Bloom! HDR! Buzzwords! Blah!

[Shaviro]

caco_killer said:

It would be great if people didn't think a plot was an essential game element. A videogame plot isn't nearly as good as a story in a book. I go to other message boards and the people there have hated games just because of the story. Gameplay is important for videogames, nothing else.

What?
Please define game play.
Think about the words for a second.

gameplay -> playing the game -> the whole experience -> all factors (video, audio, gameflow, story & setting and so on)
gameflow -> the flow of the game -> action/reaction -> monster/weapon definition & placement + more

What makes good gameplay for games? Fun. What is fun? Is it great visuals? No, but it's a part of it. All parts of the game contribute to the gameplay. Making a game fun is a delicate balance between these factors.

[Manc]

Yeah who needs a game with plot just put me in a random room and say "Go!"

You seem to be confusing plot with COMPLETELY REVEALING THE FUCKING STORY ON PAGE 1. Just because a game has a fucking story to it doesn't mean it's ruined in the least, hell that'd mean about what, 75% of all games are "bad" then? Yes it's dumb to reveal a game's entire plotline right off the bat; anyone who does that has poor game design skills to say the least, but that does not mean a plot is a bad thing in a game.

[myk]

Zaldron said:
A rather simple accomplishment in more 'abstract' gameworlds like games of ten and twenty years ago, and something that gets progresivelly more difficult because, to put it bluntly, we see the chair in 3D and all of its polished wood glory, but we cannot break a leg and use it to bash someone's head, nor move/rotate it to where we want it to be, nor even sit on it. Right now where beholders of worlds that don't react like what our eyes are telling us.

That almost sounds like things are... failing. Well, at least they're making people pretty jaded and nitpicky.

There'll be a day when we run inside an almost pitch black tunnel, being chased by extremely fast rabid zombies, counting the last bullets in our handgun, and specular bloom will reveal to us the exit. We'll look back, to gauge distance, because the echoes make it too hard to have any spatial awareness. We can't see, looking ahead to that bright, glaring half-circle of hope has fucked up our night vision for a little while. But it's ok, we're almost there but oh shit too late, you saw it but had no time to react, that patch of road was shiny...that patch of road was wet. You slip and knock yourself in the back of your head. You slowly try to stagger back to your feet, vision now blurred, still seeing some dancing, diminishing stars from the impact. But it's too late, they're already on top of you. You shoot blindly and wildly, as exulted as your chasers it seems.

You could pretty much do this in the DOOM engine using colormaps, like they did for the red pain screen.

Fuck, there'll be a day when games do not contain cleavage, ninjas, nazis, aliens or monsters necesarilly. Some will simply be dramas where the player must afront the tensions and magnetism of incredibly realistic characters.

¿Telenovelas interactivas?

But yeah, there won't be cleavage... it'll likely be bare boobs outright. Also, you can dream of many possibilities, but (popular) games evolve in a series of gernes with certain characteristics and character types.

Games fucking need good visuals if we're gonna make deeper gameplays. How else are you going to tell that you are indeed making a fucking difference on the gameworld, if its something that cannot be downright told to you via a sound file or a text window?

Or maybe worse, tons of menus for countless fixed choices. If it were to be truly effective and game play were to be enhanced, as opposed to bogged down, you'd be getting rid of inventories and multiple choice boxes, making you look into a backpack or a pouch at your belt, or giving you more intuitive (i.e., being directly tied to the environment) ways to make choices.

A game is interaction, with others or with oneself; adding complexity can give more creative possibilities, and games as intercompeting products need that, or else there'd be like 5 games during any period. But that complexity enhances game play is rather questionable; it can kill it just as much, producing an industry of of vapid short lived expensive creations; but instead simple games continue to exist, using complexity only lightly and often in the background, in a way remade over and over again because technology is constantly replaced.

That would definitely change the day we mutate and get an extra pair of arms, or perhaps if we develop a second pair of equally efficient detachable mechanic arms.

[Shaviro]

myk said:

You could pretty much do this in the DOOM engine using colormaps, like they did for the red pain screen.

No, you really really can't.
Reread the paragraph you quoted.

[Fredrik]

I sure want a game that makes me wheeze when I command the virtual character to run at max speed for a few minutes.

[myk]

Shaviro said:
No, you really really can't.

I'm talking about impairing the player's vision when light levels vary considerably. You mean slipping on a puddle, the echoes, or the rabid zombie?

[Shaviro]

With Zdoom, some clever scripting and half a year of production time, you could create a scene that kinda meets the specifications written in his post.

But that isn't really what he's talking about, is it?!

[caco_killer]

Shaviro said:

What?
Please define game play.
Think about the words for a second.

Gameplay isn't something that's hard to understand the meaning of. You should try playing an Atari or NES game, then you'd understand what gameplay really is.

[Snarboo]

In reply to Zaldron's post:
A tuly good game doesn't need good graphics, I still don't see why having pixel shaders and bloom and unified lighting is necessary for a game to be more immersive or make the gameworld deeper than games in the past. Some of the situations you describe sound very fascinating, and very immersive, and yet, do we really need HDR and bloom and all this crap to even achieve what you describe? I've played games without HDR that mimmicked how the human eye reacts to light perfectly, although maybe it didn't look as pretty as HDR or whatever, because the programmers were talented enough to put it in and emulate it without HDR. A good enough programmer can mimmick anything if he wants to, and still make it believable without having the graphics being reality shattering. In fact, often the best games, and those that turn out to be sleeper hits, don't have the most cutting edge graphics, yet are still able to draw us into their world and really become part of them.

