How long do you think till we have photorealistic open world RPGs?

[Locut0s]

It's already there, the problem is no one is going to develop them on the PC when the install base of such hardware is minimal to the point that they'll generate 20,000 sales. So when consoles become cost efficient to allow them to stuff all this awesome hardware in there and consumers are willing to pay $90 a game we'll have what your looking for.

Yeah. I'm guessing another 3 or 4 console generations

 

[Locut0s]

I imagine some things could be procedurally generated like trees and such but once you get to a "photo realistic" desk chair you need someone to create that asset. How many times do you want to see the same art asset puked up all over the world?

Someone will need to open a virtual prop rental...

Yes this will be a problem as well. As the realism goes up so will the time spent making each asset. Eventually you might just see developers buying the assets from some 3rd party company and as you said, the same object all over the place.

 

[96Firebird]

I found this sweet photorealistic browser-based driving game, it even uses real life locations!

Click here

 

[ImpulsE69]

I found this sweet photorealistic browser-based driving game, it even uses real life locations!

Click here

LOL. I was just going to say exactly that.

 

[aigomorla]

What does a photorealistic orc or dragon look like?

ummmmm like your in laws?

 

[SMOGZINN]

Yeah. I'm guessing another 3 or 4 console generations

And I think that console generations are going to get longer not shorter. PS3 and XBox360's are still showing decent sells numbers, and as the hardware tech ages it just generates more profit for the company. As long as people are content to buy old hardware there will be little hurry for MS and Sony to upgrade their hardware. It has already been 6 years, and MS has not announced any new console, so I'm guessing another year or two until we see a new one, so 7-8 years this generation, I'm betting that the generations after that will each be 10 years. So, 3-4 generations will be 30-40 years. The good news is that your next computer upgrade might be the last you ever have to do.

Yes this will be a problem as well. As the realism goes up so will the time spent making each asset. Eventually you might just see developers buying the assets from some 3rd party company and as you said, the same object all over the place.

Meh, this is true for the real world. My work office has 2,000 copies of the same chair sitting in front of 2000 copies of the same desks.

 

[SpunkyJones]

Life is a RPG, get outside!

 

[Stringjam]

I remember seeing a video showing (it was just a tech demo) a small replica of Oblivion's Imperial City (just the infrastructure, no NPCs) modeled using CryEngine 2.

When I saw that video my imagination just ran wild thinking of so many possibilities and surely I thought "omg Bethesda LOOK at THIS! Go call Crytek and ask them to use their engine for your next Elder Scrolls game! NOW!". But of course, it never happened. Well the thing is when I saw that video I really believed that we were finally very close to good-looking sandbox games (and that was back when the fuss surrounding Crysis 1's graphics being "so good" was still hot).

I don't know how long it will take, but give me just a re-make of Morrowind using CryEngine 2 at the level of quality that some of the community managed to squeeze out of it for Crysis 1 and I'll be playing the damn thing for a decade.

CryEngine2 is amazing and was WAY ahead of its time. The integrated physics engine is still, IMO, the best I've ever seen. There's a reason why a lot of universities use it for a 3D rendering engine.

The inclusion of the CryEngine2 editor with Crysis (the exact SDK the developers used to create the game) was a fantastic and generous idea. It allowed a community of modders to be developed, some of which are extremely talented and have gone on to actually work for CryTek because of their work at CryDev. The editor is very intuitive and is a real trip to play with.....I can get lost for hours in that program just messing with map creation.

Check this out in HD. Remember, this engine came out in 2007, and this looks nothing short of incredible. Can you imagine playing an RPG with this kind of art design and graphic quality?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4No43o7zkDQ&feature=related

 

[Barfo]

 

[StinkyPinky]

The closer you get to realism, the more you notice the imperfections.

I'd rather they work on more interesting stuff like real cities with thousands of NPC's in them. Notice how "cities" in open world games consist of about 100 people? Assassins Creed does a good job on this type of stuff though.

 

[Modelworks]

We are a long way off from being able to do photo real gaming. Consider that to render a scene for a typical animation scene for movies often takes 15-20 seconds PER FRAME using several hundred processors. We are nowhere near doing 30 fps without using several server farms with quad and dual processing or a couple hundred gpus.

The games you see that look good now have so many cheats that are done to make them look the way they do. So much of them relies on trying to only render what the player can see from their viewpoint and hiding the flaws behind other objects. Like rendering shadows into texture maps based on the idea that players will only be able to view them from certain positions. Most game engines cannot even handle the polygon count photo real meshes would require. Put a 5 million poly model in a current game engine and it will be the only thing on the screen that you can animate without performance falling to a slideshow on even the most powerful gpu. Now consider things like trees have 5 million polys per tree in professional animations, and you can see how a forest still remains impossible.

 

[Locut0s]

We are a long way off from being able to do photo real gaming. Consider that to render a scene for a typical animation scene for movies often takes 15-20 seconds PER FRAME using several hundred processors. We are nowhere near doing 30 fps without using several server farms with quad and dual processing or a couple hundred gpus.

The games you see that look good now have so many cheats that are done to make them look the way they do. So much of them relies on trying to only render what the player can see from their viewpoint and hiding the flaws behind other objects. Like rendering shadows into texture maps based on the idea that players will only be able to view them from certain positions. Most game engines cannot even handle the polygon count photo real meshes would require. Put a 5 million poly model in a current game engine and it will be the only thing on the screen that you can animate without performance falling to a slideshow on even the most powerful gpu. Now consider things like trees have 5 million polys per tree in professional animations, and you can see how a forest still remains impossible.

