Double definition of Clones in this game, I shit you not.
Why is it always the attack of the clones?
Well a lot of companies nowadays provide a "create a character" feature i.e. San Andreas, MMRPGS, sports games, Oblivion etc. Most of these can create a random apperance at a press of a button. So the technology is already there in a way, they just need to apply it to NPCs, enemies etc.Yackom wrote: Yeah I see what your saying I wasn't thinking much in general with people who all look the same, and I haven't played farcry. But yea I think that sort of situation with todays realism but yet the lazy work ends up with a 20 group of n-tuplets comes charging. I can see that approach some sort of similar concept to/of "uncanny valley" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley). But there is a company who specializes in this sort of technology to among other thing randomly generate believable faces http://www.facegen.com/index.htm, but licensing it could be a cost prohibitive thing for something seemingly minor.
LOL hi5.
Of course you dont want the same enemy type looking drasticly (and freakishly) different from each other. So the parameters could be scaled down to elimate things like dwarfs etc. As I've mentioned before, it doesnt need to be super complex. It could be something subtle like one npc having a different shade of hair colour or a different coloured shirt.
Maybe every game does'nt benefit from something like this but imagine something like the GTA series. Play one of those games and take a walk in it. You will see a handfull of different npcs and ememies before they start repeating...
360 Gamer Tag = Kinn, PS3 Tag = xKINNx, Wii = 3036 8283 1247 3110
Overdosed on Gaming
Overdosed on Gaming
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fastbilly1
- Site Admin
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- Joined: Tue Apr 17, 2007 7:08 pm
Well the 60 gigs is a bit of a tease, it is Xplane 8's full install. It is mid to high rez textures of most of the world on 20 dvds. The game itself can be installed in under a gig, but that is only a medium sized city. A 10 gig install gets you most of the world in low rez. This is ofcourse not counting the planes your adding in. The best way to think of it as a flightsim mugen, since I had an Xwing, a MK I Spitfire, and a 747 all in the same game...
Actually this characte merger thing has been experimented with by Valve. I think it was BlueShift that they took five faces and all the scientist were melds of those five. It was abandoned since it only kinda worked, you would get the feeling you have seen/killed this guy before.
As much as I want something like this, I am such a hypocrite, since I still play Gauntlet quite frequently. Enough that I am planning a Hack and Slash themed cab.
Actually this characte merger thing has been experimented with by Valve. I think it was BlueShift that they took five faces and all the scientist were melds of those five. It was abandoned since it only kinda worked, you would get the feeling you have seen/killed this guy before.
As much as I want something like this, I am such a hypocrite, since I still play Gauntlet quite frequently. Enough that I am planning a Hack and Slash themed cab.
if you thought that was an attack and not just an attempt to make you guys loosen up then i'm sorry. last i checked, video games weren't a topic that had to be taken 100% serious every second of every day.elph wrote:aaron: You're quite sarcastic, aren't you? Instead of belittling someone else's point of view, why don't you try sharing your own. Perhaps then you could explain your position somewhat. Maybe if you provided reasons why you feel the way you do people might actually respect your opinion, rather than tolerating your brat-like attacks on the opinions of others.
btw every post i've ever made (which can be found here) has never meant to be a personal attack on anyone or to try and belittle someone's opinion, thought, or preferences.
so there.
okay back on topic (and what i was originally going to post before deciding it wasn't really that important and opted to be an e-jerk instead), i think it was always a lot easier in the old days to have two or more characters using the same sets of sprites with different color schemes. streets of rage (or any beat-em-up, really) is a good example of this, also scorpion/sub-zero, etc.
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lordofduct
- Next-Gen
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- Location: West Palm Beach
I think it might be a matter of time and artists.
First I will concede, videogames have GIANT budgets now adays... but still lets look at this.
Take your average MMO or the likes with random character generator. You have usually a handful (6, 7 maybe) of species, then another handful of races (really white, to really black with a few in between colours), gender and size modification. The colours and size are easily pulled off, and any new outfits are just texture swaps and maybe a couple secondary bone models tossed in (for maybe a different dagger or something hanging off his side). But that's about 14 different models to make, all of which have to be made with the consideration they will be scaled, squashed and palette swapped to death.
