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The coming Earthquake in MMORPG's.
Quillim
Member UncommonPosts: 83
Is going to be centered around the biggest controversy of the moment, the 'realistic' vs 'cartoony' debate.
And the 'realistic' folks are going to lose.. badly. And justly. In a lot of ways, the traditional methods of making MMORPG's represent 'model' making. I'll give you an example, take a look at the following picture from STTOR:
Now, this is one handsome image, some might refer to it as 'realistic', but what is the core problem? The problem is that everything is static. Its a picture that can pretty much be viewed from varying angles in game, and the interactivity is with voice and text.
The next stage of MMORPG's is taking these deadeye characters, making them move, react, and interact, and doing so in a fully functional and living world. In order to do that, their overall quality will need to drop. This is why you see more 'stylistic' approaches. To get the movement and interaction that developers want to deliver, images of this depth cannot be used. It isn't about pushing massive amounts of individual pixels as largely static frames, its how those pixels move in concert and tell a story.
The tech may advance to the point where images can be as HQ while still giving the advanced movement and interactivity, but its nowhere near it right now. That's why SWTOR features dead worlds of lots of little movement and pretty pictures and backgrounds that do little. Next time you play, watch for it, watch for characters that actually talk directly in game via movement, watch for characters that actually move and come alive outside of cinematics, you won't find them.
Because this is old tech, and people need to develop these types of games. I applaud SoE for clearly taking a path into this. Starting to give movement language to all PC and NPC's, having them be more than just statues, box art, and graphical waypoints to pass you quests, this will be a great thing and it'll make games like SW:TOR look completely obsolete.
Comments
SO this is a next generation mmo. I say next gen becauseit is an open skill system, has procedural destructive environments, supports simultaneous console, smart phone, and tablet gameplay all together in real time, can create a lobby style gw1 atmosphere or create an open invitation mmo gameworld or join persistent massively multiplayer pvp areas. You can craft items, trade with other players, swap skills and roles on the fly. Its also in a seamless open world. And it happens to sport some of the most cutting edge graphics to date. enjoy the video!
Sorry but the excuse did not fly for Wow and most certainly does not fly now.
Developers have the ability to give us all the sliders and configs we need to set the game how we want it,remember that phrase the team keeps using >>>"We want to give you choice".
BTW there is another example right now that proves it works >>>FFXIV.
Epic games have proven for a few years now that you can have VERY high poly items/gear models,terrain by using techniques that scale down high quality models and make them look the exact same without all the poly's.
There is only one reason they go cheap end on visuals and it is cost/profit.
Nobody is going to sit in a board room and say "Ok i think we should make our game look bad,i think it will fly ,it works for Blizzard".No they are going to decide on how much bandwidth they are going to allot each player and make the maps accordingly.That is why you see a lot of games with such poor draw distances,they don't want to draw too much visually,they need too much bandwidth to make it work.Geesh i have seen games literally draw everything 5 feet in front of your player.
I see a lot of fogged background in the demos by EQN,it looks like they are simply going cheap.it is not a big deal as long as it is within reason,ALL games do it,i mean i do understand they have a business to run.But do not mistake their profits for being a good design decision for the game or the players.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
That's not next generation. It is a really good example of another one coming from the current generation, but it does have all the limitations of traditional 3D enviornments and MMO's and simply being able to be played on other systems does not change your generation. This really isn't that much different than any of the other shooters we've seen. Heck, you could do most of that stuff in Grand Theft Auto, just not with the same fidelity :P.
Heck, if Blizzard had gone the full monty on Titan and gone WoW 2.0.. that wouldn't have changed its generation. A generational change imo needs to actually incur a fundamentally different way of building and using games.
It is not that simple, scaling down models work to a certain degree but you still lose form of it. Oh and bandwidth? seriously? The world has nothing to do with bandwidth other than for downloading the client and that can be done through torrenting to save bandwidth, the collision and whatnot is handled client side not server side. Only thing that takes bandwidth is movements of npcs, skills, events etc. Things that needs to be updated and synced. Either way that is a veeeeeery small cost compared to development and HARDLY something they even slightly considers.
