I don't see why they both can't exist. Mobile VR already works great, and the power of mobile chipsets is only increasing. Tethered VR will only dominate for as long as mobile GPUs struggle to output stereo 2048x2048~ish video, which... isn't going to be for long. Combined with SOTA upscaling, we may already be there by some standards.
I say all this as someone with a Quest who tethers to a PC for Beat Saber and Half Life Alyx. Tethered experiences rule - but untethered ones are really not that far off.
> but untethered ones are really not that far off.
I am not sure how you measure this but you can't run proper games on mobile vr. Mobile is limited, you can't fit in a GPU the same size of a desktop GPU. John Carmack has an interesting talk about what happens when mobile chips get too small and crowded. We simply can't battle physics. It would be awesome if we had the same experience tho.
Obviously the two will never coincide. Mobile GPUs will eventually reach a "good enough" stage though, and arguably we're already there. The quality of Quest-native games like Beat Saber is almost identical to the version on PC. Older games like Resident Evil 4 play just like normal. Visually it can be 'meh', but the tech is there and the option to stream from a more powerful desktop still exists. It uses comparatively weak chipsets to deliver pretty-damn-good visuals at a price point lower than most consoles.
I would argue that your thesis of "you can't run proper games on mobile vr" is wrong. Today, you can go play DOOM 3 or Half Life in VR, untethered, on a sub-$500 headset. That should startle everyone working on tethered systems.
1 sample: I only play quest2 untethered, don't have a gaming pc and don't want to spend time on that right now. Games are more than just graphics, and a lot of fun can be had without huge GPUs. The quest works well as a portable VR console if you focus on fun games rather than pretty games.
AirLink Wi-Fi stream with Quest is great, not much different to tethered cable.
I think there is a case for local ML becoming more popular too, I could see nvidia making a Shield like box at some point with a mobile 4000 series GPU and good thermals, that could bring those GPUs to mainstream beyond hardcore gamers. It would work for gaming, VR and consumer local ML apps (Siri that actually works and doesn’t leak data).
Maybe some day the latency/bandwidth will be good enough to stream VR from edge servers so you don’t even need a local GPU. We’re not there yet, even for non-VR games
I think we’ll see new classes of games/entertainment too where you’ll just describe the (VR) experience you want and ML constructs a game or (immersive) movie like experience of it. Maybe a different one every day.
I can see Nvidia selling a lot more GPUs in the next decade as ML and real-time 3D becomes much more pervasive. At some point other much more power efficient architectures (our brain uses 12 watts) will trump general purpose GPUs
Personally, I never see something like this being made (or at least marketed as such).
However,
*pauses to put on tinfoil hat*
Nvidia does sell devkits that roughly match the compute footprint you're describing[0]. They're ARM SOCs which puts them at a disadvantage for gaming, but the form factor does exist. If you need a lot of high-power AI compute and are willing to tinker with it, you can't beat CUDA on ARM.
Again though - there's a reason these are sold as devkits and not products. Every YC-backed roach from here to Mississippi is going to spend their next half-decade trying to get your data/money for a machine learning product. Nvidia knows it's a losing game to sell hardware instead of services here, so they're arming the entrepreneurs instead of the consumer. Frankly, I think it's the right move anyways. People are going to need scaling compute for decently fast AI inferencing in the future, and Nvidia can keep that scaling curve under their thumb. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if there are Nvidia execs suggesting that they abandon the gaming market altogether just to focus on more lucrative AI/datacenter customers.
> Order of authorship was determined by the top score each person received across all three levels of the official Pottermore “Back to Hogwarts Quiz.” For information about the exact scores (and houses), please contact the authors.
It's nice that they explicitly state the meaning of the author-order.
For a while, [StackExchange.Academia](https://academia.stackexchange.com/) (like StackOverflow, but for questions about academic life) seemed to be getting a lot of questions about the meaning of author-order, where it seemed to vary across fields and even then be prone to subjective interpretation based on unstated rules. It was a very silly situation, made sillier by the fact that those doing it seemed to be under the misimpression that it was the serious, respectable way of conveying authors' relative contributions.
Of course, their particular approach to doing this does leave open one potential avenue for confusion. In particular, are they doing this because:
1. they're researchers who want to stress that the name-ordering is arbitrary in a humorous way; or
2. they're hardcore rock-paper-scissors competitors who were primarily motivated by a desire to better advertise the results of their tournament?