A lot of work goes into making these models. A WAY lot, these are the models you are going to be seeing most in the game. A lot of time and detail is paid to this set of models and probably has a small group of artists working soulily on them.
But 14 is a small number in comparison to enemies. How many enemies do you think are in the average RPG? a hundred? probably, sometimes more. A lot of which don't get a lot of air time on screen. They get killed quickily and only appear in short segments of the entire game. An artist doesn't pay as much detail to these guys. Their poly counts are lower, textures a little simpler, normal a little more mainstreamed (not manually painted, but instead just spat out with some tool, like what my buddy Andy uses "Crazy Bump"). The scalability of these models are a lot less doable. Not that much work was spent when modeling them.
See what the prob is, modeling characters and monsters isn't any easy task. I want it to look right. But then the program and model don't forgive easily. I've watched my buddy make models and merely by scaling or moving some edge or bone just the wrong way and the freakin' model just falls apart and turns into this hoaky mess of poly's that slightly resemble a VERY distorted monster with long edges poaking out all over the place. For the most part he just resets everything from his last save and goes on working. Why take the long arduous task of going in and finding which vertices are collapsing, or which layer is meshed out of whack... it's a monster, we aren't gonna see it that much.
And then having to do this for over a hundred different models.
NOW lets say the artists spent all that extra time. They got a bigger budget out of the whole chunk and went at it.
This part is a little harder to really explain. It's not like it's a huge task for the processor to pull off or anything. But it's still significant enough to slow shit down. Imagine your playing a game, and 20 (hypothetical situation) monsters come into screen, all of which are pre modeled and just loaded into RAM with their AI and come at you... and OH NOOOOOOs, your frame rate drops to 40 fps. PC gamers around the world get cramps at the thought of their computer slowing down like this.
Now lets add in that for all 20 of those monsters a randomizer script is ran to quickily alter the scale, palette, textures and maybe even secondary models placed on the main model. And create it's instance on screen. This some what minor task is now exponentially made harder because it has to occur 20 times all in a matter of fractions of seconds prior to their instance coming onto screen. Your frame rate has just dropped even more significantly.
ok... ok... theres an answer to this right? Lets just not make the game so graphically intensive that it makes up for the cycles used for the random model generator.... alas in a world where pretty movies and videogames win over all with comments like (but look how REAL it looks), we probably won't see THAT happen.
OR they could just manually go and select the randomness prior to gameplay by choosing it during level development. Just adding on even more work.
And all in the long run, to get a bunch of slightly smaller or larger enemies with a couple different textures? And as Ed just says, some games have done it, and it just turns into "one grey soup".
...
I will concede, some games do actually kind of bunk out on their supply of MOB models, but then again how freakin' creative can you get with an army soldier? For the most part they all look the freakin' same anyways. Giving you only a small handful of them. But other games tend to supply a LOT of different MOBs through out the entire game.
Oh and scaling isn't all just height. Tangent points have to be placed on specific points on the model, associated to certain edges so that when the normal line is pulled or pushed the model expands or shrinks. Height isn't enough to really add a lot of variaty (unless you want dwarves and giants like said earlier)... things like noses, breasts, thighs and stomach... these points aren't easy to tweak... and further more debug, especially when models today have enormous poly counts. I'm just saying... want pretty graphics, have your pretty graphics... you want variety, throw out your pretty graphics, a thing most developers don't want to sacrifice.
Right now we are in an age of showing off the glam... it's coming to its end. We'll probably see more variety soon as graphics are starting to really hit their roof and plateau off. Patience mad man....
...
sorry, haven't slept in a couple days. Kinda hung over... I'm rambling a LOT today.
First I will concede, videogames have GIANT budgets now adays... but still lets look at this.
