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Crytek deserves all the praise they get for their hard work in rendering... ...but... Why are we conditioned to think that "the future of gaming" is solely a

Crytek deserves all the praise they get for their hard work in rendering... ...but... Why are we conditioned to think that "the future of gaming" is solely a function of a game's audiovisual quality? I would like to see a "future of gaming" video that shows off highly-interactive (rather than just very pretty) gameworlds and characters. NPCs that notice you are trying to put a bucket on their heads, for example.

lbj 14y ago
Very valid point. In my opinion Crysis 2 sucked ass purely because it was a technical showcase more than an engaging gaming experience, unlike Mass Effect 3 for instance.
Cushman 14y ago
Visual quality is an "easy" problem. We know exactly how it ought to work (ray tracing has been photorealistic for some time now), it's just a matter of tweaking it to run fast enough on the hardware we have. And we're really close to pulling it off. AI is, by contrast, a hard problem. We don't have a very good idea at all of how to exactly simulate a personality, but it's likely to be orders of magnitude more complex than the most elaborate physical simulation ever designed. The most intelligent NPC ever developed was really, really stupid. The appearance of realistic characters in games at all is an elaborate stage show. You can spend artist time making the show seem convincing in more circumstances, but evolving it past that at all is one of the hardest problems in computer science. We're nowhere near realism. Now, with that said, in the demo they showed off some of their pathfinding and destructible environment improvements. There are plenty of gamers who care just as much (or more) about that stuff.
- dclowd9901 14y ago
  I think the fact that strides have been made in the general area of dynamicizing certain actions (like simultaneously rendering mouth movements with spoken language in games) are steps toward that grand goal of games having AI that not only acts smart, but even has dynamic scripting, based on "observances" and other environmental stimuli. Also, hinted/dynamic animation is pretty unbelievable now. Just see how real it looks when a character is tackled in a Madden game. I'm confident even the "hard" problems will be solved in the very near future.
  - Cushman 14y ago
    That's a good point, and maybe I was too binary in my original statement-- there are a lot of parts of NPC design that are more physics simulation than AI. I'd still say there's a categorical distinction between "respond appropriately to being hit by a linebacker" and "respond appropriately to someone putting a bucket on your head", though. Like you say, we're close to realism on the former; much farther from the latter.
- arketyp 14y ago
  >Visual quality is an "easy" problem. We know exactly how it ought to work (ray tracing has been photorealistic for some time now), it's just a matter of tweaking it to run fast enough on the hardware we have. And we're really close to pulling it off. That's a good point. And I don't even think it's so much about AI being really hard as it is about photorealism being such a clear goal. Because really there is no limit to the other dynamics that can be explored that aren't as unattainable as a human AI. I still think the ghosts in Pac-man are clever. And while I'm by no means tuned in on the gaming community today, just the fact that you still play these super good-looking games with a few buttons and two joysticks says a lot.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Static photorealistic scenes are still a pretty hard problem. If it was just "ray tracing and you're done" it'd be a different story. You have complex lighting interactions (best modelled using the radiosity technique) and you have complex sub-surface light interactions which are a prominent compnent to making ordinary human skin appear real. These aren't even completely solved problems in the state of the art today. Now, all of that is just square zero. A mere preface to the real problems: realistic animation and realistic interactivity. You can make a pretty decent photorealistic world with current technology but it would have to be an untouchable, unmoving, unrealistic frozen world. Adding in animations is a problem at the same computational intensity as the rendering problem. And making the world capable of being interacted with a level of fidelity approaching the quality of the rendering and animation is a problem so lacking in proposed solutions that it doesn't even have a sound theoretical underpinning yet.
- gavanwoolery 14y ago
  As someone who has worked intensively both in the fields of rendering and AI, I can say there are easy and hard problems in both. There is much in the way of AI that we already know, it's just that your average developer actually knows very little about AI (not trying to be insulting, it's just been true in my experience) -- and much more so your average company or publisher does not care to fund AI beyond enemies that can throw themselves into your gun barrel. Propositional logic, expert systems, backwards chaining, and neural networks are very powerful tools that we know a lot about, but most games rarely implement (perhaps trivially at most). We still tend to hand-design/script quests, when these fields of AI could provide very powerful emergent gameplay. What it mostly boils down to (for the sake of interesting gameplay) is proper knowledge-representation (i.e. abstraction) and reasoning (a prolog-like reasoning system would be a good start). And of course, path-finding/locomotion is pretty much a given. Interestingly, it is less about implementing these and more about designing a game that can use them properly - almost without doubt you need to create a game world that functions on its own, where every NPC has its own set of motivations, which is a very different task from creating a game that is limited to what the player does. Other than that, there are still plenty of hard problems left in rendering, especially with regards to effective procedural generation (which arguably falls more under modeling). Our ray tracing is still far from "realistic" - take a more complex scene than a table with a wine glass, and we can still usually discern the difference, especially with complex materials and subsurface scattering (human skin STILL does not look quite right). As it is, we are only able to calculate light travel by points (we use the term ray tracing, but typically every ray does a number of steps, unless every model is mathematically calculated). Light travel should be determined by complex volumes -- which is pretty much impossible to simulate on today's hardware ( O(n^6) magnitude at least - growing by volume, travel distance, number of objects, volume bounces (dear god), and number of pixels calculated ).
