Next Gen Differences?
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Topic started: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 14:59Log-in or register to post to this topic.
Tue, 7 Dec 2004 17:22
Rod Todd wrote:
Looking back on a long gamesplaying career, more of my all time favourite games are 2D than are 3D. I think people are using increasingly realistic game environments to excuse increasingly unimaginative gameplay.
How about this for an experiment:
Take your all time favourite 3D games and your all time favourite 2D games, and decide if you could do without either side. Mine are:
3D
===
ISS Pro Evo 4
Zelda: OoT
GoldenEye
Project Gotham Racing /MSR
Halo 2
2D
===
Super Mario World
Sonic The Hedhog 2
Street Fighter 2
DeathTank Zwei
Warsong
For me, I'd be less keen on never playing the 3D range again.
Tue, 7 Dec 2004 18:18
kid_77 wrote:
Take your all time favourite 3D games and your all time favourite 2D games, and decide if you could do without either side. Mine are:
what about viewtifull joe?
is that a 2d or a 3d game? are we talking specifically about the way the charcter and worlds are beign represented or are we refferencing certain types of play? (mario 64 and mario world are very different experiences but ar eboth reffered to as platform games)
Technically with all the space a DVD (hddvd, bluray) alows we coudl make old fashioned 2d games like street fighter with incredibley high quality hand drawn animation. The problem there being production cost of hand rendering ever possibly movement scenario a charchter might have.
A firend of mine worked on a pilot for a tv show where they used a 3d animation program to render out 2d images by creating a program that would judge the angle at which each part of the body was being displayed and then asign the apropriate 2d image to it. This was very simplified giving it a sort of colagey(spelling? realword?) look, however if done more throughly with hand animation you could use 3d animation techniques to create easily manipulated 2d characters. And these coudl then be used in any existing game genre. Anythign from madden to GTA could have nicely hand drawn charcters moving realisticly through a 3d space. (by the way if somebody does make a video game like that a few years from now, it was my idea and they stole it!)(infact now that i think about it you coudl do it with photographs of a person and then motion capture them!, although i suppose realistic shadoes would be the down fall of it, unle4ss you actually rendered a 3d model at the same time and then just used the shadow information as a tansparency over the images... of course go through the troubel of rendering out a 3d model behidn the scenes woudl negate the worthwhilness of useing photgraphic imagery, but if the same idea was applied to the hand drawn concept it could be very cool...i gotta right this $hi7 down somewhere...)
so point being better grapgics of course do not a good game make, but they make some games possible and some good games even better. They dont necesarily mean that all games will eb better but they do provide a more workable canvas for true artists to create on. The ideal would be to be unlimmitted all together so that they coudl create what they want, of course photo real virtual spaces woudl be made but so would the next generation of jet set radio future and rez.
I for one love my old 16bit games but i am thrilled at the prospect of what the future of gaming coudl potentially bring, as long as EA doesnt buy everyone!
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Tue, 7 Dec 2004 18:28
kid_77 wrote:
Rod Todd wrote:
Buyt (sic ;-)) the camera system is more logic/mechanics than graphics.
Oooh, controversial. Surely anything that is incorporated in, or directly affects, the rendering of graphics is under the "graphics" umbrella.
Not really. Camera code doesn't affect how stuff's rendered, just what is rendered.
In fact, camera mechanics are bundled under the "AI" umbrella.
Personally, I'd prefer it if developers didn't get all hung up on the camera's line-of-sight being obscured by dead body, or getting jittery when you back up into a corner. It's reare they get it right (have they ever?)
They should look to the past - 1996, Die Hard Trilogy (PS1/Saturn/PC).
In this game, the camera didn't make any attempt to avoid scenery. Instead, the scenery became transparent as if it came between the player's character and the camera. Problem solved.
Tue, 7 Dec 2004 18:34
2D or 3D, the same kind of argument pops up.
With 3D it's poly count, texture/specular/bump/normal/vertex/blah mapping.
With 2D it was all sprite count and BOB sizes
:)
With 3D it's poly count, texture/specular/bump/normal/vertex/blah mapping.
With 2D it was all sprite count and BOB sizes
:)
Tue, 7 Dec 2004 18:49
config wrote:
They should look to the past - 1996, Die Hard Trilogy (PS1/Saturn/PC).
In this game, the camera didn't make any attempt to avoid scenery. Instead, the scenery became transparent as if it came between the player's character and the camera. Problem solved.
this actully is implimented to even greater affect in the new DOA games (DOA3&DOAU, i dunno if they did it in 2, i think it happens in ninja gaiden but i dont remeber, its been a while since i played it) where not only does the scenery in the way get made transparent but there is actually extra geometry underneath the main scene so that there isnt any backface clipping going on.(no view of the void of cyber space) Although to be honest i don't know if they did that in Die hard or not but it is handly very well in those games.