(Though, in the spirit of being clear-and-explicit, I'm just kidding about that last part!)
Do we anyone here who feels qualified to comment on how much more it would take to run the process backwards and de-render a stream of general footage scenes to a compact, nearly lossless format for transmission or storage?
As far as i understand the neural engine is trained on texture BRDFs which are too memory intensive for most rendering usecases (offline & realtime). The hierarchical model delivers sub-pixel accuracy outperforming mipmaps. So far so good but this is no replacement to tracing a ton of rays. Temporal stability and versatility is questionable. Will be interesting to see how this compares to Unreals Substrate.
Cool, but I'm sure there must be some better link for this material. Quote from a YouTube comment: Now if we could only get text to speech from "OK" to "blows you away", instead of "your drunk uncle talking from down an empty well"
It's a funny bit, but this particular voice over is awful. Simply terrible, F- quality. There are 10 other links intthis thread that would have produced a better voice, or the publisher could have just read the material themselves.
It’s hilarious, but in this case I think it doesn’t apply. There is next to zero content here that is actually contributed by the person who made the video, and the voice over is pretty horrible. But it did get to front page so maybe I’m just wrong!
Okay. Then I think I see where you're coming from.
From my perspective this was the mainly the first contact with the research presentation and the renderings, and I think those are undeniably very impressive to most people at this point in time.
But viewing it as a "Youtube value-add", or whatever the jargon for that phenomenon might be, I guess it's close at hand to judge it as poor, lazy work that doesn't do the original material justice.
I will also admit it is something of a funny juxtaposition to have the photorealistic, high-definition graphics along with voiceover that is very obviously artificial.
I've been playing with TorToiSe and other emerging local projects with voice cloning, but ElevenLabs is so far ahead that it's the only one I've considered promoting to clients.
Our system is running on Direct3D 12 using hardware-accelerated ray tracing through DirectX Raytracing (DXR). All results are generated on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPU at resolution 1920 × 1080
If you see progress of graphics design in the last 40 years, do you have any idea what would be considered a "progress of graphics design" in the year 2100 ?
I mean seriously, it looks like in the next maybe 5-15 years, GPU will be able to render graphics that even another GPU wouldn't be able to distinguish whether its real or fake.
Graphics aren't really the problem anymore. We've already reached photorealism, and iterative improvements to render it in real-time are developing quickly, while the hardware gets more powerful, efficient and cheaper.
The bulk of the progress will be in human-computer interfaces. We're still mostly interacting with keyboards, mice and 2D touchscreens; voice recognition is still primitive; XR is still experimental and nobody wants to strap a heavy headset to their face, etc.
I believe its purpose is to reduce sinusoidal repleneration, but usually limited to situations which need forescent skor motion.
About one minute in I had a "Turbo Encabulator" feeling. So much so I'm not sure the original article is even real... I'm in no position to validate it without spending many hours scouring the content.
I think graphics technology has already "arrived" for the most part. There's tons of stuff that surpasses what Crytek did that blew away the industry 16 years ago, but a lot of that wasn't just technology, it's that they had world-class artists.
If you go back to that game today, there's a lot you can nitpick, but I think the biggest problem that remains today is that it's still extremely labor intensive to make assets.
At Planimeter, I worry more about asset creation turnaround time than anything else. I worry about it more than the tech we write, I worry about it more than fiction writing, or audio engineering. Just nothing else compares.
It's the most expensive part of any game development pipeline, and yet industry-wide accessible photogrammetry is half-backed, and it also doesn't help hobbyists who do 2.5D or 2D work.
So yeah, this neural engine stuff is superphenominal, for people who care about PBR workflows and photorealistic pipelines. This is obviously the most computationally complex work that can be addressed today, anyway, which I appreciate.
But the people who can actually access and harness that tech is just so absolutely tiny. I guess I just care a lot about this one particular sector of the industry where you have these world-class bedroom professionals who become studio professionals and Unreal and Nvidia are probably the only orgs in the world who cater to them, but for some reason I have to put in a lot of effort to articulate why what we have today, despite being so much more powerful than what we've had 20 years ago is less accessible and less functional and less empowering than what we had then.