  - wisty 14y ago
    Also, better rendering is generally better (unless you want a cartoony cell renderer). Better AI might not always be better. You don't want stupid AI bugs, but you don't necessarily want the AI to be smarter than the player. You may want an AI with a realistic character, but maybe not. Good AI makes some sense in a sandbox world, but it's not necessarily fun.
- dualogy 14y ago
  Classical raytracing by itself is highly unrealistic unless you also implement an add-on physical-based rendering-equation-solver such as Path Tracing or Photon Mapping. The first one beginning highly noisy and "converging" to photo-realistic over a looong time -- the second being only as realistic as the number of photons your hardware can manage. Now without such a physical-based rendering-equation-solver, realtime raytracing of "simple scenes" (couple of spheres and boxes) is doable today. The more complex your scenes get (even with acceleration structures), the more you need to lower your viewport resolution. Your high-end desktop GPU can then handle raytracing for a low-end "mobile" resolution such as 320x240 or whatever. But your low-end mobile GPU probably can't. Also for fully accurate antialiasing you'd need to render at 2x your resolution and downscale. tl;dr: realtime raytracing of simple scenes is feasible, realtime photorealistic full-screen antialiased raytracing of complex scenes isn't and if current tech development trends continue, won't be for another decade perhaps. I don't see "we're really close to pulling it off" because as GPU flops and caps happily increase, so do unfortunately screen resolutions. In realtime raytracing, we're always lagging behind and always have to compromise: (1) high resolution, (2) antialiasing, (3) complex scenes, (4) photo-realism -- for real-time speeds, pick any two.
  - aidenn0 14y ago
    I didn't read the grandparent as saying we are really close to real-time path tracing; I read it more as real-time rasterization is getting rapidly closer to looking like path tracing both in the quality of the scenes and the types of scenes it can represent. Also FLOPS has been increasing much faster than resolutions. 1920x1200 is about 3x the pixels of 1024x768. Graphics FLOPS has increased way more than 3x since 1024x768 was considered a high-resolution screen.
    - dualogy 14y ago
      Good points ... that's a silver lining, too =)
hbz 14y ago
Crytek isn't going to do your job for you, they make the tools that others use to make high interactive gameworlds and characters. They also happen to make a game from their engine called Crysis but I wouldn't call the be-all-end-all of FPSs.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ssharp 14y ago
I think labeling it the "future of gaming" is simply for attention. If anything, we're not talking about much more than the next iteration of consoles. While XBox and Sony were battling over who could have the prettiest graphics, Nintendo made lots of money with the Wii's unimpressive hardware, and Apple (maybe even unintentionally) and other smartphone manufacturers came in and revolutionized the mobile gaming market with unimpressive gaming hardware. There is a "future of gaming" for consoles and more serious gamers, and there is a "future of gaming" for more casual gamers.
Negitivefrags 14y ago
I see this kind of sentiment all the time from people outside the game development industry. Every single time a new graphics card is launched, a new console, a new engine, whatever. Do people really think that it's a matter of CPU time goes in and intelligence comes out? People seem to think that if we were not spending so much time on graphics, that we would have amazing AI by now, but it's simply not the case. The reason we use simple state based AI's for the most part comes down to controllability. In order to actually design a fun gameplay experience you need to have ways to tweak the AI to behave in the way that the player will find fun. You want to be able to ask "Why did that character not throw a grenade in this situation?", be able to find the answer, and tweak it. The techniques that come out of AI research don't expose parameters in this form, and so are essentially useless for real game AI. Probably the biggest CPU use from AI today are perception checks, like can entity X see entity Y from it's location. Checks like these tend to cross cut into engine code and just feed into the very simple state based AI.
- antihero 14y ago
  It would be cool to see incredibly rare behaviours, such as if you are going up against a bunch of mercs, wipe the floor with all of them, and round the corner and shove your rifle into the last one's face he'd be like "fair cop mate, I'm out of here". This would only happen every once in a while but it would be a fantastic reward for the player to feel like they can, if they do well enough or play in a certain style, make the AI feel simulated emotions - fear, rage, complacency, etc. So if you snuck through the building and carefully knocked out guys they might not be fearful, but complacent, but if you did the same thing and brutally fucked them all up with knifes, they'd be much more alert but fearful and prone to error. Personally I don't think this would be hard to simulate, for instance fear would be marked with increased cursing, decreased accuracy, increased error, and a potential for full scale running away. Complacency would mean that guards don't check every corner on their patrol routes, have smaller visual cones, and are slower to react when shit hits the fan. Confidence could be marked by seeking cover less, drastically increased accuracy, and so on. So yes, whilst in the distant future we could have truly "intelligent" AI which would lead to unpredictable gameplay, we at present have the tools to create enemies that can provide a much richer and more vast array of feedback to the player's behaviour.
dkersten 14y ago
Agreed - the future of gaming should be in gaming. One of my favourite games is The Witcher 2 because it explores player choice with branching story lines. A lot of things you do in the game change things later on in ways that few other games do.

