Progress is gorgeous

Things have come a long way in the computer world.

(long one today, with a bunch of screenies that will benefit from a click to make them true size)

One of the first that caught me and gave me that "Wow" moment was called Alone in the Dark. It was an adventure game, possibly one of the first to feature full 3d movement. It was limited but an outstanding achievement at the time. I wrote a bit about it here (linked post), although there's a Rant Warning on that post cos it was written while I was watching the extremely poor film that stole the name. Curse Uwe Boll to eternity ! And never let him near a camera too ! Muahaha :-)

There's a bit more about the game here too in this Wikipedia post (linked). Remember that this came out in 1992 and the game itself was smaller than your typical MP3 file. This is when home computers didn't have enough memory to hold a picture taken by your modern mobile phone camera.

How did it look ?

(640x480 - picture grabbed from Wiki)

She's just about recognisable as a person isn't she ? They got the sharp, pointy shoes dead right too :-) Note the simple textures. More on that in a bit.

After this one, games took a bit of a sojourn into being mixed between 3d environments and sprites. In a 3d game, a sprite is like having one of those life sized cardboard cutouts, which is scaled according to how far away it is. There was no sense of depth.

Let's leap forward a bit. A game I was passing time on last week is Star Wars : Knights of the Old Republic. It's set 4,000 years before the films, so its creators Bioware had the opportunity to run with a fairly clean slate. They did a bang up job too. It's a fully 3d game, taking in a form of the Dungeons and Dragons rules to run things from behind the screen.

How's it look ?

(1280x1024 - my picture converted from bitmap to jpeg)

That's my boy Finlay taking centre stage, with cohort Bastila to his side. The Jedi Council are in back, that's one of Yoda's ancestors there :-) He passed his English GCSE in time for this game, unlike the Yoda we know so well who only caught up last year (Newsbiscuit story).

I have all the bells and whistles and shiny things turned on and it shows in the screenie. There's more detail in there, people look like people, aliens look like aliens and the textures allow more detail in the background. Still a bit plain though.

There's a techie thing called Anisotropic Filtering at work here. The way a game builds up its 3d world is by overlaying textures on a frame. The frame is made up of polygons, with much of the work going into mapping textures to the polygons. And then doing all sorts of stuff to it. A lot of the detail gets lost though, which is where this Anisotropic Filtering comes in. So whereas Alone In The Dark had very simple textures, modern games have very complex textures with this filtering thing keeping the detail.

First time I noticed it was in World of Warcraft, where changing to a better graphics card let me see the stitching in the outfits that my characters were wearing. That's anisotropic filtering at work. Before it's mush, after it's finely detailed stitching.

Knights of the Old Republic looked impressive stood still. The action was pretty good but the detail is a bit limited. The main character only had about 6 faces to choose from and when you talked to people, it seemed as if they had just eaten one of those things that makes your tongue swell up. Not much scope for variation here.

On to my current favourite game !

(1280x1024, pretty options to Maximum)

I've played Mass Effect to death and then some. It's easy to play and has a decent storyline. Good blaster. As well as the screenie above, here's a link to the Wiki Mass Effect screenie page.

This one gave a Wow when I first started playing it. The detail level steps up yet again. The face you see there of the main character is highly customisable, as that frame the textures are mapped to is altered. The problem some of these games can fall victim to is to look a little too stale and clinical. That's tackled in this game by the graininess that's deliberately introduced into the image.

It works too. The movement of the characters looks highly fluid and there's lots of little detail in the patterns on the armour, the walls and the equipment the characters carry. There's still some limits with the non-player characters though, short dark hair is definitely in fashion in the Mass Effect world.

But - there's always room to raise the bar, which is where Mass Effect 2 comes in.

The first Mass Effect has you living on a frigate called the Normandy. You walk its corridors and interact with its people. The second game starts with the Normandy coming under attack my mysterious alien forces. You're moving through surroundings made unfamiliar by battle damage and you reach the top of the stairs. The doors open, all the air escapes. There's a subtle feeling that something's different ... Even on top of the battle damage.

And then you look up ... and see open space where there used to be a roof.

It's a definite WOW moment. I've only played a little of Mass Effect 2 so far and I can already see how they've raised the bar yet again with this one. Let's get a screenie :

More extra detail again coming in there.

And it just continues on coming. The extra detail being added in makes it look as if you can hear the leather of the armour creaking. Mass Effect looked great but the new one just makes it look "better". There's much more detail in the environments you fight in too, ME was all a bit samey after a while with a limited selection of area types made different by altering the layouts of crates.

Can't wait to give it some more playtime. I picked it up on Friday, just had time to scratch the surface so far. It has the usual Bioware touches. They have something about them, other developers produce interesting and technically good pieces of work but there's something missing when they're compared to what Bioware come out with.

Definitely a fan. But alas ! Bed time has come around, I'll emerge for work in less than 8 hours, so the game will have to keep until tomorrow.

PS You'll see another sign of the progress by comparing films like Final Fantasy, Beowulf and Avatar. FF made a good early fist of it, Beowulf did well but Avatar just raised the bar again.