Multi-billions of dollars of customer revenue says you're wrong. Even at 8 million subs or whatever they're at, they're still the most dominant MMORPG in terms of revenue on the market to this day. To say its anything other than the most successful MMORPG in gaming history is just being silly. Yes it flew, it soared, and there was nothing better in its time.. regardless of whether you personally played it or not. The people spoke with their money.
The key is to find and be the leader of the next generation.. something radically different and better. Maybe that's EQN, or maybe it something else, but everything points to voxel worlds and what they make possible, having ushered in the next generation of MMO's.
True words. As much as some people might hate it, thats how things stand right now.
(Retired)- Anarchy Online/Ultima Online/DAoC/Horizonsz/EQ2/SWG/AC1&2/L2/SoR/WoW/TMO/Requiem/Atlantica Online/Manibogi/Rift+(SL)/Lol/Hon/SWTOR/Wakfu/Champions Online/GW/Lotr/CO/TcoS/Tabula Rasa/Meridian 59/Vanguard/Shadowbane/Fury/SotW/Dreamlords/HGL/RoM/DDO/FFXI/Aoc/Eve/Warhammer Online/Gw2/TSW/Tera/Defiance/STO/AoW/DE/Firefall/Darkfall/Neverwinter/PS2/ESO/FF14/Archeage/Gw2
Hmmmnnnn...Aesthetics do not equal graphics, you can have really nice aesthetics and clear graphics. If the resolution is high and so is the fidelity, yet it is made to be stylized it is still highly graphical. Nice edges, smooth animations, flowing visuals....Like BASTION...Bastion has great aesthetics both visually and audio, and great graphics. The graphics are the tools used to deliver the aesthetics. Just like Okami! Okami is a wonderful game with great aesthetics delivered on stunning graphics. The graphics are the tools used to shape the artwork, the artwork can be in any number of shapes and sizes. Borderlands has a certain aesthetic, but it still has high quality graphics. Just because it's not "realistic" does not mean it has cheaper graphics. It simply means the graphics were used to convey a different art form. People need to learn this difference.
--Custom Rig: Pyraxis---
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Most people are ignorant about those things and even if you tell them they will say whathever they fell like.
Maybe one day this will change.
(Retired)- Anarchy Online/Ultima Online/DAoC/Horizonsz/EQ2/SWG/AC1&2/L2/SoR/WoW/TMO/Requiem/Atlantica Online/Manibogi/Rift+(SL)/Lol/Hon/SWTOR/Wakfu/Champions Online/GW/Lotr/CO/TcoS/Tabula Rasa/Meridian 59/Vanguard/Shadowbane/Fury/SotW/Dreamlords/HGL/RoM/DDO/FFXI/Aoc/Eve/Warhammer Online/Gw2/TSW/Tera/Defiance/STO/AoW/DE/Firefall/Darkfall/Neverwinter/PS2/ESO/FF14/Archeage/Gw2
Divergence Kick starter going on right now
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/372333499/divergence-online
Huh?
While developers can give us all the sliders & configs we want in a game, that doesn't mean it doesn't come without a tradeoff.
You use FFXIV as an example, but in reality you should be using GW2. FFXIV is a VERY simple MMO. Graphically it looks gorgeous, but if you actually look at the mechanics & systems going on in the game, it's extremely minimal. If you look at GW2, it might not look as realistic as FFXIV, but it does have more going on behind the scenes. One big example of this is in WvW. Most people have to severely turn down their graphics in order to handle some of the massive / zergy 3-server battles. And even then, most people complain about lag & their computers chugging. Some of it comes down to optimisation but a lot of it is just that people's computers can only handle so much processing at a time, in real time.
This is a fact of 3d processing that isn't going away any time soon. We do not live in an age of limitless processing power. Neither for GPU or CPU. Even with 100,000$ machines there are still rendering limitations.
It's one thing to have a system that basically just has to compute Friendly vs. Unfriendly targets, skill inputs, and aggro proximity. The rest can be handled client side for the most part. It's an entirely different thing to have to check for your environment being altered by everyone ingame. To check for things like inter-player combo attacks, and the like. These are things that can't be left up to the client.
