4 ms·

> so the fact that say a rock is not made of zillions of atoms But that's the problem. When the player misses the target with a rocket and hits the rock, it g

by RyanZAG 13y ago

> so the fact that say a rock is not made of zillions of atoms But that's the problem. When the player misses the target with a rocket and hits the rock, it gets a strange looking explosion and then the rock is either still there, or simply 'removed'. Sense of realism? Lost. In an open world game, the player might want to pick up the rock. If you took a shortcut and just made the rock an object that sits on top of the ground plane, when you pick up the rock there is normal grass underneath. If you throw the rock at a building, it bounces off and rolls around stupidly. Sense of realism? Lost. > That's what will be coming in the next decade. That's what the article is saying - you're deluded into thinking we're close to solving this stuff. There is no way it's coming in the next decade, it is a long way off with a huge number of very difficult problems to solve. This is like the AI debate. AI is always 'just around the corner'. No it isn't, we are nowhere close to even beginning to understand what we actually need to accomplish once the tricks are taken away.

dragontamer 13y ago
Which is why tons of people play "Minecraft", because the voxel technology and ability to deform the environment is much more real than many other games. There are some advancements in this field, but really... at the end of the day... the best "deformable field" is Minecraft still. And it hardly even tries to be realistic. Fortunately, most gamers don't care about realism to this degree. Many FPS gamers want a tight engine, fun mechanics. Bunny Hopping was left in the Halo series for this reason. Ditto with super-cancels in Fighting Games (tell me if MMA-fighters cancels their jabs into super-attacks). Realism for the sake of realism is hopeless. Game programmers need to focus upon entertaining the gamer. Some gamers require a degree of realism... but it should never be the primary point of a game.
- SixSigma 13y ago
  We were deforming the world in Populous in 1989 ... and people drowned.
  - dragontamer 13y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7424517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7424517 I know. Early 90s gaming was awesome. Such flexibility in games is a rare sight today.
    - SixSigma 13y ago
      I have the 5 1/4" floppy of Populous on my shelf (which is why I knew the year). Sadly I can't play it any more because of the 1980's DRM. Even if I could get a 5 1/4" drive working in my modern PC, the game asks you populations of various world cities for which the answers are on an un-photocopiable (black on dark red) sheet that came in the game box which I have sadly lost. hmm I just looked on GOG and it's $5.99 http://www.gog.com/game/populous http://www.gog.com/game/populous Annoying though, when you have it already :) I got the three pack for $15, gog bless. Even better, you get free games too including Beneath a Steel Sky - I never finished that either - I am a happy gamer.
      - SixSigma 13y ago
        I was wrong about the DRM, that mechanism was Sim City Populous asks you to identify a picture, which came on a separate sheet from the manual. It is disabled in the GOG version (although it still asks you the question but without checking the answer).
- mr_luc 13y ago
  I was wondering when someone was going to mention Minecraft because that's a great way of illustrating to people something of just how vast the gulf to be crossed is. There are graphical mods for Minecraft, but none that bridge the gap from "cube world" to "our world." And even Minecraft has artifacts like floating islands and limitless water -- the voxels are meant to represent fairly unchanging substances like dirt and stone, and even the trunk and leafy volume of a tree, and they support a limited amount of state being attached to them, but they are not being computed constantly in a way that would make it possible to implement something like erosion or a landslide, or realistic water motion, etc. And when you try to imagine going much beyond minecraft, you realize that, crap, you'd have to be computing the entire (essentially unlimited) voxel world maybe several times a second ... I think it will be done, but there's a good case for it NEEDING to be done in a massively multiplayer way, because the work of simulating the world becomes too large to be done by any individual user's machine.
  - dragontamer 13y ago
    Single-player fans can play Dwarf Fortress, which creates a custom 1000+ year history and has the most "realistic" damage formulas I've ever seen: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Combat http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Combat * Contact Area: Determines the surface area hit by the weapon. Likely in mm2. * Velocity Multiplier: Effectively increases the velocity of the weapon swing. * Blunt weapons are all about weapon mass, contact area, and velocity. Apply a large force to a small area for bone crushing goodness. * Mass is likely material Density times weapon Size * Momentum is Mass times Velocity * Velocity is based on the Mass of the weapon, the Strength of the wielder, and the Velocity Multiplier of the weapon * Any impact must have a conservation of momentum, and thusly, impart the weapon's momentum to the target * Stress is the Force of the strike divided by the Contact Area * Material Impact Yield determines the Stress required to dent the armor (likely not used) etc. etc. etc. Oh yeah, Dwarf Fortress runs quite slowly. Its an ASCII art game that bring computers to their knees.
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      It's also quite badly coded. And there is absolutely no reason it couldn't do sim on one core (or more) and rendering on another core, there just happens to be no 3d coder on the team, let alone artists.
benched 13y ago
Since this is inherently a moving-goalposts conversation, I am not going to argue with you. I will say that, speaking as a graphics programmer who has been writing advanced renderers for more than 20 years, I do think the sense of your comment is wrong. In my working life alone, I have seen the state of the art progress from 4-color pixelated 2D, to the current Frostbite/Unreal level engines. I believe that already crosses most of the gap from nothing, to photorealism. I am also thinking more about rendering than all the other things people are discussing in this thread. I also do not think the incredible and dramatic progress in rendering can be sensibly compared to the ongoing slow progress in AGI. Again, we all know that with graphics, it's all an approximation. Perhaps you, being of a later generation, have much higher standards. You don't say what you don't think is coming in the next decade, and you can set that bar arbitrarily high, so I don't see this discussion becoming productive.
- droopyEyelids 13y ago
  I think the point is that a photorealistic scene isn't 'realistic' because you can't really interact with it, it's a painting. And a world where you can actually interact with stuff, like minecraft, can stagger the most beastly rig, even though the graphics suck from a realistic perspective and your interaction is limited.