I swear gamers these days have a borked suspension of disbelief. Suspension of disbelief, as you know, is what allows us to believe in something as far fetched as a science fiction novel. It is also the same thing that allows us to give chess pieces properties and values and abide by the rules of the game. And yet, gamers nowadays can't even handle a game if the graphics aren't realistic enough for them to drool over. If it doesn't look real enough, it's just too jarring for gamers today, and they will complain endlessly about how the shadows in the game aren't perfect or something appears too pixelated. Meanwhile, we're still playing games where we blow up aliens in robot factories just fine. Why is it that we can't handle "jarring" or "unreal" graphics, yet can appreciate a far fetched story so easily? Maybe it's because we're spoiled by graphics and not by good storylines or gameplay. Funny how we can pick and choose when to suspend our disbelief like that.

As much as you want to argue that graphics are necessary for immersion and somehow enhance the gameplay, it has been proven time and time again that you can pull off any trick even with the most limited of features, and it will still work. Did Doom 3 really need unifed lighting? Some would argue yes, because it enhances the mood and makes the game scarier, because the only light you have are the lights in the environment and your flashlight. It's also a horror game, where light and shadow are the difference between life and death. However, at the same time, it made the game frustrating because there were times where you couldn't see anything, meaning you couldn't effectively play the game or fight back unless you liked shooting in the dark. I actually wonder how anybody got anything done on Mars if half the lights were off, or would only work half the time, or weren't really bright enough for anyone to see anything. Ironically, the lighting system totally borked my suspension of belief even though it looked good, and since my computer couldn't even handle the lights or shadows without slowing down anyway, I actually had to turn some of it off or down, and the game played a little better for it, while still keeping the atmosphere and gameplay intact, even if it looked dated.

Yes, graphics and audio can be tied into gameplay to make a game deeper, and I have seen games that effectively tied those things together in a way that actually improved gameplay. Yet, most games like Doom 3 or Half-Life 2 don't use the graphics or audio to full effect or in a way that even touches the gameplay. They are merely there for aesthetics purposes, and for us to gawk at. It ends up looking pretty, but not playing well because of it.

I mean, can you actually name a game where the graphics actually improved the gameplay or even had an effect on anything, maybe even your survival? And I'm not talking about lighting here, which has been proven in some ways to improve or affect gameplay, but things like knowing if a texture is actually metal or wood or not, or whether or not what you are looking at is shiny, wet or rusted. In fact, the only time where you would need to know if anything was anything is if the designers want you to interact with it. In the case that you could interact with it, they will smother you with audio/visual cues* to let you know that what you are looking at can be affected in some way by what you do or affect you, rather than sit around doing nothing but have a good looking wooden texture slapped on it that cannot but should be able to be shattered, yet hasn't until now because the designers haven't given you a rocket launcher or whatever. In that case, knowing it was wood and can be broken would help, but only because the designers of the game made it perfectly clear that this box wasn't made of Acme brand Indestruct-O-Wood(patent pending) and that you should/could break it.

So, if a piece of wood is beautiful and takes full advantage of any rendering tricks the designers have put into it, yet cannot be interacted with and is just there to look pretty or look realistic, but does not touch the gameplay or depth of the game by looking that way, why does that piece of wood even need a nice pixel or bloom shader slapped over it? If the shader has no effect on what you can do with it, or even how you play the game, why is it even there? Some game designers might not even know why they need to support Pixel Shader 5.0 or whatever, the only reason they are even putting it into the game is because it's popular, makes the game look pretty and maybe sells more units, or it's to show off Company X's new shader, but only because they partnered with or supported X because X was paying them or helping them advertise. Meanwhile, people who can actually dream up gameplay shattering ways to use said shaders either don't exist right now, are constrained by what the publisher thinks their game should be, are so obscure either from lack of money or because they didn't team up with Company X to hype their game and help advertise that nobody knows about them, can't program, aren't even in the game industry at all, or don't want to.

I am not arguing about this because I think graphics or audio have no effect on gameplay, complexity, or depth, or aren't even important or even that we shouldn't have realistic game worlds. I'm not even bothered by people using HDR or having it available to them to make their game appear more realistic. It's just nobody is taking advantage of these new graphic techniques other than to make their game look pretty! And half the time the effect is applied so sloppily or without reason that the game looks awful three years later. Can you name a game that uses unified lighting in such a way that it surpasses tried and true techniques that games years ago used for enhancing gameplay? Can you name a game that uses bloom, pixel shaders or even HDR other than to make things really shiny to the point where everything is blurry or blinding?

Will we be able to take advantage of these shaders to improve gameplay? Maybe, but for now I think we're jumping the gun and onto a bandwagon for no other reason than to show off or so Company X's graphics card and "exclusive" shader sells more units and forces people to buy newer cards because they aren't supported, even though you could feasibly emulate any feature without relying on someone else's shader code or graphics card. Games just a few years ago looked and played fine, and still do, so why do we need to have these brand spanking new rendering techniques right this moment and put in every game? We don't, and until the game industry slows down with all this shader crap so every game that comes out doesn't look like it has been covered in shiny goo, I'm going to be extremly miffed about this. I'm sick of playing two seperate games and not knowing the difference between them, one, because they both play the same, and two, because neither know play that well or differently and both happened to use every pixel shader available to them. It's just excessive and pointless at this moment in time.

