I just thought I'd share my idea to achieve much more realistic special effects and graphics in the 3D developing industry.
If you think about it, what gives us our texture? Cells do. I was thinking, if instead of using those fat triangles used for the current meshes, what if we used cell-sized meshes, then colored the mesh "cell" with pigment. Then when it is play time, since there isn't cell-sized pixels, it would combine the few cell-sized mesh to a pixel-sized one and try to match the two the best it can.
On lighting: I don't know if this is how they handle lighting right now, but what I am seeing so far is that shadows are premade. What if the lightsource actually shot rays like in real life, reflected off of certain surfaces, or is absorbed by the rest of the surfaces. That way, when someone walks by a lightsource, or an object is thrown in front of it, etc. It absorbs the light so it gets lit up, and blocks wherever behind it.
Particles: Particles are everywhere, but you never see them in games for realism, unless they are painted onto a texture already. If there were realistic particles such as dust, pollen, etc. then I think it would make the environment a lot more realistic, for it would float around and when in front of a lightsource, it would look like how we see it, or it would gather in areas, flexable as it is, and make realistic groups of particles such as dust.
Doing these things however would probably have to have a very, very good computer in order to have no lag from them.
ID:189070
 Oct 25 2003, 2:30 pm
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If you think about it, what gives us our texture? Cells do. Acutally it's the shell of the atoms formed by the electrons that prevents things from passing through each other to form texture. I was thinking, if instead of using those fat triangles used for the current meshes, what if we used cell-sized meshes, then colored the mesh "cell" with pigment. Then when it is play time, since there isn't cell-sized pixels, it would combine the few cell-sized mesh to a pixel-sized one and try to match the two the best it can. You can achieve the same effect by just using more and smaller triangles which would be mathmatically more effecient since triangles are very mathmatically elegant and easy to work with compared to other shapes :). On lighting: I don't know if this is how they handle lighting right now, but what I am seeing so far is that shadows are premade. What if the lightsource actually shot rays like in real life, reflected off of certain surfaces, or is absorbed by the rest of the surfaces. That way, when someone walks by a lightsource, or an object is thrown in front of it, etc. It absorbs the light so it gets lit up, and blocks wherever behind it. This already happins in programs like 3D Studio Max. Light also reflects and refracts differently according to the surfaces and angle of intersection. But since the rendering time is incredibly slow it's not feasable to include all that detail in a game. In my simple environment project I'm doing in one of my classes at Digipen it takes about 5 seconds to draw a frame at 640x480 and I'm not even using the advanced lighting features which would probably triple my render time. But you can make some pretty good looking hacks. Just look at Neverwinter Nights with the detail all the way up. The shadows look awsome if you have the proccessor power :). Particles: Particles are everywhere, but you never see them in games for realism, unless they are painted onto a texture already. If there were realistic particles such as dust, pollen, etc. then I think it would make the environment a lot more realistic, for it would float around and when in front of a lightsource, it would look like how we see it, or it would gather in areas, flexable as it is, and make realistic groups of particles such as dust. The problem here is the same as the last. The more complex you make it the more power it takes to do. Games have had particle effects way back since the old sprite days. Particle effects generally look better now-a-days but it's not like we don't have them so I don't see what you mean :P. Doing these things however would probably have to have a very, very good computer in order to have no lag from them. More like one that won't exist for the next decade. When you're do effects like this you don't want to think about how they are done in the real world since that is generally way too slow for the machine. The trick is pulling them off in a slick way thats much more processor friendly. | |
I took a peak at some of the everquest 2 screenshots, and they have it going on much better than most games. I'll have to look up some half-life 2 ones and check it out.
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I took a peak at some of the everquest 2 screenshots, and they have it going on much better than most games. I'll have to look up some half-life 2 ones and check it out. heh If you have the bandwidth you should download some of the videos :P. You can't tell how awsome some of the stuff is until you see how well it reflects light off wet or shiny surfaces or how it handles the movement of water. | |
http://www.istaria.com/ Geez this game is still under development :P? I thought this would be a cool game until I realized how bad MMORPGs after playing Ultima Online and Everquest. | |
Your last sentence basically sums up why none of these things are being used currently (well, the newest consoles are reaching into these territories, as are the latest PC games)...