lbj 14y ago

Very valid point. In my opinion Crysis 2 sucked ass purely because it was a technical showcase more than an engaging gaming experience, unlike Mass Effect 3 for instance.

Cushman 14y ago

Visual quality is an "easy" problem. We know exactly how it ought to work (ray tracing has been photorealistic for some time now), it's just a matter of tweaking it to run fast enough on the hardware we have. And we're really close to pulling it off. AI is, by contrast, a hard problem. We don't have a very good idea at all of how to exactly simulate a personality, but it's likely to be orders of magnitude more complex than the most elaborate physical simulation ever designed. The most intelligent NPC ever developed was really, really stupid. The appearance of realistic characters in games at all is an elaborate stage show. You can spend artist time making the show seem convincing in more circumstances, but evolving it past that at all is one of the hardest problems in computer science. We're nowhere near realism. Now, with that said, in the demo they showed off some of their pathfinding and destructible environment improvements. There are plenty of gamers who care just as much (or more) about that stuff.

dclowd9901 14y ago
I think the fact that strides have been made in the general area of dynamicizing certain actions (like simultaneously rendering mouth movements with spoken language in games) are steps toward that grand goal of games having AI that not only acts smart, but even has dynamic scripting, based on "observances" and other environmental stimuli. Also, hinted/dynamic animation is pretty unbelievable now. Just see how real it looks when a character is tackled in a Madden game. I'm confident even the "hard" problems will be solved in the very near future.
- Cushman 14y ago
  That's a good point, and maybe I was too binary in my original statement-- there are a lot of parts of NPC design that are more physics simulation than AI. I'd still say there's a categorical distinction between "respond appropriately to being hit by a linebacker" and "respond appropriately to someone putting a bucket on your head", though. Like you say, we're close to realism on the former; much farther from the latter.
arketyp 14y ago
>Visual quality is an "easy" problem. We know exactly how it ought to work (ray tracing has been photorealistic for some time now), it's just a matter of tweaking it to run fast enough on the hardware we have. And we're really close to pulling it off. That's a good point. And I don't even think it's so much about AI being really hard as it is about photorealism being such a clear goal. Because really there is no limit to the other dynamics that can be explored that aren't as unattainable as a human AI. I still think the ghosts in Pac-man are clever. And while I'm by no means tuned in on the gaming community today, just the fact that you still play these super good-looking games with a few buttons and two joysticks says a lot.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
Static photorealistic scenes are still a pretty hard problem. If it was just "ray tracing and you're done" it'd be a different story. You have complex lighting interactions (best modelled using the radiosity technique) and you have complex sub-surface light interactions which are a prominent compnent to making ordinary human skin appear real. These aren't even completely solved problems in the state of the art today. Now, all of that is just square zero. A mere preface to the real problems: realistic animation and realistic interactivity. You can make a pretty decent photorealistic world with current technology but it would have to be an untouchable, unmoving, unrealistic frozen world. Adding in animations is a problem at the same computational intensity as the rendering problem. And making the world capable of being interacted with a level of fidelity approaching the quality of the rendering and animation is a problem so lacking in proposed solutions that it doesn't even have a sound theoretical underpinning yet.
gavanwoolery 14y ago
