Have we hit the technology wall?

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mogulus said:
I don't post here much, because rarely can I bring anything relevant to the table that hasn't already been said.

but...

technology walls don't actually exist. You see, once we get to a point that man power in designing levels, textures, etc is holding back the design of said game, which quite frankly, as you guys point out, is happening right now, the next step will be undertaken. That step is what we call "proceedural design"

the idea is that eventually we won't have to "draw" or photograph each texture or object in the enviroment, but rather, we'd program the game with paremeters to generate the enviroment from scratch, on the fly. We're talking fractals and mathematical formulas that would simulate nature and therefore, have infinite variations. Computing these proceedures would take much more power than our most powerful game systems today. The current game systems may be able to pull it off, maybe not. I'd suspect the Ps3 would be the best machine for this, as it does have that whole corecell thing going on where it can do multiple computations at one time. but regardless, i believe that this process will eventually change "the games" more than anything that has ever come before.

at that point, you can say goodbye to looping backgrounds, overused texture surfaces and enemies that look exactly alike. But even though proceedural graphics exist today, and even as powerful as a machine as the PS3 is, we're still not QUITE to that point yet.

technology will continue to improve until we run into the only REAL technology wall, which is sillicon conductivity. that wall won't exactly apply to video games, however, i don't forsee, because by the time we develop sillicon conductors that are only 1 micron across, proceedural computations will have taken hold.

hope that gives you guys something to think about. great thread. And with that, i'm out. : )

You stated clearly what I fumbled around like a retard trying to say, thank you :)