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?'
Problem is how to handle worst-case scenarios. With pre-rendered movies that might or might not be a problem, and even if it is - it's production one (e.g. you can't predict how many well for how many days you would render your movie)
But for a game - this means dropping the frame rate, making it visually unappealing.
That's why Ray-casting would never pick up for real-time games (Unreal most definitely is not doing any ray-casting, I'm just giving it as a an extreme example).
The other problem is content creation. Current games are 7-15gb of compressed data - half of them textures, rest models, animations, etc. and fitting that in memory (and loading it in memory).
Even with the fastest drives, you end up spending a lot of time loading (or streaming).
Then if that thing looks so real, you start feeling that something ain't right if your gun can't really destroy every piece of a building... And later allowing that in the engine, makes it worse as not much pre-processed data can be reused (static lighting, bsp geometry, etc.). Or you do it (somehow) real-time.
Also this complicates the game "AI" - there is no real AI in an FPS shooter - it's simply too god damn hard. Just think about the cover system, and how laughable it would be if you have destructible surfaces, and you can see the "AI" guy trying to hide behind thinking it was a fine cover point.
Less realism, more constrained world, and better gameplay are the key components to good gaming... Not fancy graphics all the way :)
> That's why Ray-casting would never pick up for real-time games (Unreal most definitely is not doing any ray-casting, I'm just giving it as a an extreme example).
I'm not convinced that you are correct here. Although ray-tracing has not been a good option in the past due to processor limitations, we're reaching the point at which it may become feasible. Because ray-tracing scales linearly with the number of cores you use, modern CPUs are fairly well equipped to work with it, albeit at sub-optimal framerates. See the following (from 2007) for reference: http://www.q4rt.de/
Outside of this, consider that the only way vector graphics are allowed to perform at their current level is due to the existence of discrete graphics cards which are optimized for the necessary matrix calculations. If we were to develop discrete cards for ray-tracing, we could potentially see amazing results. For example, in 2009 IBM developed a computer that could run full-scene ray-tracing at 1080p averaging 90 FPS. While I do not know how complex said scene was, I'm optimistic about the future of ray-tracing.
I mean no offence but I think the term you are looking for is raytracing not raycasting. Raycasting is kind of a stilted version of raytracing and was used in Wolfenstein3D and those old 3D games from the DOS days.
Content will have to be increasingly procedurally generated. I worry less about the practical size of the content - to be frank, I think games will likely trend towards being rendered in whole or in part remotely, with consoles being dumb clients - than the manpower and budget required to create it.
I lament constriction - I haven't bought any of the latter games in the Call of Duty series owing to how constrained and linear they are. Games like Far Cry or Just Cause 2 are more my style; but these sandbox games tend to gain from more freedom, rather than lose.
Re cover: "all" the AI needs to do is have a desired target location such that the AI's bounding box is fully or partially contained in volumes that are not in the player's line of sight (i.e. in shadow imagining the character's head as a light source). I don't think that's an insurmountable problem.
Too bad all these beautiful effects will be covered up by the foreshortened perspective of a gun in one corner and a health bar in the other corner.
I kid, but honestly, seeing this doesn't excite me anywhere near as much as a preview of whatever the team that made Mirror's Edge has in store next for current-generation consoles.
DICE made Mirror's Edge, but it was a commercial flop, so we are unlikely to see a sequel anytime soon :( Personally I loved it.
Slightly OT but interesting: from what I hear from people at EA, it was a huge internal political war that year between the people who wanted to build more sequels and licensed franchises, and the people who thought that EA would die if it didn't innovate on its own IP. The latter won and were given a chance to prove their worth - the two main titles to come out of that were Dead Space and Mirror's Edge. From what I hear management considered this direction a flop (Dead Space, while popular, and spawning a sequel, was not the sort of hyper-blockbuster it needed to be, and ME was an unquestionable flop) and now EA is culturally back to the sequel-mill mentality.
