Future and Emerging Technologies

[Anonymous]

hi guys, i doing a module on Future and Emerging Technologies of multimedia, which means i have to research for 12 weeks about something like XML or speech recognition, and do a big report on it.

i don’t actually do any research myself, i just have too find other research or articals, books etc about the subject , kind of writeing researching about research….

anyway, does anyone have any suggestions for a topic that is game related? i was thinking the future of middleware/ game development/design

and also does anyone know of any good reasources e.g. about the subject?

ta

[Anonymous]

Just a couple of suggestions…

A. You could research the future of game engines. Renderware is now exclusive to EA, so there’s a huge hole in the market. What will the next Grand Theft Auto game be using now? There’s many other popular games too. Engines are becoming more and more powerful. Doom 3 is a great example. Some people think that we should only have a few engines on the market so that production is made much easier. After all, do movie studios use different engines to make a film?? Then again, some argue that too few engines will mean numerous numbers of games that are just clones of others. This could be an interesting subject to write about because it’ll be changing a lot in the future.

B. Are you able to write about the future of game development? The publisher is dominating right now, but Greg Costikayan and Manifesto Games is one example of trying to change this. Studio models could change immensely in years to come. Stuart Roch of Shiny proposed the ‘Hollywood’ model in Gamasutra last year. Jason Rubin has talked about giving power back to the developers. Will small studios be getting pushed out? Or will there still be room for them to thrive in ten years from now?

That’s just a couple of ideas. Hope it helps! Good luck, Paddy.

[Anonymous]

Here’s a poss:

The use of procedural generation techniques for textures, models etc to combat the ever increasing game dev. budgets. eg. demo scene, spore

[Anonymous]

You could maybe write something on procedurally generating bugs – removing the need for programmers in next-gen development…

:wink:

Oh theres gonna be letters

[Anonymous]

How about text to speech and speech recognition and how games could be made more fun through the use of it.

Dave

[Anonymous]

you can borrow one of my pet ideas, since I am not really using it at the moment:
discuss the conflict of interest between the need to research AI that makes good NPCs, and therefore allows for better single player experience, versus the fact that most people are much happier to play against other humans (and the ever growing availability of Internet), making research on advanced AI a much less critical subject (e.g. the absence of bots, or of Single Player mode, isn’t seen as a big deal nowadays)

(of course, I have my ideas as to why this is stupid, being interested in AI myself; and how the two apparent opposite sides can be actually combined to enrich the game experience)

Is that the sort of stuff you want?

[Anonymous]

How about text to speech and speech recognition and how games could be made more fun through the use of it.[/quote:233041a5ab]

Personally I would just take the big picture and extend this to the whole problem of GUI, and how it has evolved throughout the years.
VR/Text to speech is but one element of a bigger jigsaw, that some people have solved admirably well, but only partially, over the years.
VR is just one way that you could improve interfaces, and sometimes a good menu system would actually be much better than a bad VR interface.

[Anonymous]

Here’s a poss:

The use of procedural generation techniques for textures, models etc to combat the ever increasing game dev. budgets. eg. demo scene, spore[/quote:8b67f8a2c6]

This one turns me on (if that is the right phrase)

[Anonymous]

Personally I would just take the big picture and extend this to the whole problem of GUI, [/quote:734a227c99]

Text to speech and speech recgnition is about immersion in a game world and improving gameplay, and would result in a far more important addition to gameplay than simply using it to navigate menus…

[Anonymous]

This one turns me on (if that is the right phrase)[/quote:cb19f71a64]
Whatever you are into today Ivan :shock: :shock: :shock:

[Anonymous]

wow, thanks for all the feed back :wink:

ronny: your first idea (about the game engines) was what i was thinking, and i think i will find that the most interesting and i think there should be lots of reasources abou it.

your second idea, is not really an emerging Technologie, i don’t think that is a good idea (ta very much anyway)

some thing i had not thought about is the future of GUIs, that would be interesting, and i would guess there would be a lot of material on that.

philippe_j: again not really emerging (future) Technologie……. well it is t but not really what my lecturer wants…i think.

just to make clear, i don’t carry out any research myself, i kind of grather what other people have written about it and do a big report about it.

thanks again for your help

[Anonymous]

Here’s a poss:

The use of procedural generation techniques for textures, models etc to combat the ever increasing game dev. budgets. eg. demo scene, spore[/quote:ff87430c53]

This also arouses me greatly.

In fact here at ITB we are starting a research project soon which tackles this very area. More info here ..

http://www.gamedevelopers.ie/jobs/viewjob.php?article=82

Maniacrobot – I know all about Spore but I’m curious to know a bit more about the demo scene and procedural gen …. could you elaborate a bit?

[Anonymous]

Well, originally the demo scene was a place to show off prog. skills so it could be anything that was written, but the coding I am refering to in this instance is examples like kkrieger, http://www.theprodukkt.com

In terms of procedural generation, any number of objects can be created on the fly for ingame use when specified in code, such as complete levels which in their most basic form are simply a series of linked geometric shapes, also in game models, epecially organics such as trees, plant, grass, also rock formations can all be generated procedurally, specify a series of parameters which are to be followed by the code, and then randomly generate or generate a selection of objects. The sky in a game could be made up up a series of procedurally generated and animated clouds tex’s, which could be set up to never have the same sky twice, textures can be generated , the most popular being the checkerboard style :) and it doesn’t have to limit your graphics style either, normal maps, displacement maps, height maps, parallax maps whatever, they can be placed in code and then rendered to screen at your convenience without having to be read from disk.

