I don’t understand why developers and publishers aren’t prioritizing spectacle games with simple graphics like TABS, mount and blade, or similar. Use modern processing power to just throw tons of shit on screen, make it totally chaotic and confusing. Huge battles are super entertaining.
The dream of the '10s/20s game industry was VR. Hyper-realistic settings were supposed to supplant the real world. Ready Player One was what big development studios genuinely thought they were aiming for.
They lost sight of video games as an abstraction and drank too much of their own cyberpunk kool-aid. So we had this fixation on Ray Tracing and AI-driven NPC interactions that gradually lost sight of the gameplay loop and the broader iterative social dynamics of online play.
That hasn’t eliminated development in these spheres, but it has bifricated the space between game novelty and game immersion. If you want the next Starcraft or Earthbound or Counterstrike, you need to look towards the indie studios and their low-graphics / highly experimental dev studios (where games like Stardew Valley and Undertale and Balatro live). The AAA studios are just turning out 100 hour long movies with a few obnoxious gameplay elements sprinkled in.
The improvement levels are the same amount they used to be. It’s just that adding 100mhz to a 100mhz processor doubles your performance, adding 100mhz to a modern processor adds little in comparison as a for instance.
Well, that’s what Moore’s Law was for. The processing power does increase massively over each generation. It’s just that at this point better graphics are less noticeable. There is not much difference to the eye between 100.000 and a million or more polygons.
We’ve basically reached the top. Graphics fidelity is just down to what the artists do with it.
Go watch a high budget animated movie (think Pixar or Disney) and come back when real time rendered graphics look like that.
Yea games look good, but real time rendering is still not as good as pre rendered (and likely will never be). Modern games are rife with clipping, and fakery.
If you watch the horizon forbidden West intro scene (as an example), and look at the details, how hair falls on characters shoulders, how clothing moves in relation to bodies, etc, and compare it to something like inside out 2, it’s a world of difference.
If we can pre render it, then in theory it’s only a matter of time before we can real time render it.
If we can pre render it, then in theory it’s only a matter of time before we can real time render it.
Not really, because pre renders are often optimized to only look good from one side. If you try to make a 3D model out of it and render that in real time in the game world, it might look ugly or weird from another angle.
Any given frame is just looking at something from one side though, this is the case for video games as well and it’s part of the reason why real time rendering is so much slower. It’s an art and game direction challenge to make things look good however you want to not a technical limitation (in the sense of, you can make a video game look like a Pixar movie does today, it’s just going to render at days per frame instead of frames per second)
There isn’t really a conceptual difference between rendering a frame with the intent to save it and later play it back, and rendering a frame with the intent to display it as soon as it’s ready and dispose of it.
Toy story 1 took days to render a single frame, now it could be rendered on a single home GPU at 24 fps no problem, which would be real time rendering.
To clarify my first paragraph. The challenge is not that it is impossible to render a video game with movie like graphics it’s that the level of effort is higher because you don’t have the optimizations, and so art direction needs to account for that.
As far as considering unexpected behaviors, that is technically only a concern in psuedo-nondeterministic environments (e.g. dynamic physics rendering) where the complexity and amount of potential outcomes is very high and hard to account for. This is a related issue but not really the same one, and it is effectively solved with more horsepower, the same as rendering.
I think the point you were making is that potentially, artistic choices that are deliberately made can’t always be done in real time, which I could agree with. Something like ‘oh this characters hair looks weird the way it falls, let’s try it again and tweak this or that.’ That is awarded by the benefit of trial and error, and can only be replicated real time by more robust physics systems.
Ultimately the medium is different, and while they are both technically deterministic, something like a game has potential for unwanted side effects. However, psuedo-nondeterminism isn’t a prerequisite for a game. The example that comes to mind are real time rendered cutscenes. They aren’t fundamentally different from a movie in that regard, and most oddities in them are the result of bugs in the rendering engine rather than technical impossibilities. Similar bugs exist in 3d animation software, it’s just that Hollywood movies have the budget and attention to detail to fix them, or the luxury to try again.
I’ll end with, if we have the Pixar server farm sufficient hardware, there is nothing that says they couldn’t render Luca or whatever in real time or even faster than real time.
Star Wars: Racer Revenge is probably the best racing game I’ve played to-date. It’s very similar to, and often confused with, the N64 podracing game, but it’s way more polished, and the driving physics are chef’s-kiss perfect. Like, the N64 game, the pod and two engines all move together as one unit; basically a car racing game with a pod racer skin. The PS2’s Racer Revenge actually feels like you’re in a pod that’s being pulled by two distinct engines.
Try playing in 1st-person view and set the controls (if you have a PS2 controller) so the left joystick controls the left pod and right joystick controls the right pod - so to turn left for example, you’d pull back on the left stick to brake the left pod, and push forward on the right to accelerate the right pod; since they’re tethered together, the right one arches around the left a bit, and it pulls the pod to the left. It’s harder to play that way vs the usual ‘press X to accelerate’ mechanic, but after the first couple laps you’ll have the hang of it, and it feels so satisfying.
Unfortunately, the last time I tried to run a rom of this game, it did NOT emulate well, to the point of being unplayable. That was probably at least 10 years ago though, so hopefully advancements since then mean it won’t be an issue for you; but heads up.
What’s that FPS someone made to be as small of a file as possible? It’s like a Quake rip-off, but the game runs as a single executable and is small enough to barely take up the space of a floppy disk (like just a few kilobytes)?
Bowties have been out of fashion for so long they just look silly most of the time. That seems like exactly what you’d want for a character who’s supposed to be whimsical.
Also a necktie doesn’t go with a tophat. For reasons I can’t explain, that kind of incongruity looks more accidental than it does whimsical.
The neck tie is less crowded. The bow tie with the hat and the ducks bill has a lot going on all in the same area. Maybe if the bow tie was lower or overall there was a little more space, it’d work better.
You probably forgot to pick that key up on level 1. Try backtracking 2 hours to look for it. In case you can’t find it, it’s clear and shaped like water.
Gunman Chronicles is unironically great. Granted, I love games with ludicrous numbers of weapons, but the fact that the weapons have a bazillion firing modes is fun.
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