Are next gen consoles feasible?

[Shifty Geezer]

As they're complete, yes, but I imagine the same models retextured. Which kinda elliminates a lot of the savings... Snake, Nate, and Shepard as examples are naturally proportioned, so those heads could be tranplanted into different games. Whereas the cahracters from Team fortress can't, but then that exaggerated, Pixar-esque look is becoming quite prevalent and a number of similar titles could share assets I reckon, especially with CG movies. The thugs from Tangled for example would fit perfectly into TF3.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Nate's completely unrealistic, Snake too. Shepard is indeed based on Mark Vanderloo although there are some differences and simplifications as well (the game models eyes, for example).

Toy Story 3 actually has more realistic characters than the Tangled thugs, too The first has realistic human proportions with stylized features, whereas the thugs' bodies are extremely exaggerated. Faces are a bit different too but it's a more subtle thing there.

 

[-tkf-]

I cannot think of any game off-hand that is bigger and more detailed on PS3 than a comparable game on 360, enabled by BRD.

Hello there..

Well isn´t there plenty of reasons for the size being essentially the same across all platforms for games that has to go for the lowest common dominator, aka the XBOX

As Rage/John Carmack showed, there is(was?) a hefty price to pay for any games that required 2 discs on the 360. That plays into size as well as other stuff.

Everything fits the space you have, it´s just a question of compromise. If you have 2GB you just squeeze a little harder. One of the things that in generel have been done on the PS3 is less compression on sound/music. Not always, but again, just having that little difference between cross platform games adds to cost, so i am sure that many developers just wont care about the sound quality and just keep.

There is a reason why Sony exclusives tend to be bigger, they just don´t have to compromise or care about storage space.

The transfer speed of the BR drive also plays into this, what good is it to have super high res textures if they can´t be streamed. And then there is the memory limit which might be the most important thing, what good is 50GB of storage if you have 2x256 MB memory to play with.

I think in terms of content, the real cost is in the details, not the details of textures and the usual graphic stuff. But the required time to mocap, clean it up, get it into the game. And then simply work on way more details than ever before, a hand in GTA3 was stiff, as were the faces. In LAN they tried to make it look more real than ever but didn´t actually build a better game anyway.

I think its in the details the money is burned. And i would guess that was more money spend on "real" content the lack of details wouldn´t be noticed

 

[dobwal]

Oh, and let's not even mention how inconsistent it would look to have characters mixed together with their own distinctive art styles. Just put some screenshots of Snake, Drake, Femshep, Fenix and the rest together and see how different they all are...

I can only imagine the reason why the inconsistency in character design would disturb you is due to the fact that intraspecies diversity tends to rather lacking in most games. I don't see how Snake, Drake, Femshep and Fenix would be all that inconsistent as seeing a human, an elf, a dwarf and an orc standing around having a conversation.

I am sure if a game created a world where inconsistent design was consistent across the game, you would have little trouble dealing with it.

Snake, Drake, Femshep and Fenix in the same scene would not be that much different than have Yao Ming, Mini Me and Robert Z'Dar talking to Grace Jones.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

The differences are far beyond racial issues, they're vast, from large forms to subtle details, colors, realism vs. stylisation and so on. It's a question of art style inconsistency, those assets would never mix well at all.

If you still don't get it then I think you gotta have to trust me on this one, being a 3D artist mainly working on characters professionally for like 11 years. We've done realistic and stylized and a lot inbetween, I'm not just making this stuff up.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Well isn´t there plenty of reasons for the size being essentially the same across all platforms for games that has to go for the lowest common dominator, aka the XBOX

What Shifty means is that PS3 exclusives like GOW, KZ or UC don't have significantly more content than either multiplatform titles like COD and Darksiders or exclusives like Halo and Fable games. Similar length, similar variety, similar level of detail.

Any outsider in a blind test would not be able to point out the BR based games based on content, that's the important point here.