As someone who has worked intensively both in the fields of rendering and AI, I can say there are easy and hard problems in both. There is much in the way of AI that we already know, it's just that your average developer actually knows very little about AI (not trying to be insulting, it's just been true in my experience) -- and much more so your average company or publisher does not care to fund AI beyond enemies that can throw themselves into your gun barrel. Propositional logic, expert systems, backwards chaining, and neural networks are very powerful tools that we know a lot about, but most games rarely implement (perhaps trivially at most). We still tend to hand-design/script quests, when these fields of AI could provide very powerful emergent gameplay. What it mostly boils down to (for the sake of interesting gameplay) is proper knowledge-representation (i.e. abstraction) and reasoning (a prolog-like reasoning system would be a good start). And of course, path-finding/locomotion is pretty much a given. Interestingly, it is less about implementing these and more about designing a game that can use them properly - almost without doubt you need to create a game world that functions on its own, where every NPC has its own set of motivations, which is a very different task from creating a game that is limited to what the player does. Other than that, there are still plenty of hard problems left in rendering, especially with regards to effective procedural generation (which arguably falls more under modeling). Our ray tracing is still far from "realistic" - take a more complex scene than a table with a wine glass, and we can still usually discern the difference, especially with complex materials and subsurface scattering (human skin STILL does not look quite right). As it is, we are only able to calculate light travel by points (we use the term ray tracing, but typically every ray does a number of steps, unless every model is mathematically calculated). Light travel should be determined by complex volumes -- which is pretty much impossible to simulate on today's hardware ( O(n^6) magnitude at least - growing by volume, travel distance, number of objects, volume bounces (dear god), and number of pixels calculated ).
- wisty 14y ago
  Also, better rendering is generally better (unless you want a cartoony cell renderer). Better AI might not always be better. You don't want stupid AI bugs, but you don't necessarily want the AI to be smarter than the player. You may want an AI with a realistic character, but maybe not. Good AI makes some sense in a sandbox world, but it's not necessarily fun.
dualogy 14y ago
Classical raytracing by itself is highly unrealistic unless you also implement an add-on physical-based rendering-equation-solver such as Path Tracing or Photon Mapping. The first one beginning highly noisy and "converging" to photo-realistic over a looong time -- the second being only as realistic as the number of photons your hardware can manage. Now without such a physical-based rendering-equation-solver, realtime raytracing of "simple scenes" (couple of spheres and boxes) is doable today. The more complex your scenes get (even with acceleration structures), the more you need to lower your viewport resolution. Your high-end desktop GPU can then handle raytracing for a low-end "mobile" resolution such as 320x240 or whatever. But your low-end mobile GPU probably can't. Also for fully accurate antialiasing you'd need to render at 2x your resolution and downscale. tl;dr: realtime raytracing of simple scenes is feasible, realtime photorealistic full-screen antialiased raytracing of complex scenes isn't and if current tech development trends continue, won't be for another decade perhaps. I don't see "we're really close to pulling it off" because as GPU flops and caps happily increase, so do unfortunately screen resolutions. In realtime raytracing, we're always lagging behind and always have to compromise: (1) high resolution, (2) antialiasing, (3) complex scenes, (4) photo-realism -- for real-time speeds, pick any two.
- aidenn0 14y ago
  I didn't read the grandparent as saying we are really close to real-time path tracing; I read it more as real-time rasterization is getting rapidly closer to looking like path tracing both in the quality of the scenes and the types of scenes it can represent. Also FLOPS has been increasing much faster than resolutions. 1920x1200 is about 3x the pixels of 1024x768. Graphics FLOPS has increased way more than 3x since 1024x768 was considered a high-resolution screen.
  - dualogy 14y ago
    Good points ... that's a silver lining, too =)