If a game designer could make anything as immersive as the zombie scenario you described, where the specularity from wet rocks clues you into how slippery they are and you have to be careful when you walk on them, then I might be impressed. However, you could still pull off the scenario you described with graphics that don't even come close to matching a mainstream game. All it takes is a game programmer with enough knowledge, interest and dedication to make a situation like you describe. Good graphics don't and are not required to make a game deep/more realistic. In some ways, however, the "deep" and immersive gameworld you describe sounds like it would be more frustrating than anything else. Having to worry about whether or not the shiny thing you're about to walk on is slippery to the point where it would cause you to get killed would add a level of frustration I'm not sure most gamers would want to take part in. I'm not even sure I'm ready to have my virtual skull cracked open by slipping in the bath tub yet, as intersting and unique as it sounds. But again, you wouldn't need HDR, bloom, or specularity to be able to simulate the experience of cracking your skull open anyway.


* Ironically, audio/visual cues do enhance gampelay, but in this case, it would be done in such a way that it forces you along the path that the designers intended you to be on by breaking this box rather than the one right next to it.

[Shaviro]

caco_killer said:

Gameplay isn't something that's hard to understand the meaning of.

Well for some reason you haven't grasped it yet.

[AirRaid]

Snarboo said:

In reply to Zaldron's post:

Your entire argument is like, a waste of time. We're not saying that good graphics, with lots of features, specular highlights bump mapping etc are required. Of course they're not a requirement of a good game. But used properly, certainly they can very much enhance an already good game. And they do open doorways to things which wouldn't be possible without them.

Ayu said:

Look for HDRIBL, it's a demo that uses REAL HDR. Not the half-assed crap that valve is using.

Saw that a while back. It's a little bit nicer than the HL2 video that was released, but there are 2 things to consider. 1) the Lost coast video was that - a video. I ran HDRIBL at 1280x1024, so clearly it's going to look better right off the bat. 2) HDRIBL was specifically made to show off the HDR lighting. And so that's all it does, and it still chugged a little at high res even on my machine. So while it does look nice and fancy, it hasn't got any other rendering worries to think about, like, you know, the rest of a game world.

But anyway aside form those, I still wasn't particularly over-impressed by it. It still ended up being rather blurry a lot of the time, and I just really don't think blurriness is very realistic at all.

This post is longer than it was meant to be.

[caco_killer]

Shaviro said:

Well for some reason you haven't grasped it yet.

What the hell kind of response is that? If you're so goddamn smart you shouldn't have needed to ask me for a definition.

[Manc]

No game made after 1989 has "good gameplay".

[Snarboo]

AirRaid said:

Your entire argument is like, a waste of time. We're not saying that good graphics, with lots of features, specular highlights bump mapping etc are required. Of course they're not a requirement of a good game. But used properly, certainly they can very much enhance an already good game. And they do open doorways to things which wouldn't be possible without them.

I wouldn't go as far as to say my post is a waste of time, however I thought Zaldron was replying to me in such a way that it was implied that he thought graphics were required for a more immersive or better games(ie the Zombie scenario he described). I guess I just didn't understand the argument here. I do admit that graphics can open doors and allow us to make more cinematic, realistic, or stylish games, but I wasn't arguing against that anyway. My post still stands, however. Until we can utilize graphical techniques in such a way that it is more than just for show, I'm not sure we should even be touching technologies like HDR, especially when it's half-assed or sloppily done most of the time right now. I'm just going to have to accept newer games making use of and requiring such technology.

[Zaldron]

Excuse me I kind of forgot to check if there was anything new here, plus I was somewhat busy.

I'll tackle everything altough in a slightly fucked up order, mind you. I'll start with this because I think this is the only real point of debate, the rest is more than likely armchair ranting.

Snarboo said:
Until we can utilize graphical techniques in such a way that it is more than just for show, I'm not sure we should even be touching technologies like HDR

Why should we dampen the efforts of one group because the other is not up to scratch due to:

1) Lack of skill.
2) Lack of commercial viability.
3) Lack of proper technology.
4) Some/All of the above.

Remember that a game is a work of love for those actively involved, and everyone in the group tries to do their best. If rendering coders, conceptual artists, and content-creation artists can pull out something amazing...why should we stop them? That would be unfair, to simply...impair their contribution to their pet-projects and babies. Are they supposed to work less hours, shoot to lesser hardware, and kind of kick around staring at the networking coder and making random ridiculous "tips"?

however I thought Zaldron was replying to me in such a way that it was implied that he thought graphics were required for a more immersive or better games

True, but I'm not saying games' designs are capped by today's graphics, I'm presenting a problem that is not quite here yet, but not too far away, in fact, perhaps only as much as 2 years away.

As for better games, yes, I believe that games relying in graphical components will be better given better graphics. It's highly logical, of course. Perhaps not that much better, but if an aspect gets better, the whole will be better in some degree too. I don't see anything particularly crazy here.

If a game is inmersive to such point, and we can make better, more inmersive graphics (be it attention to detail, random effects, clever texturing, clever shading, unequaled concept-stage research and photoreference, etc), then yes, the game will be more inmersive. How much is another story, but it's certainly a positive number. I don't see anything crazy with that either.