 

[dobwal]

Studio heads are very clever people, publishers have their own CTOs, and so on. These people are more aware of these issues than most of us are and they've already been looking into the possible solutions for years. They're not sticking to existing practices because of stupidity, laziness or a lack of an open mind. There's a realm of problems from technical through artistic to legal that keep studios from sharing stuff to the level that you'd expect them to do.

Samsung, RIM, HP and Motorola could all be described as having very clever people among their upper management. But look at tablets today and that "obvious" design that enables them to push millions of tabs a quarter. But until the Ipad, companies like Samsung, HP and Motorola (all players in the UMPC market well before Apple) didn't produce tablets that looked anything like the "obvious" design we see today.

I don't think the desire to stick to existing practices are do to laziness or stupidity but due to a lack of vision.

I look at a company like Bioware and I see 3 different franchises with a couple of sequels released or with planned release over a 4 year period that uses 3 to 4 different engines. Why? Obvious some of these engines are designed for a specific game type in mind. But if you going to develop different types of games with varying mechanics then shouldn't you have the foresight to create a more robust in house engine that can handle different game mechanics. Nevermind that UE3 has been used in almost everything from fighting games (Mortal Kombat) to racing (Fatal Inertia) to MMORPG (DC Universe) and to kinect titles (Zumba Fitness). So maybe UE3 is unfit for whatever Bioware is trying to accomplish with DA and SW. Should a company be compelled to use a different engine per franchise just to offer a broader spectrum of games? Why doesn't MS or Sony release engines for their platforms or even platform agnostic engines (MS has no problem collecting patent fees from the sale of Android phones)? They have ability to pour far more research into engine design than any one company. Or why doesn't EA or the other pubs take their best engineers and build a standard robust engine for use across their own development houses that can be customized if need be for certain devs with specific needs.

It has to be unique for a lot of reasons. Each game, even those using the same engine, have very different subsystems for animation, shaders, lighting, and so on. You can't just simply exchange characters between Gears and Mass Effect even though they're supposedly both using UE3.
Moving assets between MGS, UC, KZ, COD, and so on would involve redoing almost everything from scratch, except maybe the high res source art (but even that is completely different between various studios).

Even games like GT5, Blur and Forza are using completely different material and shader systems, physical models, texture and poly budgets and so on. Deferred rendering or forward rendering, 30 fps or 60fps, HDR or LDR, number of cars... these are all very important factors in determining poly and texture budgets and shader complexities. So it's just as impossible to reuse even the car model geometry between these games.

There are a lot of such companies but it's always very very complicated. Animation is completely tied to the pipeline of not only the given engine but also the entire studio. Gears used standard 3ds max bipeds at a time AFAIK, now they're also using Maya for facial animations; Mass Effect uses 3ds max with custom bones and rigging, even though both have data in UE3 formats in the end.

For example we specialize in CG cinematics, along with Blur, Plastic Wax, Axis, and a few others. The result is that today only Square and Blizzard have their internal teams and everyone else has pretty much stopped maintaining CG departments. It's a lot easier to outsource this kind of work because there's a lot less to sync (nothing we do goes into the game engine), and it's a small contained piece that's easy to lock down early on and requires relatively limited data exchange.
But we've done contract work for Heavenly Sword and The Club characters, and character animation for another title, and it's always been waaaay more complicated, despite a far smaller scale and a lot less people involved in the project.

And besides, outsourcing in itself is an incredibly complex issue, covering stuff like communication, feedback loops, constant technology updates and synchronization, education, art direction... We've outsourced some stuff and on average it takes twice as long to produce the same assets, even though we have very few technical restrictions compared to a game. Takes a lot more time from lead artists who can't focus on their more important tasks, requires a lot of extra legal and HR work (contracts, NDAs, money transfers) and so on.

All you say is true but its true because the industry was built from the ground up to be that way. The industry must evolve because the rate of increase for development costs are not sustainable long term. Either consolidation, standardization and specialization has to happen or most development work will move to emerging markets where labor is cheap.

