***Updated***WHEN Will We Play "life-like"/"real" VideoGames?

[manko]

remember for realism, it's not just polygon count, resolution and colors. you've also gotta have really good physics: particle, liquids, fabrics, inverse kinematics, all calculated in real time. you could never animate all the potential movements for every character in a game. if you look at the Unreal Tournament 2 video, that is like the first baby-steps of realistic looking physics.

i would consider realism - yeah basically like an episode of Seinfeld where you control one of the characters, and you could interact realistically with EVERY aspect of the world. you should be able to break and build things and create chemical reactions, you should be able to boil and freeze water. you should be able to pick up a coat hanger and stick it into a wall socket and shock yourself.

 

[apoppin]

<< I would consider realism - yeah basically like an episode of Seinfeld where you control one of the characters, and you could interact realistically with EVERY aspect of the world. you should be able to break and build things and create chemical reactions, you should be able to boil and freeze water. you should be able to pick up a coat hanger and stick it into a wall socket and shock yourself. >>



I wish you'd quit equating "realism" with Seinfeld. 🙂

Yes, we considered the "physics" element of gaming (thorin's #2) to be very important. It seems to me that the Game Engine should have that built-in to it. However, being able to walk into a closet in a game and change a lightbulb strikes me as mundane and un necessary to gamePLAY (how many times have you really wanted to see a scene or detail not shown in a movie - Like, "what's in the box on the table?").

And how far would it go? Should the characters be able to have sex (like not in the Sims)?

Nope, that's not the "realism" I am looking for - just photo realistic graphics in a reasonably interactive world that conforms to the laws of physics . . .

Thanks for your replies . . . even though I am in Paradise (Hawaii) right now I still have to head for work. I'll check back later . . . mahalo and aloha!

 

[bluemax]

Never, I hope. Damn violent games are already far too gruesome. More detail will only make things worse.
Realism would be nice for other things, but if the technology is there, it'll be used for Quake and its ilk.

 

[JellyBaby]

<< Howzit, JB? >>

They're hangin' fine and I got time to rhyme. (btw I just made that up, never heard it before. Bow down before me.) 🙂

Aloha! How are the native girls?

I have no problem at all with Dell laptops. Eventually these should get the new GF 440 Go video which is not bad at all.

 

[KenAF]

> I wish you'd quit equating "realism" with Seinfeld.

Evidently you've never spent time living in NYC.... 🙂

 

[SilentRunning]

Just 'cause it tooks hours to rended a frame in FF doesn't mean computing power isn't increasing rapidly. . . look at the first Star Wars (which took hours to render a frame, years ago).

As far as I can recollect the original star wars was done with blue screens, masks, models, stop action, painted backdrops, etc. What frames did the render for that movie, and the re-release does not count as the first Star Wars 😉

 

[apoppin]

<< Aloha! How are the native girls? >>


They are Ok . . . you gotta watch out for her brother's overprotectiveness. 🙂 The European tourist girls are more fun. 😉

The example I gave of Star Wars was from memory. I thought they used some form of CG. Anyway, the point was that a few years ago film computer graphics were being rendered on mainframes.

As the PC gets more powerful, you can be certain that graphics equal to Final Fantasy - the movie - will be rendered in real time - I was just looking for speculation as to "when". And 3 years is a much better answer than I expected. 🙂

 

[PH0ENIX]

I hate to be the one to say it, but how exactly is this general hardware?

That aside...

True realism will be held back.
Even if it was possible, Quake style games will be a LONG way off using it, for a not-so-surprising reason, when you think about it.

Bluemax brought it up... Violence.

Computer games are immediately held responsible for a good 99% of adolecent violence.
True or not, this has a great effect on public opinion.
How could anyone argue against computer games inspiring violence, if there was a game where you could not only hunt down and kill your opponent - hell you could even chop off a toe or 2 to make him tell you where his buddies are hiding.
Now although, like many of you, I personally like the sound of that - your average Joe Impressionable should probably be kept away from it.

History has told us that ratings dont help.
Age, it seems, has little to do with a person's mental stability.

If the parents of 3 teenage boys who raped and killed a 15 year old girl can sue the band Slayer for inciting their children to violence, then I tell ya - realism would be the death of Id Software...

(On the above - I am a 19 y/o long-time Slayer fan, i've got the shirts, i've got the posters, i've got the albums, i've got a job and a life... You dont see me going out and killing people, do you...)

 

[apoppin]

<< I hate to be the one to say it, but how exactly is this general hardware? >>


Now I gotta defend my topic choice???

Take a look at half the posts here . . . they are not exactly general hardware but close enough. Playing videogames requires "hardware" . . . I just wanted to know when computer hardware would be advanced enough to render photo-realistic scenes ("build it and they [the programmers] will come").

