2000-5 PS2 (so far)

[Nightz]

The concepts behind the machine
Around PS2 launch Edge had an interview with Phil Harrison from Sony R&D. Quite a good read, it talked about some interesting new concepts which the PS2 was supposed to introduce. The interesting bits.

When asked what the emotion engine is?
"The emotion engine is synthesis and the ability to elicit an emotional reaction from the player"

He describes the synthesis model as a new technology where content is completely generated Procedurally inside the PS2 hardware. Allowing for huge randonly generated worlds and characters.

His description of the games is that basically nothing in a game will look or the sound the same. Every single cloud, brick, stone, tree, leaves even sound and A.I will be individualy different.

What to expect from the synthesis model?
Large infinite gameworlds with no edges, no predefinition of textures or geometry.
The end of on-rails racing games.

Further more
In future PS2 titles; over time trees will grow, roads will get ware, paint will deteriorate, characters will age.

He mentioned some other complex stuff I couldnt understand.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Its been 5 years now

What happened to the emotions that were supposed to created by the EE?

Are any programmers using the synthesis model to create new experiences?

 

[cybamerc]

What happened is that reality set in.

 

[Guden Oden]

If only they would start using VU0, games could do all this...




Seriously though, games COULD do all this on hardware even less capable than the PS2, but no developer has actually taken the time to develop such a piece of software and then create a game around it.

 

[Megadrive1988]

Shenmue is one of the few console games that IMO have come closest to reaching this 'synthesis'. maybe some of the PS2 RPGs do aswell but I havent played many RPGs on PS2 except FFX.

 

[Guden Oden]

I would have said Black & White, but whatever. I guess now the DC fans will go on about friggin shmenue forever.

 

[Fox5]

In future PS2 titles; over time trees will grow, roads will get ware, paint will deteriorate, characters will age.

Heh, sounds like what nintendo said the 64dd's rewritability would do.

BTW, randomly generated terrain would probably suck.

Shenmue is one of the few console games that IMO have come closest to reaching this 'synthesis'. maybe some of the PS2 RPGs do aswell but I havent played many RPGs on PS2 except FFX

Eh? I don't think anything in shenmue was random, it just had a lot of hand created things.(probably why it took so long to make)

 

[MechanizedDeath]

Its been 5 years now

What happened to the emotions that were supposed to created by the EE?

Are any programmers using the synthesis model to create new experiences?

Maybe Peter Molyneux could make some pie-in-the-sky promises like that and then grossly underdeliver. Maybe Kutaragi and Harrison are hitting the same crack pipe Peter's been pulling on for years. Game design needs to step up bigtime. PEACE.

 

[wazoo]

I agree that Molyneux is much closer to that than Shenmue.

Shenmue stands out because every texture, every detail was made different, which was possible only because of the 200 (and more) people team and the big budget. Shenmue is just an example of brute force development.

IMO

 

[Fox5]

I agree that Molyneux is much closer to that than Shenmue.

Shenmue stands out because every texture, every detail was made different, which was possible only because of the 200 (and more) people team and the big budget. Shenmue is just an example of brute force development.

IMO

Too bad the voice acting budget wasn't as big.

BTW, shenmue also is rather confined compared to a game like grand theft auto...hmm, some new sports and wrestling games have some pretty neat random player creation functions though, perhaps technology like that could be used to randomly create npcs in games?

 

[Nightz]

What happened is that reality set in.

Im sure they have demo at R&B showing their synthesis model

 

[Nightz]

I agree that Molyneux is much closer to that than Shenmue.

Shenmue stands out because every texture, every detail was made different, which was possible only because of the 200 (and more) people team and the big budget. Shenmue is just an example of brute force development.

IMO

I think Dark Cloud has some dynamic world building feature in it.

 

[add n to (x)]

Procedural geometry and textures have two main issues: i. making them look as good as their pure artist generated equivalents and ii. making them fit the kind of gameplay that you want. These two requirements present two problems to solve: i. designing your algorithms to give the artist or level designer enough control to create what they want, whether it be from an aesthetic or practical point of view, and ii. making sure that those controls act in an intuitive manner. It's all very well having a heightfield or texture generation function with 60-odd parameters, but if your artist can't use the controls then it's all for nowt. It's easy enough to write a heightfield generator to run on VU1 and churn out 100k polygons/frame, but making it look good and work the way you want is something of a black art, and probably why we haven't seen this approach take off in great numbers. The amount of R&D and effort that has gone into something like Terragen (http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/) goes to show it's not an easy task, and certainly not anywhere near real time yet.

 

[zurich]

Well, I always figured "emotion synthesis" meant having the poly pushing power to do facial animation

And more than a number of PS2 games have illicted emotion from me (the player), so I guess they came through on that part. Regarding huge procedurally generated worlds? Well, not sure on that, but DQ8 sounds pretty seemless, as do the GTA games (to a certain extent). I agree though, mucho hype.

 

[Evil_Cloud]

I agree that Molyneux is much closer to that than Shenmue.

Shenmue stands out because every texture, every detail was made different, which was possible only because of the 200 (and more) people team and the big budget. Shenmue is just an example of brute force development.