Take your average MMO or the likes with random character generator. You have usually a handful (6, 7 maybe) of species, then another handful of races (really white, to really black with a few in between colours), gender and size modification. The colours and size are easily pulled off, and any new outfits are just texture swaps and maybe a couple secondary bone models tossed in (for maybe a different dagger or something hanging off his side). But that's about 14 different models to make, all of which have to be made with the consideration they will be scaled, squashed and palette swapped to death.
A lot of work goes into making these models. A WAY lot, these are the models you are going to be seeing most in the game. A lot of time and detail is paid to this set of models and probably has a small group of artists working soulily on them.
But 14 is a small number in comparison to enemies. How many enemies do you think are in the average RPG? a hundred? probably, sometimes more. A lot of which don't get a lot of air time on screen. They get killed quickily and only appear in short segments of the entire game. An artist doesn't pay as much detail to these guys. Their poly counts are lower, textures a little simpler, normal a little more mainstreamed (not manually painted, but instead just spat out with some tool, like what my buddy Andy uses "Crazy Bump"). The scalability of these models are a lot less doable. Not that much work was spent when modeling them.
See what the prob is, modeling characters and monsters isn't any easy task. I want it to look right. But then the program and model don't forgive easily. I've watched my buddy make models and merely by scaling or moving some edge or bone just the wrong way and the freakin' model just falls apart and turns into this hoaky mess of poly's that slightly resemble a VERY distorted monster with long edges poaking out all over the place. For the most part he just resets everything from his last save and goes on working. Why take the long arduous task of going in and finding which vertices are collapsing, or which layer is meshed out of whack... it's a monster, we aren't gonna see it that much.
And then having to do this for over a hundred different models.
NOW lets say the artists spent all that extra time. They got a bigger budget out of the whole chunk and went at it.
This part is a little harder to really explain. It's not like it's a huge task for the processor to pull off or anything. But it's still significant enough to slow shit down. Imagine your playing a game, and 20 (hypothetical situation) monsters come into screen, all of which are pre modeled and just loaded into RAM with their AI and come at you... and OH NOOOOOOs, your frame rate drops to 40 fps. PC gamers around the world get cramps at the thought of their computer slowing down like this.
Now lets add in that for all 20 of those monsters a randomizer script is ran to quickily alter the scale, palette, textures and maybe even secondary models placed on the main model. And create it's instance on screen. This some what minor task is now exponentially made harder because it has to occur 20 times all in a matter of fractions of seconds prior to their instance coming onto screen. Your frame rate has just dropped even more significantly.
ok... ok... theres an answer to this right? Lets just not make the game so graphically intensive that it makes up for the cycles used for the random model generator.... alas in a world where pretty movies and videogames win over all with comments like (but look how REAL it looks), we probably won't see THAT happen.
OR they could just manually go and select the randomness prior to gameplay by choosing it during level development. Just adding on even more work.
And all in the long run, to get a bunch of slightly smaller or larger enemies with a couple different textures? And as Ed just says, some games have done it, and it just turns into "one grey soup".
...
I will concede, some games do actually kind of bunk out on their supply of MOB models, but then again how freakin' creative can you get with an army soldier? For the most part they all look the freakin' same anyways. Giving you only a small handful of them. But other games tend to supply a LOT of different MOBs through out the entire game.
Oh and scaling isn't all just height. Tangent points have to be placed on specific points on the model, associated to certain edges so that when the normal line is pulled or pushed the model expands or shrinks. Height isn't enough to really add a lot of variaty (unless you want dwarves and giants like said earlier)... things like noses, breasts, thighs and stomach... these points aren't easy to tweak... and further more debug, especially when models today have enormous poly counts. I'm just saying... want pretty graphics, have your pretty graphics... you want variety, throw out your pretty graphics, a thing most developers don't want to sacrifice.
Right now we are in an age of showing off the glam... it's coming to its end. We'll probably see more variety soon as graphics are starting to really hit their roof and plateau off. Patience mad man....
...
sorry, haven't slept in a couple days. Kinda hung over... I'm rambling a LOT today.