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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 me

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.

rorrr 16y ago
I bet more of the art will be procedurally generated.
- johngunderman 16y ago
  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.
  - dan335 16y ago
    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.
    - johngunderman 16y ago
      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.
      - dan335 16y ago
        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.
  - dkersten 16y ago
    Great, yet more games that look exactly the same. That is not the answer.
- icefox 16y ago
  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?
  - bmalicoat 16y ago
    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.
    - icefox 16y ago
      potatolicious mentioned animation systems http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2303453 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?
      - georgemcbay 16y ago
        Animation? Granny. Audio? Miles Sound. 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).
- Devilboy 16y ago
  How about scanning real-world locations? That should save loads of time.
  - iwwr 16y ago
    Fallen Earth MMO is based on real topographic maps of the Grand Canyon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Earth
Lost_BiomedE 16y ago
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?'
- bonch 16y ago
  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.
  - tristanperry 16y ago
    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.
  - dkersten 16y ago
    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.

rorrr 16y ago

I bet more of the art will be procedurally generated.

johngunderman 16y ago
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.
- dan335 16y ago
  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.
  - johngunderman 16y ago
    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.
    - dan335 16y ago
      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.
- dkersten 16y ago
  Great, yet more games that look exactly the same. That is not the answer.
icefox 16y ago
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?
- bmalicoat 16y ago
  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.
  - icefox 16y ago
    potatolicious mentioned animation systems http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2303453 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?
    - georgemcbay 16y ago
      Animation? Granny. Audio? Miles Sound. 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).
Devilboy 16y ago
How about scanning real-world locations? That should save loads of time.
- iwwr 16y ago
  Fallen Earth MMO is based on real topographic maps of the Grand Canyon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Earth

Lost_BiomedE 16y ago

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?'

bonch 16y ago
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.
- tristanperry 16y ago
  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.
- dkersten 16y ago
  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.