Games are quite well suited for this as so much has to be done in real time , of course it does take a toll on the machine used, and a fairly high spec and load time is required.

http://aim.adc.rmit.edu.au/phd/sgreuter/papers/graphite2003.pdf

Granted, this is just my understanding of it, haven’t actually done too much work on it, just batch generation of normal maps.

[Anonymous]

i actually picked procedural generation techniques, as one of my 3 that i had to suggest, but i think i will stick to the game engines idea. i was scared that procedural generation techniques was too narrow to do my reseach on, while game engines/middleware will have lots of material on it (i hope).

btw if anyone nows any interest online links about engines/middleware (the future of them) or any jurnols or books about about, please tell

ta

[Anonymous]

Thanks Maniac. I will check out the kkrieger thing you mentioned it looks interesting.

I have read the Greuter paper you referred to. There are also two really good SIGGRAPH papers about similar stuff:

procedural modelling of cities
http://www.centralpictures.com/ce/tp/paper.pdf

and

instant architecture
http://artis.inrialpes.fr/Publications/2003/WWSR03/

Both of these generate static models (as opposed to Greuter who does it in real time) but they have really sophisticated algorithms in them for mimicking architectural styles and so on. It’s all good stuff.

Also there loads of good links here:

http://www.vterrain.org

[Anonymous]

i actually picked procedural generation techniques, as one of my 3 that i had to suggest, but i think i will stick to the game engines idea. i was scared that procedural generation techniques was too narrow to do my reseach on, while game engines/middleware will have lots of material on it (i hope).

btw if anyone nows any interest online links about engines/middleware (the future of them) or any jurnols or books about about, please tell

ta[/quote:bf65417dce]

Patrick,

You might find that a bigger problem would be that your research topic would be too broad and hence you will find it difficult to get a good angle/approach on it. I wouldn’t see a perceived “narrowness” of the proc gen thing as a problem. It’s nice and tightly defined, has a long history in computer graphics and obvious application in games that maybe hasn’t been exploited yet as much as it could be ….. it might be hard to write about game engines in any kind of coherent way and not just end up with a report that says “yes well this game engine does this, and then there’s this other one that does that too, etc. etc.”.

Anyway, good luck with the work whatever you end up tackling!

[Anonymous]

yeah i know what u mean, originally i thought game engines was too broad, but after talking to the lecture/course director, he thinks that game engines would the best topic to pick. But thanks for the advice anyway

[Anonymous]

sorry to bump an old topic, but if any knows of any books, Journals, or articals etc about the future of game engines, i would be be gratefully if you would post them ;)

[Anonymous]

Patrick –
a quick braindump of some of the sites I’ve found useful on the subject. You may already have come across some of these.

Haven’t read the book so can’t vouch for it and the General 3D Engine Lists mainly lists Open Source partial/complete engines and may well be out of date

Overview:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,594,00.asp – Game Engine Anatomy 101
http://archive.gamespy.com/futureofgaming/engines/index.shtml – Engines And Engineering

Database:
http://www.devmaster.net/engines/ – DevMaster’s Game and Graphics Engines Database

Articles:
http://weblogs.asp.net/justin_rogers/articles/65797.aspx – Game Engine Design: A series of abstractions for better engines.
http://www.gamearchitect.net/index.html

Book:
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/bookdescription.cws_home/677921/description#description

General 3D Engine Lists:
http://fraktali.849pm.com/graphengines.html
http://cg.cs.tu-berlin.de/~ki/engines.html

[Anonymous]

thanks for the links

some i got but others i did not.

thanks again

[Anonymous]

Some key areas of technology that will change over next few years of the industry:

– adaptive content: can’t scale the art teams as rapidly as would be needed, plus memory bandwidth/capacity on consoles is even more critical in forthcoming generation => therefore need content that is more detailed but less specialized (i.e. can be redeployed in different scenarios in the game). This subsumes procedural generation of textures, models, cities, characters and also includes procedural animation and AI for those models/textures.

– real time content tools: boy is this a black hole in the industry right now. You can create a crate in max/maya/xsi but what tool do you use to attach a script to it so that it blows up and emits a sound when collided with by a grenade? The industry is partially crippled due to the deadlock between coders and artists – this dependence needs to be broken to facilitate efficient team operations.

– Speech Synthesis & Recognition – cited by many as one of the next big hurdles to immersion and emotional content delivery. Adaptive dialogue generation to get rid of the Monkey Island “choose 1 of 4 reponses” approach.

– AI – the great challenge. The term encompasses too much really – but somehow developing workable solutions that allow combining of low level but plausible steering & interaction behaviors for characters with high level story arc / narrative direction scripts… well that’s just hard, but this is the crux of interactive story telling. Fool the gamer into thinking they have choices, but in fact bring them along a realtively linear story arc. Your allies in this are the environment and the characters that you interact with. Make it persistent and consistent and plausible and you’re on track.

These are all very tech focussed I guess.
Steve

[Author]

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