Necessary Evil

February 20, 2012

Every creative person can affirm with ease the fact that a work of art is only rarely an exact manifestation of the author’s initial vision, but oftentimes very much about dreadful trade-offs and compromises instead. Which is especially true with pieces pushing new boundaries in terms of technology. It is what it is, and to accept that reality as soon as possible helps to deal with the frustration later on if and when the finalized product falls short of the expectations.

From the perspective of the end user, there are basically two kinds of compromises, or at least in the realm of real-time imagery which is by nature very much about trade-offs. Ones that are reasonable obvious to the spectator possessing general knowledge of the medium, and ones that become evident only when additional, specific information of the product is provided by the developer.

Let’s first examine the former variety of compromises that are indeed fairly noticeable from the surface. An apt example of such can be found, for example, in a polygon-based racing game called Stunts (1990) that featured a rather compromised bitmap backdrop.

Indeed, due to the peculiar algorithm that handles the rotation of the bitmap milieu, the solution begins to fall apart the more the view is being tilted. The way the backdrop is dealt with is a rather odd one as the algorithm doesn’t actually rotate the bitmap at all, but rather skews it quite crudely. The backdrop is clearly divided vertically into 10 pixels wide strips which are then moved individually along the y-axis in order to create an appearance of rotation. And when the screen tips over a certain point, the backdrop vanishes altogether.

One can only speculate the reason for such a bizarre algorithm. Perhaps it was genuinely best what the developer could come up with given the hardware limitations at the time. Or they just didn’t know how to code a proper algorithm for bitmap rotation within the time frame they had. In any case, the developer had to make a call to either include the inconsistent and unstable solution into the game, or simply leave the whole feature out.

Since the backdrop performs most of the time reasonable well, I believe the pros ultimately outweighed the cons. However, it’s quite obvious that the developer wasn’t particularly proud of the solution, as the horizon indeed disappears, I would argue, by design, when it really starts to disintegrate.

Another more recent instance of a compromise that comes across quite noticeably is the Gran Turismo 5’s (2010) particle system that, for some reason, gets exceedingly blocky when viewed from certain angles. Frankly, I’m not completely sure what’s going on there since other games with similar particle effects chiefly don’t do that. However, I’m positive there’s some valid trade-off involved considering the super-ambitious developer, Polyphony Digital. Perhaps the particle system was put in place to future-proof the graphics engine for the next generation of hardware, since the smoke and dust perform beautifully in the Photo Mode.

As said, the above two cases are instances of compromises evident to the spectator simply by experiencing the product as is. To recognize, then, the second form of compromise requires indeed specific information of the production process itself and the original vision, dreams and hopes of the developer.

One example of such is the production of Alan Wake (2010) that initially was very much hyped for its supposed open-world structure. The end result, however, was a purely linear experience which made the game seem like a compromise, even if true, to those who had followed the production from the outset. But people without such knowledge saw Alan Wake merely as a kick-ass action thriller, which it was.

In the end, compromises are what actually get things done. In fact, one could argue that the whole concept of design is at its core about dealing with compromises and trade-offs. More than anything, though, the art of compromise is to be able to step back and evaluate the big picture, to see the forest for the trees, and then doing the right thing for the product as a whole and everyone involved.

Posted in Medium, Philosophy | Comments Off

Lost in Translation

February 10, 2012

As long as I remember, I have had this particular fondness toward arcade games (and I mean the actual coin-operated ones), especially when growing up. Obviously we are now living in the post-arcade era where sophisticated home systems made arcades finally obsolete, but fortunately at least classic arcade games continue to live on through collectors and, of course, emulation.

What made arcade games so special back then was that they offered, in a way, a window into the future of consumer real-time imagery, as in, what could be possible in home environment somewhere down the line. In fact, for me they acted like windows quite literally since I rarely had resources to actually play the games, but awkwardly hang around them. Watching other people play was almost equally exciting nevertheless, which made me a rather lousy customer for the local arcade as a juvenile.

