REALITY ABOUT GAMES :
Pc or console, this generation is all about the games, and what a glo0rious generation this promises to be! We have already seen some great titles on the consoles- gears of ears, halo3, uncharged, ratchet and clank: tools of destruction, gran turismo5, prologue, grand theft auto 4, crysis the age of conan hyborian adventures mario galaxy with many more games to come. There has never been a better time to be a gamer. so here is my suggestion for the year-ahead and enjoy
The road of Realism:
The Upcoming games of this generation have been a visual feast. thewy are inching ever so closely to the holy grail of computers graphics resembling the real world. There are still some huge hurdles to clear. The biggest is the Psycological the so called uncanny valley hyponthesis, that "when computer rendered look and act almost, but not entirely, like actual humans, it causes response of revolution among human observers".another hurdle is that of texture quality a game looks as good as the textures it can display. high quality textures take up both disc space and graphics card bandwidth and memory- all are in limited supply, finite, even though blueray discs slightly alleviate one of the problems. One possible solution is the megatexture approach taken by ID software , recently.
Mega texture employs an extreme large terrain texture, instead of repeating multiple smaller textures ,which adds to the visual fidelity o scene and makes the artist's work much easier to boo. The single large texture is stored on removable media and streamed as needed, allowing large amountsa of detail and variation over large amounts of detail and variation over large area
The Tech also alleviates the uncanny valley associated with shadows as Tech 5 renderer includes a penumbra in the shadowing, by using shado maps. This engine will also support multiple processors by multi-threading many of its tasks such as rendering, some gameplay logic, AL, physics and sound processing.
Multiprocessing is also been appropriately utilised by the u[pcoming Alan wake. This psycological action thriller will showcase some great effects due to its levaraging of multiple processors- including a complete modelling of atmospheric scaterring- giving us realistic cloud formation and skies day/night time cycles, ambient occlusion, normal mapping high dynamic rendering, fully volumetric shadows that are projected through the entire world, full weather modelling , bloom, depth of the field and draw a distance of around 2kilometers! The game is being designed with five threads-the renderiong thread will prepare vertices to be sent to the GPU, an audio thread and a streaming thread, which wil be used to stream data off of the DVD or the hard disk as well as decompress the data on the fly and allowing seameless traversal of the environments without loading screens, a thread for physics calculations, which are being simulated using the havocengine, and one for the terrain tessellation. Moreover, an entire core processor can be dedicated to physical calculations alone.
games are only going to improve in visual quality as we progress, the next few years should bring us eye candy unlike any we could imagine. If you took a look around what's around you now, you'd get an idea of the awesomeness that is to follow.