The fact is the cost to increase hardware performance is being significantly outpaced by the cost it takes to develop games that make use of that performance. The console market is centered around 3 manufacturers (Sony, MS and Nintendo) whose core tech mostly comes from 3 other companies (IBM, AMD and Nvidia). Imagine hardware cost if we had a dozen console manufacturers dependent on a dozen of others for cpu and gpu tech with everyone having comparable marketshare. The 360 and PS3 would be impossible to release and maintain in such enviroment unless a company was willing to endure 2X to 4X the losses MS or Sony have seen.

What we have now is an abundance of redundant work done by developers everyday who act as small groups working independently of each other. Its a total waste of development dollars.

 

[dobwal]

The differences are far beyond racial issues, they're vast, from large forms to subtle details, colors, realism vs. stylisation and so on. It's a question of art style inconsistency, those assets would never mix well at all.

If you still don't get it then I think you gotta have to trust me on this one, being a 3D artist mainly working on characters professionally for like 11 years. We've done realistic and stylized and a lot inbetween, I'm not just making this stuff up.

I believe you to a point. The problem I have is people tend to pick up inconsistency due to their rarity. If the inconsistency becomes common enough it becomes accepted. Look at Roger Rabbit the movie. There is nothing more inconsistent that placing cell shaded characters with actual human ones. But immersion for most viewers isn't constantly shattered since the inconsistency is so persistent and prevalent that it becomes accepted.

 

[tabs]

I really think Laa-Yosh is right with this. Just putting the image of these characters together in my head is ugly enough. You've got to remember that while hollywood actors are re-used, they are all (if you like) the same art style. i.e. natural. They naturally blend with each other (to a point) artistically.

Creations such as Marcus Fenix et al are works of art, in different styles. It wouldn't look like a bunch of different people, it would look like a mess. Artists only represent their particular vision of a thing, not the thing itself. If you've got a bunch of different interpretations going on at once it's garish.

On another point, look how much time and effort is spent in Hollywood on makeup. It's not just tired/lively/cut lip on each individual. It has to fit the style of the production, the lighting in particular scenes etc. Just take an actor from one stylized flick and pop him in another, he'll look terribly out of place until the makeup department has done their magic.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

But look at tablets today and that "obvious" design that enables them to push millions of tabs a quarter.

Tahblet design is a question of creativity, which is pretty elusive. Although Samsung argues that all designs originate from Kubrick's 2001, which is what I've been saying ever since the first iPad has been announced
But production management is a more exact thing, you can measure and evaluate stuff pretty easily. There's no need for vision, you can simply run the numbers - outsourcing loses efficiency quickly as the difficulty of the task increases.

I look at a company like Bioware and I see 3 different franchises with a couple of sequels released or with planned release over a 4 year period that uses 3 to 4 different engines. Why? Obvious some of these engines are designed for a specific game type in mind.

I've worked with Mass Effect game assets and beyond their artistic qualities they are among the best and most efficient I've ever seen. Those guys really know their stuff.

The DA team is inferior, no question about it; not sure about the KOTOR MMO guys but their presentations indicate the presence of some pretty clever technical people.

The question of different teams and different engines is interesting. But you need to understand that UE3 is usually heavily modified to better fit the requirements of each and every game, it's not like the devs don't touch the source code at all. There's no engine that fits all and as faras I understand even Epic's solution is more of a wide framework then a one size fits all approach. Some coder insight would be appreciated here


In the end I'd trust the Bioware decision makers a lot more than you seem to do. They are one of the best studios I've ever worked with, even the DA team was pretty proficient in terms of tech issues and I'm sure they have made highly educated decisions. Their games are actually widely different in their requirements and it is probably enough justification for the different tech choices. Trying to force the same tech on all teams would inevitably lead to compromises in content and gameplay, which are still the number one selling points of nearly every game, so I think it's the better approach, especially if they don't want to move people between projects (which they don't do, apparently, choosing to focus staff on DLC between projects instead).

