Virtual or reality

It's still amazing how far games have come ...

Hell - that includes all types of virtual environments, which I touched on by mentioning how the models in 2001 look as good now as they did in 1968 when the film first came out. They don't use models any more though, movie graphics get done in computers giving incredible amounts of shininess.

Movies can cheat a little though, as it doesn't matter if it takes an hour to draw every frame if the completed thing isn't going to be on screens for a while. Games on the other hand, depend on getting their images drawn very quickly and the hardware needs to be able to react to what the player is doing.

It's no good having a view like :

If it comes on screen like the computer hamsters have their easel and brushes out, that's no good. Bit like our machines at work at the moment when they do the daily virus scan (which is irrelevant with cloud data anyway). No - a gamer needs the graphics to :

Not slow when things get busy,
Not be too jerky,
And not interfere with the actual game play.

Think of if you're driving and are blinking your eyes closed half the time. It's tough. (Albeit highly tempting with the standard of driving at the moment). That's what poor "frames per second" feels like as a gamer. The world is going on around you but you can only affect it when your eyes are open. To have good playability, games need images like the one above to come at at least 30 frames per second, preferably 60.

Uhoh - think I just detected a trace of philosophy coming from this addled brain. I promise to stop that.

So - you don't really need graphics of the quality above, you need them to keep up with what's happening. But it's awesome when you can have your cake and not have it go straight on your hips. I was quite pleased when Skyrim told me it would be happy on maximum detail with my machine :-).

Here's another pic :

That's from high up in a town called Whiterun, which is located on the top of a hill. It makes for a spectacular view. The detail is incredible too. It puts other games like Star Wars Old Republic to shame, that one looks fairly crude in comparison. Deus Ex Human Revolution looked pretty good too but a key difference there is that DXHR has closed environments, Skyrim is totally open. Those forests over there - you can walk to them.

It also helps that, for a change, it's a Bethesda game that I seem to be getting on with ... I've got bored with their earlier efforts quite early. They allow a lot of bugs to get unleashed in the release versions of their games.

That quality does look awesome though. The wildlife areas are just as detailed and colourful as you might see out in the countryside. Possibly richer colours too cos you can cheat with the contrast on the monitor. With patches, the water looks incredible too. Instead of going for a certain visual style like games like Warcraft do, they're looking for Ultra Real which helps with getting the player immersed in the game. Wonder if that's why SWTOR didn't catch me ?

And you can probably guess what I'm going to be up to very soon ... More Skyrim !

Last thing though - it didn't look good for our hero earlier :

(clicky on the various pics for higher res)

Oh - Real vs Virtual - the view from Whiterun is better than the view from Snowdon. But that's because as we reached the summit, all the fog rolled in hiding the view ! Which is what they used to do in old games, they'd fog away the long distance stuff so the machine wouldn't need to spend time drawing it.

PS If that guard says "but I took an arrow to the knee" again ...