Certainly this is true. However One can get close enough with the tricks they are using now and more trick to come that you don't need to render the 5mil poly count models. Again what I'm talking about is "close enough" to photorealism. The quality posted above as rendered in Cryengine 2 is just about at the level I'm talking about. True photorealism is defintely far ahead of even this but that's not what I'm talking about.

I know you work in the CGI industry so your standards for photo real are not what I'm talking about. Believe me I know what you are talking about. I did a lot of hobby work with ray tracers back in the day and worked with 3D modellers and renderers, I know exactly what you are talking about. But I'm not looking for quite that. The tricks of the trade they use are fair game as far as I'm concerned so long as they can cause you to suspect your disbelief for long enough.

Like I was saying above I think we are 3 to 4 console generations away from this in mainstream games. For the level of graphics you are talking about we are decades away.

 

[Nintendesert]

We can't have it now because texture artists suck. It's true.

 

[Locut0s]

We can't have it now because texture artists suck. It's true.

Umm no. If you had any idea how low the poly counts are in modern games you would be amazed at the level of detail they manage to get out of them. Plus you have to remember the target hardware is like an Nvidia 7800 or less.

 

[Modelworks]

We can't have it now because texture artists suck. It's true.

Not going to completely disagree . So much could be done with texturing that would improve a lot of the games out there. It is amazing that so many titles don't even have bump maps . Bump, specular , diffuse mapping is so important for texture appearance and sadly it just isn't being used . Instead we get titles with bloom effects that look like the artist was locked in a room in the dark for months then had a screen thrust in their face and told to draw what they think it should look like to everyone.

I don't know about everyone else , but in my world the color white doesn't glow all around me

 

[Locut0s]

Not going to completely disagree . So much could be done with texturing that would improve a lot of the games out there. It is amazing that so many titles don't even have bump maps . Bump, specular , diffuse mapping is so important for texture appearance and sadly it just isn't being used . Instead we get titles with bloom effects that look like the artist was locked in a room in the dark for months then had a screen thrust in their face and told to draw what they think it should look like to everyone.

I don't know about everyone else , but in my world the color white doesn't glow all around me

Again I think a lot of this is the hardware specs they are forced to work with. Having to write games that run smooth on the Wii restrains you a lot. But I agree I see WAY too much of this shit:

Seriously when was the last time you saw cobble stones that you could see your reflection in? And yeah the bloom effects need to STOP!!

 

[Bonesdad]

The question is, How long until we get games with quality gameplay, writing, story and voice acting? Eye candy is fun, but it is meaningless if the other parts are missing...which they usually are.

 

[Via]

I'm looking around my room, trying to guess the resolution of my eyes; I have to assume it's pretty high. The lighting effects and depth of field are pretty awesome as well.

If you want true photo-realism, I'm thinking it's still a long ways away.

 

[dennilfloss]

That's a VERY good point. I wasn't thinking about that at all. You are probably right. If it were not for the consoles I'd say we are only 5-10 years off or so. But yeah with consoles holding us back each with 5 year life spans of their own

Remember when it was computer games that got ported to consoles later? Like when Doom, Dungeon Master, Wizardry V, Might & Magic 3, Eye Of The Beholder, Ultima Runes of Virtue, etc... got ported to the SNES.

 

[JamesV]

Realistically, the only way to make a game photorealistic is to increase texture resolutions drastically, along with post-processing effects.

Rage uses megatexture, which allows them to make a more realistic texture (huge), and weighs in at 22GB, but still you see textures that are bland mixed in. If everything was a megatexture, the game would be around 10 TB easy.

We won't see truly photorealistic games until not only storage is a non-issue, but when transfer rate is a non-issue, and transer rate is the bigger problem. How many terabytes per second of information do you think your eyes receive?

 

[Locut0s]

Realistically, the only way to make a game photorealistic is to increase texture resolutions drastically, along with post-processing effects.

Rage uses megatexture, which allows them to make a more realistic texture (huge), and weighs in at 22GB, but still you see textures that are bland mixed in. If everything was a megatexture, the game would be around 10 TB easy.

We won't see truly photorealistic games until not only storage is a non-issue, but when transfer rate is a non-issue, and transer rate is the bigger problem. How many terabytes per second of information do you think your eyes receive?

Yes this is true. We've come a LONG way in the past 10 years or so though. So I don't think it will take like 20 - 30 years.

 

[obidamnkenobi]

The NPC AI in that game is not incredible! It's absolutely terrible. Just see any MTV show..

Also there are too many griefers, and way too much grinding. I quit last month.

 

[HardcoreRobot]

you need cameras to capture at greater than human eye resolution (exist, but cost prohibitive). you need a display that can show it (not sure if exists). you need gobs of hard drive space to store the data (cost prohibitive).

i would say its in our lifetime, but not in the next few generations of games thats for sure bf3 is nowhere near photorealistic.

true photorealistic may even have a hard time being adopted, going to cause massive motion sickness issues for people.

 

[aigomorla]

kept pressing the "Get Life" button.. and it black listed me.

 

[Wyndru]

Obligatory screenshot from GTA4 with the ice enhancer mod.

Is that a real pic from it? I've seen lots of video footage and it looks more refined, but this pic is way nicer than what I've seen in the HD vids of it.

I like this vid with the updated car textures:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdZ-eJIRxKs&feature=related