3d Rendering... has come A LONG WAY in 10 years...........

[Xzin]

A bit off topic to boxing but some of us were waxing poetic about UO and how great it was.

We hit upon the topic of 3d rendering and how far it has come.

Now.... back 10 years ago, this is what we had.



Ultima Online. The pinnacle of MMORPGS 10 years ago.

Then we moved to a 3d world: EverQuest



I can't say that was amazingly better but all of a sudden we were 3d.

Ok so now we were 3d. But everything was..... still .... well... basic.

But doing some research recently, I had no idea how amazingly far things had come.

This apparently (!) is the FOURTH year Playboy has done their "girls of gaming" feature.



Now, those are professional renders. Ok sure. Nice. But how accessible is that to the average person? That level of detail?



Turns out, with newer software and some time rendering.... pretty darn accessible.

I mean these are not PHOTO QUALITY enders but they look like drawings!



Now... WoW will maintain their current graphical requirements. They are NOT going for photorealism. Which caused some people to complain that the game looked "cartoony" upon release. Well, it kind of is. They don't want to go for photorealism. Why? Graphic cards can't handle that. You don't get 9+ Million subs with a requirement for CUTTING EDGE $3000 computers (*looks at Vanguard*).

I guess my point is that I had absolutely no idea that CG art had come this far in a fairly short time period.

And yes, it was really hard to find SFW images for you guys. Consider yourself lucky (or unlucky considering on your perspective).

[Gallo]

Growing up in the generation of gamers has been great. Seeing one of the best games of all time in my living room in 4th grade (The Legend of Zelda), both me and my father thought that graphics were so cool. Now, we have games that rival movie effects from just 5 years ago.

On a side note... that last picture is hot

[Xzin]

Or even more amazingly....



In it's native resolution.

Of 256x224 pixels.

Which is 57,344 or .057 megapixels.

To put that in perspective, my main monitor array is 25 megapixels.
I could display roughly 436 NES games. At the same time. With my off the shelf processor, I have no doubt that I could actually emulate all of those at the same time.

How far we have come.

[Xzin]

Another update. Because running 40 copies of Jnes and seeing the same CPU load (although 40 copies of Zelda with the sound desyned is a bit odd) made me think about this:

From Joystiq:

The New Gamer has a fascinating video, with analysis, of the "averaged gameplay" of fifteen different gamers playing through level one of the classic shmup, Gradius. Why Gradius? Because it's "an auto-scrolling shoot'em up, is programmed so that the stage automatically scrolls at a fixed rate. With the stage constant, that allows us to compare how the player interacts with the AI and how, retroactively, the AI responds to that."

http://www.thenewgamer.com/content/a...raging_gradius

Averaging Gradius

I saw this movie a year or so back and found it fascinating.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfvsdBq9RrQ


For those of you who want the quick and dirty flash youtube version.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Have you seen Beowulf?

Its kinda clear that in 10-20 years there will be no movies made with real actors.

[Xzin]

Hell, they made parts of the Matrix II and III without actual actors.



Was almost all done digitally.

De-aging Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen was done completely digitally.



I believe it.

[Wilbur]

Semi-naked chicks can now be rendered on my PC? Hurrah!

[Xzin]

They have been able to do that about 2 milliseconds after the first computer said "hello world".

The only difference is now they happen to be more than 2 pixels.

[Zseth]

Have you seen Beowulf?

Its kinda clear that in 10-20 years there will be no movies made with real actors.

My god, if I could go the rest of my life without seeing such a horrible movie like that I would be happy. The worst part was, it was like a trainwreck, I didn't want to stare, but I couldn't look away. I think I was more horrified at just the crappiness of the CG editing. Idk, I think the Matrix and the Yoda fight scene have spoiled me too much, or IDK the fact that Crysis ingame puts the entire movie to shame. Rant complete

[Shogun]

Amazing how far it has all come from my first console the NES, or my Commodore 64 before that Used to play Tetris on the NES with my parents, even they can appreciate how far games have come since then


also, wtb NSFW links >.>