I think it's primarily the labor factor in artwork, but also accessible engine tech today is actually worse than what we were using then, simply because no one really uses the id Tech family of engines anymore besides the most modern incarnations of them, and even to this day no class of engine compares to old versions of id Tech. Not even Unreal, by a long shot, despite having industry leading rendering capabilities. Everything else about that engine is half-baked or unusable.
I wonder how much AI models can help. If they are trained on enough real world content, they should be able to produce rough models based on descriptions: "Generate a tropical island about 5km in width by 10km length with an active volcano in the center" and then then the artists adjust/massage as needed.
Right, we're already there, and the tech is quickly improving. I'm not sure why GP thinks this will remain the most expensive process of game development.
Generating assets using AI will drastically cut costs and turnaround time. I'm eager to see these tools generate assets in real-time. Imagine being able to interact with an endless possibility of scenes. Games would ship with a generative model, and entire levels could be created on the fly, ensuring every play through is as different as the authors want it to be. Exciting stuff.
I never said it will remain the most expensive part; that's what I hope more engineering effort will go into. The graphics capabilities we use today are already commonplace and well written about.
Fast content creation isn't, or the tools are sparse and locked behind small, costly proprietary silos.
I’m not sure text prompts offer the kind of plasticity needed for artists to really do their thing.
Frank Gehry used to do really chaotic abstract drawings and hand them off to aerospace CAD operators to turn them into something that could be engineered and machined and assembled. Lots of people could do the drawings and have magic mushroom facades but Gehry understood the resulting interior spaces as well … I think it’s there is a ton of potential for great tools employing the past decade or so of ML/AI but ISTM it should empower the process rather than replace it.
I would have liked to see examples of human skin, and of cloth. That's hard and important.
Rendering the perfect cheese grater and glazed pot is nice, but really, not that important.
Most of the hard problems in graphics today involve scale. Epic's Nanite texture compression system is impressive, but about 60% of the work has to be done in CPUs because GPUs don't have the right stuff for it. And Nanite is still just for rigid objects.
Crowds of individually dressed people are still tough to render fast.
NVidia put in ray-tracing hardware into GPUs. It's not used much in games. NVidia was angry with reviewers who just ignored their ray-tracing hardware in reviews. The reviewers were not wrong.
And could we please have good hardware support for order-independent translucency? That should be standard. Then we can get rid of depth sorting of faces, which never works right.
> NVidia put in ray-tracing hardware into GPUs. It's not used much in games.
Well, it's true that the proportion of games that have ray tracing -- over the space of all games released -- is small. But most triple-A games seem to have ray tracing these days. Of the last four such titles I've played three had ray tracing (Resident Evil 4, Jedi Survivor, Hogwarts Legacy). I think that's only going to become more true in the future, as IMO it does materially make an image quality difference.
They had the technology but not the power, so most games still only had bits and pieces using ray tracing and were not globally illuminated by it. Not to mention you have to make the game work on old equipment too. That means all the downsides of old lighting techniques remained and none of the art efficiencies are realized.
We are at the third generation of cards with RTX and there are almost no games using ray traced global illumination, and even if they do they still have to offer rasterized lighting for older hardware.
What do you mean "almost no games using ray traced global illumination"? The games mentioned above and many others are using ray-traced shadows, reflections, and sometimes one bounce of (diffuse) light. Not full path tracing, of course, but these techniques are still considered "ray-traced global illumination".
Only the bounce lighting would be considered global illumination in my understanding, and that still requires other rasterized techniques to make a fully illuminated scene.
Yeah, I only worked in the business shortly but I would dispute that statement as well.
Back at the time licensing from iD was basically "here's a cd, never call us again." Meanwhile Unreal, at a much more approachable price, also came with support contacts, a private email list and irc channel, etc. It was like night and day between the two.
In my role as a level designer I vastly preferred UnrealEd. The workflow was more interactive, and the BSP implementation way more robust against leaks. There were flaws to Unreal... the initial versions of UnrealScript were not great. But again, there was simply no comparing the two imo.
Easing the creation task for professional uses is definitely "in the pipeline". If you're making a 2D game, diffusion models are already capable enough to act as a shortcut for detailed painting. It's stuff with generating optimized meshes, animation, scene lighting, other details that is still in the research stage. In many ways it's more straightforward and gives a better demo to address the "render the entire scene" case than to go asset-by-asset and work out a better UX for that than "do everything by hand". Even though the latter is what's really being called for.
This... 100% this.
