When will video games look as good as real life?
I think we're making lots of progress over the years, 2 perfect examples would be The original Half-Life in 1998 and Half-Life 2: Lost Coast of the year 2005.
But I think all the games are FAR from looking as real as real life.
How many years down the road will they come up with game engines and build PCs powerful enough that can simulate actual life graphics, physics, and details?
But I think all the games are FAR from looking as real as real life.
How many years down the road will they come up with game engines and build PCs powerful enough that can simulate actual life graphics, physics, and details?
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Because all of the aforementioned activities can get really, really, tedious. Drawing pimples on Susie's face and animating mites on grass will get old fast.
-drasnor
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/playstation-three8.htm just click on the titles below and you'l get a summary of the game and some screenshots. I cant wait for vision grand turismo, and devil may cry 4 looks like a fun game too.
What? How can you even say this yet? I pretty much doubt they've got a fully working, street-ready PS3. And remember the Xbox360's previews? They looked great, too - but they were all pre-rendered. If the PS3's in-game screenshots really ARE as good as that Gran Turismo, then I will abandon 10 years of Nintendo faithfulness and buy one.
I'm pretty sure that Nintendo can count on me, though.
And yes there are working PS3's, except they've been having trouble with the blu ray drives(beta's i guess you would call them, but not street ready). I've heard from multiple sources that discs have actually melted
Characters are made to be appealing to the eye, you have to remember their average target audience.
Your partly correct, but no.
Most of the CG you see pre-rendered is done by a CPU, or a farm of normal computers. It's all software rendered and thus limited in speed by the processor. A processor as many of you know does not computer a games 3D as fast, or anywhere near as fast as a GPU.
I would say in the next 10 years, we'll see games that are pretty damned lifelike, but limited still to scalability, it really matters on the type of game being made.
Interestingly that may not be such a problem, have a look at upcoming games like Spore and to a lesser extent Oblivion. A lot of the graphics work is done mathematically rather than um...'manually'. For example in Spore you can design creatures, if you give your creature (for example) 3 legs the game will work out, on the fly, how this creature will walk and then generate animations based on that. according to people who've seen the game in action the animations are as good as anything a human animator could come up with. In Oblivion (next title in the Elder scrolls series) the forests and landscape are generated by the game on the fly, and judging by the screenshots and video's I've seen it's one of the best looking games ever.
As to the 'computers aren't powerful enough' line of reasoning, look back at a top end machine from 10 years ago and compare it's rendering power with a dual core, Sli monster of today...and then consider that most games are only taking advatage of half the power that a dual core machine has to offer. once more games start taking advantage of multiple cores we're going to see a huge boost in performance. I think we can expect to see games becoming indistinguishable from reality within the next 15-20 years at a conservative estimate.
Apply that to creating the same kind of CGI for a video game and nobody will be able to afford to buy one.
That probably includes time to model and texture, add special effects, etc... not just render time. Note that while a game gets developed, the engine, and art are generally worked on at the same time, with multiple teams. Environment Artists, CHaracter Artists, Texture Artists, etc... plus programers. Each team working on their own things working toward a common goal that is seen before hand. Games can take 5 years or more to build, some great games can even take less especially with an already made engine thus allowing for more money to flow towards the art development. Plus with a pre-built engine you know it's limitations and work with them instead of having them work against you.
Some games look realistic now if you ask me, the real problem I am seeing is lack of texture due to lack of memory on systems. Give HL2 twice the polygonal count and texture size, with the HDR and those new Motion Blur techniques on a system 5 years from now and I bet you will find some people finding screenshots of it rendered from real time and wouldn't notice it's faked unless someone pointed it out, or at the very least a Production Quality scene from a movie.
I would like them to find a way of having grass rendered in real time, I don't see why they haven't done this already using it.
Actually most Mil-Sims used by the government look like crap and are a decade old. Only the flight simulators they use in the USAF are really up to par with what's on the actual gaming market. The military is more concerned with physical accuracy and effect than visual pleasure.
