GDC goodness | The Coffeehouse

androidi

I see people here did not read between the lines or whatever.

Someone did though (GDC panel transcript, great stuff to quote)

Greg Costikyan wrote:

As recently as 1992: games cost 200K. Next generation games will cost 20m. Publishers are becoming increasingly risk averse. Today you cannot get an innovative title published unless your last name is Wright or Miyamoto. Who was at the Microsoft keynote? I don’t know about you but it made my flesh crawl. [laughter] The HD era? Bigger, louder? Big bucks to be made! Well not by you and me of course. Those budgets and teams ensure the death of innovation.

While I do not 100% agree with Greg's statement, it seems clear Xbox's technological advances are rather offtopic. HD is news? Perhaps if we were talking about a mere TV.

What will XNA Studio do to PC as a gaming platform? If one would base estimates on the Xbox 1 performance, and having all Xbox titles start coming to PC also, but having less of PC invidual titles, it can't be all good. I have no interest to play the latest Battlefield (2) with a pad!

Maybe future isn't this grim for the PC player. We may even see something new on Xbox/PC - something PS players have had before. And computers had before PS, but PS had more than PC thereafter. I am of course talking about some innovative titles here. Had we have XNA studio and every publisher wanting XBOX+PC release of every game, would have we had Battlefield 1942 in its current form? (OK probably as its dev was started before Xbox release - not the point though)

androidi

http://www.gamedev.net/columns/events/coverage/feature.asp?feature_id=69

The lectures kicked off with the overview of the Common Game Controller that was introduced last year. The CGC is a PC and Xbox compatible game controller, which should allow developers to write one controller interface for at least the Windows and Xbox platforms. MS also seems to be trying to push more games away from the mouse/keyboard IF for PC’s, but many PC games require much more functionality than a controller can provide, so it may be a hard sell.

Instead of more better interfaces we get less and poorer interfaces?

Minh
WOOH! WOOH!

Have you seen Wil Wright's new game Spore?

http://www.gamingsteve.com/archives/2005/03/pictures_of_wil.php

androidi

No, I did read notes someone took from the Wil Wrights GDC session though. Thanks for the pics link.

http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3138792&did=1

http://www.donhopkins.com/home/WillWrightSporeDemo.html

Of course there have been remotely similar ideas around.. For example Millenia: Altered Destinies, where life seeds are planted acros the galaxy and using time travel these born civilizations are helped to avoid catastrophes and whatever.

Or Megalomania ..

Anyway it seems to combine a multitude of stuff. It will be exciting to see how it pans out.

Minh
WOOH! WOOH!

androidi wrote:
No, I did read notes someone took from the Wil Wrights GDC session though. Thanks for the pics link.

Did you also listen to the podcast? He went into much more detail. Sounds like a very BIG game. We'll see if it's actually fun.

Cider
Daze-d & Confused

It seems like one of those games that occasionally pops up from developers at the top of their game who can demand anything. Indeed, the hype for this "massive taking-control-of-evolution" game is very similar to the sort of talk that occurred when Black and White was first revealed. And look at what happened to THAT.

Its funny when they talk about massive games where you have control over everything, that in many ways we are still not got up to the level of openness there was in early 90s games like Midwinter, Hunter and, of course, Elite & Elite:Frontier.

I'd be happy just for good updates of those (and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. finally released).

androidi

Interestingly one of the comments on the link you provided gave away what Will Wright may be using to create the "infinite" world without using hundred DVD's.

http://www.theprodukkt.com/theprodukkt.html#tech

So its possible to create quite interesting graphics for the worlds by combining some player choices, designer choices and procedural synthesis.

In fact theres some pics there that show you can create better than Doom 3 GFX in 1/1000 size of doom.

androidi

Minh wrote:
Did you also listen to the podcast? He went into much more detail. Sounds like a very BIG game. We'll see if it's actually fun.

Yeah I'm just finishing it! It seems I were not alone 13 years ago (when playin Civ 1) when thinking "DAMN we need Civ Universal".. Sure they came up with Alpha Centauri or whatever it was called, but that was just "Civ on another planet". This is just like the stuff I dreamed back then, though this ability to create all buildings,characters etc which seems major selling point of this game I didn't think off.

I think we do not see this before christmas 2005 though, could be 2006 too.

androidi

From the blogs of Flight Simulator graphics engineer Sebastien St-Laurent and Tom Miller of Managed DirectX fame I picked up some interesting graphics programming related links to slides presented at the GDC:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/directxcommunity/default.aspx (at the bottom of the page)

I have not yet had gone through these but there's some interesting names atleast.
PIX for Xbox.ppt - PIX (Performance Investigator), one of its devs, Rick Hoskinson, has a blog.
Windows and Xbox Best Practices.ppt
Visual Studio 2005.ppt (XNA studio slide? perhaps)

There's also shader programming workshop and exercises

Far Cry and DirectX, by Carsten Wenzel of Crytek
http://www.ati.com/developer/techpapers.html#gdc05
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/gdc_2005_presentations.html

And this cool program where you can try running shader code and see results realtime. It has special "artist menu" where you get the sliders for those particular parameters that affect the look of whats rendered.. In realtime of course! Quite amazing. You don't need to know how to code shaders to play around.

Rendermonkey

androidi

From the just launched Coding4Fun page
I picked up the ZMan's site where he mentions that April 19th (Today - not yet though it seems) there should be some of the GDC sessions coming available as video streams!

Upcoming GDCTV Sessions:
Gameplay Moves Forward into the 21st Century	Peter Molyneux
Game Technology and Content Creation for the Next Generation	Tim Sweeney
Rolling the Dice - The Risks and Rewards of Developing Katamari Damacy	Keita Takahashi
The Near Future of Media Distribution	Masaya Matsuura