, I'm not sure we should even be touching technologies like HDR, especially when it's half-assed or sloppily done most of the time right now.

You have to factor in 'practice makes master' and 'goddamn people go buy a card that we can actually use for something'. Only companies like id can outright push the envelope saying "ok, it's unplayable for anything older than this card here". The rest have to accept that the target audience is very varied, and no feature can be really declared "obligatory", resulting in scalability. When you acknowledge for scalability, you cannot longer declare a feature a tightly-woven feature of gameplay, only a tangent, a satellite effect. But still, it looks pretty, it makes their baby a bit nicer, and people will, further along the line, want to play their beloved game with that feature, so that at least will push them to get more advanced hardware.

As it stands now, you have tons of people with Geforce3 and GF4MX chipsets, not to mention a rather respectable crowd of GF2 owners and the like. We even have some TNT users, I mean come on. I myself have no computer at the moment, and the one I do have at my hometown has a pathetic GF4MX, so I am further alienating myself from the world of PC gaming, but I still beg people to upgrade.

With the current demographic, there is simply no amazing features to be used beyond the scope of PURE_DEVICE and HARDWARE_TRANSFORM_AND_LIGHTING. And that's like 6 years old man. It's GF2 stuff. How could we even get fancy vertex programs in there..for say effectively fast and pretty wind simulation in the vegetation and branches moving as you brush past them? Let's not even talk about a game where you are expected to read from this in order to shoot your longbow over long distances. And if we sit and not even use this for stuffy jungles as we crouch under a cloud of mosquitos with an M4, simply for the sake of inmersion, then who would even care about upgrading?

AirRaid said:
Your entire argument is like, a waste of time. We're not saying that good graphics, with lots of features, specular highlights bump mapping etc are required. Of course they're not a requirement of a good game.

But for new and even newer games, it might very well be the turning point from good to very good games. Because very good games, the ones we cherish and replay everytime we bump into the cd when we're cleaning the shelf have amazing visuals. Wich leads me to my next point:

Snarboo said:
A tuly good game doesn't need good graphics...

I think it does. You're free to give me a few examples of games you adore that are just simply visually crap, both in terms of execution and underlying technology. I simply cannot find any, but I will instead proceed to tell the graphical virtues of some of my all time favourite games:

Hexen (1996): a lushfully rich palette that gave place to all kinds of extremely well executed wasteland and generally decaying scenarios. Complex sprite trajectories for effects and particles, such as blowing leaves, breaking stained glass, gravity influenced fireballs, etc, etc. Color-keyed textures for transparency, extremely inmersive and sparely used fog, debris and gore. Extremely fast assembly code underneath the rendering process to make all this come true.

Thief 2 (2000): many disregard the graphics of the game, but among one of the best steam-punk representations I have ever, ever seen, this game also offers some non-trivial and actually tough technologic features. Amazing visibility culling technology that allows for such levels as "Life of the Party", where you spend the first hour simply walking over roofs staring at the streets, getting into random windows, only to reach a gigantic tower that could be a whole level by itself. In fact, this level is like 4 levels big, and still it doesn't crap on your computer's pants. Colored lighting, dynamic baked lights (with no shadows), an extremely efficient baking process that, unlike Unreal and Quake, did not create sampling errors in highly tesselated areas (or oddly composited triangularity). A scout orb which emulated spherical perspective and refraction in the chipped areas of its surface.

Daggerfall (1996): seasonal representations for all vegetation, terrain generators, textured polygons, moving polygons, hi-definition sprites, color tinting for underwater, screen overlayed rain and snow.

Ultima VII, p2 & VIII (1992 to 1994): isometric engine with level-on-top-of-level layering, tile and non-tile positioning. Directional sprites and 3D renders.

I can't think of any game that I -really- like that didn't have some striking visuals at the time, and some incredibly clever tricks in the name of rendering.

Snarboo said:
A good enough programmer can mimmick anything if he wants to, and still make it believable without having the graphics being reality shattering.[/b]

And why discredit all the latest features of graphic cards, that have been so well thought and developed that they are just tools for coders to mimick anything they wish to project in their game? It's not like the days of "textured polygon, new to this videocard", this is the day of vidcards complying to conventions and standards that give us tools to mimick anything we wish, but with the following differences:

1) In a cross-OS fashion.
2) With precision.
3) With physical accuracy, if sought for.
4) With speed.
5) With marginal tricking and hacking, leading to stability and modularity.

And yet, gamers nowadays can't even handle a game if the graphics aren't realistic enough for them to drool over.

Are you sure? This might be simple as stereotyping the population.

As for me, I think that only 10% of the games are good, which makes sense, since it applies to any other form of media or entertainment. But of this 10%, which you can say that at the very least have respectable graphics and at best earth-shattering graphics, I only deem 5% having both accomplished technical robustness, adaptability and performance, and exceling visual arts direction.

It seems you think games have graphics that are too good for these days of gameplay, while I think they are already in many many cases crap compared to their gameplay. I still see glaring, horripilant glitches and botched art direction in many games today, even those that are toted as A++ visual treats.

I beg to differ in what Doom 3 feels like. It never became frustrating for me to fight in the dark, and yes, I argue that the unified lighting system did wonders for that game. I prefer games with far more brain into them, even in 'mindless' FPSs, and there's many things of Doom 3 I don't like. I also don't really like the stencil shadows and their glaring edges without penumbras, but I had loads of fun and enjoyed the visual execution of the game just fine. I also understand that prettier unified lighting systems are some way off yet.