I've dabbled in India game making for a while and have no issue creating the relevant systems etc to make a game work because with good software engineering practises and modern off-the-shelf game engines you can scale that stuff like nobody's business.
What you still can't scale... Art assets... Especially if you're not creatively talented in that way. There's a reason so many AAA games these days have staff that are like 80% artists, 10% developers, 10% everything else.
I think part of the point of moving to ray tracing and physically correct global illumination is that if the technology stack works right you don't actually have to work very hard to get your assets to look good.
Let's take for example Second Life. The content is almost all user-generated, and when it originally came out it looked a lot worse than other games that were available at the time. The difference is mostly: since the content is user generated, you don't have some army of artists touching up the textures and pre-baking the lighting to make everything look at least plausibly realistic.
What Second Life was missing was the technology to compute global illumination in real time against arbitrary content so that the user-generated assets look as good as if some artist had specially lit and textured each one. (Maybe even better, because computers are more thorough and exact than humans -- assuming exactness is what you want. Artists sometimes take creative liberties because unrealism sometimes looks better.)
I haven't paid attention to Second Life in a long time; if a few minutes looking at random youtube videos is any indication, it seems they haven't really made much progress on this front. I think eventually companies will figure this out. I haven't paid attention to Facebook's Metaverse project because I expect it to be a flop (for non-technical reasons), but maybe they're banking on the graphics technology being there to make user-generated content look not-fake. I think that part might be achievable now with modest hardware.
As far as this new paper goes, I'm not sure if it makes things easier or harder for content creators. It seems like it makes the rendering stack more complex and harder to understand, but if someone can supply came creators with awesome textures and they don't have to care where they came from or how they work then maybe that's fine.
I think AI can be a force multiplier for asset turnaround time by helping artists who don’t have particular preferences for vision make generally real-world recognizable objects quickly and build meaningful libraries of models to help build world building sets.
Theres also non-AI work that can help dynamically fill scenes with world meshes to help create seamless transitions between spaces as a part of overall terrain development.
A lot of this tech will be proprietary in nature, and it may be a long time, think decades, if ever that we get to use it as general creators.
It means that the gap between studios and bedroom professionals who used to create the mods that became full fledged intellectual properties that dominated for years will widen and there will be fewer opportunities for individual authors and small teams to become the next generation of production studios.
This will happen while large organizations enjoy extreme technical leverage while not having many great ideas to execute on simply because there will be fewer fiction writers and fewer studios who have concentrated technologies.
I currently don’t see much room for the next Zoid to create the next CTF gamemode.
I don’t really see anything meaningful come out of community contributions to games anymore ever since the introduction of the UGC model which has superseded the traditional modding model.
Instead of modders using game software mechanisms to create something new and interesting organically, UGC structures in games are explicitly designed so that creators can only do nominal things like create hats and skins for the most part.
It’s shifted the mentally from, “Here are the tools we used to create the game,” to “Here’s what you’re allowed to create and put on a marketplace so we can take a cut of profits.”
It’s gross, it sucks, and it’s another example of rug-pulling. Future generations will completely miss out on the previous paradigm because there’s so much focus entrenched on user-generated content versus modding.
For gaming you're absolutely right. It's interactive so the threshold for immersive is that much lower.
But imagine the impact on rendered art, VFX, etc. How long until you can ask ChatGPT for a model of a teapot with shaders for blue glaze? The labour involved from inception to render is going to be cut down to a tiny fraction of what's required today.
A long rant about the state of things in game engine techn and quite offtopic. I could not agree less. The id engine was hardly usable for anyone except a few studios with big pockets. With modern game engines you get great documentation and affordable tech. Unreal even comes with free photoreal assets and open source.
This is a weird third party AI generated speech video. Does anyone have a link to the official NVidia video where they are getting all these clips from?
76 comments
[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 61.6 ms ] threadSooner than you expect, games and virtual reality are going to look as good as movies -- scratch that, they are going to look better than movies.
We live in interesting times.
I say all this as someone with a Quest who tethers to a PC for Beat Saber and Half Life Alyx. Tethered experiences rule - but untethered ones are really not that far off.
I am not sure how you measure this but you can't run proper games on mobile vr. Mobile is limited, you can't fit in a GPU the same size of a desktop GPU. John Carmack has an interesting talk about what happens when mobile chips get too small and crowded. We simply can't battle physics. It would be awesome if we had the same experience tho.