A sad opportunity that didn't pan out :( There are precious few new IPs being worked on at EA right now.
You kid--but it's the sad reality of most modern games (or at least the ones that generate the most press). Rather than just putting a new "pretty face" on the same old shooter concept that's been the norm for the past 15 or so years, I'd like to see game companies get back to innovative gameplay concepts. Interestingly, I see far more of that innovation coming from the indy publishers who don't do anything in the realm of "crazy 3d graphics" than I see coming from studios churning out "DOOM clone v 29345.2"
Did you know that Mirror's Edge is built using the current version of Unreal Engine? Tech demos are built to showcase as many features as possible, in a very limited time. In order to show shadows/lighting they are often dark.
I get the impression (albeit as somebody with nothing to do with the industry) that studios aren't very excited about another generation of hardware because it already takes a huge amount of resources to make a current-generation blockbuster, and profit is not alway guaranteed. The demo is completely amazing and I loved it, but if it "took about three months for 12 programmers and artists to build" this 2 minute scene, surely this is beyond the limit of what a studio will undertake for a full length production? Or am I underestimating the horsepower of the studios today?
It's safe to say that there's little appetite for a new console generation right now.
As in the movie industry, the middle ground in the games industry has been disappearing. Your best shot at turning a profit is either to make small bets on mobile/indie games, or go full-bore for a AAA title with a budget in the double or triple digit millions. Indies don't need another generation of consoles; AAA developers don't want to rebuild all the tech they created for the 360/PS3.
The assumption at the start of the current generation was that if you invested in your tech fairly early on, you'd be able to get a trilogy out of it before the subsequent generation of consoles made the tech obsolete. (This is why so many 360/PS3 IPs were structured as trilogies) Now that it's obvious the current consoles aren't going away anytime soon, developers are looking to amortize their tech over a few more titles before the hardware changes again.
I think the best way to make sense of that stat is to compare how long previous tech demos took to produce. Anyone got the data? (like the Rage demo perhaps)
Not to put too fine a "trolling point" on it--but after playing Final Fantasy XIII I'm inclined for game developers to take a step back in terms of their graphics aspirations to continue to deliver quality games. It's been speculated (and supposedly admitted to--though being at work I don't have time to dig up a link) that the incredibly linear world of FFXIII was a direct result of being overambitious with the graphics. There just wasn't time to build a more "complete" world to the graphical standard they set.
I agree with much else of what is said here about it being a "perfect conditions" demo that doesn't have to deal with any unknowns--and I also echo that it looks exceedingly cool. All that said, great graphics does not a great game make!
Final Fantasy 13's failings were mostly due to a horribly dysfunctional studio environment and a broken development process. They released a surprisingly honest postmortem of the project in a recent issue of Game Developer (you can find a summary of it at http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/30640/Exclusive_Behind_Th... ), and 'overambitious with the graphics' pales in comparison to the other things that went wrong. My favorite tidbit: They went through a large portion of the project with the game not in a playable state until they realized they needed to build a demo, and only then did they finally get the game playable and start testing it.
Perhaps one might say that developers are aiming too high in every respect (including graphics), and that's leading to flawed projects. But in this specific case, I doubt the game would have turned out good even if the graphics weren't given the effort they got. In many cases it's possible for a studio to easily scale up development when it comes to graphics, because with strong enough art direction, you can have 50 or 100 artists working on assets for different parts of a game and have a reasonable chance of tying all that art together at the end. Unfortunately, engineering teams don't scale nearly that well...
On the other hand, you have studios like Bethesda - who build great games with incredible gameplay... but graphics performance so sluggish that it really takes away from the experience, not to mention buggy and crashy as hell.
There's room on both sides to improve. IMHO Valve is the best at this - their games run on an incredible range of hardware and look good on just about anything. Their engine is also rock solid to boot.
