Thread: Future of Gaming

As long as you have Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo battling for a larger gaming marketshare, games will keep improving over time. If one of them takes over and "wins" the console wars, we'll all lose because they will no longer have an incentive to keep making things better.

We have competition to thank then. I just hope these companies won't have to risk bankrupcy in order to provide decreasing prices.

Even if one company wins the console wars (which won't happen) there are still hundreds of developer companies and even more third party developers. If game dev companies get lazy then the open source market will call them on it.

OpenGL, ODE, Havok, DarkBasic... allow 3rd party people to make huge advances in the game industry and will continue to push it along.

In my opinion games are getting better, not worse even as they focus more on graphics. Good stories are key for a game to take off now. Remember, game development companies are teams and there is usually maybe one or two graphics specialists on that team, plus maybe two or three modelers. The rest are working on the engine, AI, and story.

The graphics might advance but not cheesy storylines, the graphics will always advance limitless, bump mapping is the whole jazz right now but soon bump mapping will be replaced with paralax mapping which makes textures look 3d, the graphics will just keep getting better but don't expect the gameplay to keep up.

I honestly would rather see gameplay improve, the graphics are already good enough for me, you can get better but gameplay is what makes a game fun.

Graphics are almost unlimited in what is displayed. There are still a lot of advancements to go though, whoever solves the problem of chromatic reflection will get his name on the algorithm. Refraction still has to be done with raytracing and therefore not able to be put in games.

What I'm looking forwards to soon though is dedicated physics cards. As good as the Havok engine is, it's slow and still very restricted. It can't do cloth or liquid in real time, I can't wait to see better simulations in games.

The storylines and gameplay are getting more sophisticated all the time. Many game companies have professional sci-fi writers on their payroll.

Yes !!
PPU's (physics processing units) are going to rock, once they get cheap enough (and have sufficient demand)
they'll do for realism what GPU's have done for real-time graphics

That, and ray-tracing I think is where high-end games are going

nVidia & Intel are also butting heads over hybrid CPU / GPU processors, as well - so we may have hybrid multi-core units sometime soon

having said that, Nintendo have shown that good, old fashioned (and cheap) fun to play games have more clout than anything

PC games are in something of a limbo at the moment, with no-one wanting to commit too heavily in anything new
- DX10 has largely petered out due to vista
- OpenGL, while on a par, and in some areas surpassing DX, is overdue for an API breaking rewrite with version 3.0 (LongPeaks), and developers in the DX camp seem reluctant to adopt it at the moment, instead opting to stick with aging DX9

This has left the door wide open for consoles and cute portable devices to woo the public

But yeah,
realism & advanced AI (from Accelerated physics cards) and hybrid processors would seem to be the way forward

It'll be interesting to see if any AI API shows up. Right now every game has a separate AI system, even though large chunks of the code are usually very similar. I think AI should go the way of graphics and physics and game dev community should create an AI package that the developers can use and customize as they'd like.

I don't like the idea of hybrids because they seem like they will be difficult to program for. Similar to the PS3's cell processor. In theory it's way beyond the power of the XBox, however there is still no way to harness the full power of it because no one knows how.

Well said Ynot about Nintendo, the Wii has no next-gen hardware in it. Fun games don't rely on graphics.

3.0 is way overdue. It was supposed to be out last year. Hopefully it will come out soon, they have finally gotten rid of the fixed pipeline so I think DX developers will be happy with it.

I'm curious to see if the iPhone/iTouch shows up as a competitor in the handheld gaming market. In terms of power it's far ahead of the DS and PSP, and Apple just released the developer's kit today. The three axis accelerometer makes it great for certain types of games.