8 replies to this topic

[Ooka]

Bicycles today are pretty much designed the same way they were 40 years ago. Materials have gotten better, some minor tweaks have been made for comfort and safety, but the overall look and engineering of the bicycle is virtually the same.

It seems to me that although individual aspects of game engine technology are being developed at their own rate, eventually the state of the art will hit a Bicycle stage. What this means, essentially, is that all the pieces of virtual reality rendering will be fully engineered, and improvements will reach a rate of diminishing returns. Materials will improve, such as faster CPUs, GPUs, and physX cards, but the engineering of the software will remain virtually unchanged.

Once that level of engineering has been achieved, what matters most will be the "shape" of the game itself. The shape consists of storylines, game genre, and innovative use of features.

Bandwidth is increasingly less of a problem; recent technological innovations have led to a transistor chip that operates at 350 Gigahertz at room temperature, 500 GHz at 40 degrees absolute, expected to be commercially introduced in 2009.

Assuming that hardware and technology proceed apace to the development of gaming software, at what point in time do you think software engineering will result in a Bicycle Paradigm for gaming technology?

I'd venture to say that in about 10 years, we will see fully developed and extremely powerful open source game creation kits on the level of Unreal 3, and that the top-of-the line game engine at that time will be very similar to the open source technology. The differences will be only those things that require time and skill, like music, art, and model creation.

The Unreal 3 Engine, in my opinion, represents a very close approximation to a graphical Bicycle Paradigm. Physics, sound, and other sensorial input (like force feedback controllers) will eventually catch up.

[eddie]

Ooka said:

I'd venture to say that in about 10 years, we will see fully developed and extremely powerful open source game creation kits on the level of Unreal 3... <snip>

The Unreal 3 Engine, in my opinion, represents a very close approximation to a graphical Bicycle Paradigm. Physics, sound, and other sensorial input (like force feedback controllers) will eventually catch up.

Nothing has shipped yet on UE3, so it might be a bit early to start talking about how perfect the engine is. ;) I agree the demos/screens of games look good (check out the new Turok.. <wink>), but it might be a bit early to be touting it as the one-engine-to-bind-them-all, no?

[Ooka]

I'm not saying it's perfect, I'm just saying that graphics technology has phenomenally less ground to cover than it did 5 years ago, and that Unreal 3 is generally assumed to have the best graphics. The demos are obviously tweaked to show off the full capability of the engine. In practice, the graphics are demonstrated by Vanguard. You could use several engines as an example of how far graphics technology has progressed, but I chose to use UE3 because it is well known :)

[TheNut]

Ultimately all software will be created by artificial intelligence because humanity is far to slow =P

[Reedbeta]

Game engine technology may reach a plateau where it has come to the limits of today's display and input devices, but once full virtual reality interfaces are created (and I doubt this will happen within 10 years), game engine technology will likely have to be developed further (maybe not graphics so much, but physics and input techniques).

[Ooka]

Coming from the point of view of the late 18th century, where a full color HD flatscreen display for a computer had yet to be even conceptualized, I won't venture any guesses into what the technology of tomorrow may be.

Coming from a more informed standpoint, I'll toss a guess out there that after we master it, holography will start to become more prevalent, and finally, direct neural input/output devices.

Some of you might have seen the recent news about the guy who's moving a robotic arm, reading email, and sending basic I/O to a computer system through a chip implanted in his brain... we're taking baby-steps now that will probably translate into strides before long.

Anyway, after fast photorealism is achieved, the other areas of entertainment technology will be developed into similarly sophisticated systems.

I can't wait to jack into the matrix :)

If you're interested in direct neural output devices (e.g. something that can read your brain and translate it to a computer) check out http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/ .

The technology is at the point where a system could be designed for simple mouse movement using a headset.

[SmokingRope]

Computers lend themselves very well to the 'bicycle paradigm'. Eventually most of the software industries will reach a point where development is unnecessarry in the traditional sense. Everything will be done with a reference manual an a few drop down lists. Some of the rendering/audio technology may pass through puberty soon however there will be less complex areas of software development which will reach the plateau sooner.

I'd like to think databases might be the first.

[dave_]

I think the analogy of the bicycle is of limited use.
You're thinking to linear.
The diamond frame hasnt changed much over time but that doesnt mean there hasnt been new innovations in transport, such as trains, cars, planes etc, or even in bicycle design.

I mean just because the clock speed of CPUs hasnt improved that much over the last couple of years doesnt mean there hasnt been improvement in terms of multicores and other aysnchronous things.

People will change methods. They'll use, for example, radiosity and other techniques that where previously unavailable for real time applications.

Oh and I've worked at a company with the latest unreal engine projects so I'm pretty sure I know enough about it.

[SmokingRope]

That's the point of the bicycle analogy is that there are subsets of the larger transportation industry which are approaching their limitations. Just as trains have tapered off in terms of use, and bicycles have reached a certain pinnacle in design. The software industry will eventually experience certain subsets of it's whole which become obsolete/perfected.