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HappySqurriel on 19 November 2007
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Words Of Wisdom said:
Avinash_Tyagi said:

Companies like Sony and MS only understand how to add in more power when they make a system, as the tech continues to advance, you may not get massive leaps in graphics, but costs inherent in programming the games would continue to rise gen after gen as games got larger and systems got harder to program for


Right now, innovation is turned toward things the player can visibly see.  This type of innovation is going to hit a wall in the near future.

After realizing that, innovation in this area will turn to how many effects can be overlayed much akin to what Halo 3 did.

After realizing that, innovation in this area will turn toward things the player cannot visibly see.  AI, large quantities of objects outside the player's view point..etc.  Imagine a game the size of Oblivion or Metroid Prime 3 with no loading screens and where every single level and area in the game is already primed and ready.

After this, games will hit their limit.  They will have the power to do everything the game designer wishes and do so both beautifully and at 60 fps (or whatever fps the designer chooses). 


These innovations depend both on time and cost-effectiveness.  Hardware moves forward and increases in power regardless of other factors however.  Programming costs will do as they have almost every generation.  Start high and slowly go down in cost as developers become more familiar with the system and its API.  Graphics and the like will go down in cost as the tools for creating such become more advanced.


Programming costs are really not an issue anymore, the real problem is the cost of producing artistic assets ...

"Back in the day" I used to make models for friends and mods in games like Unreal Tournament and Quake 3; at the time it would take me about 4 to 8 hours to create the model, 4 to 8 hours to produce a texture, and about an hour to skin it onto the existing animation. These were very simple models (usually 500 to 750 polygons) and the textures were also very simple (usually 128x128), and you usually were only looking for it to look somewhat like what people wanted.

Its been a few years since I did any modeling, but I have done some stuff (for pre-rendered scenes) which is similar in quality to what games are now using; it would take me a couple of weeks to produce a model, and a couple of weeks to produce a texture, at the quality level of these games.

This is why the 100 person development teams are made up of (approximately) 80% artists.

The reduction in development costs will come from developers producing libraries of content, dramatically improving development tools, and moving towards procedural development; but don't expect to move far beyond what we're already producing (in terms of graphics) in the near future. Ultimately, movies get away with such expensive content because they have massive budgets and a very limited scope (you don't have the ability to run on a street which is not in a scene).