Tue, 7 Dec 2004 19:07
config wrote:
With 2D it was all sprite count and BOB sizes
what about levels of paralax, frames of animation, resolution, and size of sprites? oh and scalling... somethign the negeo was kinda famous for as neither the snes or genesis could handle it on a top quality game like fatal fury
also... what is a BOB size? forgive my ignorance
Tue, 7 Dec 2004 19:57
config wrote:
Not really. Camera code doesn't affect how stuff's rendered, just what is rendered.
That is true, but are you saying something that determines which graphics appear on screen should not come under the graphics umbrella?
config wrote:
In fact, camera mechanics are bundled under the "AI" umbrella.
I can't disagree ;-) I'll settle for this:
;-)
config wrote:
Personally, I'd prefer it if developers didn't get all hung up on the camera's line-of-sight being obscured by dead body, or getting jittery when you back up into a corner. It's reare they get it right (have they ever?)
They should look to the past - 1996, Die Hard Trilogy (PS1/Saturn/PC).
In this game, the camera didn't make any attempt to avoid scenery. Instead, the scenery became transparent as if it came between the player's character and the camera. Problem solved.
I find camera's that move in and out, and all ove the place very annoying. Keep it behind the player, fade out objects that obscure the line of site, and offer the user control of it.
Wed, 8 Dec 2004 08:59
LUPOS wrote:
oh and scalling... somethign the negeo was kinda famous for as neither the snes or genesis could handle it on a top quality game like fatal fury
The Super NES Super FX chip introduced with Starfox added scaling abilities. The Super FX2 chip, best demonstrated in Yoshi's Island, improved these abilities.
config wrote:
I find camera's that move in and out, and all ove the place very annoying. Keep it behind the player, fade out objects that obscure the line of site, and offer the user control of it.
Yeah, but I don't think that camera can be fixed behind the player any more. I find it automatic now to adjust the camera on games such as Sunshine and Wind Waker. In fact, I'd say that Wind Waker's camera is near perfect - it's fairly clever in where it moves but is also highly flexible. Having a "following fixed" camera such as in OoT is really claustrophobic and doesn't make it easy to observe your surroundings.
Wed, 8 Dec 2004 09:24
Actually I think the 3D games are now just as good iff not better than the 2D:
(I'm obviously going to have missed some off here :p)
3D
==
Zelda: Wind Waker
Metroid Prime
Tales of Symphonia
Resident Evil 0
Future Cop: LAPD
2D
==
Zelda: A Link to the Past
Super Mario Kart
Yoshi's Island
- Argh... Can't remember any more yet!!
(I'm obviously going to have missed some off here :p)
3D
==
Zelda: Wind Waker
Metroid Prime
Tales of Symphonia
Resident Evil 0
Future Cop: LAPD
2D
==
Zelda: A Link to the Past
Super Mario Kart
Yoshi's Island
- Argh... Can't remember any more yet!!
Wed, 8 Dec 2004 10:18
LUPOS wrote:
config wrote:
With 2D it was all sprite count and BOB sizes
what about levels of paralax, frames of animation, resolution, and size of sprites? oh and scalling... somethign the negeo was kinda famous for as neither the snes or genesis could handle it on a top quality game like fatal fury
Damn, parallax, I'd forgotten all about that. Many people will cite Shadow of the Beast, with its numerous parallaxed layers (and no gameplay - oh how Reflections have advanced!) as being the greatest. However, I recall seeing Lionheart [1993] (click to see the screens) on the Amiga, which had, like, dozens of layers. Basically, the game used the Amiga's Copper chip to scroll individual pixel lines, giving per pixel parallax. It rocked. For some reason I could never find the game in the shops in the UK, and had to resort to, erm, other measures.
Animation frames too, I suppose, but that was more down to the developer's competence and balancing memory usage between scenery, level size, audio and anims.
For the most part sprite size was pretty much fixed in hardware, so the developers would stitch them together and willy wave over the size of their end-of-level bosses. Of course BOBs changed that on the Amiga (see below), as they could be arbitrarily sized.
If anything, I recall people boasting about numbe rof sprites rather than their size. IMO, no machine could be capable of handling too many sprites :)
Scaling was a neat feature, but I was always left a little cold by it. It was perfect for scaling sprites for stuff like track-side objects, but I never really like the flat F-Zero type of race tracks. I always prefered sweeping hills - Lutos Challenge was prolly the first game I played where racing down a huge dip gave me a heady sense of speed.