Realtime graphics are finally blurring into stylized film. I expect in another ten years or so we will, for all intents and purposes, have the horsepower to render photorealistic scenes. The bigger problem may be finding ways to create this content without insane amounts of work. Cloth mechanics, particle/hair systems, realtime physics, constrained IK/semirigid body solvers, fractal elaboration, fluid dynamics, procedural character/animation generation... all of these problems are going to be really interesting as we start hitting the limits of what humans can imagine and express to a computer.
It seems like the more horsepower that these consoles/video cards have, the more opportunity exists to create tools that create part of the graphical experience. IE a toolset that handles creating realtime dynamic forests or cities or hair etc
Yes, the skin rendering was very nice, and the lighting was great. Which brought into sharp relief how little progress has been made on procedural character animation. When the welder-guy walked across the roof and stopped on the edge, you could see a painfully clear walking loop and outro animation back to the standing position -- very familiar from the earlier Unreal engines (except for the residual swinging of the arms). It is jarring to see such mechanical movements in a demo where the quality of the graphics is so realistic. Epic should use Euphoria or some other engine for procedural body movements. The act of walking to the ledge of a roof to inspect a fight below shouldn't look like any other kind of walk.
Agreed. There's a distinct lack of R&D in what is IMHO more important than graphical fidelity - conveying emotion and motion in games. Valve made waves with its (honestly somewhat primitive) facial animation system, and not much has been done with it until now (LA Noire has done something really cool with it and is coming out soonish). It's amazing how much effort we'd spend crafting the perfect artillery shell explosion but your CO yelling orders at you moves like a mannequin.
We've made a lot of gameplay progress into action-RPGs (Mass Effect and the like), and I for one would like to play a game where facial expressions and body language actually mean something (e.g., the character is lying, but instead of smacking you over the head with it, the game can be subtle about it).
Admittedly, this is a tech demo which was designed to pack in the maximum amount of variation into the shortest possible time frame. Game development typically reuses the same carefully-crafted assets (particle systems, models, textures, shaders, even level geometry) in as many places as possible.
Wow I could actually read the emotions on the guy's face and it didn't feel too uncanny to me at least.
But calling this real-time I think is stretching things a bit, even if its using the game engine and not prerendered. The demo and assets were probably polished and optimized for that machine, angle, lighting and scenario. And it was heavily scripted. I think an engine flexible enough for more general gameplay - with more calculations, interactions, assets and erm unmasked NPCs would be a lot less smooth and certainly less realistic looking. This seems like one of those theoretical optimums with requirements that just don't line up for most practical purposes.
Not trying to downplay how cool this is though. It will still be and is a visually and computationally amazing feat.
I remember seeing pictures around 2004/2005 of what new games would supposedly look like on the old 'next gen' (read current gen) consoles. The actual games were nowhere near the hype (games like Madden and FIFA). I seriously doubt that the next 'next gen' consoles will have graphics like this for the reasons you outline. I'd love to be wrong though. You could easily imagine this technology be used in movies - I thought Jeff Bridges' digitally altered younger version in Tron Legacy had such a case of the "uncanny valley" going on that it detracted from every scene he was in.
Why is everybody complaining about how long it took for Epic to create this demo? This is a next generation engine so the team directly working on the demo was probably working concurrently with development. They probably encountered multiple bugs with the engine every day.
This engine isn't meant for release today, it's meant for release in a few years. Any pronouncements you make about how this engine is too X for today's Y are going to be invalid.
It's going to be a while before there's another console generation. (In a sense, the Kinect and PS Move were an attempt to refresh the consoles without changing the base hardware) I haven't even heard rumors of new console development yet, so I'd guess they're at least 2-3 years out.
IIRC, Sony was banking on the PS3 being a 10+ year console. This could all change with the discovery of the PS3's private key however. Of course if that's the case, the PS4 might just be a PS3.5 with a new private key.