I mean, can you actually name a game where the graphics actually improved the gameplay or even had an effect on anything, maybe even your survival? And I'm not talking about lighting here, which has been proven in some ways to improve or affect gameplay, but things like knowing if a texture is actually metal or wood or not, or whether or not what you are looking at is shiny, wet or rusted.

Ummh, how could I name one if it was not possible to code games like that, and for commercial purposes its not even possible to code them right now, or the next year? As for simpler scenarios, such as to know if something is metal or wood....all the way since arkanoid, pick any.

So, if a piece of wood is beautiful and takes full advantage of any rendering tricks the designers have put into it, yet cannot be interacted with and is just there to look pretty or look realistic, but does not touch the gameplay or depth of the game by looking that way, why does that piece of wood even need a nice pixel or bloom shader slapped over it?

So it should be a blurry texture or a brown polygon? If the game doesn't take advantage of it's sound propagation system to echo/reverb samples to alert or raise the awareness of idling enemies (because it doesn't matter, because they couldn't code it, because there was no time, because they're stupid), that means the shotgun should be the sound dude saying "pow...ka-chuk-chk, plip plip plip" over the mic?

makes the game look pretty and maybe sells more units

Pleasing your producer lets you stay in your job, the one game designers love. Selling more units gives you more creative freedom, because you're accomplished and influential. You must factor in commercial viability because they're trying to eat and feed their kids in the process too. If producers are tight-ass, neanderthals with no clear concept of all the amazing gameplay ideas that could be adopted, it's not really some dude's fault that managed to code a pretty skin shader, right?

It's just nobody is taking advantage of these new graphic techniques other than to make their game look pretty!

Aha, and it's the scalability problem again. Your audience doesn't have what it takes to do something critical or even mildly useful with it.

Can you name a game that uses unified lighting in such a way that it surpasses tried and true techniques that games years ago used for enhancing gameplay? Can you name a game that uses bloom, pixel shaders or even HDR other than to make things really shiny to the point where everything is blurry or blinding?

If you gave me 3 more years of games I could easily answer this, as it's a bit unfair that you ask me for relatively new features that have yet to find market penetration. But, regardless, I'll bite:

As for mindless Quake/Doom-style playing, Doom 3 sure did use its unified lighting system to full effect. I mean, when you get a zombie with their hands upraised, and the tips of their fingers show up first, while two red dots stare from the tenebrae, it's just great. The whole scene lasts 0.3 seconds, but it's burned in your mind, how you could see the gritty nails and after that, fire and blood everywhere.

Thief 3, even with all I hate of it, finally allowed for a system that didn't fall prey to the shortcomings that made the AI in the first two so exploitable. It also removed certain "shadow volume bugs" where you were deemed darkened because key places of you were in dark places, allowing you to get away with crouching and staying still where you were so obviously visible it hurt. And there's nothing like circling a statue as the shadow casted by a patrolling guard's torch rotates with almost devilish intent, while in the process you try to reposition as silently as possible.

HDR is too new, sorry no real examples I can give. I can say however that it would finally fix the problems I mentioned early, and everything would altogether make more sense, and that's always good.

Bloom is a tough one, but I have seen this effect to great use in many console games. Someone who knows the names can probably chip in.

even though you could feasibly emulate any feature without relying on someone else's shader code or graphics card

Simulate me soft shadows, in such way that there is no artifacting over time, it doesn't bleed into the air while looking at really steep angles, and it accounts for self shadowing. It can be very downsampled, but I want it not to jag as the projection makes it reach far away from the light source, relying on more sampling for penumbra.
If you can do that at 30 fps at 800x600 in targeted hardware I'll shut up.

Games just a few years ago looked and played fine, and still do, so why do we need to have these brand spanking new rendering techniques right this moment and put in every game? We don't, and until the game industry slows down with all this shader crap so every game that comes out doesn't look like it has been covered in shiny goo, I'm going to be extremly miffed about this. I'm sick of playing two seperate games and not knowing the difference between them, one, because they both play the same, and two, because neither know play that well or differently and both happened to use every pixel shader available to them. It's just excessive and pointless at this moment in time.

If you really think games graphics five years ago looked fine enough to warrant not do anything about them for five years more, up to the present, I think I might just step down from my upside-down oranges crate and go do something else.
If all games look the same to you, well, we are doing something right, we are actually managing to "simulate reality". Reality is all-around the same looking, no matter the scenario or characters involved right?
But, what about the 'artistic side'. Reality looks different depending, on say, which cinematography director worked in a movie. You're right, so if it looks 'the same' in the bad way, it's because of improper art direction, making everything generic and uninspired. I complain about this all the time to people who still listen to me, but this is the dudes making the textures fault and not the guy who coded specular support, or the vidcard manufacturers that allow for them.

The industry must not slow down with the shader crap if we are to ever say "ok, this is needed, can we please move on?". As we are right now, we have games with unified lighting systems, games with baked lightmaps, and games with vertext lighting. As we are right now, we have games with 3 textures per surface minimum, and others with 1 texture per surface minimum, and we cannot properly swap them between games because they are fundamentally different in construction. This is a moment of transition, transition from hard coded graphical features to a world of programmable, flexible graphical features. In a moment of transition you cannot reap the rewards of a fully implemented scenario. Not just yet.