I would argue that your thesis of "you can't run proper games on mobile vr" is wrong. Today, you can go play DOOM 3 or Half Life in VR, untethered, on a sub-$500 headset. That should startle everyone working on tethered systems.
I think there is a case for local ML becoming more popular too, I could see nvidia making a Shield like box at some point with a mobile 4000 series GPU and good thermals, that could bring those GPUs to mainstream beyond hardcore gamers. It would work for gaming, VR and consumer local ML apps (Siri that actually works and doesn’t leak data).
Maybe some day the latency/bandwidth will be good enough to stream VR from edge servers so you don’t even need a local GPU. We’re not there yet, even for non-VR games
I think we’ll see new classes of games/entertainment too where you’ll just describe the (VR) experience you want and ML constructs a game or (immersive) movie like experience of it. Maybe a different one every day.
I can see Nvidia selling a lot more GPUs in the next decade as ML and real-time 3D becomes much more pervasive. At some point other much more power efficient architectures (our brain uses 12 watts) will trump general purpose GPUs
That is indeed how i see it working. A dedicated VR "console" of sorts that tethers via wifi.
However,
*pauses to put on tinfoil hat*
Nvidia does sell devkits that roughly match the compute footprint you're describing[0]. They're ARM SOCs which puts them at a disadvantage for gaming, but the form factor does exist. If you need a lot of high-power AI compute and are willing to tinker with it, you can't beat CUDA on ARM.
Again though - there's a reason these are sold as devkits and not products. Every YC-backed roach from here to Mississippi is going to spend their next half-decade trying to get your data/money for a machine learning product. Nvidia knows it's a losing game to sell hardware instead of services here, so they're arming the entrepreneurs instead of the consumer. Frankly, I think it's the right move anyways. People are going to need scaling compute for decently fast AI inferencing in the future, and Nvidia can keep that scaling curve under their thumb. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if there are Nvidia execs suggesting that they abandon the gaming market altogether just to focus on more lucrative AI/datacenter customers.
[0] https://store.nvidia.com/en-us/jetson/store/?page=1&limit=9&...
Movies will be made with this stuff. No expensive actors, sets, or long editing times that come with traditional animations.
I hope to see more and more bizarre ways of picking the author order on these kind of papers.
> equal contribution, three of the authors are the real authors, the other seven names were generated by an AI
> Order of authorship was determined by the top score each person received across all three levels of the official Pottermore “Back to Hogwarts Quiz.” For information about the exact scores (and houses), please contact the authors.
https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/spc3...
For a while, [StackExchange.Academia](https://academia.stackexchange.com/) (like StackOverflow, but for questions about academic life) seemed to be getting a lot of questions about the meaning of author-order, where it seemed to vary across fields and even then be prone to subjective interpretation based on unstated rules. It was a very silly situation, made sillier by the fact that those doing it seemed to be under the misimpression that it was the serious, respectable way of conveying authors' relative contributions.
Of course, their particular approach to doing this does leave open one potential avenue for confusion. In particular, are they doing this because:
1. they're researchers who want to stress that the name-ordering is arbitrary in a humorous way; or
2. they're hardcore rock-paper-scissors competitors who were primarily motivated by a desire to better advertise the results of their tournament?
(Though, in the spirit of being clear-and-explicit, I'm just kidding about that last part!)
This still has to be bridged with compressed texture representations (and compressed model representations) but I think that's not too far away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U
From my perspective this was the mainly the first contact with the research presentation and the renderings, and I think those are undeniably very impressive to most people at this point in time.
But viewing it as a "Youtube value-add", or whatever the jargon for that phenomenon might be, I guess it's close at hand to judge it as poor, lazy work that doesn't do the original material justice.
I will also admit it is something of a funny juxtaposition to have the photorealistic, high-definition graphics along with voiceover that is very obviously artificial.
I've been playing with TorToiSe and other emerging local projects with voice cloning, but ElevenLabs is so far ahead that it's the only one I've considered promoting to clients.
--------------
Our system is running on Direct3D 12 using hardware-accelerated ray tracing through DirectX Raytracing (DXR). All results are generated on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPU at resolution 1920 × 1080
I mean seriously, it looks like in the next maybe 5-15 years, GPU will be able to render graphics that even another GPU wouldn't be able to distinguish whether its real or fake.
