Topic: Games Industry Death Watch 2010-present

[ThePerm]

its from a Raphael painting called “Pope Gregory IX approving the Vatical Decretal�

[ShyGuy]

I've found you can't just avoid a thread because the topic title sounds boring. You drop in and find all these fascinating off topic posts.

[TJ Spyke]

On topic, NCSoft announced they are shutting down Paragon Studios. As a result, they will shut down the MMO City of Heroes by the end of the year, and have already shut down subscription billing and the Paragon Market.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-08-31-city-of-heroes-goes-dark-this-year?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=us-daily

[Chozo Ghost]

Maybe its just me, but the guy's head in the first picture looks disproportionately small compared to the rest of the body. Just like those Goombas from the Super Mario Bros. movie....

[Sarail]

CONFIRMED.

John Travolta is a Goomba. I knew it.

[nickmitch]

Maybe a shrunken head is part of his secret to immortality.

[Chozo Ghost]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandering_Jew

Here is a legend which could possibly explain why one of these celebrities looks so much like people who lived hundreds of years ago. Perhaps Nicholas Cage, John Travolta, Keanu Reeves, or whoever is none other than the legendary Wandering Jew? But if the legend is true it can only account for one person. So who is it?

And for further reading on the subject, check this guy out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_of_St._Germain

[Kytim89]

To get this thread back onto track...
 
"Assassin's Creed 3 Director Predicts The End of Major Titles - Game Scoop!"
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8zpUCU-1Qg&feature=g-all-u

[TJ Spyke]

That doesn't really have to do with the thread. He only thinks that fewer Triple A games with large budgets and multiple studios will come out/

[Kytim89]

That doesn't really have to do with the thread. He only thinks that fewer Triple A games with large budgets and multiple studios will come out/

Triple A games that don't sell are killing game companies. :

[tendoboy1984]

All games that don't sell are killing game companies. : :

Fixed.

[Kytim89]

All games that don't sell are killing game companies. : : :

Fixed.

Most of the top tier game developers can survive smaller games not selling, but when triple A titles like Final Fantasy, Dead Space, GTA, et al, do not sell well then it can mean the death of their companies. What that video is getting at is that major developers like EA, SE, Activision, Ubisoft, and eventually Nintendo, are going getting to a point when their major franchises have to sell a set number of units or otherwise a massive chucnk of revenue is taken out of their wallets. The Final Fantasy series is no longer as popular as it once was, and the high development costs are pushing developers into a position where they can not afford to innovate with new IPs because it is simply too dangerous to spend the money to it. You can only make so many Dead Space and Assassin's Creed games beofre the series becom stale. 

[TJ Spyke]

Games don't need ultra high budgets and multiple studios making one game, which the director of AC seems to realize and notes that they are decreasing. Take a look at something like New Super Mario Bros. Wii. It is a great title, but doesn't cost as much as some other "Triple A" games. It has sold over 26 million copies (making more than $1 billion).

[tendoboy1984]

Games don't need ultra high budgets and multiple studios making one game, which the director of AC seems to realize and notes that they are decreasing. Take a look at something like New Super Mario Bros. Wii. It is a great title, but doesn't cost as much as some other "Triple A" games. It has sold over 26 million copies (making more than $1 billion).

This. I wholeheartedly agree. Same thing goes with the movie industry. But the difference is, movie studios have the money to throw around on crap like that.


I just thought of something... What if movie studios helped fund game development? They could get studios like Pixar, Dreamworks, ILM, etc. to help make character models, environments, programming the game engine, etc. The game developers would then be able to spend more time focusing on the gameplay and narrative.

[oohhboy]

That wouldn't work. Movie animators and modelers use completely different and almost incompatible set of technologies to do their work. Movies don't have a technological budget like a game does where every polygon, effect, shader, lighting has to be taken into account to work inside the hardware. Games can't throw what it's rendering into a render farm for a couple days to get a result.