hbz 14y ago

Crytek isn't going to do your job for you, they make the tools that others use to make high interactive gameworlds and characters. They also happen to make a game from their engine called Crysis but I wouldn't call the be-all-end-all of FPSs.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

ssharp 14y ago

I think labeling it the "future of gaming" is simply for attention. If anything, we're not talking about much more than the next iteration of consoles. While XBox and Sony were battling over who could have the prettiest graphics, Nintendo made lots of money with the Wii's unimpressive hardware, and Apple (maybe even unintentionally) and other smartphone manufacturers came in and revolutionized the mobile gaming market with unimpressive gaming hardware. There is a "future of gaming" for consoles and more serious gamers, and there is a "future of gaming" for more casual gamers.

Negitivefrags 14y ago

I see this kind of sentiment all the time from people outside the game development industry. Every single time a new graphics card is launched, a new console, a new engine, whatever. Do people really think that it's a matter of CPU time goes in and intelligence comes out? People seem to think that if we were not spending so much time on graphics, that we would have amazing AI by now, but it's simply not the case. The reason we use simple state based AI's for the most part comes down to controllability. In order to actually design a fun gameplay experience you need to have ways to tweak the AI to behave in the way that the player will find fun. You want to be able to ask "Why did that character not throw a grenade in this situation?", be able to find the answer, and tweak it. The techniques that come out of AI research don't expose parameters in this form, and so are essentially useless for real game AI. Probably the biggest CPU use from AI today are perception checks, like can entity X see entity Y from it's location. Checks like these tend to cross cut into engine code and just feed into the very simple state based AI.

antihero 14y ago
It would be cool to see incredibly rare behaviours, such as if you are going up against a bunch of mercs, wipe the floor with all of them, and round the corner and shove your rifle into the last one's face he'd be like "fair cop mate, I'm out of here". This would only happen every once in a while but it would be a fantastic reward for the player to feel like they can, if they do well enough or play in a certain style, make the AI feel simulated emotions - fear, rage, complacency, etc. So if you snuck through the building and carefully knocked out guys they might not be fearful, but complacent, but if you did the same thing and brutally fucked them all up with knifes, they'd be much more alert but fearful and prone to error. Personally I don't think this would be hard to simulate, for instance fear would be marked with increased cursing, decreased accuracy, increased error, and a potential for full scale running away. Complacency would mean that guards don't check every corner on their patrol routes, have smaller visual cones, and are slower to react when shit hits the fan. Confidence could be marked by seeking cover less, drastically increased accuracy, and so on. So yes, whilst in the distant future we could have truly "intelligent" AI which would lead to unpredictable gameplay, we at present have the tools to create enemies that can provide a much richer and more vast array of feedback to the player's behaviour.

dkersten 14y ago

Agreed - the future of gaming should be in gaming. One of my favourite games is The Witcher 2 because it explores player choice with branching story lines. A lot of things you do in the game change things later on in ways that few other games do.