Re: CRAP Poll: Does The Tech Still Impress?

On Mon, 24 Jun 2024 12:23:03 +0200, H1M3M <wipnoah@gmail.com> wrote:

Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

What about you? Does the tech still impress? Did it ever? And do you
care?

Last time tech impressed me was with Dreamcast. Nowadays you can throw
all the crap at me you want, 4K, HDR, gigatextures, etc... I am more
impressed seeing konami games from their golden age pulling graphical
tricks on 16 bit consoles. Rocket Knight, Sparkster, Contra The
hardcops... And Thunderforce IV. I'm a sucker for parallax effect and
multiple layers.

But there's more to technological advancement than just visual effects
(although, being a largely visual medium, it's often hard to
distinguish the non-visual effects from the visual ones).



<Ramble>

I think I've told this story here before, but I'm rambling now so I
can repeat it.

Back in 1995, Looking Glass (yes, THAT Looking Glass) released a game
called "Flight Unlimited". It was a visually breathtaking game, with
rolling hills and fully textured ground. It doesn't sound so
impressive now, but back then the default for flight simulators was
flat-shaded terrain where elevations tended to be giant pyramids stuck
to the ground representing mountains. Like so much Looking Glass did,
"Flight Unlimited" was ahead of its time.

But it's not really the game I wanted to talk about. Rather, it was
its sequel, the imaginatively named "Flight Unlimited II". And it's
not really the game so much I wish to bring up, but the hype about the
game before it was released. While the first game's arenas were fairly
limited maps --maybe a few miles across-- "Flight Unlimited II" was
going to accurately depict 100 miles all around San Francisco; not
just the terrain, but also 'every building 10 stories or taller'.
Again, this in a era when most cities were represented by a cityscape
texture and a handful of rectangles that stood in for the most famous
landmarks. It felt like an unheard of level of fidelity, even if today
we take such things for granted.

It wasn't the actual game that impressed me, though (although that
probably had to do with the fact that I didn't actually get to PLAY it
until the early 2000s, because the game was all but impossible to find
on store shelves when it was new). When I did finally install it, I
was in fact somewhat disappointed; it turns out that there are a lot
fewer 10+ story buildings around than I expected, and the terrain
still looked barren.

Still, it was the *idea* of that level of fidelity that excited me.
"If today we can do all buildings 10+ stories, maybe in two years
we'll do all buildings 3+ stories, and in five years /every/
building... and after that? Maybe even the lowliest flight sim (or
game) will not only have fully rendered copies of the world but those
buildings will filled with interiors and sims living virtual lives
within them."

As it turns out, I was /incredibly/ optimistic with my timeline. The
dream of a 'fully rendered world' wasn't really achieved until  with
"Microsoft's Flight Simulator (2020)" and even then, the game
cheated... a lot. And the dream of fully rendered interiors still
hasn't happened (still, with all the personal info we put out onto the
web, and modern generative AI coupled to procedural generation tools,
it doesn't seem too outlandish that one day interiors could be created
on the fly too. One day. Maybe in the 2040s. Or am I being naively
optimistic again? ;-).

Nonetheless, that dream never quite died, and even if it was slower to
arrive than I hoped, I watched excitedly as we crept closer to it
every year. "Grand Theft Auto 3" was an exciting milestone; a fully 3D
rendered city, mile across! Sure, the scale was much tinier, and the
buildings remained hollow facades, but it had a fully-active populace
milling about and seemed a definitive first step. ("Mafia", released
only a year later, even had several buildings with actual interiors!).

And the potential of such a world? Well, I hardly have to tell you,
since pretty much any modern game is chasing after that dream, whether
it's "Project Zomboid" or "No Man's Sky" or "Minecraft" or "Dying
Light 2" or "FarCry VI" or "Assassins Creed XXXVIII": they're all of
them building out giant maps as realistically and fully-developed as
time and RAM restrictions allow. And for years it seemed that every
game was moving us one step closer to the fully-open, fully-simulated
world.

Except nowadays, not so much because --along the way-- we discovered
having such immense maps to play around in actually can work AGAINST
the play value of a game (not to mention it's damned expensive trying
to map out such huge tracts of land in that much detail!). So a lot of
games are focusing on smaller regions; still filling them with
hundreds or thousands of locations, sure, but there's been a pull-back
on chasing after bigger and bigger maps.

Anyway, the whole point of this wandering diatribe is as an example of
tech that once excited me but nowadays, not so much. Admittedly, I'll
be the first to say that it's probably a good thing that developers
are refiguring their ideas as to what is necessary for a good game --a
frequent complaint I've made here is that modern games are often just
too damn big to enjoy and that I'd rather a smaller, better-paced
experience-- but this is the difference between the artistry of game
design over the tech.

I'd still go gaga over the tech used to create a fully rendered, fully
interactive Virtual Earth. I might not think it a very good gaming
experience, but -having watched video games crawl towards the goal for
so long - I'd be impressed by the skill to create and simulate such an
immense creation.

</ramble>