Quake3World

Well I was talking about more in terms of mapping. If the level of detail for models is this big, how the hell can the average user put together a good map on the same level with good gameplay? Not saying there arn't talented people out there, but its much easier in quake 3/warsow to make a decent looking map that balances out with good gameplay than say.. most modern games IMO.

Quake 4 bombed in the mapping scene because it shipped with god awful textures that cant be used in that many ways. I've only ever seen one guy make good use of them and that was Meth, and look where he is now...

in goof's pipe

I think this is awesome. I'm very exited to see how this works. I think as many else here that this would make the workflow much easier... I mean it's not that hard to do a sculpt for a brick wall or pillar and other environmental stuff I'm sure the cummunity will catch up on that.

There's another good demo regarding voxels in film productions, where they can render film assets in realtime with GI in realtime.
http://technorati.com/videos/youtube.co ... z7AukqqaDQ

Kat wrote:

ix-ir wrote:... Id don't have the knowledge to make a good 1v1 E-sports game any longer... Id have some very talented people but not quite the right meeting of minds or power in the wrong hands to produce what we're talking about

It's got nothing to do with that, it makes absolutely no finacial sense to make games that cater to just one (rather small) section of the wider gaming community.

depends on how you look at it and your strategy.

Take Activision for example.
They believe that the best way to retain players is to follow a PVE/PVP model

In other words they almost religiously feel it is important for an otherwise single player game to have multiplayer for it to sell and retain players. A vast majority of people will buy your game for its single player (PVE) and a much smaller portion will buy your game for its multiplayer (Usually PVP, Sometimes PVE/COOP ect).. A very large portion of people will buy the game for its single player only if it says it also has multiplayer on the box.

If you can swallow that pill then its not so far fetch to say you can in fact retain an additional boost in sales and retain a even larger player base if your multiplayer fully supports both casual open War and an E-sports style of play.

As far as the multiplayer design strategy is concerned you make it high priority to balance your E-sports environment first and foremost then once that is functional create and tack on your more casual multiplayer model.

For example if Quake 3 shipped as CPMA it would have been a stronger title and the extra attention to balance would have had essentially zero negative effects on casual players. In fact it can be argued that it would have positive effects only even in a mindless free for all environment with grind based leveling system and everything. Casual players would respect how tight the game feels even if they know nothing of E-sports setting.

Start small and make 1 vs 1 fun first, THEN use that as a base for the rest of your modes. Avoid doing class based hierarchy make sure your single player is good retain the most players possible.

Kat wrote:It's got nothing to do with that, it makes absolutely no financial sense to make games that cater to just one (rather small) section of the wider gaming community.

I think the 'myth of the newbie' is just that...a myth. A deep, polished competitive platform with a relatively high skill ceiling should appeal to everyone...certainly over the long run. We are not talking about Falcon 4.0 ffs. We are talking about a 1 on 1 FPS that is relatively simple to get into...and if it is built with a relatively high skill ceiling in mind, it will stay relatively interesting over the long run because you can keep improving over time and see tangible benefits. There is no logical or even practical barrier to achieving rewarding gameplay across a wide variety of skill levels...the point is, don't hamstring your ass out of the gate by dumbing everything down to cater to a theoretical (mythical?) population of supernewbs.

Hannibal wrote:

Kat wrote:It's got nothing to do with that, it makes absolutely no financial sense to make games that cater to just one (rather small) section of the wider gaming community.

I think the 'myth of the newbie' is just that...a myth. A deep, polished competitive platform with a relatively high skill ceiling should appeal to everyone...certainly over the long run. We are not talking about Falcon 4.0 ffs. We are talking about a 1 on 1 FPS that is relatively simple to get into...and if it is built with a relatively high skill ceiling in mind, it will stay relatively interesting over the long run because you can keep improving over time and see tangible benefits. There is no logical or even practical barrier to achieving rewarding gameplay across a wide variety of skill levels...the point is, don't hamstring your ass out of the gate by dumbing everything down to cater to a theoretical (mythical?) population of supernewbs.

If there is one thing that has been shown with modern games is that you can in fact expect a hell of a lot from your players provided you ramp them up properly.

Its not so much about dedicating your multiplayer to hardcore niche players but rather understanding that PVP games are generaly less popular than single player games. You need to have a tangible system for your sheep class players to graze in safe pastures out of reach of the wolves.

In other words, cater to the picky crowed first, then give the casual players something to chew on as well. Let them meet in the middle on their own free will.

This topic has derailed a lot and it was bound too I guess... so I'm just gonna fill in there...

Castle wrote: [...]
In other words, cater to the picky crowed first, then give the casual players something to chew on as well. Let them meet in the middle on their own free will.

