> so the fact that say a rock is not made of zillions of atoms
But that's the problem. When the player misses the target with a rocket and hits the rock, it gets a strange looking explosion and then the rock is either still there, or simply 'removed'. Sense of realism? Lost.
In an open world game, the player might want to pick up the rock. If you took a shortcut and just made the rock an object that sits on top of the ground plane, when you pick up the rock there is normal grass underneath. If you throw the rock at a building, it bounces off and rolls around stupidly. Sense of realism? Lost.
> That's what will be coming in the next decade.
That's what the article is saying - you're deluded into thinking we're close to solving this stuff. There is no way it's coming in the next decade, it is a long way off with a huge number of very difficult problems to solve. This is like the AI debate. AI is always 'just around the corner'. No it isn't, we are nowhere close to even beginning to understand what we actually need to accomplish once the tricks are taken away.
Which is why tons of people play "Minecraft", because the voxel technology and ability to deform the environment is much more real than many other games. There are some advancements in this field, but really... at the end of the day... the best "deformable field" is Minecraft still. And it hardly even tries to be realistic.
Fortunately, most gamers don't care about realism to this degree. Many FPS gamers want a tight engine, fun mechanics. Bunny Hopping was left in the Halo series for this reason. Ditto with super-cancels in Fighting Games (tell me if MMA-fighters cancels their jabs into super-attacks).
Realism for the sake of realism is hopeless. Game programmers need to focus upon entertaining the gamer. Some gamers require a degree of realism... but it should never be the primary point of a game.
I was wondering when someone was going to mention Minecraft because that's a great way of illustrating to people something of just how vast the gulf to be crossed is.
There are graphical mods for Minecraft, but none that bridge the gap from "cube world" to "our world."
And even Minecraft has artifacts like floating islands and limitless water -- the voxels are meant to represent fairly unchanging substances like dirt and stone, and even the trunk and leafy volume of a tree, and they support a limited amount of state being attached to them, but they are not being computed constantly in a way that would make it possible to implement something like erosion or a landslide, or realistic water motion, etc. And when you try to imagine going much beyond minecraft, you realize that, crap, you'd have to be computing the entire (essentially unlimited) voxel world maybe several times a second ...
I think it will be done, but there's a good case for it NEEDING to be done in a massively multiplayer way, because the work of simulating the world becomes too large to be done by any individual user's machine.
It's also quite badly coded. And there is absolutely no reason it couldn't do sim on one core (or more) and rendering on another core, there just happens to be no 3d coder on the team, let alone artists.
The pair of them tried the whole 3D thing with their previous game, Armok. They said that it limited their options too much, so they decided not to do it. I don't think the core rendering speed has anything to do with that decision.
Besides, there are passable tilesets available by replacing the fonts, support for individual bitmaps for every creature, and if you don't mind directly accessing the memory, even an isometric renderer (Stonesense). All of these graphical enhancements are made by fans, freeing the two of them making it to just make the game.
The development log for this game is fascinating and occasionally hilarious. Today he implemented a system that lets refugees from conquered sites turn to banditry if they 'choose' to. A long time back, to test thermal conductivity, he took control of a magma man, grabbed on to an adventurer's head with both hands, and waited for its various tissues to catch on fire / melt.
Dwarf Fortress is memory-limited, not CPU limited. Running DF on multiple cores won't change the fact that the simulator taxes memory extremely hard. Taxing memory even more by including 3d rendering or PCIe transfers to a graphics card will slow down the game.
Its a known fact that Dwarf Fortress is mainly effected by memory latency (and not cache size or memory bandwidth). Each simulated agent takes up a lot of RAM, and lots of their information needs to be updated in every game tick. Cache-optimization is near impossible.
When the single CPU that runs Dwarf Fortress is almost always stalled waiting for RAM, then adding more cores to the mix does NOTHING.
Multiple threads of execution means you can saturate memory instead of alternating between fetches and computations. But I thought pathfinding and fluid simulation were big CPU hogs, and those can cache very well.