That said, unless you are working on EQN, we don't know the details behind the tech they are using. It's very possible they may have gone overboard with the stylized graphics, to overcompensate for potential tech limitations. However, I would personally rather see a game be too cautious with their game's performance, than promise realistic graphics and run into a game that cannot handle the graphics & the mechanics they want to implement.
- Honestly, this whole graphics debate is kind of silly to anyone with any experience in games, or 3d. We know the limitations of the current generation of 3d technology. We know that you are constantly juggling tradeoffs when making a game. There's a reason why most games go for either flashy graphics, or complex gameplay & robust game systems, and rarely both.
Heck, if Blizzard had gone the full monty on Titan and gone WoW 2.0.. that wouldn't have changed its generation. A generational change imo needs to actually incur a fundamentally different way of building and using games.
I think voxel engines and progressive rendering are innovative tools to create great games. But its not the only way to create great games and its also been done by dozens of games already for the past decade. Who knows, maybe one day all games will be made this way. That would be sad. Because a good game is an art form and its done however best expresses that. Even if this becomes the new standard, whats your point? Does that make you right or something? Im not sure the point of your original post then.
Not an MMO.
This ^^^
Compare Bioshock vs CoD. One stylish graphics, one realistic. Both highly successful and made tons of money.
The same applies to MMOs.
I have to agree.I don't know why people here get this idea that it has to be one or the other.All sorts of artstyles exist in other genres and should in the MMO ones
Variety is always a good thing.
Its more of an mmo than EQN is currently.
OP I think you are wrong
You don't seem to understand who has the power...and who doesn't.
Customers have the ability to choose to give some of their money to a game company...or not.
Company's exist to satisfy consumer needs
Company's who fail to satisfy consumer needs...don't get money from the consumer .....they don't recover their investment or make a profit and may go out of business.
In the mmog industry there are many choices.Customers spend their money on things that satisfy their wants and needs.
The customer is not forced to accept or buy anything.
Company's are constantly looking for unfilled needs...opportunities to offer consumers a product others have failed to offer.Too many companies offering similar products, creates an opportunity for another to make a new/different offering to the consumer.
The smart company listens to..and learns from its customers and the customers of their competitors.....and is constantly trying to fill or satisfy the needs/opportunities they identify.
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(I cannot believe I actually had to type the above)
That's what I'm working on.
You can use exactly the same textures for procedurally generated animations as for manually done ones. The real killer problem of animations is the geometry. There, if you want characters to be able to react to their surroundings (e.g., feet on the ground even on unlevel terrain, rather than punching through the ground or standing in mid-air), you're not going to be able to make as beautiful of screenshots. One issue that you may not have considered is that if animating characters requires heavy use of mathematics, then most artists won't be able to do it--and the people who can't won't be able to produce as good looking of graphics as the professional artists.
But there are, to some degree, trade-offs between how a game looks in screenshots and how it looks when animated. I think the former tends to be valued too highly and the latter too little.
Graphical stuff is all done client-side. Other than the initial download, bandwidth isn't relevant. You do need Internet bandwidth for a server to tell you that this character is over here rather than over there, facing this way, moving that way, using this attack, or whatever. But drawing whatever the server says is relevant is all done client-side.
For drawing higher polygon models, tessellation is the end-game. Used properly, even modern integrated graphics can process enough vertices that doubling the number of vertices wouldn't make it look any different to human eyes.
Is there any reason to use voxels other than not knowing what a manifold is? That's a serious question, not a rhetorical one.
And how do you destroy any object in thousand pieces, or even in any 2 pieces with manifolds. and i guess you talk about 2-manifold. I don't even see where those could either be replaces or are even in the same category. It is like you talking about vegetables and i am talking about fruits.
And will be voxel the future? I don't know a lot of people thought after Comanche (1992) voxels would be utilized a lot more.. it wasn't the case. Well now Carmack's new engine ID6 will be based on voxels. And i do see potential for voxel's as you can easier manipulate a 3D world based of voxels instead of meshes. But 3D cards have to follow that trend..
