I think outsourcing will be the key to the future of games. At the moment almost every aspect of a new game has to be built from scratch by a company, unless they buy an already existing engine. This means constantly reinventing the wheel.

If you look at how movies are made, certain aspects of the films are almost always outsourced to experienced companies - particularly visual effects and sound design. I can see this being a very fruitful process for games. Some companies can specialise in making game engines (I'm looking at you, id), some in physics engines (Havok), some in AI, some in audio. That way the game developers can focus on the design and gameplay, while experienced teams can focus on the technical aspects.

http://www.davidcsimon.com

Yeah I think that in game graphics will be that good eventually. Might take 30 years, but we will live to see it.

I actually disagree.

I think your right about the cost of production getting so high, however i think we will see more and more companies offering specialist outsourcing solutions.

We can already see this in physics with the Havok engine, and i think it will only be a matter of time before a company offers a realistic water simulation. After that who knows, realistic sky and cloud, realistic skin texture and depth.

All developers have to do then is buy the tech at a fraction of what it costs to produce it and then integrate something that has been developed with more man hours than they would be able to put in themselves.

I think that then the cost of development will remain high, however it will come down in some areas (Water simulation) and then be made up in other areas (Fluid character movement).

just my $0.02

------
Leading the "Support our Arrow keys" movement!

I think it's an animation problem, a game could never move so fluid as a completely scripted CG movie.

------
“The closer you get to being a pro, the closer you can get to the client. The knife, for example, is the last thing you learn. Ok?"

vermilion,

out of curiousity do you have that thesis somewhere on the net? i'd be interested in reading it. i completely agree btw, and think once we get to such a high point in technology, the vg market will become extremely similar to the hollywood system. im pretty much convinced that we've seen the peak of pc game development because costs have risen so high.

dave snider
co-founder | guzzlefish.com
my dvd, cd, and game collections
http://www.guzzlefish.com/?user=dave

"So how long before we see graphics like those in everyday games? "

I did my mster's thesis on a topic like that - the asthetic on low-poly art and where it's going in the future. I don't think games will ever look quite that good, because the work needed to create content with that degree of detail takes more time and money than most game studios have to spend. I expect we'll end up with a hybrid of the two, with more advanced dynamics and world simulation becoming more significant than massively high-poly models.

Getter closer and closer, that's for sure!

pretty cool!

So how long before we see graphics like those in everyday games?


------
Leading the "Support our Arrow keys" movement!

It's an awesome movie if your into 3d, you can then at least appreciate the work they do. Great modeling/texturing/animating.

Great, blizzard made their own little version of the bittorent client and called it WoWSneakPeekDownloader.exe.
So instead of downloading a 10k torrent file, I get to download a 3MB downloader that I'll have to download all over again when another blizzard file comes out. I'd rather have them officially support an existing tracker then making their own with it's own software...
Atleast it doesn't seem to really install itself, although they just removed bittorent cross-platform capacities.

This is a cool little movie about the work involved in making the CG intro.

But if you want to see some cool game content, get the Griffon trailer...I cant wait to play WoW.

I took the time to download this , even though i wasent really interested in buying the game , wow , guess what? i might buy this sucker now =), worth watching!

This comment was edited on Mar 6, 17:29.

mommy