I don't think any objection to "violence" will slow down gaming realism any more than it has slowed down the current crop of ultraviolent "realistic" movies. The gaming industy will be just as regulated as the rest of the entertainment field - or not.

 

[RemyCanad]

We will not have truly real graphics until they can plug into your optic nerves or whatever they are and send video singles straight to your brain for processing.

You should ask some professional 3d move people. And ask them about it. Things like ray-tracing and so on take tons of power for seemingly little effect. And that is how it is going to be from now on. Be have basic 3d but making it detailed enough takes more and more power because of the math involved to render it. I believe light is going to be the problem/ is the problem to making a game "real". I have read articles about why people cannot look very real made from 3d but animals can. Its because light reflects oddly from your skin. Animal hair is not that way. If you think about it everything is a room gives off light of some sort. My keyboard puts off white light...

The way I see it, the more detail we want will take exponentially more power to do it. D=P^d

Also someone said that T.V's take less resolution so less power. Well first off film resolution is much much higher than anything you have on your computer. (Does film even have a resolution really?) Also you cannot compare a T.V. series to a video game. T.V. is recorded a video game is rendered. Resolution does not matter at all. I am sure you can find out what FF was rendered at and you will be surprised.

 

[apoppin]

<< I have read articles about why people cannot look very real made from 3d but animals can. >>



I am asking for "realism" on the order of FF, the movie. These CG "people" are very realistic.

From an interview in Honolulu's Star Bulletin with the films creeators:

<< We are producing the first computer-generated, animated motion picture with photo-real human characters. The goal is to convey human emotions and movements more realistically than any current computer-generated feature.

SB: But you actually do use real actors don't you?

HS: Oh, yes. All the movements are made with hu-mans (filmed at the Hawaii Film Studio) then the characters are computer generated, designed at the downtown facility. ...

SB: What has been the most difficult aspect technically of making this film?

HS: Natural human facial expressions. To have the skin and hair move naturally like it does in reality. Also the way clothes wrinkle when people move. That is very, very hard to simulate realistically. If you produced wrinkles by hand animation it would take probably 10 years. So we created our own software to accomplish this. ...

SB: It sounds like a lengthy, tedious process?

HS: Yes. ...It takes about one month of production to produce 3-5 minutes of film. >>



Eventually, the PC's graphics will be able to render similar game images in real time.

 

[BFG10K]

I just finished Star Trek: Voyager Elite Forces, based on the Quake III engine . . . not too bad really . . . immersive . . .

Yeah, it's a great game. I especially loved the Borg cube and the Dreadnaught missions.

I also recently watched Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within - The Movie (crappy story - awesome graphics!!! - some "realism" definitely here).

The difference is that movies are pre-rendered animation loops with absolutely no interaction with the user. In order to render those same movies in realtime you need some pretty serious horsepower, and even more power is needed if they are to react to your actions (like games).

 

[travler]

I doubt we will ever see that. It would just be so much more power than MS office and Ineternet explorer will ever need. It would be so incerdibly expensive to produce something like that it probably wouldnt be feasable.

In order for that to happen the computer market would have to be primarily driven by entertainment. hardware would have to become vastly less expensive to produce.
Maybe it will happen but i wouldnt count on in in terms of years. maybe decades.

 

[BD231]

Nvidia say 10 years. Sounds about right. But think about it. If games looked real, where do you go from there?

the moon?, mars?, pluto? ......., work?

 

[thorin]

"Even looking at your point #3, thorin - just a few years ago, there was much debate that a chess program would EVER beat a human grandmaster..."

Ummm none of those DeepBlue type chess computers are real time (to my knowledge). There are some fairly intellegent computer chess opponents that are real time but they don't even come close to DeepBlue. We are getting there but it's still pretty far off.

I'm talking a computer (or program) that can improvise completely based on information not based on what it is told (programmed) to do, I mean completely improvised abstract solutions). A computer does fine in things like chess where there are a finite set of unchanging parameters (board size is constant and piece movements and interactions and pre-established).

Thorin

 

[gregor7777]

doubt we will ever see that. It would just be so much more power than MS office and Ineternet explorer will ever need. It would be so incerdibly expensive to produce something like that it probably wouldnt be feasable.

In order for that to happen the computer market would have to be primarily driven by entertainment. hardware would have to become vastly less expensive to produce.
Maybe it will happen but i wouldnt count on in in terms of years. maybe decades.


I don't need a Northwood CPU or a GF4 to run Internet Explorer or MS Office.

There allready is a market where people pay more for a video card than even the most expensive console gaming system out there.