What you've got here is a bunch of people that have been hating on Blizzard for 10 years for 'cartoony graphics', now feeling their own petards being very firmly hoisted.
But as a whole, this is a very yawn-worthy Epic Crisis!!!1one!!
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
this is the only game i am truly excited about, like a schoolboy excited. i just haven't resolved how to either steal a PS4 or how to convince them to port it to PC.
"There are at least two kinds of games.
One could be called finite, the other infinite.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning,
an infinite game for the purpose of continuing play."
Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse
ive honestly been wondering if there were some kind of coder breakthrough or other tech breakthrough that has made it so attractive lately to developers both indie and full studio.
oh. and i have no idea what a manifold is except ive seen it mentioned in math and physics texts that i have tried to read on my own ... obviously with little success.
"There are at least two kinds of games.
One could be called finite, the other infinite.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning,
an infinite game for the purpose of continuing play."
Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse
If you want an object to shatter, have pieces flying every which direction, and then disappear, that's pretty easy if you're using DirectX 10 or OpenGL 3.2 or later, even if you're trying to patch it on to current techniques. Pass a uniform with the time (in milliseconds) since the object has shattered so that pieces know how far to move, then in geometry shaders, pick a random orientation and speed to rotate and velocity to move for each triangle. Instead of passing through the vertex coordinates that enter the geometry shaders unchanged, move and rotate the whole triangle by whatever amount that triangle needs to be moved. You'll probably want to recompute the normal vector after moving the triangle, and use flat interpolation rather than smooth for the normal vector.
And if you're already extensively using tessellation DirectX 11 or OpenGL 4.0 or later, then it's even easier. Rather than having to take your base vertex data, you can decide how many triangles you want to shatter the object into, set the tessellation degree accordingly, and then proceed as above. There will be a bit of a performance hit GPU-side to shatter the object, but we might be in the range of a 20% hit to your frame rate if you wanted everything in the entire game world to shatter simultaneously. For just one or two things at a time, it's not a big deal. CPU-side, the extra computations to do this amount to a rounding error.
Now, if you want the shards of the exploding object to have some physics attached (e.g., land on the ground and then stop, bounce off of walls, or bounce off of each other), then you're probably going to have to do a ton of work CPU-side, and that's going to be a problem regardless of your rendering method. I could see how voxels would mitigate the problem some there, but it's going to take an awful lot of explosions (e.g., bullet hell quantities) for that to overcome the disadvantages of using voxels everywhere else. Even if this is a huge priority, it might well be easier to convert your model to voxels when it explodes and proceed from there, without using voxels for anything other than explosions.
Here's a quick screenshot of something I posted several months ago that is kind of related, but not exactly what you're talking about:
You can click on it for a larger view.
The total amount of vertex data for all of the flames there consists of a single float, 0.0f. If you want to have such particle effects of varying sizes, colors, and numbers of particles all over the game world, they can still all share exactly the same base vertex data and pass in the other few parameters as a uniform. And then the program is run exactly once to draw all of the flames in the picture. The CPU-side work amounts to rotating the whole stack of flames once, having to tell the GPU the system time of the start of the frame once per frame (to know how far to move each flame piece), and passing some uniforms to the GPU once again every frame. The CPU does that once, treating the flames as a single solid object, not separately for each of the 2550 flame pieces.
The video card decides where the flames move, not the CPU. Each flame rises up to a certain point before it disappears. Some rise much further than others before disappearing. In this screenshot, the flames form a cylinder of sorts, but I've also implemented doing the same thing with a cone.
And there's likely a negative performance hit to do this: the game will run faster with the flames than it would without them. The reason for this is that the fragment shader is very, very simple (take the color received from the interpolating at the rasterization stage and pass it along), so it carries virtually no performance hit, but it will block more distant objects so that more expensive fragment shaders sometimes don't have to run at all.
While I use triangular pieces, it would be pretty easy to have geometry shaders construct tetrahedra or cubes or whatever else you want instead.