Movies also don't use polygons, they use splines. Star Wars Rogue Squadron had used models from the movies but only as references. While you can convert splines to polygons, the converter doesn't know how to make an efficient model or what kind of details are important, so at the end of the day you still have to retool the result.

Also programming the engine is the developer's job.

[Chozo Ghost]

Triple A games that don't sell are killing game companies. : : :

Triple A games that don't sell aren't Triple A games at all. Isn't commercial success what defines what a Triple A game is? Game companies can't just arbitrarily define their games as Triple A. Only the market has the right to make that determination.

[tendoboy1984]

Triple A games that don't sell are killing game companies. : : : :

Triple A games that don't sell aren't Triple A games at all. Isn't commercial success what defines what a Triple A game is? Game companies can't just arbitrarily define their games as Triple A. Only the market has the right to make that determination.

Triple A refers to the budget and size of the team making the game.

[BranDonk Kong]

I don't know anything about developing 3D games...but didn't ILM lend SEGA their actual Iron Man models for the video game?

[tendoboy1984]

That wouldn't work. Movie animators and modelers use completely different and almost incompatible set of technologies to do their work. Movies don't have a technological budget like a game does where every polygon, effect, shader, lighting has to be taken into account to work inside the hardware. Games can't throw what it's rendering into a render farm for a couple days to get a result.

Movies also don't use polygons, they use splines. Star Wars Rogue Squadron had used models from the movies but only as references. While you can convert splines to polygons, the converter doesn't know how to make an efficient model or what kind of details are important, so at the end of the day you still have to retool the result.

Also programming the engine is the developer's job.

Then maybe game studios should adapt some of the tools that movie studios use ("splines") to make development more efficient. If movie studios don't need to budget every little detail when making a CG movie, then why must game studios do it?

[oohhboy]

You are shitting me tendoboy.

I don't know anything about developing 3D games...but didn't ILM lend SEGA their actual Iron Man models for the video game?

It is likely they had the models to use as a reference or for those models only they went through the conversion and retooling process. The only time you could directly use such models is if for some reason movie were using polygons which they wouldn't thats assuming the polygon count of the model in question was not ridiculously high or they took the model and rendered it to a 2d sprite. In Star Wars Rogue Squadron's behind the game feature where they show you how they went about developing the game had a section where they talk about splines or NURBS from ILM and the work they had to do to make them usable in a game.

There is a reason why movies uses splines and it is in the wiki article.

In computer graphics splines are popular curves because of the simplicity of their construction, their ease and accuracy of evaluation, and their capacity to approximate complex shapes through curve fitting and interactive curve design.

To create the same curve in polygons you would use an absurd number of them to have a high enough level of detail for a movie so flat surfaces don't show up on a curve. It's easier to work with since the real world is made of curves. It's basically digital clay. The current implementation of splines for mechanical objects are NURBS.

The reason why splines isn't used in realtime applications like games is because they are computationally too expensive to use and requires massively more programming work to implement compared to using polygon meshes in an environment that is limited by the amount of computer power and time to render. There are plenty of other reason why polygons are used over splines and anymore discussion about it beyond this level is above the level of knowledge I have on the subject.

Lets just say programmers and mathematicians the world over has already looked at this question and had decided one set of technology for this purpose and another set of tech for another for some very good reasons. If they could uses one "Universal" system, there wouldn't all these different model construction/rendering/animation types/methods out there.

[tendoboy1984]

So a movie using polygons would require more hardware rendering (using more resources and a higher cost) than a game using splines/NURBS?


I remember reading an article years ago that said the PSP could use NURBS... If the PSP could do it, then surely more powerful consoles like the Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii U could do NURBS as well.

[oohhboy]

So a movie using polygons would require more hardware rendering (using more resources and a higher cost) than a game using splines/NURBS?

No. A movie using polygons would require more physical work for the modeller to construct than to use splines. Given that a movie compared to a game console has effectively infinite rendering power/time why not use splines which are easier to mold complex shapes out of with surfaces the mathematically contain "infinite" detail.

