As if there were no twelve months that passed after GDC 2014. The same people, the same conversations, the same news … It comes to the most perfect curioses, even take last year's review and copy entire paragraphs from there. All the same virtual reality on every corner, the same war of the engines, the same war of the API and all the same traditional rumor that Valve announces Half-Life 3. Fortunately, as it were GDC 2015 neither tried to resemble GDC 2014 , You will not enter the same river twice. And this conference allowed us to look at many things from a completely new angle.
Here is a reduced version of a truly large -scale and detailed report on GDC 2015. Read the full version in the April issue of the magazine "Gambrine".
VS developers. Players
Decision No. 1
The problem of communication with players is becoming more and more painful for the gaming industry. The GDC gathered a whole round table, at which the veterans of the industry cried each other's vests, complaining about evil users. Everyone noted an alarming trend: the game community is becoming increasingly significant and more and more hostile.
How to solve this problem, never came up with. Unless take a real life as a model and begin to build barriers and form social groups. Highlight and encourage active users with icons and forum titles, so that they listen to their opinion. At the same time, fenced off from random people, infringe on their rights, limit opportunities (close access to topics, sections, votes, etc.), giving yourself an incentive to behave well to become “your own”.
In a word, to form game communities in the image of a police state, while dividing the forums into many sections and subsections so that the people do not get into heaps and do not begin to buzz. Such a “cheerful” result of the discussion is to disperse everyone by the procurements and do not forget about the whip.
Decision No. 2
Fortunately, there were more positive examples of working with the audience on GDC.
Belgian Larian Studios I made unsuccessful games for a long time. In 2009, they released a particularly unsuccessful Divinity 2: Ego Draconis, After the failure of which the studio was on the verge of closing ..
And then the leadership made two strategic decisions. The first is to make a game not for publishers, but for players, even if it means problems with the search for investors and a small budget. The second is to admit that the studio does not understand anything in the creation of the games, and start listening as carefully as possible to the opinion of alpha testers.
From the very opening of early access, the studio staff sifted hundreds and hundreds of reviews, trying to understand what the players want. Often their wishes were contrary to the opinion of many developers. I had to overcome serious resistance from the team. As a result, 4.5 million euros were made to the budget Divinity: Original Sin, One of the best role -playing games last year. Such a story.
About the future of cinema and video games
Epic Games , company WETA Digital (they created computer special effects for " Hobbit ") And Oculus vr They arranged a very spectacular presentation with the participation of the Dragon Smuug. The demo was called "Thief among the shadows", and materials from the film "were used to create it." Hobbit ": The facial https://sister-site.org/kong-casino/ animation, models (simplified, of course) and so on put into the Unreal Engine 4 engine and launched in real time on the latest" titanium "from NVIDIA.
It is one thing to see the Smuug on the screen, and it is completely different – live when he hangs over you, his head moves under the arches of the hall, when he plays with you like a cat with a mouse, tears and mocks your insignificance when his scaly tail crawls Past like a monstrous snake.
However, at this presentation it was not so much about technologies as about the future of virtual reality. When the game companies realized that it would not be possible to drag the equal action and shooters into cyberspace, they began to look for alternative paths. And one of these ways can be cooperation with the film industry.
Although many Hollywood chips in cyberspace simply do not work, because the viewer does not want to be a passive participant in events, he wants to manage the character and interact with the environment. The first experiments in this direction are already conducted. For example, in VR Crytek The viewer is offered to sit in the dinosaur nest and wait for the female to return. Когда огромный тираннозавр зависает над вами и внимательно следит, реагируя на каждое движение, это впечатляет.
There are still purely technical difficulties, but they are permitted. For example, modern computers do not pull the source models and textures that are used to create films. They have to be simplified and optimized – and so far this process requires the active participation of modeliers whose time is worth a lot of money. But in the very near future this business is fully automated. True, the technical director of Epic Games Kim Librri believes that in five years the problem is possible, it will disappear by itself. Graphic technology will develop so much that you can make models at once for cinema and computers.
Virtual reality
Vive from Valve
Having rolled once again connoisseurs Half-Life , Valve was noted by a number of great announcements, the main of which was the long -promised virtual reality helmet, created with the participation of Oculus Rift and HTC developers.