All you say is true but its true because the industry was built from the ground up to be that way. The industry must evolve because the rate of increase for development costs are not sustainable long term. Either consolidation, standardization and specialization has to happen or most development work will move to emerging markets where labor is cheap.

As long as art style and uniqueness of content are selling points, it would be unwise to give up these advantages for the sake of production costs. An UE3 based MGS, Halo, COD or UC would lose a lot of its appeal and the sales drop would be more significant than the content creation cost gains.
Also consider that games are about a lot more than characters. What else could you move between them? Some vehicles and weapons and maybe simple stuff like trash cans, but all the environments and other impressive elements would still have to be created from scratch. You don't want to stage every game's key moments on Times Square. We've even got client instructions that we should avoid New York as a setting because Crysis 2 has already "taken" it and we need to differentiate their stuff.
So re-using content goes against the publishers' interests, they want unique selling points whereever they can.

What we have now is an abundance of redundant work done by developers everyday who act as small groups working independently of each other. Its a total waste of development dollars.

As long as resources are limited there have to be trade-offs at the engine development level. Those compromises lead to different approaches in every part of the graphics pipeline and the content creation workflow has to be built on top of that.
That is why even most UE3 games have different requirements for their assets, shaders are different, as are number of bones, animation systems, lighting, and so on. And as soon as you start to introduce such differences, the costs of refitting preexisting assets start to build up, and combined with the stylistic differences it begings to make no sense.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

If the inconsistency becomes common enough it becomes accepted. Look at Roger Rabbit the movie. There is nothing more inconsistent that placing cell shaded characters with actual human ones.

The problem is that there are only two kinds of wildly different designs there. But putting together characters from a dozen different games with more subtle changes is a lot more confusing.

It's like you'd try to create a movie by mixing scenes from Conan the barbarian, danish Dogma movies, indian musicals, Schindler's List and german experimental cinema from the '30s. Not going to work.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

On another point, look how much time and effort is spent in Hollywood on makeup. It's not just tired/lively/cut lip on each individual. It has to fit the style of the production, the lighting in particular scenes etc. Just take an actor from one stylized flick and pop him in another, he'll look terribly out of place until the makeup department has done their magic.

Yeah, people are usually unaware of the amount of make-up and lighting work and post production stuff like color grading when thinking about hollywood movies. It's extremely different to just going out with a camera and filming real people.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The problem is that there are only two kinds of wildly different designs there. But putting together characters from a dozen different games with more subtle changes is a lot more confusing.

It's like you'd try to create a movie by mixing scenes from Conan the barbarian, danish Dogma movies, indian musicals, Schindler's List and german experimental cinema from the '30s. Not going to work.

You're talking about the final characters rendered in their own styles, and then compositing the final image. If instead you took the models, redressed for the new environment, they wouldn't look out of place. That is, taking the realistic models proportioned like real people - Nate, Snake, etc. If you were take those models' heads and place them untextured, as pure polys on bodies dressed accordingly, and put these cut-and-paste characters in a CG movie of untextured scenes, they'd fit alongside each other. You could then texture and light them to an art-style.

Yeah, people are usually unaware of the amount of make-up and lighting work and post production stuff like color grading when thinking about hollywood movies. It's extremely different to just going out with a camera and filming real people.

Right. You don't expect to just throw people together and have it work. It has to be styled. Likewise with these virtual characters. The facial design of Nathan Drake would fit into a dozen different games. No doubt the virtual actor would be type cast (you'd also need the same voice actor or people will get very thrown). But you could take these virtual actors and apply costume and makeup and lighting to make the whole work. You couldn't mix different art-styles, like having an angular Team Fortress actor appear, as that'd break the illusion, but you could pull it off with characters of the same type.