Even though arcade games by and large came from a variety of developers, one publisher was and, in a way, still is in a league of its own: Sega, and particularly the Sega AM2 team led by design genius Yu Suzuki. I’ve yet to encounter an entity that has broken ground in video game graphics as ambitiously as Sega has, with games that continuously redefined what the real-time image can do.

The closest games to my heart out of the Sega’s overwhelming portfolio are the ones released in the 80s using so-called Super Scaler technology. These are the titles that simulate 3D space by algorithmically scaling the bitmap art assets creating an illusion of traversing along the z-axis. The effect was nothing short of staggering and light years ahead what home systems could do at the time. Games, like Out Run (1986), After Burner (1987) and Thunder Blade (1988), to name but a few, all used this Super Scaler system, and the whole charm of them, I would argue, was ultimately reduced to the smooth scaling effect.

As said, the above-mentioned arcade games ­represented the absolute high-end of the gaming spectrum at the time. The commercial success of them naturally created financial pressures to bring the arcade experience to the home systems, such as the Commodore 64, as well. The problem was, that the C64 represented virtually the direct opposite end of the spectrum with its lackluster hardware in terms of screen resolution, color palette and computational horsepower in general.

Of course, that didn’t stop money-grabbing publishers, such as Ocean and U.S.Gold, bringing Out Run and the likes to the low-end home systems. The issue was that, for instance, Out Run was not so much about the gameplay per se, but the spectacle of driving smoothly through the colorful scenery filled with eye pleasing details. When those things were stripped off in the low-end versions, such as the one on the C64, there wasn’t that much, if anything, conveyed from the original experience anymore due to the hardware limitations. All that there was left was a really bad game, even by the C64 standards.

The original Out Run was indeed a rock-solid fusion of software and hardware that carried through the visual concept Out Run was built on gracefully with no hiccups whatsoever. The game ran beautifully at high and steady frame rates, contained striking transition effects when driving from one section to the next one, and offered vast variation in terms of visuals in general. I’d say Out Run was best the year 1986 had to offer for real-time imagery which the everyday audience had access to.

However, the way the C64 version was constructed was completely backward. The exercise here was to shove the concept of Out Run into the system in any way possible regardless the inherent hardware limitations. There was indeed nothing – not a single chip – inside the C64 that would’ve warranted or justified the ludicrous idea of porting a game like Out Run to such a weak system. Which is painfully obvious just by glancing at the end result, especially in motion.

In the end, everything comes down to the fact that the real-time image as a medium can’t be separated from the hardware platform that it’s on; the real-time image is the software and the hardware. I can only imagine the level of disappointment of someone who actually paid real money for an arcade conversion like the C64’s Out Run and thought having nearly the same arcade experience at home. It was like buying Star Wars: Episode IV on DVD and getting Star Wars Uncut instead.

It goes without saying that in the end the logic of such endeavors had got to do more than anything with the power of Intellectual Property and the “fraudulent” financial leverage that came along with it. In fact, all this makes me think of fast food joints where the pictures of the burgers above the counter represent nothing of the actual products people are shoving, rather happily, into their faces. What they are doing is consuming the simulacrum of the Big Mac, not the Bic Mac depicted in the marketing materials.

The problem of horrible arcade conversions wasn’t the poor target hardware in and of itself. There were quite beautiful games on the C64 at the time, like, for instance, Uridium (1986) that utilized even the awkward shape of the C64 pixels for its advantage. The problem was the completely backward and corrupt creative process. And I’m using the term creative very loosely here.

Posted in Hardware, Medium | Comments Off

Yes, Size Did Matter

February 4, 2012

The younger audience of today is probably having hard time comprehending the concept of sprite that pretty much defined real-time imagery for more than a decade or so between the 80s and 90s. Sure, we do still use the term to denote planar 2D images representing 3D objects in a 3D space, but it has a very different meaning today than back in the day.

