procedural-synthesis

Everything from Console, PC & Handheld. This is the place your none On-line Graphic related play things go.
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kaos
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Post by kaos » Wed Jul 12, 2006 11:48 pm

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Super Goat Weed
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Post by Super Goat Weed » Thu Jul 13, 2006 2:59 am

definatly. the only argument against it is rather stupid, that people wouldn't buy the latest installment of a game because the graphics would improve themselves.

that's just stupid

asside from that, eventually a game will just max out. Think of it this way: Design a SNES game with that idea in mind. just how much can you improve a sprite whout having to re-design the game itself? eventually new ideas will come around that make the older ones obsolete. That's the nature of the industry. Designing games this way will only delay that process somewhat and give a game more replay value. i don't see the harm in that. most people i know that buy the latest installment of a series do it because it's different, not because the graphics are better. this is especially true with sports games where new athletes join and old ones retire every year.

I think a better argument would be will it give some gamers an edge over others? This is already a problem with some people. For example: will playing halo out of a top of the line widescreen plasma TV with the highest res possible and surround sound speakers give me an edge over the poor sap that has to run his xbox through a madcatz adapter so it will work on his coaxael cable imput and one mono speaker on his 15 inch TV? I think so, and in games like this, if they do support online multiplayer, will the guy with the newer PC suddenly gain a staggering edge over the competition simply because he can afford to upgrade his equipment every 6 months? That would certainly piss me off, and would discourage me from buying the game if i couldn't afford to dump a shitload of money into new equipment all the time.

Will every company adopt it? probaby not. and some games even now are designed with that philosophy (ie: i can play games like Oblivion and F.E.A.R with the graphic turned way down, then when i get better equipement, turn up the res and activate all the shiny bells and whistles) Especially when games are moving more toward console and farther from PC. Basicly, i think it's good for some games, and not for others, and designers will use it as they see fit. Just another new toy to play with if it works
Last edited by Super Goat Weed on Thu Jul 13, 2006 3:08 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Chewi
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Post by Chewi » Thu Jul 13, 2006 10:09 am

I think the idea is being vastly oversimplified but there is some truth in it. I can give you a very basic example too. Imagine an image of a circle that is 16x16 pixels. Now imagine if I blow it up to 1600x1600 pixels. It would look really pixelated, right? But why should it? The computer knows how to draw a smooth looking 1600x1600 pixel circle so why didn't it? The reason is that it didn't see the image as a circle but merely as some arbitrary image. If it had known it was a circle, it would have enlarged it properly. This is what is known as raster graphics vs vector graphics. It's the reason why most Flash movies still look great when you view them in a really big window - they use vector graphics. Unfortunately web browsers are only just starting to support them (the SVG format) and as usual, IE is lagging behind.

To a certain extent, this exists in games already. Most games allow you to change the screen resolution. Suddenly everything looks sharper. But that can only take things so far. What they're talking about would take it much further.

My 3D graphics lecturer actually did the reverse when he did some work at Codemasters for Colin McCrae rally. They wanted the in-games cars to look as much like the cars in the promotional images as possible. The PlayStation wasn't going to get very close but my lecturer developed some software whereby they could still use the same models at the base. The really smooth car models would gradually be degraded and degraded automatically until they worked at an acceptable speed on the PlayStation. Obviously all PlayStations are the same so they ran the process beforehand.
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Mik
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Post by Mik » Fri Jul 14, 2006 8:53 am

I think the arctile is typical headline attention grbbing, mentions nothing about frame rate/ gameplay or anything else.

that picture doesn't look all that great imo.
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