Shit man, if we all had GF5, you could expect all games to have dynamic lights, normal maps and the like. Think of what we could do with these, or add on top of these. And every company could make this, since every company can fucking afford to Google for 8 minutes for all the tutorials. It becomes extremely easy, extremely affordable and intuitive.

All it takes is a game programmer with enough knowledge, interest and dedication to make a situation like you describe.

I see this as the bane of next years' gaming industry. 'Making' the situations will no longer be feasible.

Consider this, a commercial Doom level could be done in a couple of days, with the first and second days being all needed for using the engine to a reasonable extent. Besides, it used to run slow for some computers back then, so we can't go with The Darknening Ep2 details just yet.

For Quake, a level took weeks to be made, in order to reasonably represent this new 3D reality.

For Doom 3, they probably tweaked the levels over four years, to make the content needed to describe a Mars research outpost with such attention to detail.

We cannot longer keep adding Kodak moments and plot twists by hardwiring ALL of them. Emergent gameplay must happen. Rain must fall based on certain statistical parameters, and rain should gather and trick into the tunnel, and make a puddle at the lowest level it can find. This puddle must then inherit low friction properties.

We cannot expect a FPS set in London to have every puddle hand put there by a level designer, every puddle attached to an entity that describes friction as a coeficient. We will simply fall short at our intentions of providing free worlds to explore and engage. How many different shirst you want to model and draw to fill closets? Should this not be done procedurally with size, scale, texture, and tones combining colors and some simple graphical patterns?

We can't take 20 years per game, and we cannot simply reach a point where we go "ok this is it, we cannot make games more inmersive than this I'm sorry".

Having to worry about whether or not the shiny thing you're about to walk on is slippery to the point where it would cause you to get killed would add a level of frustration I'm not sure most gamers would want to take part in. I'm not even sure I'm ready to have my virtual skull cracked open by slipping in the bath tub yet, as intersting and unique as it sounds.

True, and not all games strive for all-right, everything-to-do gameworlds. Not everyone hopes to maybe in a decade make games be as inmersive as 1/100th of real life. But for those games that are purposedly kept 'simple' in some aspect for the sake of fun, it's done by presenting a highly tight system that becomes engaging simply by user input.

FPSs don't need to be too complex, give me a good weapon with nice visuals, talented, smart enemies with different personalities and reactions to the scenario and that's it. I don't need fancy levels with context and plots and characters and plot twists and super duper graphical features and stuff, but this strafing, this evading and tactical-to-mindless shooting...it has to be proverbial. It has to appeal to the id of my brain.

It also happens that 'simple' good games are actually quite complex in different, focused areas, so what I said long ago...

Me said:
I see them as the same, basically. As long as the input I receive from the game makes up for output that matches what I am expecting to happen (not in a predictable fashion but more of a consistent fashion), I deem the game as containing great gameplay.

And yes, for some people it would be very frustrating to slip. For example perhaps Fredrik by his witty remarks and stuff. But for me would be game heaven, and for many others the same. It's all about audiences, really.

I am the gamer that, amidst the killing and spookery of a slaughtered fort, cooks his own pies in Arx Fatalis to stay alive.
I am the gamer that patiently switches from one lockpick to the other in Thief 2, waiting maybe even as much as 6, 8 minutes, listening to footsteps before proceeding.
I am the gamer that in Deus Ex reads every newspaper and random console.
I am the gamer that in Morrowind adopts a house and populates a shelf with interesting books brought from the most strange of necromantic towers and dwemmer cities. And I try to keep some fashion in my arrangement of books.

I know most of the stuff I thrive upon doens't really attract many many gamers. It's a shame really, because perhaps the games I seek will only become feasible and popular in fifteen years time. But then again all of the games I mentioned today have sold quite well, in the end, so I can't say I am the exception to the case. I cannot attribute an elitist approach over the "dumb gamers out there", because there are many, many many people interested in more inmersion, and enough of us going for full-fledged level of inmersion.

I'm not even sure I'm ready to have my virtual skull cracked open by slipping in the bath tub yet, as intersting and unique as it sounds.

Blame that only to my lame examples. It was early and I couldn't come up with anything revolutionary. And if I did, I would keep it to myself and implement it in my own games. I'm quite sure you can think of many many scenarios where good interpretation of accurate situation-depicting graphics would make for stunning gameplay.

[Zaldron]

A couple of things more because I wanted to reply to Myk.

That almost sounds like things are... failing. Well, at least they're making people pretty jaded and nitpicky.

It does sound bad, yeah, but I think game developers are catching on the fact that they have to make modular engines in more than just the typical aspects of rendering, networking and audio systems. They have to make gameplay engines. They need to create XML parsers (or something equally simple for definitions), flexible scripting code, metadata about every item and "logical" structure in the game, and functions and algorythms to back them up, in a portable fashion.

I'll take the case of TES:Oblivion, where the developers, hardened by their years of both 1) Making random content and 2) Making painfully detailed hand-created content, have found clever ways to make the game and the editor help them in the creation of each Elder Scrolls iteration. The fact that they built a solid scripting system they can work on, a solid editor the artists understand, and an incredibly robust method for adding, replacing and modifying references over objects and global variables with layers of modules is genius.

