I am not a big video game fan but I can appreciate the technological expertise it takes to make a good, realistic-looking game. This article in Popular Science breaks down the top 10 challenges game-makers of today are facing to develop the next generation of cutting-edge video games. Here is the breakdown:
1.Processing power-if a computer can't keep up with the instructions the game issues, the image stutters, ruining the experience.
2.Water-having the processing power to create realistic water movements/viscosity.
3.Human faces-trying to re-create the subtlest and most familiar aspects of human expression
4.Artificial intelligence-the article describes this challenge like teaching 1,000 kids to think for themselves overnight
5.Light and shadows
6.Fire-this challenge is similar to that of trying to program the behavior of water
7.Material physics-It's no longer enough to make buildings look realistic. Now videogame makers have to be able to knock them down realistically, too.
8.Realistic movement
9.True to life simulation
10.Motion capture-apparently the old method of motion capture (dressing a person up in a clunky ping-pong-ball-studded suit) is now out of fashion
Each Top-10 challenge is accompanied by a brief 'status report' on the current state of the technology and what the future holds for overcoming the particular hurdle. It's a good read.
All excerpts taken from the Popular Science article by Jacob Ward, Doug Cantor and Bjorn Carey.
Image courtesy of Bioware.
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NVidia has actually been pioneering GPGPU for many of the problems listed above, and it is especially relevant to the problems above related to physics simulation. GPU's have capabilities that far surpass CPU's on flop performance and data-parallelism, so being able to program them for general purpose computation in an environment like NVidia's CUDA is an exciting prospect.
If anyone wants a technical reference, there are several articles on new methods for real-time fluid simulations in GPU Gems 3.
My brother is an artist who programs in his spare time and he says that the biggest problem is that hard-core programmers are not artists and are focused more on the difficult code than on the asthetic portion and artists don't usually like computers.