Go dig up that PSP article. If it was any good they would tell you the limitations of the system. Also go read the wiki articles as they breakdown the pros and cons of each method. You won't understand it all, I don't, but it should be enough to give you a sense why they use different method for different applications.

[TJ Spyke]

So a movie using polygons would require more hardware rendering (using more resources and a higher cost) than a game using splines/NURBS?


I remember reading an article years ago that said the PSP could use NURBS... If the PSP could do it, then surely more powerful consoles like the Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii U could do NURBS as well.

PSP is CAPABLE of NURBS, but doesn't use them. Current gen consoles can do so too, but don't. Hell, even PC games rarely, if ever, use them either. They are just too expensive.

[tendoboy1984]

So a movie using polygons would require more hardware rendering (using more resources and a higher cost) than a game using splines/NURBS?


I remember reading an article years ago that said the PSP could use NURBS... If the PSP could do it, then surely more powerful consoles like the Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii U could do NURBS as well.

PSP is CAPABLE of NURBS, but doesn't use them. Current gen consoles can do so too, but don't. Hell, even PC games rarely, if ever, use them either. They are just too expensive.

If NURBS are so expensive, then why do movie and animation studios use them? Polygons are a cheaper alternative, but they require more manpower to construct models using them. So which is the better rendering tool to use? NURBS or polygons?

[oohhboy]

When he said expensive, he mean the amount of computer calculations required. A console or handheld device have only so many calculations per unit of time before it has to render the next frame/physics/input output/AI. Movies are not restrained by the amount of time they have to render a frame nor deal with gameplay elements besides physics. Also without the time and hardware limitations they can pool massive amounts of computing resources to do some extremely complex maths.

This is a entry from the developer commentary from Portal 2. It should give you a perspective of how much computing power is required to do something.
  Introduction Destruction 

“ The container ride destruction sequence provided some unique technical challenges. The dynamics you experience are actually computed as two separate but nested simulations. The first is a coarse scale simulation designed as a stress element analysis pass. This pass computes the overall gross motion of the container itself, and computes the collisions and break points based on path keyframe data and a network of constraints. As the container bumps and crashes along, the constraints start breaking, and the room progressively starts to come apart. There are over three hundred rigid bodies and nine hundred constraints in this rig, all individually configured for properties like tensile, friction and collision response. The coarse simulation portrayed gross motion that captured the main dynamics of the ride, but not the fine details. The product of the coarse simulation was then used to deform spline-based surfaces representing the container geometry, which in turn were parents to fine debris as anchored rigid bodies. As the surface deformations increase, anchors are broken and the fine debris rigid bodies are released into the simulation. The fine simulation also includes the interior furniture, and the model detailing. The two simulations were then connected using cache data and were driven together by a series of scripts. Due to the computational complexities of having two nested simulations, we had to come up with some solutions to some interesting mathematical problems. One problem was that the nested nature of the simulations resulted in some instability in the fine debris calculations due to floating point computing limits. The solution employed for this was to compute the fine debris on a stage where the root transform of the coarse simulation was essentially cancelled out and stored for later use. This allowed us to more accurately detect the fine interactions between the debris and the environment. Post simulation, the root transform position and inertia were reapplied to the details. We solved the problem of trying to compute the player within this highly dynamic environment by putting them in a virtual room that has all the base shapes of the rendered container, but is simply used to compute player navigation. (It’s hidden somewhere else in the map.) The viewpoint of the player is then parented to coarse simulation transform, resulting in the final rendered frame. At the end of the ride the player is teleported into the actual game space. The simulations were iterative, enabling us to sculpt the dynamics in parallel with the gameplay design. In the final product there are over 1200 rigid bodies, 900 constraints, and 1000 joints. With all the iterations combined, the actual run time spent computing the simulation was 92.4875 days. — Gray Horsfield