Plus, by the time true photo-realistic graphics and true physics game engines are around, I'll be writing my MS Word documents with my air-pencil on a virtual reality chalkboard. Now that'll take some serious CPU cycles. 🙂

 

[HardWareXpert]

Considering Nvidia's fastest computers would render one frame of Final Fantasy every half a second, i'd say we are along way off.

You just add 4 lights to a complex sence the graphics card would run piss poor, and you only need to look at 3d studio max rendering a complex scene to realize how far GFx cards are off Final Fantasy quailty graphics.

 

[apoppin]

I thought Deep Blue was 'real time'. I am just beginning to research (again) and found IBM's site Here:


<< Humans are slow but exquisitely good at pattern recognition and strategy; computers, on the other hand, are extremely fast and have superb memories but are annoyingly poor at pattern recognition and complex strategy. Kasparov can make roughly two moves per second; Deep Blue has special-purpose hardware that enables it to calculate nearly a quarter of a billion chess positions per second. >>



From reading your replies, I can see that many doubt that a home PC will be able to render (a reasonable approximation of) FFmovie-quality graphics anytime (soon). I see it as inevitable.

EDIT:
More from the site:


<< would have imagined in the late 1950s when an IBM 704 first played chess that 40 years later computers would be a million times more powerful? Who then would have imagined that in 1997 a computer would be examining 200,000,000 chess positions per second and searching to depths of 14 levels when making a move. . . . Deep Blue . . . is programmed in C, a language that looks more like assembly language than anything fit for chess, and the brute force approach taken by Deep Blue's alpha-beta search is apparently in vivid contrast with the search done by grandmasters
. . . we have learned something about learning itself. While there have been many attempts to program machine learning, there have been no great successes to date. Computers have been taught to play chess, but learning how to improve their own play as we do is centuries away. >>

 

[teddymines]

I'm waiting for games that go beyond staring at a screen and working a controller.

Some day, I think we'll have games that feature a 3-d helmet display, body controllers so you can set up a natural body motion to control game play, and pain feedback. Pain feedback would put mild electrical currents into your body so that you have difficulty controlling game play. I could even see an odor generator in the helmet to immerse you even more (imagine having to hold your breath going past that fly-blown body).

You would be able to play the game anywhere because there would be no computer in the literal sense. You would wear the whole thing on your back like a small napsack, or in a fanny pack. It would have communication built in, so you can have a virtually unlimited network available.

I think there will be a lot of games where you can literally do anything in the environment. There should be very few rules. Land the plane, get out, touch the engine and get burned. Run into a wall and get hurt. Rip a locker off the wall and drag it behind your truck. Open the hood of your car and take apart the engine.

 

[Dudd]

What I don't understand is why NVidia or ATI don't start up their own software developers? I mean, lets think about it. I never upgrade right when the newest technology comes out because it will be a while before I need that tech, and it will be cheaper later. If ATI and NVidia actively pushed software to market that used a graphics engine that would take advantage of the new features, I'd jump on that bandwagon much sooner. They could then liscense the engine to other companies and we'd all get to play games that utilise the latest graphics advances. Right now, I have a Radeon LE, and it works fine for all my games. There really needs to be something other than the latest 3dMark that takes advantage of a Geforce 4 or a Radeon 8500.

 

[tomrizzo]

bump

 

[dullard]

<< dullard,

This isn't a limit of the film or movie, however, it's a limitation of the VHS medium and the 1950's era NTSC format that standard televisions use. You would see the same resolution if you connected your computer to the TV with the NTSC s-video output. Standard NTSC TVs, are, after all, just junk 720x480 interlaced monitors with 60Hz refresh. While we have upgraded to 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 monitors for our computers, standard TVs are still stuck at low resolution with interlace. >>


You aren't understanding my point. Imagine that you are forced to watch a TV show on a standard TV. I'm pretty sure you have watched at least one thing on a standard TV. Now tell me this: did that show look life-like or did it look like the people were fake? If you watched the local news on a standard TV would you think, "those newscasters look completely computer generated - not at all real"? If you watched a sporting event on a standard TV would you think that the sport looked fake? Of course not. You can get life-like realistic images at poor viewing resolutions. Do the people on viewed a standard TV look life-like? Yes. Images at 30000x20000 resolution can be lifelike and realistic - and so can images at 640x480 resolution. Who cares what the "resolution" of the camera is set at or what resolution they are stored at - why do you even bring it up since it has no effect on how lifelike the final result is?

With current CPUs and video cards you CAN have much more life-like games at 640x480 resolution. With current technology the programmers have a choice: program (A) 1024x768 resolution with X polygons, Y colors, and crappy physics or (B) 640x480 resolution with 2X polygons, 2Y colors, and realistic physics. Basically every game out there picked choice (A). My argument is that choice (B) is possible and looks far more life-like and realistic.