► best on the topic GDC 2015 and rumors about the announcement Half-Life 3 The famous Russian video blogger Gupovsky spoke out. Try not to die from laughter.
Vive is not just a VR. Valve always thought comprehensively and independently and was never interested in iron production. But she was always interested in games. Therefore, Valve engineers decided: if virtual reality is not adapted for existing games, then you need to make new ones, especially for it. Logical? Certainly. And so that the developers can do something new and special, you need to give them new and special tools.
It is this Vive that differs from other VR-Schles. This is a whole set of devices consisting of the helmet itself, special controllers, as well as an innovative system Steam Lighthouse. The base station emits many invisible laser rays, and the sensors track them and with a frequency a hundred times per second. A person can calmly walk around the apartment with a helmet on his head, without fear of knocking his forehead against the wall – when leaving the safe zone, he will see a warning. It is no less important that the system allows reducing delays when tracking the movements of the user himself.
The studio did not make a patent on Lighthouse. As we have already said, Valve does not need profit from the sale of devices, she needs to give developers a standard that allows you to make new interesting games. So anyone can engage in the production of such a device, since it is quite simple and cheap. You can embed it on TVs, tablets and even mobile phones!
Sulon Cortex
The exhibition announced Sulon Cortex, another VR shlem, from an unknown, but very ambitious company Sulon Technologies. She tried to solve the same problems as Valve, but in her own way. Instead of placing sensors throughout the house, the company's engineers mounted them on the helmet itself and added ordinary cameras there. The device turned out to be truly monstrous, but functional.
Sulon Cortex can independently monitor the position of walls and furniture, and very accurately: as a demonstration, the audience was offered to follow the battle of two androids, and the main feature was that the room where they fought … fully consistent with the real! One could approach the virtual wall and feel it, because exactly in the very place there was a real wall!
Sulon Cortex “Quality” of virtual reality, however, does not yet reach the point that competitors can offer, and as for unique chips, the price of the helmet and support of these chips by the developers can decide everything here. There is serious reason to believe that Sulon Cortex will be able to confidently compete with simpler main mainstream devices. Although who knows for sure?
Project Morpheus
The theme of virtual reality continued Sony With his own Project Morpheus. The first version of the points with the TN screen was really very raw, but this time the engineers presented a completely complete solution. You can twist your head as you like, nine control points are responsible for tracking its position. In addition, they improved the mount, now put on and remove the helmet, as well as to adjust it for yourself it will be easier.
But the main changes occurred as an image: the delay of the picture was reduced by more than doubled, to 18 milliseconds, expanded the viewing area to a hundred degrees, supplied the helmet with a 1920×1080 OLED display and “honest”, as the developers say, with subpixels of three colors on Each pixel is a pebble in the Samsung garden, often using Pentile technology to reduce the number of subpixels and reduce the cost of the matrix.
The frequency of the screen update is 120 Hz, that is, the helmet is sharpened for games that go at a speed of 120 frames per second; According to Sukhay Yoshida, this is an ideal speed for virtual reality. Vive has only 90 Hz, Oculus Rift may be even smaller. It is known that the increased smoothness of the image prevents the appearance of unpleasant symptoms of nausea.
Oculus Rift
But with Oculus Rift, it seems, not everything is smooth. And the point is not even that Valve introduced a much more interesting product (everything will depend on the price there), but that there was very little spoke about Oculus Rift at the conference, although Oculus VR participated in it very vividly in it. Instead of setting the release date and start a wide advertising campaign, the developers seemed to forget about their creation.
For example, John Karmak gave a big lecture, but spoke in it about … Gear VR, a product from Samsung, as well as about virtual reality prospects in the mobile sector. It is clear that an interesting thing is that the developer is Oculus VR, and the Gear VR itself, in fact, is fully created on the Oculus Rift platform … But this is not the main product and will never become it! The cost of the smartphone required for the work of Gear VR makes the price for the average player simply prohibitive. It seems that Oculus Rift with its communist ideology “Cheap virtual reality into every house” was pushed into the background.
AMD will help
AMD on GDC 2015 successfully attracted attention, announcing Liquid VR technology. Although this is not a technology, but rather a set of optimizations that help adapt a computer to work with VR shit. As you know, virtual reality is very sensitive to small things. Delays, the slightest changes in FPS, the lack of smoothness in movements – when looking at the monitor, we simply do not notice this, but when immersed in cyberspace, such shortcomings create an increased load on the brain, and a person begins to “mutate”.
