.kkrieger - AMAZING 96kb fps

[breez]

midi

They do use their own software synthesizer and not the midi interface the operating system / sound card provides.

 

[Albuquerque]

They do use their own software synthesizer and not the midi interface the operating system / sound card provides.

Musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) is still the term for computer synthesized instruments, no matter what audio software emulation mode they use. It's quite far from WAV 96kbps audio, especially in the "reality" department.

Generating simple tones and melodies is one thing, but generating environmental noises just doesn't come out right with mathematical formulas that are this small. You must also consider that all this stuff must be "precomputed" before the level can start. Levels in this demo are fairly small and use very little data, but they still take quite a bit of time to pre-process between when you click the icon and when you can actually start the game.

Consider a level such as the original DOS-based Doom I intro level, all the textures involved, the visibility checks, the monster AI, the sounds involved and the polygons in the map and the monsters. Imagine now the precomputing power needed to forumalate all that on the fly.

Now upgrade to FarCry: the 32x increased texture resolution, the 100x increased polygon density, the 500x increased visibility capacity, the 20x increased audio quality, the list just goes on. Precompute ALL OF THAT before you can start each level, and enjoy the hour wait on a Prescott 5ghz machine with 4gb of DDR600 ram and a Raptor RAID 0...

Get the idea?

 

[JigPu]

All in all, their compression numbers are not really anything of the sort. Procedurally generated textures are interesting from a technical standpoint, but not from an artistic standpoint. Honestly, have a look at the textures in that game. They're generic, repetitive, they aren't high resolution, they aren't really even "lifelike" in any way, shape or form. Sure, they're bumpy, but so is the sand texture in FarCry and the sand looks better... Also, look at the level modeling, even the 'characters' are procedurally generated and are done at very low poly levels.

All of us technoweenies like the conceptual part of the game, but no "ordinary" Joe Gamer out there is going to forgive the ugliness because it's uber technical. Joe Gamer only cares that his characters look realistic or at least believable, and his textures aren't generic and "computer generated looking".

Allow me to dissagree

The generic nature of the textures is not a problem of procedural generation, but of only having space for a handfull of functions with which to generate the textures. If you took FarCry and reduced the total number of textures it had to work with to the number that this demo does, I assure you it would also look quite generic. In the same way, the lack of "lifelike" textures is a result of the space reserved to each function. Being 96K, there isn't exactly much space for every texture to look like it came from a photograh

The "repetitive" and "low res" arguments I'll dismiss because every game has repetitive textures (textures MUST be repeated since the object they are applied to is very usualy larger than the texture itself), and "low res" dosen't apply to procedurally generated textures (which, being mathematical functions, techically have infinite resolution)


We technoweenies may enjoy the conceptual part of the game, but I garuntee you that there are numerous people out there who wouldn't mind the lack of visual quality in the game one bit. Somebody high on his brand new X800 or 6800U may dismiss the game because of it's looks, but make the game fun to play and people begin to ignore how a game looks.

Just my $0.02

PS: I do count procedural generation to be a true form of compression. It may be lossy, and have to be tweaked and tuned by hand, but that does not negate the fact that the data that is stored is FAR smaller than the data it creates.
JigPu