Pug, you amuse me for several reasons. One, you make a bunch of false assumptions about me. That's funny because you cited HTML, a programming language built entirely for webpage creation and nothing more. Hell, that's given based on name alone - hypertext markup language. Nothing having to do with gaming at all. So that's a cute comment and all, but it's off base and pretty much a knee-jerk reaction that even a high school computer science student might giggle at.
Then you can't name Kasperov, but I don't necessarily hold that against you since it's largely a trivial point for two reasons: 1) It doesn't help your argument, and 2) it's just a Jeopardy question (meaning this reason is far less significant but I wanted to point it out anyway). Although, I would like to add that Deep Blue is nothing BUT programming, that graphics don't even enter into the equation (does it even have graphical output?), and that it is thinking out moves for several minutes (if not hours) at a time. Yes, that would make for brilliant gameplay - we could watch enemies assume The Thinker position and tell us "Wait, I almost know what I want to do here." It's a supercomputer of CODE, yes, but it's devoted to nothing BUT code, and there's NO WAY to gauge it's graphical performance because, surprise, no one has done it before. Without any kind of graphical accelerators or video hardware, what does this have to do with anything? Let's keep this in the realm of the video game industry.
"Calculating more lines in the same amount of time makes it far easier on programmers, not harder."
Um, what? Writing MORE code is somehow better? I will have to have that explained to me. This sounds like a managerial comment at McDonalds - "Hey, if we stay open twenty FOUR hours, we can make more profit. Nevermind the losers running the stand at 4 AM, they can deal with it if I tell them to." So some guy decides 500K lines of code isn't enough, and tripling it makes it better? Yea, it MIGHT make it better IF the programmers don't tell him to eat sh*t first and write half ass code. But in an industry that demands 60-70 hour weeks for months at a time, who in the hell has time for that? You can ask the EA programmers. I'm sure they'd be delighted to think about writing MORE code for a useless engine that won't showcase a damn thing they worked on anyway.
"I really think your missing the point here too, if for example there were a hundred enemies on the N64 how many could or would you have on a PS3"
Fairly irrelevent. If the N64 can make a character react to the same atmospheric and environmental effects in the same general way as the PS3, whats the damn difference? It all goes back to the idea of games looking better but still playing, looking, controlling, and feeling the same. What is the honest difference between Final fantasy 1 on the NES and the fundamental cores of FF7, 8, 9, 10, etc? You do largely the same thing in all of them. Yea, FF7 and the like introduce some nice new elements, they look killer, but so what? I cast Ice 3 in FF and kill an enemy in 5 seconds. Or I can cast it in FF7 and wait the 45 seconds that Square thinks is necessary to prove to me their artists got a lot of damn time on their hands. In both instances it's almost the same game. An FPS on the PC years ago is almost identical to anything out now. Half Life gets trumped by Half Life 2, but aside from the physics engine, whats the difference?
I think you're the one missing the point that I was getting at. Can the PS do PS2 games? No. It can't emulate 1/10th the graphics. But any sort of engine on it could be duplicated on both systems fairly well and you'd never notice much of a difference. Is there really any doubt that the mechanics of a game can't be retrofitted? If not, I suggest you look at the GBA. Talented programmers are spitting out some massively impressive 3D engines on it, and this is something a little more powerful than the SNES. That's code optimization because that technology has been around forever. If you fully optimized the code of a PS2 or Gamecube or Xbox, I bet you could get games much better looking than RE4, Halo 2, or ZOE 2.
Hell, I remember back on a PC100 mhz computer playing Stunts, a fully 3D polygon racing game. This is fully 4-5 years before the N64, and it was honestly comparable to first gen games. The cars controller well, you biult your own courses, the draw in distance was amazing. We're talking all of this before 3D hardware acceleration, before nVidia and ATI, before a thousand innovations in graphical technology. Before AGP even. And it ran without a hitch, had effects, opponents, racing AI, the whole 9 yards.
Whats the point I'm making? If someone took the time, they could make an engine, fill it FULL of effects, FULL of physics, FULL of shaders and lighting and complicated AI, and STILL manage to make it run on the current generation systems with fantastic graphics. But the time it would take to fully understand and unleash that kind of power would require thousands of hours of programming and research. Companies do not, and more importantly WILL not, sacrifice that kind of time in such a competitive market. There's no need to increase the power of a system 10 fold when you haven't even tapped the final innards of the current gen, NOR will you ever tap the full potential of the next gen.
I talked with a friend of mine who has done internship research with virtual reality companies, is currently purusing a computer architecture degree, and has programmed for the greater part of the last 10 years of his life. He might not rank with game develop programmers yet, but he's got enough insight to know what he's talking about, and he's a brilliant guy to boot. So he knows far more than me. And he knows that throwing 3 3.2ghz processers into a system is largely wasteful because the chances of them getting all three to work in tandem is difficult enough, and in most cases, one will do all the work and shovel off ancillary commands to the other one, and in rare cases, both. There's no way Microsoft is going to allow Bungie to sit back and fully wrangle the power out of all three processors. They don't have the time. And even if they DID ever make an engine that COULD do something like that, the artists would be worked to death filling up the screen with a bunch of useless polygons. There's no way in hell it would happen, ever. Most commands can't even be executed by two chips - only certain applications can be run on dual processors. And Microsoft thinks three are needed? You could cut one off and there'd be little, if any, loss in power. No one would know the damn difference. It's like having 512 megs of ram versus a gig of it when all you awnt to do is check your e-mail. If you can do it with 64 megs without a hitch, whats the damn need for all that useless power?
You're right - a Gameboy can't compare to a PS3. That's a stupid comparison and you're probably smart enough to know I wasn't saying that. The point I'm making is that all this power is largely useless, it won't make games look "omfg so much battar!!111" than today's games, and it will NEVER be an infinite possibility. Until we can automate graphics rendering in such a way that humans can get machines to do it for them, NO ONE has the resources, manpower, sweat, or determination to take a system with that kind of power to it's potential max. There's just no way to do it and NOT work on a game with hundreds of peopel for years at a time. If that were the case, the Duke Nukem Forever fiasco wouldn't be that - a fiasco - but rather something commonplace.
People bitch when Nitnendo takes 3 years to make Zelda. I can't imagine the groaning if Nintendo tried to push graphics even further and took 5, 6, or 7 years.
And I gaurantee you that if they wanted to, they could have. But no one has the time in this market.
And no programmers are going to be allowed to sit around and try to optimize something like that. It's not going to happen. At some point, it's all going to level off, and games are going to look all generically the same. Who in the hell honestly thinks you need more than a few dozen characters on screen? We're limited enough by 2D television technology as IS, who in the f*ck wants to clog their screen up with a bunch of useless bodies? Oh wait, and they better all have clothing dynamics, water effects, and personalized shadows.
Yea right.
Give me a break. The graphics argument is dead and has been since the friggin Dreamcast.
Topic: Recolution a lost battle? (Read 11930 times)