In the era of 8 and 16 bit systems, like the Commodore 64, Super Nintendo or Neo Geo, sprite denoted specifically an independent, dynamic visual object (like a space ship or a race car) of which properties, such as size and number, related directly to the capabilities of a certain piece of hardware. So, for instance, the C64 could display no more than 8 sprites at a time which paled in comparison to the 96 sprites the more advanced Neo Geo was able to push to the screen at once. Put simply, sprites were Lego-like building blocks for the dynamic elements of the game, and very much of the visual outcome depended on them, whether one liked it or not.

As said, not only the number of simultaneous sprites varied between the systems, but so did the sizes of them as well. That is, how many pixels one sprite could consist of in maximum, which was relatively few in lower-end systems, such as the C64. This limitation made larger game characters and other dynamic objects that more fascinating at the time, even if the assets usually consisted of several sub-sprites to make an impression of a one large one.

An iconic example in my mind is The Way of the Exploding Fist (1985) originally developed on the C64 that was, in addition to the great gameplay, celebrated indeed for its seemingly massive characters, which, of course, consisted of a number of separate sprites. Nevertheless, the size of the characters in and of themselves bore so much aesthetic value that the technical side was secondary: big was big was big.

Since the fascination of real-time imagery is very much based on the recognition of technical limitations and, at the same time, pushing that envelope of what is considered possible, it’s not coincidence that some games, especially the ones released on the launch of a new hardware platform, exploit this frame of thinking. The thing is, there is this short post-launch window within which a game can make an impression employing merely the basic features of the freshly released platform.

One instance that comes to mind is Super Mario World (1990) that came bundled with the Super Nintendo as a launch title. So, I believe the sole reason why there was a huge Bullet Bill, aka Banzai Bill, right at the first level was indeed to impress new console owners, or people playing at stores, with the power of the SNES. And since the sizes of game characters were highly limited in the previous generation of hardware, it was only natural to put an oversized version of an already established character to mediate the point across: Kids, we can have this big Bullet Bills from now on.

It was the inevitable decline of sprite-based hardware that made the issue of size obsolete in the realm of real-time imagery. Once everything was constructed with polygons, the dimensions of art assets became totally relative, and thus a non-issue technically speaking. Which seems to escape people who marvel, say, God of War III (2010) as a technological achievement for its colossal characters. I can too scale up a 3D model in a 3D software environment as much as I please and technically it makes no difference whatsoever.

If, then, one “superficial” attribute has to be singled out that bears any technical meaning in art assets today, it’s definition instead of size.

Posted in Hardware, Medium | Comments Off

From Photorealism to Corporealism

January 27, 2012

The history of simulated space, as I wrote in my thesis, basically consists of going through several stages of development, most of which relate to the level of spatial latitude. My observation was that the freedom of movement the player, or the “camera”, has within a game has increased one dimensional/rotational axis at a time over the years, starting from a fixed game space with no spatial freedom at all (think of, say, PacMan), to the current state of six degrees of freedom (think of any modern game).

So games like Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and Doom (1993) were positioned somewhere between the two extremes, in that they lacked, thanks to the ray-casting technique, the ability to tilt the view up or down. The vertical lines remained parallel however player positioned the view within the game, there was no escaping it.  Interestingly this restriction liberated developers worrying about something that came with the first-person view, which is as follows.

As Quake (1996) was de facto the first FPS to introduce the full six degrees of freedom which allowed the player to genuinely look up and down, it also brought forward one of the biggest issues with the first-person view by and large. It’s as simple as when looking down in a FPS, one should, according to all logic, see the rest of the corpus, or at least the legs, especially since there are usually other body parts visible, i.e. hands holding the weapon or what have you.

The issue here is that in most cases the rest of the body simply isn’t there for people to behold. Even such prominent series like Half-life and Call of Duty employ a first-person view that bears little of the feel of controlling a physical corpus, but a floating, massless camera with arms and a gun attached to it instead. Yes, Call of Duty games do show the body of the character aside from the hands here and there during some of the cut-scenes, but, to my mind, that just doesn’t cut it.