I've long been a supporter of the idea that gameplay comes before graphics. Though it's certainly neat to see a demo looking so dazzling, it really doesn't say all that much to me about the future of the games industry. It's long been clear that over time games will continue to look progressively better.
This reason is why I was actually so happy to see Nintendo abandon this pursuit of ever-prettier graphics in the hopes that gamers would be drawn in by the innovative gameplay ideas that propelled the Wii to the top of the console heap this generation. Though the Wii has somewhat fallen short on my expectations, I am still impressed by Nintendo's decision.
This generation has been the death knell for countless (up-til-now) successful companies. The higher development costs of making prettier and prettier games has meant that a single flop can tank the company. It's exactly because of this that I believe we are seeing the rise of mobile and social games as they are cheap not only for the consumer to pick up, but also for the developer to produce in the first place.
To give a bit of historical context, this is the very same company that put out such classic shareware hits as Jill of the Jungle, Jazz Jackrabbit, and my personal favorite One Must Fall: 2097.
Other person knows One Must Fall! I played that for months with friends on a 386.
It is easy to grouch about how gameplay rules over shiny effects, but I am quite impressed and uplifted that the company that made those games is still around and on the cutting edge of games.
Why do they always have to do these shots at night? Is it because the processing to render far away objects in the background is just too much for the engine and they have to compensate by making these things at night so the background behind the characters is black or something close to them?
It's actually the other way around. Night shots are harder to pull off well since the effects of individual light sources are much more pronounced. In this video, they are trying to showcase a number of different light sources, reflections, diffusion which require a dark setting to stand out. Outdoor day shots get most of their "character" from a spot source at infinite distance (parallel rays) which is much less computationally demanding.
The problem with these tech demos is exactly that--they're just tech. In-game graphics will never look this good because of non-cinematic camera angles, behind the shoulder viewpoint, and HUD elements mucking it up. It's nice looking, for sure, but I can get that from a Pixar movie.
They probably mean the 6-core i7-9* series, distinguished from "regular old i7" by their Gulftown architecture and 50% higher transistor count. But yeah, I thought that term died a while back.
Sony and MSFT didn't do that well on this generation.
> Collectively, that means that 2011, on the console side, is going to be relatively drab. Microsoft doesn't need a new console, Nintendo doesn't want to compete with the 3DS launch, and Sony can't afford a new console. So it seems like the only points of interest this year will be price cuts--certainly, Sony and Nintendo will have them.
There are no plans for a future generation, aside from Nintendo, which _might_ have a full HD console. (Please correct me if I'm wrong).
> The demo ran on a PC with an Intel Core i9 microprocessor with three Nvidia GeForce 580 GTX graphics cards connected through SLI technology. The demo took about three months for 12 programmers and artists to build.
It's on a huge, hot, expensive PC now, how would the big 3 recoup their investment in such a beast? Wouldn't they be better off trying to sell portable units with cheaper to produce games?
[+] [-] squidsoup|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Lost_BiomedE|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rorrr|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malkia|15 years ago|reply
But for a game - this means dropping the frame rate, making it visually unappealing.
That's why Ray-casting would never pick up for real-time games (Unreal most definitely is not doing any ray-casting, I'm just giving it as a an extreme example).
The other problem is content creation. Current games are 7-15gb of compressed data - half of them textures, rest models, animations, etc. and fitting that in memory (and loading it in memory).
Even with the fastest drives, you end up spending a lot of time loading (or streaming).
Then if that thing looks so real, you start feeling that something ain't right if your gun can't really destroy every piece of a building... And later allowing that in the engine, makes it worse as not much pre-processed data can be reused (static lighting, bsp geometry, etc.). Or you do it (somehow) real-time.
Also this complicates the game "AI" - there is no real AI in an FPS shooter - it's simply too god damn hard. Just think about the cover system, and how laughable it would be if you have destructible surfaces, and you can see the "AI" guy trying to hide behind thinking it was a fine cover point.