This are systems that these guys will improve and improve with each new game, sometimes adding, sometimes rewriting, sometimes dropping for something altogether more complex. This allows for "gameplay" features to be done directly by artists and level designers, and as the core engine programmers come up with more and more customizable and emergent functions to describe the behaviour of objects and characters, stuff will happen by itself, or happen in such specific way because the designer wanted. But stuff will happen nevertheless without intervention, instead of our current situation of "if you don't look into it and make it up completely it doesn't exist at all".

If it were to be truly effective and game play were to be enhanced, as opposed to bogged down, you'd be getting rid of inventories and multiple choice boxes, making you look into a backpack or a pouch at your belt, or giving you more intuitive (i.e., being directly tied to the environment) ways to make choices.

Interesting how Ultima VII got this right. You had a rather simple backpack, simply one pouch (the big bag itself), which, upon double clicking, showed you the contents from a top down view. Iconic representations of items could be inserted in there, and they would linger whererever you drag them, this was clever because:

1) As you put new stuff on top of older stuff, the older stuff is partially hidden by the stuff on top, simulating the height order of real backpacks.

2) If you dragged something that was partially hidden, you brought it up to the top, simulating grabing something and pulling until it's up so we can see clearly if that's what we wanted.

3) If you wanted something and you couldn't find it, you started dragging the stuff on top to other locations, which is exactly what I do if what I'm looking for cannot be detected by shape.

This became annoying when you had many objects, so what you used to do was to get a couple of bags and small boxes, and put stuff in them in a categorical fashion, and then put the boxes and bags in your backpack.

LIKE IN FUCKING REAL LIFE. It was magical.

But that complexity enhances game play is rather questionable; it can kill it just as much, producing an industry of of vapid short lived expensive creations; but instead simple games continue to exist, using complexity only lightly and often in the background, in a way remade over and over again because technology is constantly replaced.

Interesting that you mention this, because I am not sure what to think of it. When I'm given more choices, I generally enjoy the game much more. It becomes a passion rather than entertainment. I think complexity kills the game when the new details and factors to consider are riddled with problems, the most typical being:

1) The AI is not good enough to make it worthwile.

2) The interfase they made for it is abysmal.

3) It goes in direct contradiction with another detail or factor's mechanics.

4) It makes other factors or details absolutely useless and surplus.

So yeah, I think complexity (complexity doesn't imply difficulty to understand/use, simply more choice and action/reaction) is always good, but you have to do good implementations, both in the sense of your design document and how the feature is played by the user.

[Snarboo]

I have to say I'm very pleased you can keep up with me, Zaldron, and I don't mean that in a sarcastic way. I often devolve into ranting, so it's good someone can pick up some of what I said and gleem some useful info.

Zaldron said:

Remember that a game is a work of love for those actively involved, and everyone in the group tries to do their best. If rendering coders, conceptual artists, and content-creation artists can pull out something amazing...why should we stop them?

We shouldn't stop them. We should never impede a game designer from showing us their vision how they intend for us to see it. I love it when new rendering techniques are used in a good, artistic way, to be honest. For all it's failings and mediocrity, Half-Life 2 had some great lighting at times that really emulated the soft yellows that the sun is known to cast across our world, which in turn made the game look fabulous. What irks me about emerging technologies is that we often take too much time trying to put them into games and study the rendering techiques themself rather than studying how we can use them before we have a chance to use it in a good way, such as improving the quality and art direction of the game. By the time someone has used such technology to good effect, the graphics are either dated or the next big thing is on its way.

That is what bothers me about games of today and the technologies we have available. When technology should be making art direction easier on the designer, it is in fact making it harder, becase a designer more often than not has to rush in feature x because it's the latest thing without learning first how to use it properly. Not to mention how much more work new graphical techniques need to have put into them. I sometimes wish the industry would slow down with its graphical progress so that designers could try to make full use of what is available to them to really make their games look good artistically. Sure, graphics might suffer if we don't release a new video card every six months, but art and game design could flourish. Unfortunately, that will never happen.

Games with good art direction are very rare these days, and it disappoints me that it has to be that way.

I can't think of any game that I -really- like that didn't have some striking visuals at the time, and some incredibly clever tricks in the name of rendering.

I am the same way, strangely. I've noticed that sometimes even older games still impress me with how they were able to pull something off, and most games in the past had very good art direction, such as some of the examples you describe. That is why I believe I am still able to play older games, because I am still able to appreciate what the designers tried to do. That hard work and dedication is why I appreciate older games so much. They might not have had the best graphics or they can't compare now, but damnit if they didn't try to make things look good, and have the art in the game actually be quality rather than have a photoshoped metal texture that took all of 5 minutes to make.

I beg to differ in what Doom 3 feels like. It never became frustrating for me to fight in the dark, and yes, I argue that the unified lighting system did wonders for that game. I prefer games with far more brain into them, even in 'mindless' FPSs, and there's many things of Doom 3 I don't like. I also don't really like the stencil shadows and their glaring edges without penumbras, but I had loads of fun and enjoyed the visual execution of the game just fine. I also understand that prettier unified lighting systems are some way off yet.

I admit fighting in the dark didn't really bother me either. However, I could see how it would irk someone or make the game more frustrating for a person who doesn't appreciate the atmosphere of the game and just wants to play, which is why I spoke out against it. I really think id did something special with Doom 3. That game is one of the few examples I can think of where new rendering techniques are put to good use and where the textures aren't just using a pixel shader, but taking advantage of one. Yes, I know this goes against what I've said earlier, but I'm not going to argue against good art direction, atmosphere, and presentation, which is something Doom 3 had in spades. Gameplay could have been better, but it suited and pleased me fine, which is what matters.

