Next generation graphics engine

[Reverend]

Humus's demo prompted this (altho' I've yet to see it myself!).

So here's a question :

If there is a developer that could care less if he makes or lose money, what would you like to see in a game in terms of graphics? Let's leave out the obvious stuff like "bump everything" or "more bones!!" or "forget clockspeed, just use more pix and vert proggies for everything in the gameworld!". I would also leave out insane texture resolutions.

Basically, I'm just wondering if there are any Nobel-prize-like thinking out there :smile:

 

[Need Evil Myopia]

Basically, what I want is Doom 3. Doom 3 will be the first to have a somewhat realistic lighting model, with proper (but still "hard") shadows, "additive" light sources with a pass per light, surface materials, and bump maps that are autogenerated from near-megapolygon models.

If we had 10 times the graphical power, I'd probably just keep the Doom 3 engine and add distributed rendering effects with an accumulation buffer such as real motion blur, really nice AA, soft shadows, and soft reflections. But you couldn't play this game on any hardware yet, so it's not really worth considering.

If I had to pick something, it would be complex, per-pixel material properties. Textures would, instead of just RGB values, also have: a normal, a specular exponent, an RGB specular term, an RGB reflectance term, a direction of anisotropy, etc. Many channels for many material coefficients, and they should all vary per pixel and be taken into account in the shader. Doom 3 will have some of this, but isn't going to take it all the way.

 

[borzwazie]

I would want to see three things:

First of all, lighting is really important. Let's have all objects casting shadows, and capable of self-shading as well.

Second, physics. After seeing what Halo did with the Havoc physics engine, I consider it unthinkable that anyone would use anything less at this time.

Lastly, you tie this all in with accurate sound propagation. I think the best engine I've ever seen with sound propagation was Thief, and graphics were secondary. Even the Dark engine had some issues, so any improvment on that would be tremendous.

So, it's not all graphics stuff...but it's what I demand from an engine if I'm allowed :smile: Really, graphics are secondary to gameplay. Anyone who tells you different never played System Shock or Thief.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: borzwazie on 2002-02-16 08:07 ]</font>

 

[demalion]

What about deformable terrain? Isn't this also worthy of consideration, for enhanced immersion? What comes to mind is a "vertex shader" type language for defining behavior of objects when hit with varying forces (trampolines, snow, and bean bags, not just bomb craters).

Also, no one has mentioned things like the "deformable smoke" from the Unreal Warfare engine in this thread (how is this done, anyways? Particle system? Or some type of procedural texture magic? I was under the impression that this didn't require pixel or vertex shaders to be done in the engine).

 

[3dcgi]

I'd like to seem improvements on the content creation side. If the artists are freed from technical constraints the graphics will only get better.

For example, using the material editor in 3ds max you can set up procedural textures, mixed with static textures, specular highlights, you name it. We need an automatic path to export this data, as is, to shader formats.

 

[3dcgi]

From a technology standpoint I'd like to see improved speed to allow for better dynamic lights and shadows. Also, more use of level of detail techniques so that the same engine can stress top of the line hardware, but still play on older hardware.

Lighting quality is one area that could benefit from this scalability. Many people think per-pixel lighting is better than per-vertex, but this isn't necessarily true if a triangle is no larger than a pixel. If the engine is able to adaptively tessellate a model based on the speed of the computer it can use coarse models for slow computers and automatically add detail for faster computers. Theoretically this will make the engine stress graphics cards that haven't even been released yet. To be truly effective this might require some hardware support as well. Maybe extensions to the current higher order surfaces.

 

[jjayb]

I agree with Borzwazie. (Yes, I'm a big system shock and Thief fan) Too many games come out with great graphics and ignore sound. Mohaa comes out with great graphics and only 2d sound. What a joke.

 

[pascal]

I agree with Need Evil Myopia and I would like improved 3D sound.

What if Doom3 support Trueform too?


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: pascal on 2002-02-16 21:52 ]</font>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: pascal on 2002-02-16 21:53 ]</font>

 

[EvilTwin]

I would like a game where you can interact with everything , like the real world . For instance if you had some explosives , you could blow up any wall (if you have enough =) ) ; although if you plant too much you could be killed in the blast (if you get too close) . Just a game where you can use anything , it would be impossible , but oh well .

