over our lives!) but just that AI has sooooooooo far to go its unbelievable. on a similar note so does mechanical interfaces to gaming too really....i mean we all agree apart from the silicon there hasnt been a revolution in much really imho. you know what? sometimes i wonder if it will ever come, processing power evolution has been incredible, no! a miracle, but even that will fail us soon and the world will be back to slow technological progress....i mean computers are probably more powerful than the ones in star trek right? just sod all else towards science fiction has become science fact....there aint no non combustion based space craft engines and even a tri-corder is unthinkable ;o) (im not a trekkie b4 u ask either!! just observations of progress of technology)
the multi processor idea struck a rose tinted cord in my heart, but hasnt multi processing been around for ages as an idea? the c64 on a primitive level? or maybe the amiga's gfx core of copper + blitter on DMA doin there own thing? i mean that Amiga 1000 was a revolution. It lived and breathed in 1985 when my c64 was only 2 yrs old or less!! ive always said in hardware terms we need something as radical as that.....the competition was the original mac h/w (haha good try) and the good ole pile of crap IBM compatibles with ega and 286 for 3000 quid....then a lil company launched a lil machine whose blitter alone was equivalent to a 70mhz 68000 and the 68000 was light yrs ahead of 8086 hardware. thats what made me look up and take notice. sure the xbox is nice but its a pc really with cards melted onto the mobo really <sigh> effective but not really radical in thinking really. anyway max usable increase in processing performance is about 25% if u double the cpu content on the silicon too, so thats probably a dead horse already
as for true immersion, thats not what i was trying to describe, just a stepping stone between sittin infront of my lightbox and a "matrix" style experience. even my grandchildren (when i find an avril lavigne look alike!!) wont see neuromancer style jackin in before they die, or bio ports, just aint gonna happen. 3000 yrs on we still shit in a hole and bathe with running water systems in fancy packaging after the romans ;o)
one thing no-one has really gone into tho is that gaming has become maintstream and i dont think mainstream console and pc gamers are hankering for the head units, the immersive 3d sound fed direct to your head or the natural control systems to interface into the game world (like a vr glove) atari dumped the jag head unit idea and nintendos glove thing was a joke and the virtual boy is a nice antique for future years. put it this way i want the next ford focus to look like the cars in the film minority report, kinda ironic that im in the minority, most ppl are happy with a lil more mpg bigger wheels and bigger interiors with softer plastic..whoopee doo!!, anything more would scare them off and so my friends would the kind of game system we describe alienate a multi billion pound customer base, society isnt ready for immersive gamin neither do the companies with the resources to start designing them have a mass market waiting yet. so roll on xbox 3 with same shit different polygons route of progress. thats the saddest part, its no more likely in the foreseable future as flying cars coz the market just isnt there *sigh*
but even at the silicone level i think something radical MUST happen, time to wheel out our dusty university papers on neural network creation in silicon me thinks, something totally alien in its working and its abilities will guarantee in itself radical new possibilities (although im sure EA will just use it to make the footballers monthly choice of haircut/style more realist hahaha)
but before u all put me down as a misery guts id like to point out im pissin myself holdin out for outrun 2 on the xbox, *2 fingers*@ gran tourismo, that game is unrealistic but fun as hell, and at the end of the day its the fun of games and the feeling of wonderment that addicted us 100s of moons ago right? cant say ive sat and wondered how the grass sways in colin mcrea 4 reallllyyyyyyyyy hmmmmmmmmm
I want a full body suit (sans head) that monitors your physical condition and makes sure that the experience of doing nothing is not harmful to you, and in fact it might actually control your body in such a way to make sitting there better than light physical activity.
Take for example the odd case of a player who sits still for so long they get deep vein thrombosis. The suit could make sure this never happened.
Then theres the exercise belts which you see on infomercials which use electrical pulses to contract your muscles in order to help you lose weight. The suit having this full body would optimise your inactivity to be good for you.
Perhaps even a massage attachment that helps with circulation. Sans trouser snake region because thats just tacky
Now, I rarely play games and I change position frequently so I would not use the suit as is. But what I'd do is take it in on those long plane trips so you could go to sleep and the suit could signals to your body to get it keep the circulation going. If the circulation didn't improve for a reasonable period of time it could wake you up and make sure you moved around for a satisfactory period.
You wouldn't want to make it too good though because then everyone would wear it all the time.
Take for example the odd case of a player who sits still for so long they get deep vein thrombosis. The suit could make sure this never happened.
Then theres the exercise belts which you see on infomercials which use electrical pulses to contract your muscles in order to help you lose weight. The suit having this full body would optimise your inactivity to be good for you.
Perhaps even a massage attachment that helps with circulation. Sans trouser snake region because thats just tacky
Now, I rarely play games and I change position frequently so I would not use the suit as is. But what I'd do is take it in on those long plane trips so you could go to sleep and the suit could signals to your body to get it keep the circulation going. If the circulation didn't improve for a reasonable period of time it could wake you up and make sure you moved around for a satisfactory period.
You wouldn't want to make it too good though because then everyone would wear it all the time.
Bravo. I was going to make a post along the same lines but could not justify the time.ThetaReactor wrote: Algorithmically generated worlds. Randomization. Fractal forests.
I want a world as real as Shenmue, constructed by a machine.
...
The world is all about rules. Strip them down, choose the essential ones. Teach the hardware how to build a world. How to be a god.
We've reached a point where real-time rendered graphics look nearly as good as pre-rendered images. The next logical step is real-time modeling.
This is very similar to a project a friend and I are working on, and have been working on very unproductively for several years now.
Our general plan is to procedurally generate everything and then run it as a simulation. You would have a knowledge base that drives the procedural generation, in our case a medieval lifestyle. People with families who have a profession, apprenticeships and a general routine based on this with the ability to be interacted with.
We have the procedurally generated landscape and a couple of 3D viewers that work in different ways, but have decided to take it text based to concentrate on the modelling of npcs in a world rather than visual display. And the scope of the project was preventing us from knowing what to work on.
In any case, I see great potential for this. Imagine if you built a comprehensive and consistent world simulation. You could rent it out to other people as an environment to stage their own meta-games within. The more quality meta-games you have within it, the deeper the world would be.
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ThetaReactor
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Well, I've sloppily sloshed my idealism all over the concept side of things, but I've still got a few stabs for the hardware.
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...
Example: http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~sidapohl/egoshooter/
And I think a dedicated AI unit would be nice, too. Some RISC chip specifically designed to pretend to think.
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...
Example: http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~sidapohl/egoshooter/
And I think a dedicated AI unit would be nice, too. Some RISC chip specifically designed to pretend to think.