So it should be a blurry texture or a brown polygon? If the game doesn't take advantage of it's sound propagation system to echo/reverb samples to alert or raise the awareness of idling enemies (because it doesn't matter, because they couldn't code it, because there was no time, because they're stupid), that means the shotgun should be the sound dude saying "pow...ka-chuk-chk, plip plip plip" over the mic?

That's not quite what I mean. I'm not saying they shouldn't take advantage of new rendering techniques for the sake of art or making a game look good, but that they shouldn't just put it into the game just 'cause it's the thing to do. A regular, relatively hires wood texture looks fine even without HDR or whatever, even if it looks rather plain, and so it should suffice just fine, rather than haphazardly putting a pixel shader ontop of it just for shits and giggles. This is why new technology bothers me more than anything else. Half the time shaders aren't even used artistically but just because they can be used, which I think defeats the purpose of having something like that available to designers.

Pleasing your producer lets you stay in your job, the one game designers love. Selling more units gives you more creative freedom, because you're accomplished and influential. You must factor in commercial viability because they're trying to eat and feed their kids in the process too. If producers are tight-ass, neanderthals with no clear concept of all the amazing gameplay ideas that could be adopted, it's not really some dude's fault that managed to code a pretty skin shader, right?

I agree, it's not the shader coder's fault for making the shader, but the people who don't know how to use it putting it in their game.

Simulate me soft shadows, in such way that there is no artifacting over time, it doesn't bleed into the air while looking at really steep angles, and it accounts for self shadowing. It can be very downsampled, but I want it not to jag as the projection makes it reach far away from the light source, relying on more sampling for penumbra.
If you can do that at 30 fps at 800x600 in targeted hardware I'll shut up.

I've seen bump mapping and dynamic lighting atleast 5 or 6 years before Doom 3 had it, so I know it's more than possible, it just won't look as good as it does today. As for soft shadows and other techniques being emulated, give it some time. If someone can program a shader to simulate the effect to begin with, another program can make one from scratch that will work just fine, even if he has to cut corners. The art is more important than the execution in some cases, as a painter with decent enough quality paint, tools and canvas to get by will still paint.

If you really think games graphics five years ago looked fine enough to warrant not do anything about them for five years more, up to the present, I think I might just step down from my upside-down oranges crate and go do something else.

I think graphics five years ago actually did look just fine. I mean, I'm still playing Deus Ex, System Shock 2, and other games from around that time now. To describe what I just said better, I believe if a company wants to make a game that uses graphics from around 2000, then they can do so. I'm not going to dismiss the game or give it a rating of 5 or so, like some game magazines are known to do, just because technically the game isn't up to par. If the game plays fine and I can get by with the graphics they give me, I'm fine. Sure, if I was rating the game, the graphics category would be scored rather low, but I wouldn't tilt the score in such a way that the overall rating suffers for it. I also wouldn't rate a game higher overall just because it uses the latest technology, like has been done with Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 in some cases.

I am the gamer that, amidst the killing and spookery of a slaughtered fort, cooks his own pies in Arx Fatalis to stay alive.
I am the gamer that patiently switches from one lockpick to the other in Thief 2, waiting maybe even as much as 6, 8 minutes, listening to footsteps before proceeding.
I am the gamer that in Deus Ex reads every newspaper and random console.
I am the gamer that in Morrowind adopts a house and populates a shelf with interesting books brought from the most strange of necromantic towers and dwemmer cities. And I try to keep some fashion in my arrangement of books.

I know most of the stuff I thrive upon doens't really attract many many gamers. It's a shame really, because perhaps the games I seek will only become feasible and popular in fifteen years time. But then again all of the games I mentioned today have sold quite well, in the end, so I can't say I am the exception to the case. I cannot attribute an elitist approach over the "dumb gamers out there", because there are many, many many people interested in more inmersion, and enough of us going for full-fledged level of inmersion.

I am the same kind of person. I love actually being a part of the world rather than just plowing through it. I remember taking time out of the game just to make pies for me to eat and "enjoy" in Arx Fatalis, I can remember just strolling around in Deus Ex investigating things and seeing what I could do or where I could go, and I know there were times in Theif 2 where I would be so cautious I could actually hear every footstep, mine or not, or feel extremely pleased when my sleuthing and attention to detail payed off allowing me to loot treasure from some nobleman. In fact, I think there should be more games that make a player want to do that. Most games don't even give you a chance to be part of the world enough to flush a toilet or read a book. Designers, it seem, would have you rather play through the game rather than be a part of it.

I would reply to the rest of what you had said, but I really don't have a response. I think you summed things up well enough that I can agree with you rather than disagree. You make some very good points, and I am rethinking my initial statements. However, I still think we need to focus on art and gameplay first before we simply try to use every technique out there because it's new. Just because you know how to make a brush stroke doesn't mean you should focus on only stroking the brush and simply continue brushing the same way because it's the popular thing to do, but rather take the time to improve your stroke each time the brush touches the canvas so your painting is better over all, rather than just pretty and deep enough to keep your audience for now until you learn a new technique. That is what seperates a mere painting from a classic or timeless one.