It takes a LOT of computing power to do these sorts of things... Essentially, each little bit takes up data that the computer must keep track of... Particles, for instance, need to be seperate objects, each created, tracked, and controlled by the computer... The same thing sort of applies to polygon counts... The more polygons used, the more memory it takes to keep track of all of the points... And if they were to try to create entire objects cell by cell, then each of those cells would need to be controlled individually... A model that takes up a few thousand polygons would end up being a model with a few million objects... We just don't have the processing power yet to be able to handle these things... | |
About the particle graphics, i found this one site that was made by some college students...
They used the Linux expansion thing for the ps2, then, using, i think it was 32 ps2's, they opened them up, linked them together, and used the linux program to manipulate the processors to generate high particle count graphics. Basically, they made a makeshift supercomputer. Why ps2's and not xbox, you say? because the Ps2's graphics chip is integrated into the same board the central processor is, therefore making the graphics manipulation slightly easier and faster, (however not has powerfull as a seperate gfx card). I'm going to go look up that site again, i'll edit this post when i find it. [EDIT] Found it! however, after looking it over, i'm so confused with most of it that i'm not quiet sure it's talking about actual graphics, but check it out, all you high-leveled computer wiz guys, it's actually quiet interesting, i was very interested, besides the fact I dont understand any of it. lol http://arrakis.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ps2/index.php | |
What really interests me about Half-Life 2 is that even with all these advancements, it's still going to be made for not really fast gaming computers. One of it's promotions is that its supposed to run on computers just fine if the computer runs the first Half-Life normally.
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Theodis wrote:
http://www.istaria.com/ Ultima Online is the best MMORPG ever made. Yeah. | |
Pfffft. I don't believe that, it's probably just marketing hype. Certainly it won't be possible at the detail levels displayed in the demo movies, unless their technology is even better than I thought.
If the AI is as good as the demo movies show, the game will rule anyway. =) I rather suspect they scripted some of it, though (especially the one where the enemy tries the door, finds it blocked, and starts shooting through the window). Hopefully I'm wrong, we'll just have to wait (and wait, and wait) and see. | |
Those are, in teh leaked beta you can run the scripts...
However, that does not reflect upon the real games Ai. | |
well you could always just split sections of a game into "loading periods". I think we have been spoiled lately by the almost non existant loading times in most games now days, but I think we could suffice with small loading amounts in a medium amount of quantity...
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ya it was, key word... was :)
it had it going on when everything was chaos do-what-you-want, fend for yourself or form a community, either way it was carnage :P | |
No, no... This isn't a matter of data loading... It's a matter of data processing...
Loading does nothing but cache the needed resources for the section being loaded, in order to free up some memory that would have been used for this process later on when those resources are needed... For instance, if a certain part of a game needs a certain model, skin, background music, etc, all of these things are loaded into a cache to be brought up faster when they are called for... (if they weren't preloaded, you'd need to load them during gameplay, which would slow things down) However, that doesn't have much to do with the computing that needs to be done to actually run the game... Yes, in a way it frees up some power by doing this work beforehand, which leaves more memory free later on, but past that, they're not related... The things we're talking about in this thread aren't things that can be preloaded... They are effects that must be done in realtime, during the gameplay... Particle effects, for instance, must be created, and controlled when they are displayed... The actual graphics for the particles can be preloaded, but the system that creates them, keeps track of them, moves them around, deletes them when they're done, etc must be handled in real time... Same with higher polygon models... Each point in the model must be kept track of during gameplay... Every move the model makes, the computer has to update the location of each and every point in the model... The more points to do this for, the more power it requires... We just don't have the power yet to handle the immensely large processing loads that would occur with these sorts of effects... | |
A polygon for every single cell? Ouch... maybe in a few decades, but not now. It'd take FOR-EVER.
Some games, like Half-Life 2, are beginning to do more realistic lighting. It can only improve further as computers get faster!
It would make it more realistic. Trouble is, it'd also make it VERRRRRY VERRRRRYYYYYY SLOOOOOOWWWWWWWW. =P
You are absolutely correct. =)
I suggest you have a look at some of the screenshots from games such as Half-Life 2. The graphics in some of these uber-hyped titles are getting quite realistic.