The thing is, the first-person view should be all about the illusion of being in someone else’s shoes, quite literally, so it surprises me to some extent that so many games of that genre ignore the rest of the body altogether. I know it’s mainly a technical thing and something which many people presumably don’t even care about so much. Nevertheless, I would argue that if FPSs want to move forward as a genre, the corporeal nature of the action has to be integrated more and more not only into the visuals, but core gameplay mechanics as well. I do acknowledge that such an endeavor probably isn’t as straightforward as when dealing with the third-person view, but pushing the envelope never is.

Much hyped Jurassic Park: Trespasser (1998) was an early, highly ambitious attempt to put some meat and bones into the FPS experience, failing miserably at almost every level. F.E.A.R. (2005) is worth mentioning as an endeavor to incorporate martial arts into the genre using a visible lower body, not to mention Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (2006).

To me, it was Crysis (2007) that showcased the impact a decent first-person body can have on the visuals overall. Indeed, to see one’s own shadow hovering over the sandy beaches while shooting at enemies was something of a breakthrough in my eyes, which would’ve not been feasible without the body casting the shadow. It still continues to amaze me whenever I pay attention to it, and boggles my mind why, for instance, the Call of Duty series still ignores completely this aspect.

Furthermore, Crysis earns extra kudos for the way weaponry and other movables are picked up using the character’s hands, and not just teleporting them into the inventory. Or, levitating objects at the center of the screen in the manner of Half-life 2 and derivatives. In Crysis, there really is a strong illusion of a physical connection to the game space through the character, and the brilliance of the system can’t be emphasized enough.

Then there are instances where the first-person view wouldn’t make much sense without rendering the rest of the body. Mirror’s Edge (2008), for one, is a great example of a first-person game which makes great use of the body when parkouring over the rooftops, or delivering kicks and punches. In addition, the corporeality manifests also through the gameplay itself in terms of inertia, mass, and momentum that each have to take account when jumping and landing with the character.

That said, I still wouldn’t go so far as Shift 2: Unleashed (2011) which featured so-called Helmet Cam that put the view inside, you guessed, a helmet. Sure, that sounds like a logical extension to what I’ve written about here that everything related to the game character should be modeled in the first-person view. However, for some reason, such a solution feels gimmicky and, moreover, wrong.

So what my position is regarding the first-person view is that when presenting a game from it, everything below the neck should be there visible to the player, not merely arms and hands like most games seem to operate. I guess I have to make a follow up post to open that “neck-line” dogma further, but it most probably has got to do with the fashion the player’s real head and body relate to the screen.

Posted in Geometry | Comments Off

The Fourth Wall

January 17, 2012

Before home computer systems that were capable of displaying sophisticated bitmap graphics such as Commodore 64 and the likes, there was, at least, one gaming console that employed graphical overlays made of translucent plastic that were put on front of the TV screen. The console in question was Magnavox Odyssey which had extremely rudimentary image producing capabilities. Consequently, the main functions of these overlays were to provide detail and, more importantly, context for otherwise abstract visuals. There were a variety of overlays that represented tennis courts, race tracks, or haunted mansions, to name but a few.

How ridiculous the overlays may now seem, they were, one could argue, an innovative placeholder technology that introduced “color graphics” to the black and white world far ahead of its time. Unfortunately, Magnavox Odyssey happened before my time so I have no first-hand experience how the overlays actually worked regarding the overall experience, but I can’t see why not?

The plastic overlays were, of course, a dead-end technology that became obsolete once the color graphics evolved sophisticated enough to display more accurate representations. The main problem with the overlays, besides being awkward and clumsy, was their static nature, and in the realm of real-time imagery, dynamic entities do always override static ones. Or at least that’s the ideal to look up to.

What’s, then, my interest in the said overlays is the fact that they are, in a sense, an archetypical example of using a technically inferior visual paradigm in order to enhance and/or provide additional information on top of a more advanced one. A plastic overlay is indeed less sophisticated a medium than the visuals Magnavox Odyssey was able to produce, even if on the surface the overlays may appeared more pleasing to the eye with all the colors and details.

