Although I am hardly a gamer, I used to keep my eyes peeled for new things in the world of realtime 3d graphics. For the past few years I have considered myself well out of the loop, concentrating instead on the world of 2D and windows applications. Having just got an ADSL connection, it occurred to me that it might be fun to download a few of the latest demos to blow my socks off with the incredible improvements in technology and design…

[please put on your spittle resistant goggles now]

The sort of games I’m really interested in are the space flight ones [since space flight is something I can only ever experience in simulation] and in this day and age I expect to see realism to make my jaw drop. But what do I see? Or, to get to the point, what do I see that really pisses me off?

1. Space is represented as a "viscous ether", with a uniform distribution of pebbles, and in order to stay in motion we need to have thrusters firing continuously. Star Trek and Star Wars are largely to blame for this, with the notion of an absolute reference frame and the tendency to come to a halt when your engines go offline. Particularly inappropriate when in low planetary orbit, since arresting lateral motion should leave us at the mercy of that planet’s gravity.
2. Planets are allowed to be surprisingly close together (closer than the earth is to the moon) and also may be surprisingly small (as small as a few kilometres across, judging by nearby reference points)
3. While the notion of ubiquitous space travel seems to be easily grasped, the notion that an energy weapon might have the ability to actually aim itself is clearly considered too futuristic. Instead you have to make yourself nauseous lurching about trying to keep your cross hairs over the target leader.
4. All surfaces of space ships appear to be of a matte texture, and all are plastered with similar bitmaps of overlapping grey squares, apparently forseeing that engineers of the future wont even bother cutting metal to shape, they’ll just keep slapping squares on until they’ve covered every bit of the hull.
5. All surfaces on all sides of objects are lit so as to make it possible to discern the startlingly boring detail that the texture artists have created, eg overlapping grey squares. The brightness of a surface facing the sun is only about twice as bright as a surface facing away, rather than a thousand times plus.

Ok, so I can understand why so much [visualized] space fiction go with the idea of a viscous ether. The motion is so much more familiar to us (think ships/airplanes).

My biggest beef is probably with the boring texture mapping [and boring lighting] problem. What the hell is wrong with geometry? Aren’t 3D cards supposed to be able to render a gazillion triangles per second these days? Wouldn’t it be nicer to use higher detail models which don’t need to be slathered with hokey textures? The "space station" on the right seems to have been fabricated out of sheet metal, and then painted grey. Note that the curvy bits don’t even look curved. And can you see any shiny bits (eg windows, solar collectors)? Texture mapping an object kills its surface properties, because the shadows and hilights you draw on a texture map can’t move when the light source changes.

I downloaded… It isn’t so detailed that it can’t be rendered in real time, but it is detailed enough that it requires NO texture mapping! And once you’ve freed yourself from texture dependency, you can experiment with lighting and material parameters to simulate surface qualities. Here a variety of material parameters are used to simulate different surface properties, including what might be called "chalky" or "metallic".

Another great thing about using geometry instead of texture mapping is that when you get close to the object, the realism is not compromised by blurry textures. When you approach a window on a space ship, it doesn’t turn out to be a black smudge of blurry pixels… it maintains its definition, and even catches the light like a shiny thing should. The whole thing feels more real.

Will all this get me fired up to work on again? It’s very tempting, I have to say…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2003 at 12:51 am and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.