 

[pcchen]

What if Doom3 support Trueform too?

Unlikly if Doom3 uses CPU for extracting silhouettes.

 

[Humus]

How would that affect the use of truform?

 

[Xmas]

Hm, wouldn't the normal maps be a bit wrong with TruForm enabled, because they're created with a flat triangle in mind?

 

[marco]

Hmm interesting question;
What I like to see, mentioned above an engine/world in which you can move freely. That means no boundaries. If I would walk down a street and there is a wall on my left side, I would want to blow it away and move in that direction. So you would be able to choose your own path in this world. Every object in your enviroment should be able to be destroyed or be moved. If we have such enviroments, we (as players) could develop our own stories within the game, our own ways to get to the end of a game. Freedom is the key word here. Every game we see; is get from point A to point B, by following a laid down (fixed) path. This concept should change.

A little of topic, as we are talking about technical things we want to see in an engine, but this is what I like to see...

 

[Humus]

On 2002-02-17 01:05, Xmas wrote:
Hm, wouldn't the normal maps be a bit wrong with TruForm enabled, because they're created with a flat triangle in mind?

Normalmaps are independent of orientation since they contain tangent space normals. It may screw up lightvectors though depending on how they are implemented.

 

[Xmas]

On 2002-02-17 01:55, Humus wrote:
Normalmaps are independent of orientation since they contain tangent space normals. It may screw up lightvectors though depending on how they are implemented.

Imagine a normal map with a half-sphere like this. Now imagine those two triangles were turned into a curved patch with TruForm... would it still look like a sphere? I guess no.

 

[gking]

Originally posted by Humus:
Normalmaps are independent of orientation since they contain tangent space normals. It may screw up lightvectors though depending on how they are implemented.

That's only true for tangent-space normal maps. Since normal maps have no internal knowledge about their frame of renference, they are only orientation-independent if you create a basis for them at every vertex.

Doom 3 uses object-space normal mapping, where the normal map is the sum of the interpolated vertex normals and the bump map. The nice thing about object space bump mapping is that you only need to transform the light position/vector once per object, and then you can do simple diffuse lighting with just 1 texture stage (assuming dot3 is available and L is sent to the blending units by one of the interpolators).

The real reason why TruForm doesn't work well with Doom is that Doom's lighting (or, more accurately, shadowing) is calculated by determining the silhouette edges for every object and then extruding them until they intersect the view frustum. All of the silhouette edge detection happens on the CPU (extrusion can happen in vertex shaders or on the CPU), and all of TruForm's tesselation happens on the GPU. Since TruForm changes object silhouettes without informing the program, the shadow volumes would be noticeably wrong.

TruForm also creates clipping and collision detection issues for programs with polygon-accurate collision detection (or in the rare case where an edge of an object's silhouette is coplanar with the object's collision volume).

 

[LittlePenny]

I would like to see some work done with infinite room sizes.

 

[Tahir2]

I would like to see Giants 2

:smile:

 

[CerthasIM]

DeusEx/DeusEx 2/Thief 3
While Deus Ex was still a long way away from "blow a wall up and go that way" it definately was the closest you could get yet. Emergent gameplay to the max.
Furthermore Deus Ex 2/Thief 3 will have soundpropagation which is vastly improved from their predecessors, and be using the Unreal 2 engine with the cool outside landscapes.
I'd say one thing I've yet to see anywhere is a good display of landscape with a dense and detailed forest. It doesn't lend itself well to the rendering technics used today, but Unreal 2 does a step in the right direction.

Combine that with the spectacular lighting of Doom 3 and you are back in the land when double digit framerates were considered fast...

 

[ram]

More dynamics/physics interaction. Today, almost everything is static.

Grass, trees, clothes, hairs and flags have to wave in the wind. Walls have to shake after an explosion, things have to fly through the scene. This dynamic effects together with better lighting and shadowing would IMO definitly increase realism in games.