 

[silent tone]

<< What I don't understand is why NVidia or ATI don't start up their own software developers? I mean, lets think about it. I never upgrade right when the newest technology comes out because it will be a while before I need that tech, and it will be cheaper later. >>


AFAIK Game developers get access to nvidia's documentation and SDK's as soon as it's feasible to release. However the same problem that face third party developers would affect in-house developers. There's just not enough people that have latest generation hardware. Only enthusiasts would upgrade 6mo or yearly even with new games released very soon.

As far as future predictions go, intelligent opponents may be possible. Kurzweil thinks that within 20 years common desktop computers will have the computational power of a single human brain. If there don't turn out to be any extra phenomena in our brains aside from the networks of neurons(like quantum computing), then we might be able to model ourselves in realtime. I personally think it's not a question of 'if', but 'when'.

 

[CocaCola5]

I'd say 50 years. Display technology is far behind. Took 50 years for the CRT to mature and probably another 50 for whatever's next to mature also.

 

[apoppin]

<< I personally think it's not a question of 'if', but 'when'. >>



I agree . . . that is the whole point of this thread . . . When??? Yet the consensus of these articles on Deep Blue is that to have actual AI equal or better than Human I is going to take decades. I am just looking for photorealistic graphics . . .


More DeepBlue details on how it "thinks".


<< To date, Deep Blue is the most powerful chess-playing computer ever developed. But what makes Deep Blue so great at playing chess? How does it so accurately "choose" its next move from a list of thousands of possible options? And why is it so much better than other computer chess 'players'? The answer lies in its unique combination of innovate software engineering and massive parallel processing power.

At the heart of Deep Blue's ability to play chess is its evaluation function. The evaluation function is an algorithm that measures the "goodness" of a given chess position. Positions with positive values are good for White, and conversely, positions with negative values are good for Black. If the overall score is negative, for example, this means that Black has the advantage.

Deep Blue's evaluation function looks at four basic chess values: material, position, King safety and tempo. Material is based on the "worth" of particular chess pieces. For example, if a pawn is valued at 1, then the rook is worth 5 and the Queen is valued at 9. The King, of course, is beyond value because his loss means the loss of the game.

The simplest way to understand position is by looking at your pieces and counting the number of safe squares they can attack. King safety is a defensive aspect of position. It is determined by assigning a value to the safety of the King's position in order to know how to make a purely defensive move. Tempo is related to position but focuses on the race to develop control of the board. A player is said to "lose a tempo" if he dillydallies while the opponent is making more productive advances.

Deep Blue is not only the finest chess-playing computer in the world, it is also the fastest. This makes perfect sense, because history has proven that the fastest computers conduct the most extensive searches into possible positions. More searches gives the computer a wider array of moves to choose from and therefore a greater chance of choosing the optimum move.

Deep Blue employs a system called selective extensions to examine chessboard positions. Selective extensions allow the computer to more efficiently search deeply into critical board arrangements. Instead of attempting to conduct an exhaustive "brute force" search into every possible position, Deep Blue selectively chooses distinct paths to follow, eliminating irrelevant searches in the process.

Deep Blue uses "live" software that can actually generate up to 200,000,000 positions per second when searching for the optimum move. The software begins this process by taking a strategic look at the board. It then computes everything it knows about the current position, integrates the chess information pre-programmed by the development team, and then generates a multitude of new possible arrangements. From these, it then chooses its best possible next move.

Deep Blue's extensive searches make full use of the computer's massively parallel design. "At the search level, you're saying 'OK, here's the position. I need to search all the moves," says Joe Hoane, the Deep Blue development team member in charge of software. "And you go search all the moves, all at the same time, preferably on a bunch of different computers."

The software inside of Deep Blue is one all-inclusive program written in C, running under the AIX operating system. Deep Blue utilizes the IBM SP Parallel System called MPI. "It's a message-passing system," says Hoane. "So the search is just all control logic. You're passing control messages back and forth that say, well, what am I doing? Did you finish this? OK, here's your next job. That kind of thing at the SP level."

The latest iteration of the Deep Blue computer is a 32-node IBM RS/6000 SP high-performance computer, which utilizes the new Power Two Super Chip processors (P2SC). Each node of the SP employs a single microchannel card containing 8 dedicated VLSI chess processors, for a total of 256 processors working in tandem. The net result is a scalable, highly parallel system capable of calculating 60 billion moves within three minutes, which is the time allotted to each player's move in classical chess. >>



Edit: I don't know about DeepBlue . . . I have ChessMaster 8000 on my PC and I have NEVER beaten the program at it's strongest level although I have managed to DRAW a couple of games with it. 😱