by RyanZAG 13y ago

dragontamer 13y ago

Which is why tons of people play "Minecraft", because the voxel technology and ability to deform the environment is much more real than many other games. There are some advancements in this field, but really... at the end of the day... the best "deformable field" is Minecraft still. And it hardly even tries to be realistic. Fortunately, most gamers don't care about realism to this degree. Many FPS gamers want a tight engine, fun mechanics. Bunny Hopping was left in the Halo series for this reason. Ditto with super-cancels in Fighting Games (tell me if MMA-fighters cancels their jabs into super-attacks). Realism for the sake of realism is hopeless. Game programmers need to focus upon entertaining the gamer. Some gamers require a degree of realism... but it should never be the primary point of a game.

SixSigma 13y ago
We were deforming the world in Populous in 1989 ... and people drowned.
- dragontamer 13y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7424517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7424517 I know. Early 90s gaming was awesome. Such flexibility in games is a rare sight today.
  - SixSigma 13y ago
    I have the 5 1/4" floppy of Populous on my shelf (which is why I knew the year). Sadly I can't play it any more because of the 1980's DRM. Even if I could get a 5 1/4" drive working in my modern PC, the game asks you populations of various world cities for which the answers are on an un-photocopiable (black on dark red) sheet that came in the game box which I have sadly lost. hmm I just looked on GOG and it's $5.99 http://www.gog.com/game/populous http://www.gog.com/game/populous Annoying though, when you have it already :) I got the three pack for $15, gog bless. Even better, you get free games too including Beneath a Steel Sky - I never finished that either - I am a happy gamer.
    - SixSigma 13y ago
      I was wrong about the DRM, that mechanism was Sim City Populous asks you to identify a picture, which came on a separate sheet from the manual. It is disabled in the GOG version (although it still asks you the question but without checking the answer).
mr_luc 13y ago
I was wondering when someone was going to mention Minecraft because that's a great way of illustrating to people something of just how vast the gulf to be crossed is. There are graphical mods for Minecraft, but none that bridge the gap from "cube world" to "our world." And even Minecraft has artifacts like floating islands and limitless water -- the voxels are meant to represent fairly unchanging substances like dirt and stone, and even the trunk and leafy volume of a tree, and they support a limited amount of state being attached to them, but they are not being computed constantly in a way that would make it possible to implement something like erosion or a landslide, or realistic water motion, etc. And when you try to imagine going much beyond minecraft, you realize that, crap, you'd have to be computing the entire (essentially unlimited) voxel world maybe several times a second ... I think it will be done, but there's a good case for it NEEDING to be done in a massively multiplayer way, because the work of simulating the world becomes too large to be done by any individual user's machine.
- dragontamer 13y ago
  Single-player fans can play Dwarf Fortress, which creates a custom 1000+ year history and has the most "realistic" damage formulas I've ever seen: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Combat http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Combat * Contact Area: Determines the surface area hit by the weapon. Likely in mm2. * Velocity Multiplier: Effectively increases the velocity of the weapon swing. * Blunt weapons are all about weapon mass, contact area, and velocity. Apply a large force to a small area for bone crushing goodness. * Mass is likely material Density times weapon Size * Momentum is Mass times Velocity * Velocity is based on the Mass of the weapon, the Strength of the wielder, and the Velocity Multiplier of the weapon * Any impact must have a conservation of momentum, and thusly, impart the weapon's momentum to the target * Stress is the Force of the strike divided by the Contact Area * Material Impact Yield determines the Stress required to dent the armor (likely not used) etc. etc. etc. Oh yeah, Dwarf Fortress runs quite slowly. Its an ASCII art game that bring computers to their knees.
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    It's also quite badly coded. And there is absolutely no reason it couldn't do sim on one core (or more) and rendering on another core, there just happens to be no 3d coder on the team, let alone artists.

benched 13y ago

Since this is inherently a moving-goalposts conversation, I am not going to argue with you. I will say that, speaking as a graphics programmer who has been writing advanced renderers for more than 20 years, I do think the sense of your comment is wrong. In my working life alone, I have seen the state of the art progress from 4-color pixelated 2D, to the current Frostbite/Unreal level engines. I believe that already crosses most of the gap from nothing, to photorealism. I am also thinking more about rendering than all the other things people are discussing in this thread. I also do not think the incredible and dramatic progress in rendering can be sensibly compared to the ongoing slow progress in AGI. Again, we all know that with graphics, it's all an approximation. Perhaps you, being of a later generation, have much higher standards. You don't say what you don't think is coming in the next decade, and you can set that bar arbitrarily high, so I don't see this discussion becoming productive.

droopyEyelids 13y ago
I think the point is that a photorealistic scene isn't 'realistic' because you can't really interact with it, it's a painting. And a world where you can actually interact with stuff, like minecraft, can stagger the most beastly rig, even though the graphics suck from a realistic perspective and your interaction is limited.