Does anyone actually like to make games for fun anymore? I really think this government has made everyone think about nothing but money don't you? Harder now days than it was for people doing things 10 or 15 years ago. I bet all the successful games developers in Brisbane and all the business people for that matter were on unemployment when they started up. Not saying this is wrong but just pointing out that a lot of wealth is created for a country and a lot of innovation and risk taking comes from people not working 9-5 jobs. Pity we've got this droid-like, manufacturing line society now days?
Anyway, what does everyone think of doing games with 100,000 poly figures such as the ones attached?
[img]icon_paperclip.gif[/img] Download Attachment: [url="http://www.sumea.com.au/forum/attached/poser/200553123555_Mayan.jpg"]Mayan.jpg[/url]
136.72 KB
[img]icon_paperclip.gif[/img] Download Attachment: [url="http://www.sumea.com.au/forum/attached/poser/200553123632_Pirate.jpg"]Pirate.jpg[/url]
83.18 KB
those characters arent really anything special - the clothes and atire look ok but still the skin and a human face is nowhere near the level of everything else. Just low polygon with a meshsmooth whacked on 2 iterations. Id much prefer seeing a 20k + hand modelled and nicely textured photoreal character than these - thats just a blatant waste of resources.
That being said - I cannot wait for the day that we are seeing characters beyond the WOW intro as ingame characters.
So I'm getting the feeling that no one thinks its ok to replace graphic artists with product but that its ok to replace programmers with engines?
Would it shock anyone to know that figures this heavy 100,000 polys can be animated at 30+ fps on pretty low spec hardware - we?re doing it with 3 of them at once with smooth (our own efficient geometry blending) limitless animation (thousands of different frames) and a 500,000 poly background scene all on as little as NVidia 5200?s in an interactive games environment. If engines can't do that then they are holding you back ? same as not using assembly line models eh?
Engines will always be behind the game - yes they may promote some consistency but at what cost - creativity, efficiency and innovation!
If anyone including you JT want to have smooth limitless animation done on your high poly models with detailed textures, then get a great programmer (me or one or two others in the world maybe) let me know - 20k poly models are a snack - would a dozen in one scene with limitless animation be enough? After all its about staying ahead of the game not using an engine to keep up with it?
Otherwise use a games engine and throw in some assembly line models and you've got it the future of Indie and the games production world! CAPITALISM - THE CRAPIEST PRODUCT AT THE CHEAPEST PRICE (I think I'm going to trademark that for my Commerce Thesis)!
Ha Ha! (Maybe I should make this my signature?)
i'm a bit confused after reading your posts (it might just be because i'm tired). exactly which game developers use poser models in games? (i imagine these are poser characters). In my opinion it doesn't matter how many polys are available to an artist, what counts is how efficiently they are used. I agree with what Hazard said, and go as far as saying that i've seen a lot of 1500 poly models with top notch textures look far better than the 100,000 poly character you posted. once again though, i'm a bit lost trying to understand your point.
Just to reiterate my point - Im not really refering to the polycounts at all - more quality and an efficient use of teh resources available. If you offered me 100k polys and multiple 8192 textures + 6 weeks per character - Id gladly use every day, every polygon, and all that texture space with the utmost glee.
But if you think youve got what it takes to create a succesful and possibly commercially viable engine with which developers could use to make games with artwork like that - then by all means unleash this creation upon the world. I for one would love nothing more than to have such an unrestricted environment.
Back to the point though - what I was meaning to begin with was the fact that simply plonking a poser like character into any game is not paticularly beneficial to your game or game engine. You could probably make 4 characters look just as flawless and use a crapload less memory than just that average looking piece.
With regards to your experiment, Im sure once you get a cohesive game environment running, with lets say 5 - 10 of those characters running around with AI / Collision / Physics / Particle Effects / Occlusion / Shadows / Lighting / Sound and not to mention - being relatively bug free, Im pretty sure youll suffer from some nice performance hits.
On the other hand should you be feverishly working away on the engine as i type, and you suceed, then im sure in a short amount of time you could be a very rich person.
Kalescent Studios own model viewer tool has the capability to run animated characters with millions of polygons on screen as well, which we use for displaying our assets to clients - all the fandangled lighting / normal maps the whole works. But thats because its a raw rendering engine - quite different from a game engine - which im sure yours is also.
But like I mentioned above - feel free to dazzle.
P.s I wouldnt replace a programmer with an engine. Maybe if i was smart, had very little money - I would purchase a cheap already created engine, and then pay a programmer to build on it to a point where its suitable for what we as a team decide to build for our game. If I was in such a position I would do exactly the same for the art.
If I take on a game project, careful planning of the use of available resources is the ultimate priority. Nothing comes before that. And my team is my number 1 resource - they come first.
quote:If anyone including you JT want to have smooth limitless animation done on your high poly models with detailed textures, then get a great programmer (me or one or two others in the world maybe) let me know - 20k poly models are a snack - would a dozen in one scene with limitless animation be enough? After all its about staying ahead of the game not using an engine to keep up with it?
With a paragraph like this I would guess that our friend ?poser? is not so much interested in fostering a discussion but is more interested in making an ill educated statement about games manufacture / politics and blowing his own horn.
quote:
Would it shock anyone to know that figures this heavy 100,000 polys can be animated at 30+ fps on pretty low spec hardware
No it would not, but in a game you want to factor into that: environments, physics, sound, interaction code, lighting, player control and feedback , updating huds etc etc. That changes things somewhat.
Just because we operate under a capitalistic society does not mean. quote:
CAPITALISM - THE CRAPIEST PRODUCT AT THE CHEAPEST PRICE
Competition eliminates this unless you believe there is across the board price fixing and product limiting going on. If one company could make basic hardware show supa high poly models without it effecting gameplay in a negative way, they would do it to get one up on the competition and thus take a greater part of the game dollar.
As for your comment of quote: then get a great programmer (me or one or two others in the world maybe)
I will close my response by saying, ?get your hand off it mate.?
Pantmonger
Sorry Poser, it's a bit hard to follow you when you're jumping around many different points...
quote:"just pointing out that a lot of wealth is created for a country and a lot of innovation and risk taking comes from people not working 9-5 jobs. Pity we've got this droid-like, manufacturing line society now days?"
If you're meaning the take-less-risk / churn-out-another-sequel nature of the industry then I agree.
quote:Anyway, what does everyone think of doing games with 100,000 poly figures such as the ones attached?
Like what's been said, they look like poser models, and don't look very inspiring from a design point of view. I don't think we'll be seeing 100,000 polygon figures in game any time soon when a normal mapped 10,000-20,000 polygon model will just do fine. Save those cpu cycles for AI, eh! [;)]
quote:So I'm getting the feeling that no one thinks its ok to replace graphic artists with product but that its ok to replace programmers with engines?
It's much harder to make the visuals of the game coherent if you're buying off-the-shelf models and content from different sources, especially if your game is adhering to a particular style. I would say that the models would have to be extremely generic or real world (e.g car models) for this option work, and I don't see any problem with cost saving ways like this really.
Engines, if the cost of developing a new engine completely dwarfs the cost of licensing one (and the difference in return is negligable), why wouldn't you go with the cost effective option? It'll save time too.
sure i like to make games for fun. Not that big a fan of the droid-like, manufacturing line poser figures which these seem to be though. perhaps not idea art resources for a non time intesive development 'free' game, but that may be just me.