Ohh yeah the military sims I have seen look like they were made back in the early 90's, with grayscale textures and vertex colors
Mathematics can never precisely mimic real life, in that there are too many variables to account for in lighting, textures, transparencies, visual accuity and other such factors. It'll always "Close, but not quite." When we can define the world around us by a series of numbers, I'll jump, I swear it.
I DONT NO WHO TOLD YOU THAT BUT ITS A BUNCH OF BULL****. I HAVE USED MAYA 7 AND ALTHOUGH IM NOT A DEVELOPER OR ANYTHING, I WENT TROUGH TUTORIALS AND STUFF TO LEARN BASICS, AND I CREATED THE BULLET EFFECT SEEN IN THE MATRIX (OKAY SO I ONLY HAD ONE BULLET AND NO BACKROUND OR NEO). IT TOOK ME ABOUT A MONTH TO DO, BUT YOU HAVE UNDERSTAND THAT I WAS READING TUTORIALS, WORKING ON A COMPAQ PRESARIO WITH NO GPU (!!!!!) AND I WAS WORKING BY MYSELF. IF YOU DONT BELIEVE ME, LOOK UP TUTORIALS FOR MAYA AND SEE HOW EASY IT REALLY IS. (FOR THOSE WHO DONT NO MAYA IS WHAT THEY USED TO MAKE THE BULLET SCENE, AND SHREK, ICE AGE, ETC). AND I ALSO AGREE WIHT Thrax IN TAHT MATH CAN NEVER LIVE UP TO THE REAL WORLD THINGS BECAUSE THERES SIMPLY TOO MANY THINGS TO WORK OUT. AND ALSO THE SAME AS HIM, THE DAY WE CAN DEFINE THE WORLD AROUND US WITHA SET OF NUMBERS ILL JUMP.
But you do STAND sir. Is that CORRECT?
MUAHAHAHH!
Part of the issue is that there are many things to figure out an once and there are bottle necks, 10 pounds in a 5 pound bag.
If we let the CPUs figure where things are, PPUs figure out how they interact and GPUs give them the look we will be a lot closer.
One big remining issue is one that also impacts HDTV. Which parts of the image need how much resolution? Stuff that is far away or moving needs less detail, even with real iamges. Managing this effect is not straightforward.
That's called LoD(Level of Detail). It's actually been around for a while, lots of tricks like this are being put to use in games to make them more life-like. So the question of this thread being when will games "look" as good as real life is not as hard as it seems. Our eyes have been measured for something like an equivalent resolution of 8000x16000, and we're already pretty close if you think about it. A monitor usually is capable of 1600x1200, and it's not taking up most of your eyesight. So with that said it is pretty close. Maybe when we hit 3000x1500 you won't even be able to see the pixels and we probably won't need AA anymore ehh? Depending on the size of the monitor of course and my prediction is based on a 19" monitor.
LoD is a great thing though, you can see it alot in games too, take a tree for example. Up close it may be several hundred poly's in count, but if it's far off it could be a SINGLE POLYGON with an image of itself. Then the in between so the farther you go the less poly's it has until it's either 1 polygon, or out of sight all together(view distance).
Of course you don't need to calculate polygons you can't see either becuase they arn't in your view area.
Texture wise we're mostly limited by memory size, but with procedural texures coming around we are needing alot more processing. A texture that has infinite depth is a nice texture, but comes at a nice price as well. Requires less memory in some cases, but makes up for it in processing. Here comes PPU help if it comes to the PC soon enough and people code for that.
Normal maps, glow effects, LoD, view distance, hardware acceleration, and so much more coming our way soon. As I mentioned before, I doubt it'll be even 10 years from now when we'll see "life-like" quality in games.
Why?! Becuase if it looks real and acts real, how the hell will you know it's not real?
One more example.... a solar system. I've tried building a solar system in 3D Studio max one time, TO SCALE. OMG that was a bad idea, learned something neat though. You don't need to make it to scale in the computer world, too much time consuming crap. You could just make it "general" and no one will ever notice. EVE-Online doesn't do the galaxy to scale, but when your warping around the systems they feel HUGE. "Feel" is relative, and the point I made earlier still applies.
Time and a place for everything.
hes kidding once again....sarcasm, tough concept for some to grasp.