30 year deadline for 3D game

I assume this is a joke, but I have a few minutes to spare, so what the hey.

Forget it. You have no possible way of knowing what will be around in 30 years time and neither does anyone else. You could ask John Carmack, Cliffy B, Will Wright or anyone else what was going to happen to game development, in terms of design, 3d formats, platforms, genres, 3d engines or whatever, and they'd be lucky if they got it 5% right. Chances are that we won't be using polygons in 30 years time. It might be subdivision surfaces or splines or some other high level approximation of polys that hasn't even be adopted yet.


Besides, even if you ignore the fact that whatever you come up with won't work in 30 years, whatever you came up with would be crap in 30 years. It used to be said that todays FMV would be realtime in five years, and it's probably less now. In other words, even if you created the highest quality you can currently manage with the high end rendering tools, it would be old tech in six years, and you'd still have 24 more years to go.

Not a joke - I just have big ambitions :)

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terms of design, 3d formats, platforms, genres, 3d engines or whatever, and they'd be lucky if they got it 5% right.

That's why I want to work on as low a level as possible. You surely can't go wrong with designing a super-detailed polygon mesh for a game, even if it's 30 years away.

To take 2D graphics as an example, one can (almost) be sure that pixels will still be around in 30 years time. Pictures will still probably be defined by a 2D array of pixels. Even if they aren't defined that way, the quality will still be exceptional given 30 years of work.

Let's say I do work on billions of polygons, and it turns out the future is a bunch of purely mathematical surfaces, one could still convert it I'm guessing.

Also bear in mind that there are graphics today which look amazing, but only run at 0.01 frames per second (i.e. unplayable). I hope to design to that level of detail, and when the future comes (say 30 years from now), it will run at a super smooth 60fps or more.

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Besides, even if you ignore the fact that whatever you come up with won't work in 30 years, whatever you came up with would be crap in 30 years.

I'll be aiming more for highly detailed and tasty, but at least partially abstract graphics. I'm not going for super-uber realism, at least not at first. Even something like the Tron film had graphics which in many ways would look 'polished' in 30 years, even if they're not as sophisticated.

So again, which current low-level universal 3D format would most fit what I'm looking for?

[Edited by - TwinbeeUK on May 2, 2009 10:41:12 AM]

No, really. You can't say anything about it. For example look at the games 30 years ago: here. These are all 2D, with the pixels visable and some just lines. Nobody could imagine a game like Crysis (with milions of triangles) to emerge within a few years. Nobody could even imagine that we would have triangles in 3D space in our games in just 30 years.

The same is true for the future. We can't "see" what lies in the future of game development. Thirty years is just too much. The splines that sybixsus proposed could be just as wrong as another representation.

Edit: reply on your edit.
2D graphics were then defined as lines/shapes and for the exeptional games as pixel arrays. It's still the same but the procedural textures are gaining field.

Emiel1

My point is that even if that is true, one can convert it whatever format exists at that point. There are many awesome artistic/highly detailed 3D pictures around today, and the future will animate those so that they run in realtime. We can certainly expect something along those lines.

With enough polygons, and maybe some texture mapping, results will eventually reach a point where the eye can't tell any difference anyway.

Forget C, forget DirectX, forget OpenGL, forget raytracing, forget polygons. None of those are gonna matter (probably won't even be around). Here's my best uneducated guess about the lowest level file format for computer games in 30 years. If we don't just go down the road of cyberbrains, instead. Then I have no clue. Maybe neurons?

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Original post by TwinbeeUK With enough polygons, and maybe some texture mapping, results will eventually reach a point where the eye can't tell any difference anyway.

It will probably be like that but go into the direction of augmented reality, but that's not 30 years out, more like five years.

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Original post by sybixsus It used to be said that todays FMV would be realtime in five years, and it's probably less now.

I already can't tell the difference between some of the in-game cutscenes and FMVs in PS3 games like DMC4 and Uncharted. The only way I can tell in Uncharted is if I put on a custom costume and it disappears during the cutscene.

In 30 years we are going to raytrace volumes instead of polygons or polynomial surfaces for sure.

Good point. Though I thought even if polygons are 'empty inside' as the representation inside the computer, they are still *treated* as if they were solid when doing the final raytrace.

lightbringer, the qubit looks complicated, but hey maybe. I like the idea of using a bunch of voxels, or 'atoms' for a game. Make every part truly interactive.

