Are current gen hi-def consoles near to their achievable limit

[Shifty Geezer]

Speaking for myself, I find it difficult to appreciate things that are not visually oriented because I don't not have the experience to pass judgement on them.

Yeah, sorry. I was probably painting people a bit black with my generalisation, although I do think on average, by a good margin, your typical consumer can't appreciate subtle qualities, hence everything often being in-your-face. Like lens flare, or DOf blur. If it's loaded on in spades people go "core blimey, that's so good," whereas if it's subtle, they may like the images but won't have that same enthusiastic reaction. And in a world driven by commerce, right or wrongly, it makes business sense to target that, and focus console technology on bells and whistles rather than core quality. Who would pick a fine quality, bug free game over a flashy, bug-ridden, gorgeous looking (when it works) shootfest when perusing the Gamestop shelves?

 

[Scott_Arm]

Yeah, sorry. I was probably painting people a bit black with my generalisation, although I do think on average, by a good margin, your typical consumer can't appreciate subtle qualities, hence everything often being in-your-face. Like lens flare, or DOf blur. If it's loaded on in spades people go "core blimey, that's so good," whereas if it's subtle, they may like the images but won't have that same enthusiastic reaction. And in a world driven by commerce, right or wrongly, it makes business sense to target that, and focus console technology on bells and whistles rather than core quality. Who would pick a fine quality, bug free game over a flashy, bug-ridden, gorgeous looking (when it works) shootfest when perusing the Gamestop shelves?

Oh, I agree. It's the same reason for those crazy picture-quality ruining dynamic contrast settings on tvs to make them "pop" in the store.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I just don't think they really can understand the rest of it, without experience, so that's understandable. Like you said, I think appreciation for the other tech is probably only going to come from other people in the industry, because they'll understand how difficult it would be to do certain things, through experience. The average person is probably going to equate how "technically proficient" a game is based on the parts they can qualify, like the graphics.

Yeah, you see things like this alot even on this forum, where users assume a lot of things are easy for a developer to implement just because they, themselves, think it should be easy.

Things like AI are tricky. One game could have an incredibly more complex simulation of behavior, and people may not notice. There are a lot of games that have their names thrown around for having the best AI, but I can honestly say I've never seen much difference between them. Maybe some I think are a little better than others, but I understand that's largely subjective as a gamer, and it says nothing about how much work, and how much complexity was involved in achieving the result. Also the unpredictable nature of AI makes it hard to understand what is coincidental and what is intentional. Did the enemy just flank me, or did it just happen to move that way?

It's interesting that you mention this. Someone on these forums linked to a presentation that Bungie had where they went into some detail about their AI for a past game.

One of the interesting things they noted is that during testing "smarter" AI was often viewed as being either dumber, more random, or buggier than "dumber/simpler" AI. Thus to make the AI appear to be smarter to average players, they actually had to simplify and reduce the complexity of parts of their AI. Squad behavior, interactions, reaction to players, etc.

Regards,
SB

 

[AlNom]

It's interesting that you mention this. Someone on these forums linked to a presentation that Bungie had where they went into some detail about their AI for a past game.

Here's one regarding Halo 2.

The Artificial Intelligence of Halo 2:
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/halo2-ai1.htm

There is another one that covered Halo 3/ODST I think... just trying to find it now.

edit: just found it:

Teaming Up with Halo's AI: 42 Tricks to Assist Your Game
http://aigamedev.com/open/reviews/halo-ai/

relevant presentations:

The Integration of AI and Level Design in Halo:
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/gdcarchive/2002/jaime_griesemer.ppt

Managing Complexity in the Halo 2 AI System:
https://www.cmpevents.com/Sessions/GD/ManagingComplexity2.ppt
https://www.cmpevents.com/Sessions/GD/HandlingComplexityInTheHalo2AI.doc

 

[BoardBonobo]

AI is one area that these generation of machines can really start to exploit. You have the processing power and you also have a wide range of devices that can feed player responses back to the game.

Imagine a situation where you had either a PS Eye or Kinnect, that monitored you emotional state through face recognition and so decided when to lay on certain stimuli during gameplay; extra scares or flash light failing, changing the music to change mood etc.

Most of the basic AI techniques have been covered but they all operate in a black box environment which is great for GA's or ANN's because it simplifies the learning process. But because the search space is so small you could quite easily get AI that always out smarts the player. And that would be very frustrating. Which is one of the reason that most interactive AI deals with big in your face events.

 

[Fafalada]

Good tools save a lot of content development time.

Going on a tangent here a bit, but I feel that toolsets used in other areas (gameplay iterations, level-design, testing etc.) actually have much more significant impact on the end-game results.
Ultimately content-creation is the lone area of production that actually scales with manpower, and while that gets abused, it also gets the job done even when tools fail(to a point) - which can't be said for the rest.