They try to solve many problems independently, but not everything is in their power. Computers have existed for decades, but no one ever thought to optimize their work under virtual reality. It simply did not exist. And AMD, together with Oculus VR, decided to change this by creating a set of all kinds of improvements that will prepare computers to support virtual reality. Their listing to an ordinary player will not say anything (what you know, for example, about asynchronous shaders?), but they help to make the picture more smooth and remove the delays.
The war of game engines
Unreal Engine 4
Epic Games canceled already a symbolic subscription of $ 19 per month, which could also not be paid (updates just stopped coming). Now Unreal Engine is completely free, except for five percent deductions from the game income. That is, fully functional Unreal Engine 4 , on which venerable studios work, now any schoolboy can begin to master. Who knows, maybe in ten years he will make a successful game on the basis of UE-and here Epic Games will receive his 5%.
Unity
But competitors have even more profitable offers. Unity , for example, updated to the fifth version and completely abandoned any deductions from sales. In addition, everyone has a completely free version of the engine with slightly cut functionality to everyone. The version for professionals costs 75 bucks per workplace per month, for developers it is much more profitable than giving part of the income.
Source 2
And then Valve came and wiped her nose to everyone, declaring her engine Source 2 completely free. No subscription fee, no sales deductions. How are they going to earn money? Indirectly. Just Valve has Steam, and the more good games there will be, the more money the studio will receive (and for commercial projects, access to Steam is a prerequisite). Moreover, Source 2 perfectly supports Linux, and taking into account the speedy release of Steam Machines, the expansion of the library compatible with Linux games is becoming more and more relevant.
Valve wireless HDMI cable
Once, talking about Steam Machines in the magazine, we compared one of the Steamos mini-devices with a wireless HDMI cable, because it was not suitable for games, but it could connect a gaming computer to any TV in the apartment using local streaming technology.
Either Valve reads our magazine, or just thoughts went in the same direction (we are inclined to the first option), however, on the GDC 2015 they announced Steam Link-just the very wireless HDMI cable to connect the PC to the TV. It looks like a router with a video output, but in fact, the machine is more likely to be a strongly simplified version of Steam Machines-with a single video of the video signal.
Such a thing will cost only fifty dollars, and if you pay the same amount, you will receive a branded Steim's gamepad. All this will appear on sale this fall. At the same time, sales and full -fledged Steam Machines will begin. The cheapest ones will cost like a console, 350-400 dollars. The price of the most expensive-somewhere in the infinity area.
Microxoli do not give up
Nvidia Shield
NVIDIA announced a microconsol Nvidia Shield! What does it mean – "announced two years ago"? That thing has long been buried! The current Nvidia Shield is a completely new prefix, just with the same name. However, the old one has not gone anywhere, only now it is called Shield Portable, but it seems that the developers were disappointed in a portable format. She cannot compete with smartphones, and it is expensive, and therefore is not in demand.
Therefore, the new console was made homemade. It can act as a digital television setup based on Android TV, but, unlike its colleagues like Google Nexus Player, has absolutely incredible game capabilities, which is responsible for the Tegra X1 chip with an eight -core processor and graphic nuclear of the GeForce 6 ULP based on the Maxwell microarchitecture, used in graphics cards of the GeForce series 9XX series. The problem is one: all these characteristics do not say anything special. Recently, it is fashionable to talk about how mobile chips have already overtaken the prefixes of the past generation and begin to wave to PS4 and Xbox One, but blockbusters with budgets of tens of millions of dollars are in no hurry to appear there … And without cool games the coolest graphics will remain unclaimed.
Perhaps the new Nvidia Shield will be able to solve this problem. The fact is that now mobile devices can support full -fledged games based on OpenGL, and soon we should expect the appearance of the API Vulkan on them, which we talked a little earlier. Add here that NVIDIA is already using the same architecture as in the video cards on PC, and you get an interesting picture: full-fledged PC games (of those that work on Linux) can be transferred without problems to mobile platforms.
Reporting in full (including the results of the GDC Awards 2015 and IGF Awards 2015) Read in the April issue of Gamemany.