Less realism, more constrained world, and better gameplay are the key components to good gaming... Not fancy graphics all the way :)
[+] [-] johngunderman|15 years ago|reply
I'm not convinced that you are correct here. Although ray-tracing has not been a good option in the past due to processor limitations, we're reaching the point at which it may become feasible. Because ray-tracing scales linearly with the number of cores you use, modern CPUs are fairly well equipped to work with it, albeit at sub-optimal framerates. See the following (from 2007) for reference: http://www.q4rt.de/
Outside of this, consider that the only way vector graphics are allowed to perform at their current level is due to the existence of discrete graphics cards which are optimized for the necessary matrix calculations. If we were to develop discrete cards for ray-tracing, we could potentially see amazing results. For example, in 2009 IBM developed a computer that could run full-scene ray-tracing at 1080p averaging 90 FPS. While I do not know how complex said scene was, I'm optimistic about the future of ray-tracing.
[+] [-] Dn_Ab|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barrkel|15 years ago|reply
I lament constriction - I haven't bought any of the latter games in the Call of Duty series owing to how constrained and linear they are. Games like Far Cry or Just Cause 2 are more my style; but these sandbox games tend to gain from more freedom, rather than lose.
Re cover: "all" the AI needs to do is have a desired target location such that the AI's bounding box is fully or partially contained in volumes that are not in the player's line of sight (i.e. in shadow imagining the character's head as a light source). I don't think that's an insurmountable problem.
[+] [-] KeithMajhor|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mortenjorck|15 years ago|reply
I kid, but honestly, seeing this doesn't excite me anywhere near as much as a preview of whatever the team that made Mirror's Edge has in store next for current-generation consoles.
[+] [-] potatolicious|15 years ago|reply
Slightly OT but interesting: from what I hear from people at EA, it was a huge internal political war that year between the people who wanted to build more sequels and licensed franchises, and the people who thought that EA would die if it didn't innovate on its own IP. The latter won and were given a chance to prove their worth - the two main titles to come out of that were Dead Space and Mirror's Edge. From what I hear management considered this direction a flop (Dead Space, while popular, and spawning a sequel, was not the sort of hyper-blockbuster it needed to be, and ME was an unquestionable flop) and now EA is culturally back to the sequel-mill mentality.
A sad opportunity that didn't pan out :( There are precious few new IPs being worked on at EA right now.
[+] [-] bcrescimanno|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andywood|15 years ago|reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi2tae2PmmU&feature=fvwkr...
[+] [-] Prisen|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flashingleds|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gamble|15 years ago|reply
As in the movie industry, the middle ground in the games industry has been disappearing. Your best shot at turning a profit is either to make small bets on mobile/indie games, or go full-bore for a AAA title with a budget in the double or triple digit millions. Indies don't need another generation of consoles; AAA developers don't want to rebuild all the tech they created for the 360/PS3.
The assumption at the start of the current generation was that if you invested in your tech fairly early on, you'd be able to get a trilogy out of it before the subsequent generation of consoles made the tech obsolete. (This is why so many 360/PS3 IPs were structured as trilogies) Now that it's obvious the current consoles aren't going away anytime soon, developers are looking to amortize their tech over a few more titles before the hardware changes again.
[+] [-] Tycho|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bcrescimanno|15 years ago|reply
I agree with much else of what is said here about it being a "perfect conditions" demo that doesn't have to deal with any unknowns--and I also echo that it looks exceedingly cool. All that said, great graphics does not a great game make!
[+] [-] kevingadd|15 years ago|reply
Perhaps one might say that developers are aiming too high in every respect (including graphics), and that's leading to flawed projects. But in this specific case, I doubt the game would have turned out good even if the graphics weren't given the effort they got. In many cases it's possible for a studio to easily scale up development when it comes to graphics, because with strong enough art direction, you can have 50 or 100 artists working on assets for different parts of a game and have a reasonable chance of tying all that art together at the end. Unfortunately, engineering teams don't scale nearly that well...