LUPOS wrote:
also... what is a BOB size? forgive my ignorance
BOBs were a feature of the Amiga. The machine's Blitter chip could take vast portions of graphics, grab a block and move it around as though it were a sprite. There were some pretty neat ardware tricks squeezed into that machine and it was all accessible to the budding coder, unlike today's development kits and middleware licenses.
Wed, 8 Dec 2004 15:11
config wrote:
There were some pretty neat ardware tricks squeezed into that machine and it was all accessible to the budding coder, unlike today's development kits and middleware licenses.
Too true. We're moving to a development library and middleware future - Sony have made the PSP easier to develop for by adding developer-friendly libraries and IBM confirmed that Cell will be easy to develop for due to the libraries and middleware that is being developed (as well as the more standard processor format).
Fri, 10 Dec 2004 19:33
I think graphics will still and always will be important in shaping games until we can fully realistically render the universe exactly as we see it, or even not quite how we see it, hallucinogenically speaking. If you look at Halo, Metroid Prime, Half-Life 2, Madden Football 20XX, GTA: San Andreas, basically any of the big budget games, they all do something the predecessors couldn't. Make a more, maybe not lifelike world, but one more holy s**t that looks incredible like. If not for graphical enhancements, we would still be text adventuring it and imagining the awesome graphics in our head. And someone would say this is as good as it gets and someone else would rebutte, "No way man! I want a little blocky character to move around and click on stuff and make s**t happen. That's all I need."
If all you guys are playing 3-D games today and buying new systems and freaking out about the better graphics, then graphics do matter and will keep making differences for at least another 100 years until rendering a universe is possible on a game machine.
If you don't think graphics make a difference keep playing your old machines and don't buy the new ones. Because then basically that's all there is.
I mean advanced AI requires alot of processor power but think if you made a SNES game with just squares but used all the other power to create a huge AI script.
If all you guys are playing 3-D games today and buying new systems and freaking out about the better graphics, then graphics do matter and will keep making differences for at least another 100 years until rendering a universe is possible on a game machine.
If you don't think graphics make a difference keep playing your old machines and don't buy the new ones. Because then basically that's all there is.
I mean advanced AI requires alot of processor power but think if you made a SNES game with just squares but used all the other power to create a huge AI script.
Fri, 10 Dec 2004 20:11
config wrote:
Personally, I'd prefer it if developers didn't get all hung up on the camera's line-of-sight being obscured by dead body, or getting jittery when you back up into a corner. It's reare they get it right (have they ever?)
They should look to the past - 1996, Die Hard Trilogy (PS1/Saturn/PC).
In this game, the camera didn't make any attempt to avoid scenery. Instead, the scenery became transparent as if it came between the player's character and the camera. Problem solved.
They should look to the past - 1996, Die Hard Trilogy (PS1/Saturn/PC).
In this game, the camera didn't make any attempt to avoid scenery. Instead, the scenery became transparent as if it came between the player's character and the camera. Problem solved.
Just about every good 3-d game has transparent walls and objects when the players view is obstructed. Fable, Def Jam: Fight For NY, Jak and Daxter 1-3, Ratchet and Clank 1-3, The Legend of Zelda: Windwaker, etc. The point is many games have done it and still do it today. It's not really something they need to bring back just that more budget or non AAA titles need to incorporate.
Tue, 25 Jan 2005 11:54
Don't know if you lot are already aware of this, but the PS3 might be just a little pokey. Apparently, the Cell processor will run at 4.6Ghz... and the PS3 will have 4 of them!
For any nerds out there this article by mega-boff Nicholas Blachford makes interesting reading.
How this compares to the Xbox 2's three 3.5ghz Power PC G5 CPU's, and it's 500mhz ATI graphics card will be interesting. Mr Blachford seems to really like the Cell though.
I know it's "all about the games", but sometimes I can't help myself with tech specs.
For any nerds out there this article by mega-boff Nicholas Blachford makes interesting reading.
How this compares to the Xbox 2's three 3.5ghz Power PC G5 CPU's, and it's 500mhz ATI graphics card will be interesting. Mr Blachford seems to really like the Cell though.
I know it's "all about the games", but sometimes I can't help myself with tech specs.
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1169 comments
I don't see that I'm assuming that good games are 3D games, simply saying that if you're going to make a 3D game you might as well make it playable ;).
The same applies to 2D - you wouldn't release a 2D game, say Mario World, just using a 50x50 resolution so that the graphics made the game characters and senarios unrecognisable (OK, a little extreme, but hopefully you get my point).
I hope you kind of see what I'm mean. I'm considering the design and creation of 2D games as a bit different to 3D games, and considering the problems encountered in early generations of 3D consoles rather than saying that 2D isn't as good.