Now I don't think there's any financial saving there at all. As you say, the underlying engines don't support asset sharing. I guess there is scope for a business of creating good assets that get shared though. I can see dobwal's point in something like Dungeon Siege 3, where the NPCs are the same generic model with decidely fake facial hair. A system whereby devs could buy in better
quality assets would improve time to build and end result. I just have no idea how that could be pulled off, not prior to the Universal Game Engine.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

You're talking about the final characters rendered in their own styles, and then compositing the final image.

I'm talking about the assembled models in terms of the technical differences; and about the characters as a whole in terms of the art direction choices. Trust me, they're far too different in each case.

That is, taking the realistic models proportioned like real people - Nate, Snake, etc. If you were take those models' heads and place them untextured, as pure polys on bodies dressed accordingly, and put these cut-and-paste characters in a CG movie of untextured scenes, they'd fit alongside each other.

No, that is my point - they would still look wildly different because most of them aren't realistic at all, they're almost all stylized to various extents and with different emphasis.
Only Shepard's default head is more or less realistic and even there are some significant differences from the fashion model guy used as reference. But Snake, Nathan, Fenix and the rest are all completely unrealistic people, and again the changes are all applied in different ways.

The facial design of Nathan Drake would fit into a dozen different games.

Yes, but only if the rest of the cast is imported from the Uncharted games too!

I guess there is scope for a business of creating good assets that get shared though.

Yes - but my point is that what can be exploited as a business opportunity is usually already underway, sometimes it's been for several years. Just because you guys don't see it doesn't mean it's not there.
Remember that for example most of KZ2's characters were outsourced to Massive Black in China!

I just have no idea how that could be pulled off, not prior to the Universal Game Engine.

Not just UGE, but Universal Game Art Style would also be necessary.
Which is where all the competitive edge in graphics dies and the publishers wouldn't want that. And of course every developer would fight to the death to keep creative freedom...

 

[tabs]

There already are a ton of default heads and bodies (not to mention other objects) out there, quite a few are publicly available and some of those are free. I would be highly surprised if most 3D modellers didn't have a bunch of their own filed away already, that they made themselves to learn their trade. A quick web search comes up with tons of model resources that you can pay for and put in a production.

Simply to share base models between games (if so much work needed to be done to them) doesn't really add anything to what's already there.

It was mentioned about sharing simple stuff like trashcans, but even that has problems for me. I don't want to see the same objects in every game. What poly count budget is there for that trash can in game A or game B? Isn't a trash can only going to take a competent modeller 10 minutes to build and UV unwrap anyway?

 

[mrcorbo]

Thinking of the cover to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.....

 

[Ghostz]

The thought of creating an assembly line for art assets made me lol. This isn't exactly the car industry, I know Toyota and Ford just signed an accord agreeing to share hybrid technology but you can't really create art on an assembly line. Art is about intrinsically held internal meanings, expressed in an extrinsic way. It's probably the truest form of individuality humanity can hope to express. That ain't something you can put on an assembly line, just saying.....

 

[Arwin]

Reading most of these posts I just hear the sound of a certain mechanical door over and over ...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The thought of creating an assembly line for art assets made me lol. This isn't exactly the car industry, I know Toyota and Ford just signed an accord agreeing to share hybrid technology but you can't really create art on an assembly line. Art is about intrinsically held internal meanings, expressed in an extrinsic way. It's probably the truest form of individuality humanity can hope to express. That ain't something you can put on an assembly line, just saying.....

There's a difference between true art and functional art. A lot of art isn't any expression of the deeper human condition, but eye-candy to make things look nice. When the Project Gotham team went out taking images of real buildings, it wasn't to express the nature of confusion or embody the intimacy between mother and baby, but to recreate the real world to look good when racing. I don't disagree that production line art isn't a good thing (although that's not really the case here. The suggestion is you get artists to create fine art and reuse it), but we shouldn't hold art in games up as any different to other functional art. One can argue that music is similarly the truest representation of human emotions, and yet Motown was born of production-line mechanics churning out several songs a day. It was a business and an industry and decidedly non-artistic methods were employed to create some great music that many will hold as works of art.

 

[Cheezdoodles]

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