In 6 years time...

[Admin_Winnuting]

Do you think in 6 or 7 years HL2 will look like what HL is to us today?
I really hope it does, that means games in 6years will be... CRAZYNESSLY GOOD!

 

[WhiteZero]

Of course it will. Graphics engines will continue to grow, just as they always have.

 

[wilka91]

yep, I think so

we'll be like "damn, this game looks like crap

DX9 is so lame compared to DX19!!!

 

[KurtCobain]

Lol ye, althought by that time we will just be settelling down from HL3

 

[01000101]

I remember back in the PS1 days, I went into a video game store and asked what the release date of the PS2 was. Two guys overheard me and they said "your just wasting your money buying that, the graphics can't get much better then what they are now" I just kind of laughed and asked for the release date. The point of my boring story is - in six more years, I think we're going to have life like graphics that look very real. At least, I hope so.

 

[dusk]

I doubt it...graphics will be better, but there won't be the kind of improvement there was from HL to HL2. Diminishing returns and all that good stuff...

 

[KurtCobain]

I doubt it...graphics will be better, but there won't be the kind of improvement there was from HL to HL2. Diminishing returns and all that good stuff...

I think there could be , because as PC's get better aswell they can keep up with the GFX etc etc.

 

[Beserker]

Hardly lifelike but incredibly close to it....thinks about all the shinyness! @_@

 

[Wraithen]

A good way to gauge future graphics is to look at current pre-rendered CGI. That's where we're headed in the next generational leap... though that's more a console observation; console's leap generations every couple of years, PC's have a generational crawl that's just more constant.

But look at the resident evil games, the "great" cut scenes from that game would later become the in game graphics of code veronica, more or less. Same with the final fantasy series... sort of.

But having said that, a lot more games are using in engine cut scenes, so this whole theory is bullshit, and you're not gonna get back the time you wasted reading this thread

 

[Gorgon]

yep, I think so

we'll be like "damn, this game looks like crap

DX9 is so lame compared to DX19!!!

for fact this is the last and the final DX version.

there is no more DX coming in the future.

Microsoft are going for XNA:

http://www.microsoft.com/xna/



edit: sory m8, this is for xbox, give me few mins, I will post the PC version name of the xna SDK type

 

[Gorgon]

after DX9.0, DirectX Graphics is no more. In name only. Microsoft's next set of core presentation and 3D APIs are now under the umbrella of Windows Graphics Foundation and Avalon. Microsoft will still rely on DirectX in name for the rest of the core components, but the graphics API is now under a new name. Look out for WGF 1.0 compatibility on the back of that next generation graphics card's box

yeah

 

[f|uke]

you're not gonna get back the time you wasted reading this thread

God damnit, hes right!!

If you want to look into the future, just check out the Unreal 3 engine. And yes, even those graphics will look fake five to six years from now.

In an interview, one of the U3 designers said that game GFX should reach a point where level of detail matches the ability of the human eye in about 20 years. Cant find the article now though.

 

[Wraithen]

I actually meant to say post, not thread. I'm actually all for speculative threads over the future of video gaming. They should make a TV show about it, you know, one that DOESN'T involve some uber-geek with a moustache talking enthusiastically about how we'll be having sex with our computers in a few years time.

 

[eiric]

I really hope we get to the point where computer games aren't photorealistic, I want my games to look like games. Altough I don't mind games looking like Doom 3 (but with bigger places instead of those boring corridors). The shadowing in D3 was great, altough that games missed alot of stuff that would have made it good (a plot). Anyway, I just hope they keep games as games.

 

[Solver]

It's going to get even better graphically, but not this fast. Doom3 already showed that it has no need for pre-rendered cutscenes becaues the in-game ones there look as good as any pre-rendered. Now, imagine us having future graphics, with great shadowing as in Doom3, excellent HL2 style textures, facial animation much better than even that... it will be sweet .

 

[Wraithen]

want a problem with photo realistic graphics? Well imagine Manhunt with really old graphics... it's basically be pacman. no one would get in an uproar over pacman. Now imagine if the graphics were completely true to real life.

 

[AntiAnto]

It will grow exponentially.

 

[BrimStone04]

The only game i really thought looked real was nfl 2k on dreamcast, and now comparing taht to games its just incredible, i am glad to live in these times of technology to see what we are capable of

 

[Asuka]

Do you think in 6 or 7 years HL2 will look like what HL is to us today?
I really hope it does, that means games in 6years will be... CRAZYNESSLY GOOD!

In a lot less. 1st game to use Unreal 3.0 engine (Makes any game coming out now look like crap) will come out in 2006. So in about 2 years we will think hl2 gfx are crap.

 

[Cypher19]

Doom3 already showed that it has no need for pre-rendered cutscenes becaues the in-game ones there look as good as any pre-rendered.