IMO

Too bad the voice acting budget wasn't as big.

BTW, shenmue also is rather confined compared to a game like grand theft auto...hmm, some new sports and wrestling games have some pretty neat random player creation functions though, perhaps technology like that could be used to randomly create npcs in games?

Sega had all it's teams contributing to the development of Shenmue... I would say nearly thousand people were involved in the production process.

 

[Fox5]

I agree that Molyneux is much closer to that than Shenmue.

Shenmue stands out because every texture, every detail was made different, which was possible only because of the 200 (and more) people team and the big budget. Shenmue is just an example of brute force development.

IMO

Too bad the voice acting budget wasn't as big.

BTW, shenmue also is rather confined compared to a game like grand theft auto...hmm, some new sports and wrestling games have some pretty neat random player creation functions though, perhaps technology like that could be used to randomly create npcs in games?

Sega had all it's teams contributing to the development of Shenmue... I would say nearly thousand people were involved in the production process.

Certainly not every team played a major part though, did they? Like did sonic team contribute anything significant, or just the models for all their characters used in the pop toy machines?

 

[Lazy8s]

It's not the variety of detail in a game world that makes it believable; it's the cohesiveness of that detail, how much sense it makes when it all comes together. Shenmue does a good job at justifying all of its game elements by having each one be a part of its world. Instead of having the clues for game progression given out by random, nameless NPCs, the NPCs are all distinct individuals within the virtual community. Instead of their lives revolving around supplying the clues, they have their own daily routines that must be observed when meeting up with them. And instead of them just being arbitrarily endowed with the wisdom to give clues, it's their identity -- who they are, what kind of job they work and expertise they have, what they know from their life history and experiences -- that determines how they can aid in supplying information. The details that compose the game come together realistically because they're all accounted for within the larger whole of the world and not simply for the sake of the game only.

 

[Akumajou]

It's not the variety of detail in a game world that makes it believable; it's the cohesiveness of that detail, how much sense it makes when it all comes together. Shenmue does a good job at justifying all of its game elements by having each one be a part of its world. Instead of having the clues for game progression given out by random, nameless NPCs, the NPCs are all distinct individuals within the virtual community. Instead of their lives revolving around supplying the clues, they have their own daily routines that must be observed when meeting up with them. And instead of them just being arbitrarily endowed with the wisdom to give clues, it's their identity -- who they are, what kind of job they work and expertise they have, what they know from their life history and experiences -- that determines how they can aid in supplying information. The details that compose the game come together realistically because they're all accounted for within the larger whole of the world and not simply for the sake of the game only.

Correct, more than any other game Shenmue and Shenmue II convey that immersive emotional world the Sony PR-Hype man pulled out of his ass.

Indeed Shenmue is a legitimate watermark that anyone including SEGA fans can use because after all if the shoe was in the other foot and Shenmue and its sequel would have been developed specifically on PS2 (provided that the PS2 were to have 8MB of VideoRam instead of 4MB) Then add Square as the publisher and forget it, all Sony PS2 fanboys would be raving about Shemue as the definitive Emotion Engine materialized in a videogame, that and the game would not have faced the gamer apathy and instead sold millions on fluffy hype alone.

As a matter of fact the following article talks about Sony PS2 components the GS and EE from a technical standpoint and compares it to other hardware like the XBox and the Nv2A:

XBox Specs: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1561&p=1

 

[marconelly!]

Holy crap, Akumajou's post is like year 2001 all over again. Some poeple just can't let it go, much less learn a thing or two so that they don't sound completely clueless. 4MB vs 8MB... Holy crap...



As for Phill Harisson, that guy's PR track record is less than stellar. I honestly take every single thing he says with a huge grain of salt, as I think he's more clueless about all things Sony than many people I know on internet forums. His recent gaffes include saying that Sony would NOT be losing money on PSP units sold (further fueling the rumors about high pricing of PSP) and also decidedly claiming that PSP would NOT play MP3s, just weeks before it was 100% confirmed that it would... There are other silly things he said, but those two I remember clearly, and both a signs of pretty major cluelessness from someone who is a president of SCE branch.

What happened to the emotions that were supposed to created by the EE?

As in "ability to elicit an emotional reaction from the player"?

I would say "Ico" happened long time ago.

 

[jvd]

civ 1 on my pc and populas on my pc ... sim city too all ahve world building going on . So are the computer games from the last gen where console games are heading

 

[-tkf-]

As a matter of fact the following article talks about Sony PS2 components the GS and EE from a technical standpoint and compares it to other hardware like the XBox and the Nv2A:

XBox Specs: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1561&p=1

This is the same memory bus configuration as the Pentium 4 and thus offers 3.2GB/s of memory bandwidth to be shared between the EE and GS. This is hardly enough memory bandwidth and hardly enough memory storage for game execution code as well as high resolution textures. This is generally why most PS2 games are limited to relatively low resolution textures compared to what we're used to seeing on PCs. While the embedded DRAM of the GS core definitely helps out, there is still room for improvement.

Funny i always thought the 32MB ram was the limitation, not quite as "impressive" on a spec list but nevertheless.