So, there’s an interesting parallel here in play which occurred to me when flying around in Star Wars: TIE Fighter (LucasArts, 1994) and reflecting the connection between the cockpit of the ship and the “outside world.” The visuals of TIE Fighter are basically a combination of two very different visual paradigms which are gouraud shaded polygons used to depict the external objects and plain bitmap graphics for the cockpit. One could say that the former represents 3D and the latter 2D, but as I wrote earlier, that dichotomy as is can be quite confusing and moot.

TIE Fighter, among its contemporaries, is indeed exactly a case in which an inferior technology (bitmap) enhances a more sophisticated one (gouraud shaded polygons) in that the bitmap cockpit provides much more detailed representation than if it had been realized with 1994’s polygons. The hardware simply wasn’t there yet to depict everything with polygons like nowadays, so the decision to combine the two paradigms was understandable. Of course, the price of the solution, just like with the plastic overlays, came in the form of static nature of the cockpit, as the bitmap couldn’t simulate any spatial movement or change in lighting whatsoever. In fact, I vividly remember fantasizing back then about a genuine polygon cockpit so I could “rotate” my head around freely and which would illuminate depending on the light source, but that did not come true until 1999 when Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance came along.

Since TIE Fighter, spatially static bitmap elements on top of polygon-based imagery have almost vanished by and large, or at least ones of that magnitude. What is there left are different kinds of so-called HUD elements that generally have no representational responsibilities, but rather informational as indicating selected weapon or velocity of a car, for example. Need for Speed: Shift is an interesting case in that regard as it integrates the HUD elements into the game space itself, making the HUD react to acceleration, braking, bumps on the road, and so on.

The ultimate point of all this is that, to my mind, the HUDs in modern games seem to be the last manifestation of those clumsy plastic overlays with which the visuals were enhanced to provide more visual detail and information using a less sophisticated medium or paradigm. Therefore, I think the HUD is something of a relic and usually the element that is the most eager to break the illusion of another reality by shouting “look, here’s your health bar and here’s the ammo! It’s indeed only a game!” It must not come as a surprise that I very much prefer the no-HUD solutions like the one in Dead Space whenever it’s possible or reasonable.

Posted in Medium | Comments Off

Understanding Light

January 8, 2012

There are a few developers in the video game space who go above and beyond the call of duty when putting a game together. I’m referring to developers who radiate deep, otherworldly understanding towards the medium in question, and possess enough ambition, technology, and talent to pull the developer’s vision off, more or less accurately.

One developer who qualifies as such in my eyes no questions asked is Polyphony Digital, responsible of the Gran Turismo series released exclusively on the PlayStation platforms. In short, GT series could be described as one long, meticulously calligraphed love letter to the automobile industry and everything related, or, conversely, an ultimate, yet affordable fantasy for car enthusiasts at large.  And while the people playing the games sometimes tend to cut corners, Polyphony Digital is definitely driven not to, which comes crystal clear when scrutinizing the newest installment in the series, Gran Turismo 5 released on the PlayStation 3.

Granted, GT 5 suffers from a few painful compromises, not least of which being the dreadful decision to include tracks and cars from the previous iteration only to bump up the numbers printed on the cover. Yes, I really hate the solution as it renders the visuals inconsistent, to say the least, and I’m all about consistency. I believe Polyphony Digital CEO Kazunori Yamauchi hated it too.

What wasn’t compromised in GT 5 was the simulation of light, which is, I would argue, very close to optimal the hardware in question can handle. The beauty of it doesn’t lie in the definition of the simulation per se (e.g. shadows in the cockpit can be quite jaggy), but in the profound understanding of how light interacts with various materials and optical apparatuses such as a camera or an eye in terms of exposure. Indeed, when simulating an entity or a phenomenon, everything is done in vain if one doesn’t grasp the core nature of the object being simulated, and GT 5 seems to avoid that shortcoming to a great extent. The lighting obviously knows what it’s doing.

Furthermore, the aspect that strikes immediately with the lighting is the extremely clean, non-obstructive look of it. The thing is, the extensive use of bloom, color grading, and obnoxious lens flares (there are good ones) are usually cheap strategies to salvage the image from the mediocrity. Bad post-processing is indeed like an old, wrinkled lady trying impress people by plastering her face with a tons of make-up. GT 5 stands on, in addition to the excellent modeling and texturing work, such a robust lighting solution, both precalculated and real-time, that it needs no saving make-up to look appealing and, above all, real.