Actually, due to the fairly low poly counts on the characters (i.e. their heads in close-ups) and the bad shadows (I USED to be a fan of shadow volumes, but they do NOT look good on low-poly characters. Plus, why did self-shadowing have to be turned off?! Hasn't iD ever heard of depth biasing?!) I found Doom3's cutscenes to be fairly poor. I'm still waiting until 2006 for real-time cutscenes to look good.

 

[ecchi]

Current games still aren't at the level of Toy Story. We have a while to go.

 

[Platinum]

"we aint seen nothing yet ..."

 

[DigitalAssassin]

It will grow exponentially.

Ha! No my friend, hardware improvements have slowed to a crawl (especially in the CPU department). You can expect graphics quality to go up very slowly for the next 4-5 years. Texture sizes will get larger, models will have higher polygon counts, particle systems will improve, HL2-level physics will become the norm... but it's all going to take a long time.

 

[silverstealth89]

the gmae will be ten times more real and you will be able to interact with everything meaning like Virtual Reality (lol i hope)

 

[Ownzed]

No, I don't think so. Because HL2 will be one of the best games ever and idk if graphics can get too much better.

 

[f|uke]

Ha! No my friend, hardware improvements have slowed to a crawl (especially in the CPU department). You can expect graphics quality to go up very slowly for the next 4-5 years. Texture sizes will get larger, models will have higher polygon counts, particle systems will improve, HL2-level physics will become the norm... but it's all going to take a long time.

Still it grows exponenially. Moores law claims CPU speed doubles every 18 months. Even if we're no longer hitting that mark, doubling every 2 years is still an exponential gain. GPUs have been accelerating much faster the Moores law, but even if that drop off, they'll probably still continue to push ahead. Add these factors on top of new technologies (like U3's mesh maps), and GFX/game abilities will continue to make sweeping strides for many years.

HL2 physics are neat, but its not an all encompasing physics engine. Theres still more to be accomplished in the reality department as well.

 

[Ames]

Check out what Gabe Newell says about XNA here..

http://www.microsoft.com/xna/multimedia.aspx

On the PC we have tools like HLSL. On Xbox, we have tools like PIX. These are both really powerful, and XNA combines the power of the PC and the power of the console into a best-of-breed platform.

 

[iamaelephant]

Actually, due to the fairly low poly counts on the characters (i.e. their heads in close-ups) and the bad shadows (I USED to be a fan of shadow volumes, but they do NOT look good on low-poly characters. Plus, why did self-shadowing have to be turned off?! Hasn't iD ever heard of depth biasing?!) I found Doom3's cutscenes to be fairly poor. I'm still waiting until 2006 for real-time cutscenes to look good.

Yeah, I'm sure you know more about rendering engines than John Carmack and the boys at id. You people never cease to amaze me.

Anyway, yes games will continue to look better and better as time goes by. It's a trend that has been going on since the dawn of computer graphics and will never stop. I think the next few years we will start to see improvements in things that are in motion. For example, much more complex physics engines capable of blending animations with phyiscal reactions (yeah they can do it now, but only to a certain extent). We will also see lighting and shadowing engines improve greatly, with blurred shadows and some very realistic lighting effects.

One thing that I think will happen is a more subtle use of fancy rendering effects. For example, have you ever, in real life, seen as many shiny floors as you see in CS:S? Those sorts of thing will improve the realistic look dramatically.

Of course this is all of my opinion based on my extremely limited knowledge of rendering engines (and I do mean extremely limited) and my observations of how graphics engines have been evolving in the last 9 or 10 years.

 

[Eon Blue]

I still think Day of Defeat looks pretty good. The graphics match it's environment well.

 

[Yogibbear]

Isn't this whole it will keep improving thing sorta obvious?? Hm.... it would be dumb if there was a limit to how developed we could become..... i mean there must be a limit to how technologically advanced humans can become in general... but you'd think that'd be millions of years away.....

 

[ecchi]

I really like the use of "exponentially" in this thread... particularly

doubling every 2 years is still an exponential gain

But in any case, it really is the subtle things that'll continue to advance and will actually make the biggest difference as time goes on. Getting facial animations just right and giving limbs proper weights would make even a low-poly model look better than a lot of the stuff out there right now. Higher resolutions will also help a lot as it reduces the need for antialiasing, which can make things blurry.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

Alright first of all, do you people really want photorealistic graphics and all that? I for one don't. Then the line between reality and games could just become blurred. I mean imagine a game like counter-strike where everything looks so god damn real and BAM you just blew a hole through a guys chest and skull. How freaking tastic eh? I mean no more would I consider that a game. I want my games to still look like games, sure take them up some notches but photorealism is a real touchy situation. Plus remember guys, just because an engine is able to produce photo-realistic frames, doesn't mean it always will.

Do you guys realize hwo much you consider "normal"? I mean honestly you don't think about such things, because they happen automatically, but then you want people to describe everything in code to make it just appear photorealistic. To make photorealism you need to have a high-enough poly count where you won't get jaggies or anything from smooth objects, maybe there will eventually be an alternative to polygons one day, and then you need to get shadowing working as that is a key part. Sure Doom3 could dynamically light things, but it had very hard straight shadows, it was imrpessive that it did it all dynamically though. He knows the lighting isn't perfect, far from it he says, but he's gonna start working on the next one soon. Oh and then you got the texture blending and like rendering of what you see. It must all match together perfectly and have the right glossiness and such.