Naturally, one can convert between polygons, atoms, voxels, qubits etc., given a high enough res to start with.

I can gurantee you that if you spend 30 years making a different game every three years then your last few games will be of significantly higher quality than your single 30 year game. Plus you'll have ten games instead of one.

Sounds like this is more of a 30-year graphics demo than a game. Do you actually have any gameplay in mind, or is it just graphics?

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I can gurantee you that if you spend 30 years making a different game every three years then your last few games will be of significantly higher quality than your single 30 year game.

I'm not entirely convinced of that, especially as I will be researching as I go. Each bit of the game would be extensively planned, and experimented with etc. At the most, I can imagine creating many external 'sandboxes' for playability/gfx ideas. This way, I can try out lots of different things without having to make each one into a game.

Each bit may undergo several revisions and drastic changes until I was completely happy.

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Plus you'll have ten games instead of one.

Ten lesser games, instead of one killer :D

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Sounds like this is more of a 30-year graphics demo than a game. Do you actually have any gameplay in mind, or is it just graphics?

I'm glad someone said that. Ironically, my tastes in gameplay are very much 'old-skool', so I'd spend just as much time on the gameplay. It will be very much like 'twitch' gameplay, where there's always something to do/move/react to, not like a lot of recent games where one might sprawl a terrain for ages before anything happens. (example SNES Zelda 3 compared to 3D Zeldas such as Zelda 64).

I often prefer 2D games in general, because of the more 'restrictive' gameplay. However, the 3D game I plan on making will use more 2D gaming concepts, despite the gfx being entirely 3D and (hopefully) breathtaking.

Forget game design all together the world will end in 30 years

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Original post by chronocalamity Forget game design all together the world will end in 30 years

Some even say.. 2012, so better limit your game design..

We'll be plugging into and rendering directly into the visual cortex.

While slightly off-topic, I have to point out that the games we are comparing your future game to that look amazing right now have maybe dozens of artists working for years to create them. I don't have any numbers on hand but in man-years, for an amazing looking game 30 doesn't sound like much to me. If your going to do the one-man-crew thing, I would recommend doing what OrangyTang said.

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Original post by TwinbeeUK Ten lesser games, instead of one killer :D

You mean ten finished games instead of one Battlecruiser clone, right? :D

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Original post by juturnas I don't have any numbers on hand but in man-years, for an amazing looking game 30 doesn't sound like much to me.

I don't have any numbers either but I would imagine that today's AAA titles need much more, somewhere around 100 or 200 man-years. Just look at the lengthy credit roll of a game like Metal Gear Solid 4. But the man-month is a myth anyway!

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you can't go wrong with this

Sure, research 30 years for one killer game...then in Q2, a better game is released. I bet you'd wish you spent those 30 years doing something more meaningful than a mere entertainment product. If you're going to study something for 30 years, at least make it something worthwhile.

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I bet you'd wish you spent those 30 years doing something more meaningful than a mere entertainment product

Well I suppose that depends on how highly you value games as an art. Remember though that it subsumes other art forms to a degree, such as graphics, animation, music, and maybe story.

One could say the same thing about music, and of course there's tons of throwaway songs out there, but that doesn't mean there aren't timeless classics as well.

Also, it would be ridiculously fun and exciting to play (in theory). Breathtaking and tons of set pieces too (which would not sacrifice playability). I would try to give it as much atmosphere as when one goes to their first theme park as a kid, which is obviously incredibly tricky to capture for jaded adults (including myself).

Apart from that, there's potential worldwide fame/money. I'm sure many would do it just for that if possible.

So, back on topic, do people think that something like X3D, U3D, Collada or Obj would be a good 'foundation' to build 3D data upon?

[Edited by - TwinbeeUK on May 2, 2009 5:45:15 PM]

Well, as people have said, this topic is unlikely to produce many accurate predictions... but it's interesting none the less.

Personally I'm interested in what kind of display technology we'll be using. I'm pretty sure all screens will be 3D, so you should probably be targeting you game at these kind of devices:

3D Monitors
Volumetric Displays

Concepts such as pixels and polygons may well be extinct - after all, 30 years ago we were probably on vector-based graphics.

And what about input? The mouse and keyboard have served us well but I think we can assume they won't last for ever. And, as shown by platforms like the Wii, input devices are becoming increasingly important.

For the much more immediate future (over the next 5 years) we're likely to see a lot more of these kinds of technologies:

">Future Gaming Technologies

At least, I'm hoping so :-)