The Truman Show (yes, haha) was on cable over the weekend. One of the scenes shows them setting up a street for Jim Carrey to drive to work. All the extras get into positions midway in the street and the shops, and don't "turn on" until he comes around the corner. That way they don't have to pay actors to continuously populate a town, they ferry them around and only pay for people in a small bubble around Jim Carrey.
Reminded me alot of streaming, open-world games - it's an almost exact analog equivalent for what we do in a streaming world. But in both cases - the only reason we go to such absurd lengths to start and stop pockets of reality around the protagonist is because of resource constraints. It'd be easier, and take less work and thought (although far more resources), to just fully populate the entire virtual world, 24 hours of every day. So while on the one hand, in both cases, we have a world that when perceived by the viewer, is extremely dense, populated, and realistic, we're actually cutting corners wherever we can behind the scenes.
I think this shows how much further we have to go, technologically, before we really "have enough" processing power, memory, etc. Everyone will be clamoring for the Xbox720s and PS4s as soon as new games are demoed, because out of the hundreds of corners we cut currently to simulate reality, some number of them can then be simulated fully. And we can never really say "technology has progressed far enough for photo-realism" until we're not constantly running around behind the scenes, moving everything in and out in a tiny LOD bubble around the player, a result of our pushing the available resources to their absolute limit.
I think players don't realize all the things they're missing out on, because they're not in the meetings where we say "that wouldn't be feasible," and then we trade manpower for CPU cycles and memory registers, doing our utmost to hide it all behind the scenes, and to avoid begging the question "why didn't you do..." But come the next 10x jump in performance, some number of those crazy ideas actually become feasible, and games get better.
Until I'm lazy and wasteful at my job, we don't have anywhere near enough technological resources available.
2 comments:
Totally agree. We may soon be able to render certain scenes at near photo realism but simulation will lag behind for quite some time. Both for agents in the world and for things like physics.
When we went from the oldest open-world games (eg. GTA 1) to modern ones (gta3/4), we didn't simulate more of the world at the same depth - we simulated the same amount of the world (as far as the player can notice detail) at greater depth.
So when we switched to the current-gen consoles, it's not like we "had enough" performance - the frontier of simulation got pushed back a little, and that will keep happening until we can solve the hardest problems, like simulating human physics, AI and animation photorealistically (we're so far from that goal that I don't even know what it would entail).
I guess it's a question of simulation scope - racing games don't need to simulate people at all, shooters and RTSs don't need to show (as much) social interaction, or simulate (and generate content for) an area as large.
Post a Comment