Now I know you have all had those wierd moments where you've seen something and gone "Whoa that looks wierd!" and you know what? If that was in a game, you would consider that an error in the game and not be photorealistic.

We can already achieve photorealism right now....

http://www.beans-magic.com/

There's also one at Alias.com I believe doing a quiz to see if you can distinguish 8 photos and find which ones are real and which one are CG... Can't find it right now.


I think in the next generation, we will just see more polygons and then start to see more things be truely dynamic for some truely entertaining gameplay experiences. I mean like no more compiling maps and all that, nothing will be compiled before-hand, everything will just be handled in-game to make sure that it maintains that balance.



Eon Blue you also bring up a good point. Each game has it's own design style. Would Half-Life 2 be as cool if it were back on Doom technology? Most likely not, or what if Half-Life 2 was using Far Cry? Nah wouldn't feel the same... Yup, wouldn't "feel" the same.... Every team of artists and designers have their own style of working... Like how you can look at paintings and say "That looks like a Picasso", you can say that about 3D artists' work if you study them long enough. A game doesn't need the next-next-gen graphics to be the best game out there, I thought Far Cry wasn't too fun, well it does add a big plus though to my books, but still if it had decent graphics for its day thats fine.




The hardware is another big problem. CPUs are just too damn hot and we have reached probably the top GHz we will have for commercial computers. If you have like a 4GHz processor, be happy as that will server you fora LONG time... Now Intel and AMD are working on multi-core solutions and others are working on technology so that all information on a computer is transferred through lightwaves and not through electricity (thus no heat) because heat is the major pain in the ass for CPUs and the like...

With GPU's, they were lagging behind the rest of things a bit but now they are catching back up (jsut keep doubling that memory) but then once they get like 1 gig of RAM they will just start getting just so damn expensive!

There are just soooo many problems for the future guys that unfortunatey I'm not all too knowledgeable about all of them, oh and I'm still drugged from my surgery and all so sorry if I made any like spelling mistakes or just plain didn't make sense... i really don't care right now...

 

[ecchi]

Athlon 64 processors aren't too hot, and they're the fastest around right now. A 2.2ghz A64 beats a 3.6ghz P4.

We're also discussing real-time graphics. Just because we can create photorealistic images with a modeling program doesn't mean we'll have real-time raytracing any time soon.

 

[antimatter]

and others are working on technology so that all information on a computer is transferred through lightwaves and not through electricity (thus no heat) because heat is the major pain in the ass for CPUs and the like...

Any interesting links to read about this?

 

[rammstein]

Still it grows exponenially. Moores law claims CPU speed doubles every 18 months.

Moores law states that transistor count will double:

http://www.intel.com/research/silicon/mooreslaw.htm

that does not mean exactly that performance will double exactly - more transistors does not mean more speed

 

[Rocketman9mm]

in a mag i subscribe to they said a US official around 100 years ago wanted to close the patent office because everything worth inventing had been thought of already.... how wrong he was. and who knows what the future holds? but I do think unless there is some major revolution in how visual media is presented I don't think there are going to be as great a leap in direct graphical improvements.

and ice eagle has a point, ya may not want it real -realistic the implications of that could be bad and the whole issue of "its making people desensitized to killing" all the more legitimate. its total bs now, but if you its the same thing as if you were really doing it...

 

[Ansur]

Moores law states that transistor count will double:

http://www.intel.com/research/silicon/mooreslaw.htm

that does not mean exactly that performance will double exactly - more transistors does not mean more speed

Moore's law has been +- good until now, but there will be a limit on the number of transistors.
They're looking into optical processors, which will probably fully alter both the law & improvements.

 

[Duracell]

I don't think it will age as badly, Half-life has aged a lot compared to Half-life 2. I don't think games that are released today will look as bad as Half-life does today. Games won't advance as much as they did in the last six years in the next six years. There isn't THAT much to improve on in some aspects of Half-life 2.

Look at the facial animations! they are great, the overall graphics can be imporved on but not that much...

To be quite honest, I don't want my games to be 100% photo realistic, I won't feel quite right shooting someone that pleas for his life just before I shot him in-between his perfect, photo realistic eyes.

 

[maxblack]

Once we get to life-like graphics (I say about 6-7 years) where to next?????


they can purely concentrate on GAMEPLAY

 

[Serial45]

to be honest, graphics will and can go a lot lot further.
We are getting closer to closer to the quality of photo realistic.
Yet we are so-so-so far away, being able to render photo realistic, is going to take more processing power than your average kray super computer.
We will get there one day its inevitible - but how long, no one knows.

I read an article recently from John Carmac, explaining that photo realism is near impossible on todays technology and the industry really would need to go back to the drawing board to reach this.