However, the ultimate testament and benchmark for the GT 5’s rock solid lighting model is the Photomode with which one can produce near photorealistic images. The Photomode is like a window to the future and PD’s nod to the gaming community that “If we just had more horsepower available, this would be the level of realism we’d be dealing with now. We understand light. We have the technology.” Indeed, no other game comes even close to GT 5 as far as photomodes go, not even Forza Motorsport 4 by Turn 10 Studios.

As said, the beauty of GT 5 stems obviously from other factors too, such as the texturing and modeling work, but in the end, everything comes down to the simulation of light. There’s no way around it. And it’s exhilarating to see that there are developers who get that exceedingly well.

Posted in Lighting | Comments Off

Getting Physical

December 30, 2011

I’m not particularly proud to admit that for a while in my youth I believed that pro wrestling (what a confusing term) was actually a real sport similar to, say, boxing. To my credit, pro wrestling is presented as such with “real” announcers, referees, and everything. Nevertheless, it amazes me how fake those kicks and punches that I once took for real now appear to me as an adult when occasionally watching pro wrestling, which is a testament to the fact how incompetent the judgment of a young mind can be.

Obviously the fakeness of the pro wrestling combat stems from the fact that the kicks and punches, even if showy, aren’t full contact, but merely soft landing slaps or ones that miss the target altogether. There is indeed very little actual physical interaction in play when the punches start to fly in pro wrestling, and the crux of such a show is, well, the show – the spectacle.

Then there are actual sports that include genuine physical violence but, in a way, don’t come across as violent as pro wrestling in terms of sheer scope of actions. Even the least holds barred sport Mixed Martial Arts include relatively little trading of (successful) kicks and punches per match, and more often than not MMA bouts reduce into unexciting unspectacles of hugging and squishing. The point of this is to say that actual violence is rarely as spectacular as fiction at large often depicts it to be. Only consider the contrast between a real boxing match experienced via TV and any of the Rocky movies, and you see what I’m after.

What then comes to violence found in video games, first of all, I’m not a fan of graphic violence per se. However, as I wrote earlier, I don’t have a particular problem with simulated violence. Some violence can actually add immensely to the overall gaming experience when done properly. Furthermore, at least one can be dead sure the violence in a video game isn’t real, in contrast to mediums like film or video which are more ambivalent towards that question.

That said, I remember finding the very first Virtua Fighter fascinating, as it represented for the first time credible full contact combat in fiction, instead of that obvious fakery found in movies or, let alone, pro wrestling. Thanks to the polygon graphics, kicks and punches actually did intersect with the opponent’s corpus, thus giving an impression of genuine physical impact. Of course, the game engine of VF was rudimentary at best and didn’t even include any actual physics simulations whatsoever. Yet, the combat in VF was not only more real and tangible than in other fiction, but at the same time, one could argue, more spectacular than real hand-to-hand combat.

However, the most intriguing aspect what follows from all this is the fact that simulated pro wrestling is, in a sense, far more real than the actual, live-action version of it. Indeed, wrestling games, such as WWE ‘12 by THQ, seem to be more truthful to the supposed frame of reference of the exercise in question, which is, presumably, defeating an opponent using violence in a regulated, non-fixed match. Actual pro wrestling neglects that premise altogether for the sake of the drama and the spectacle, which manifests itself as faked punches and fixed matches.

I wonder if this is the hyper-real (more real than the real itself) about which Jean Baudrillard so much talked? Is simulated violence some sort of hyper-violence? Does the title Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting finally make sense?

Of course everything said above applies also to computer-generated imagery at large, such as the very cool Assassin’s Creed trailer mentioned earlier. Video games just happen to add an extra layer to the mix, the interactivity, which makes the situation that more fascinating.

Remember that resorting to violence is never an answer,  outside video games, that is.

Posted in Medium | Comments Off

« Older Entries