I think that the difficulties you would face in trying to make minecraft more realistic are far greater than the difficulties you would face if you were starting from scratch. Trying to make minecraft realistic is like trying to paint over A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte to make it realistic. It just wasn't created with that sort of realism in mind, so you are working from a disadvantaged position.
Yeah, I don't mean a literal mod of minecraft. I just mean that it's a great illustration of what'd be entailed.
If you start from scratch, you still need something like voxels, ie keeping track of many points in 3d space representing different kinds of materials, which is what minecraft has now.
But then, graphical or behavioral perspective, Minecraft gives you an idea of what problems you'll run up against.
Graphically ... holy cow. I don't know of anyone that's doing that, ie taking voxel data and making it look amazing. I did see a demo that looked a bit less blocky than minecraft, it wasn't cube-based, but rather used the 3d hexagonal mesh I think. It looked less blocky of course, but it worked with only grass and stone material.
Behaviorally .. also, holy cow. I'm not sure if there's anyone doing that in a 3d game engine. Ie, voxel or volume world data representing materials, in a way similar to minecraft, but if you undercut a bank of dirt, it collapses ... to do that, you need to be constantly simulating the entire world with CA rules meant to emulate various physical properties of earth, water etc (not just the currently loaded world chunks, and not just a few kinds of very limited material types, like Minecraft's water and lava) probably at least several ticks per second.
I suppose there might be ways to cheat or to legitimately exclude 'all-quiet' areas from needing to be updated, in some cases -- like the dirt example, I can see approaches that would propagate simulation outwards from an area centered on user-generated changes at the maximum speed that the evolution rules transmit information, and that might be able to leave large portions of the world relatively static ... although that wouldn't work so well for things like fluid simulation ... but the point is that, holy cow, we're a long way off!
I have the 5 1/4" floppy of Populous on my shelf (which is why I knew the year). Sadly I can't play it any more because of the 1980's DRM. Even if I could get a 5 1/4" drive working in my modern PC, the game asks you populations of various world cities for which the answers are on an un-photocopiable (black on dark red) sheet that came in the game box which I have sadly lost.
I got the three pack for $15, gog bless.
Even better, you get free games too including Beneath a Steel Sky - I never finished that either - I am a happy gamer.
Since this is inherently a moving-goalposts conversation, I am not going to argue with you. I will say that, speaking as a graphics programmer who has been writing advanced renderers for more than 20 years, I do think the sense of your comment is wrong. In my working life alone, I have seen the state of the art progress from 4-color pixelated 2D, to the current Frostbite/Unreal level engines. I believe that already crosses most of the gap from nothing, to photorealism. I am also thinking more about rendering than all the other things people are discussing in this thread. I also do not think the incredible and dramatic progress in rendering can be sensibly compared to the ongoing slow progress in AGI. Again, we all know that with graphics, it's all an approximation. Perhaps you, being of a later generation, have much higher standards. You don't say what you don't think is coming in the next decade, and you can set that bar arbitrarily high, so I don't see this discussion becoming productive.
I think the point is that a photorealistic scene isn't 'realistic' because you can't really interact with it, it's a painting.
And a world where you can actually interact with stuff, like minecraft, can stagger the most beastly rig, even though the graphics suck from a realistic perspective and your interaction is limited.
But that's the problem. When the player misses the target with a rocket and hits the rock, it gets a strange looking explosion and then the rock is either still there, or simply 'removed'. Sense of realism? Lost.
In an open world game, the player might want to pick up the rock. If you took a shortcut and just made the rock an object that sits on top of the ground plane, when you pick up the rock there is normal grass underneath. If you throw the rock at a building, it bounces off and rolls around stupidly. Sense of realism? Lost.
> That's what will be coming in the next decade.
That's what the article is saying - you're deluded into thinking we're close to solving this stuff. There is no way it's coming in the next decade, it is a long way off with a huge number of very difficult problems to solve. This is like the AI debate. AI is always 'just around the corner'. No it isn't, we are nowhere close to even beginning to understand what we actually need to accomplish once the tricks are taken away.