[+] [-] potatolicious|15 years ago|reply
There's room on both sides to improve. IMHO Valve is the best at this - their games run on an incredible range of hardware and look good on just about anything. Their engine is also rock solid to boot.
[+] [-] Semiapies|15 years ago|reply
Yeesh. It's "bokeh".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh
[+] [-] aphyr|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emehrkay|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] almond|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] potatolicious|15 years ago|reply
We've made a lot of gameplay progress into action-RPGs (Mass Effect and the like), and I for one would like to play a game where facial expressions and body language actually mean something (e.g., the character is lying, but instead of smacking you over the head with it, the game can be subtle about it).
[+] [-] jacques_chester|15 years ago|reply
So using the new engine, the world-leading experts on Unreal Engine NG - Epic - had to spend 1 person-year per minute of video.
Like Hollywood, this can only make hit-driven game design more common on consoles and PCs.
[+] [-] aphyr|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dn_Ab|15 years ago|reply
But calling this real-time I think is stretching things a bit, even if its using the game engine and not prerendered. The demo and assets were probably polished and optimized for that machine, angle, lighting and scenario. And it was heavily scripted. I think an engine flexible enough for more general gameplay - with more calculations, interactions, assets and erm unmasked NPCs would be a lot less smooth and certainly less realistic looking. This seems like one of those theoretical optimums with requirements that just don't line up for most practical purposes.
Not trying to downplay how cool this is though. It will still be and is a visually and computationally amazing feat.
[+] [-] patrickk|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ENOTTY|15 years ago|reply
This engine isn't meant for release today, it's meant for release in a few years. Any pronouncements you make about how this engine is too X for today's Y are going to be invalid.
[+] [-] gamble|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iaskwhy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tracer|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teamonkey|15 years ago|reply
Might not mean anything.
[+] [-] MicahSeff|15 years ago|reply
This reason is why I was actually so happy to see Nintendo abandon this pursuit of ever-prettier graphics in the hopes that gamers would be drawn in by the innovative gameplay ideas that propelled the Wii to the top of the console heap this generation. Though the Wii has somewhat fallen short on my expectations, I am still impressed by Nintendo's decision.
This generation has been the death knell for countless (up-til-now) successful companies. The higher development costs of making prettier and prettier games has meant that a single flop can tank the company. It's exactly because of this that I believe we are seeing the rise of mobile and social games as they are cheap not only for the consumer to pick up, but also for the developer to produce in the first place.
[+] [-] Qz|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnyzee|15 years ago|reply
It is easy to grouch about how gameplay rules over shiny effects, but I am quite impressed and uplifted that the company that made those games is still around and on the cutting edge of games.
[+] [-] joshbert|15 years ago|reply
Better version. I could appreciate it more.
[+] [-] narrator|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mustpax|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndreSegers|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Semiapies|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barrkel|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aphyr|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exit|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pragmatic|15 years ago|reply
Sony and MSFT didn't do that well on this generation.
> Collectively, that means that 2011, on the console side, is going to be relatively drab. Microsoft doesn't need a new console, Nintendo doesn't want to compete with the 3DS launch, and Sony can't afford a new console. So it seems like the only points of interest this year will be price cuts--certainly, Sony and Nintendo will have them.
http://dubiousquality.blogspot.com/2011/01/console-post-of-w...
There are no plans for a future generation, aside from Nintendo, which _might_ have a full HD console. (Please correct me if I'm wrong).
> The demo ran on a PC with an Intel Core i9 microprocessor with three Nvidia GeForce 580 GTX graphics cards connected through SLI technology. The demo took about three months for 12 programmers and artists to build.
It's on a huge, hot, expensive PC now, how would the big 3 recoup their investment in such a beast? Wouldn't they be better off trying to sell portable units with cheaper to produce games?