Tuesday, February 15, 2005

This Is Where The Tech Is

Steven Pool's Trigger Happy mentions companies that make their living programming physics engines to sell to video game firms. It gives the example of MathEngine, and mentions that MathEngine often has to tweak its work to make it less realistic but more conducive to gameplay. This mirror's James Cameron's comment (found on one of the supplements on the Terminator SE DVD) that you cannot mathematically determine what works in art.

Today, FileFront has a new article, F! True Project Story: The Havoc Engine, which profiles another one of these companies, Havoc. A previous version of their engine powers Half Life 2, which is one of the most amazingly realistic games I've ever played. Now, having released a new version of their engine, they intend to someday model the movement of hair and clothes.

What about simpler 2D games? Simpler? Only by degrees. Joystiq has a new entry, See how a computer thinks, and run away screeching, reporting on just how many things a computer considers when making a single chess move. It's mind-blowing.

This is where the state of the art is.

posted by Dugan Chen at 4:35 PM

5 Comments:

Classic is the way to go. I've always kept up with the latest in GB and the development recently has been the best thing since the cathode ray tube.
Classic games being rereleased has made gaming fun again for someone who has been gaming since before they can remember and nostalgia mixed with excitement over new things in classic games is awesome.
3d and photorealism are nice but the interface needs to be upgraded more than anything else, the remotes used in old games just won't fit for the games to come, the next step has to be taken before reality can be reached.
Which is why I love to hearken back to simpler times, when a control was realistically all the interface needed to do what needed doing and games were simple and fun, leaving more time to appreciate rather than be overwhelmed.

By Anonymous Anonymous, at 11:17 PM  

I loved Ultima 1 (at least until the space battles). I've now bought more games for my GBA than I have for any console I've owned. Good gameplay is good gameplay, and it's easier to focus on that when you aren't distracted by FMV's, 3D modelling, or waiting for the programmers to finish that cutting-edge engine so that you can start the level designs the night before the game goes gold. Game Boy Advance games are (probably) the only new 2D games being made commercially, for extremely limited hardware, and yet (or because of that) many of them are so good.

Photo-realistic games are around the corner. Half Life 2 is more than half way there. Perhaps, as Kalendorf predicts, the games will take advantage of that to become _very_ cinematic. Or perhaps, as Scott P argues, a revolution in design is needed to take advantage of photo-realism. Only time will tell. All that advancing technology does, in the end, is give the designers more to work with.

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