It is actually hard to day to make a game more hardcore (pro) than mainstream (causal), unless you have all the money and control the whole chain of development, like Id and Valve does, as it seems, no PR-department or Publisher would wanna mess with them and their ideas of a good game (they probably are anyway). For smaller (financially) developers, it's harder and it gets harder every year, since often you make another company's game, where they have the most control over ideas, planning, pr, etc. Working as a level designer now for ~2.5 years, I noted that making a level more though than easy, even though it really isn't hard to complete and will make a fun challenge, is difficult, since the publisher often don't want a hard game, cause the press will bury them in bad words like "too hard" "will not work for new players" etc. The console marked is playing too much into this today too, it affects PC gaming way too much. It doesn't help with all the sponsorships from companies like Intel, Nvidia, Amd, etc, that really wants games to push on the graphics, thus forces the development into a more graphical direction.

Hipshot wrote:This topic has derailed a lot and it was bound too I guess... so I'm just gonna fill in there...

Castle wrote: [...]
In other words, cater to the picky crowed first, then give the casual players something to chew on as well. Let them meet in the middle on their own free will.

It is actually hard to day to make a game more hardcore (pro) than mainstream (causal), unless you have all the money and control the whole chain of development, like Id and Valve does, as it seems, no PR-department or Publisher would wanna mess with them and their ideas of a good game (they probably are anyway).

I keep falling into this idea .. it seems so logical to me that Id could do this AND get it right if they put energy into it.
You take quake 3 style game play. Apply CPMA changes.
build it into one of the newer Id 3d engines or simply keep the engine the same and sell it through quake live.

Add a single player element where you beat levels to get points in a more classic find key open door styles of play from older games then you gate progresion based on performance and fully support coop play.

CPMA for your E-sports hardcore PVP players where everyone has equal stats and perks. COOP vs monsters in classic style single player found in doom and quake 1 with a leveling system and perks for casual players. And allow for open less sporty death match and team death match using the same system where Hardcore players and casual players can face against each other with beefed up weapons and stats.

I suppose my point is that if anyone could do it Id could....
I suppose the topic is horribly derailed at my own hands. I haven't ranted here much though so that was it. I'm done until next year lol.
So there you go
Sparse Voxel octree rant!

Interesting read about how octree's can handle textures
http://www.thrownclear.com/octex_siggraph2002.pdf

g0th- wrote:Interesting read about how octree's can handle textures
http://www.thrownclear.com/octex_siggraph2002.pdf

I would be more concerned with how to make a rigged model animate then how to texture it with this tech. Anyone here have any idea how that would work exactly?

obsidian wrote:

Kat wrote:From what I understand about this it's only usable on 'static' (?) objects like environment assets and such like?

That's what it sounds like. Still a world away before they have anything really functional as a game, so I guess we'll see if they can fit everything into the same pipeline. He certainly talked about it as a strong possibility but probably leaning towards the next iteration of the technology. BTW, would you happen to know if megatextures for idTech5 support dynamic objects as well?

My understanding is that every texture in idtech5 must go through megatexture pipeline.
Meaning all unique & tiled textures, animated characters and LoD go trough the transformation to the texture atlas, so it does support dynamic objects.
In Rage they render lot's of lighting information directly to the texture, so I wouldn't expect lots of dynamic things in that game, but I do expect very high quality outdoor shadows and lighting.

obsidian wrote:Also Wikipedia article on voxel. What amazes me is that in the traditional sense, voxels give you that idea of a super pixelated "Lego block" structure since they were on a uniform grid, not this current scalar and smooth appearance as demonstrated in the video.

From what I understand, it seems as if SVOs are raycasted for occlusion culling, so like Castle says, it could be "fool-proof". It'll probably throw out most of the need for portaling (probably still necessary for dynamic polygonal stuff).

Nope, SVO is directly rendered and it does have those little cubes visible.
It's just that Olicks demo had a volume resolution of 32k*32k*32k and thus the voxels were quite small.
The character didn't fill the whole volume, but quite a nice part of it.

Here's nice thread about it @ Omph.

rgoer wrote:Yeah, Jon Olick is one sharp dude... but honestly I agree with the pessimists in this thread--this technology is ten years ahead of its time as far as actually applying it to games is concerned

I recently saw talk over using visibility culling that utilizes the google search algorithm in a voxel based engine. XD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXJUGLiZkV0

fast forward like 2 years later.. Its odd reading my own ramblings in this thread...
Seriously, though I have to agree with the above here since so many hurdles still lay ahead. Like building and rigging a character in a voxel engine that actually animates. The technology has existed for ages. It was even used as long ago as Shadow Warrior and Blood in the Build engine.

I wish I could have someone explain to me how it is actually possible to really utilize this kind of tech on a next generation standard. Whenever I think about the current standards we have in 3d engines and think about a way to make a workable voxel engine I start to seriously begin to think the idea sounds cooler than it really is. Many voxel engines seem to be using the information to generate polygons with the voxel info...

One thing I have found to be very true though, I prefer 3d engines that offer multiple solutions for various problems rather than unified anything. For example, lightmaps look good in some places while shadow maps are better for others, dynamic lights are best used in some places but not everywhere. Once you try to take that "One solution solves all" mentality you end up simply pigeon holing yourself. Maybe its not true that this will end up being the future of all things 3d..

It is possible that voxels are best used as a situational tool and not an end all be all solution for everything.... I want to work with voxels more before I really stick with this opinion though.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?