The bulk of the progress will be in human-computer interfaces. We're still mostly interacting with keyboards, mice and 2D touchscreens; voice recognition is still primitive; XR is still experimental and nobody wants to strap a heavy headset to their face, etc.
About one minute in I had a "Turbo Encabulator" feeling. So much so I'm not sure the original article is even real... I'm in no position to validate it without spending many hours scouring the content.
If you go back to that game today, there's a lot you can nitpick, but I think the biggest problem that remains today is that it's still extremely labor intensive to make assets.
At Planimeter, I worry more about asset creation turnaround time than anything else. I worry about it more than the tech we write, I worry about it more than fiction writing, or audio engineering. Just nothing else compares.
It's the most expensive part of any game development pipeline, and yet industry-wide accessible photogrammetry is half-backed, and it also doesn't help hobbyists who do 2.5D or 2D work.
So yeah, this neural engine stuff is superphenominal, for people who care about PBR workflows and photorealistic pipelines. This is obviously the most computationally complex work that can be addressed today, anyway, which I appreciate.
But the people who can actually access and harness that tech is just so absolutely tiny. I guess I just care a lot about this one particular sector of the industry where you have these world-class bedroom professionals who become studio professionals and Unreal and Nvidia are probably the only orgs in the world who cater to them, but for some reason I have to put in a lot of effort to articulate why what we have today, despite being so much more powerful than what we've had 20 years ago is less accessible and less functional and less empowering than what we had then.
I think it's primarily the labor factor in artwork, but also accessible engine tech today is actually worse than what we were using then, simply because no one really uses the id Tech family of engines anymore besides the most modern incarnations of them, and even to this day no class of engine compares to old versions of id Tech. Not even Unreal, by a long shot, despite having industry leading rendering capabilities. Everything else about that engine is half-baked or unusable.
Generating assets using AI will drastically cut costs and turnaround time. I'm eager to see these tools generate assets in real-time. Imagine being able to interact with an endless possibility of scenes. Games would ship with a generative model, and entire levels could be created on the fly, ensuring every play through is as different as the authors want it to be. Exciting stuff.
Fast content creation isn't, or the tools are sparse and locked behind small, costly proprietary silos.
Frank Gehry used to do really chaotic abstract drawings and hand them off to aerospace CAD operators to turn them into something that could be engineered and machined and assembled. Lots of people could do the drawings and have magic mushroom facades but Gehry understood the resulting interior spaces as well … I think it’s there is a ton of potential for great tools employing the past decade or so of ML/AI but ISTM it should empower the process rather than replace it.
I would have liked to see examples of human skin, and of cloth. That's hard and important. Rendering the perfect cheese grater and glazed pot is nice, but really, not that important.
Most of the hard problems in graphics today involve scale. Epic's Nanite texture compression system is impressive, but about 60% of the work has to be done in CPUs because GPUs don't have the right stuff for it. And Nanite is still just for rigid objects. Crowds of individually dressed people are still tough to render fast.
NVidia put in ray-tracing hardware into GPUs. It's not used much in games. NVidia was angry with reviewers who just ignored their ray-tracing hardware in reviews. The reviewers were not wrong.
And could we please have good hardware support for order-independent translucency? That should be standard. Then we can get rid of depth sorting of faces, which never works right.
Well, it's true that the proportion of games that have ray tracing -- over the space of all games released -- is small. But most triple-A games seem to have ray tracing these days. Of the last four such titles I've played three had ray tracing (Resident Evil 4, Jedi Survivor, Hogwarts Legacy). I think that's only going to become more true in the future, as IMO it does materially make an image quality difference.
We are at the third generation of cards with RTX and there are almost no games using ray traced global illumination, and even if they do they still have to offer rasterized lighting for older hardware.
I think you're saying that id Tech engine, even the old ones, are the best by a long shot; but some words in that paragraph seem to contradict that.
And despite being a fan of John Carmack's works, I understand that the Unreal engines have its own advantages.
Back at the time licensing from iD was basically "here's a cd, never call us again." Meanwhile Unreal, at a much more approachable price, also came with support contacts, a private email list and irc channel, etc. It was like night and day between the two.
In my role as a level designer I vastly preferred UnrealEd. The workflow was more interactive, and the BSP implementation way more robust against leaks. There were flaws to Unreal... the initial versions of UnrealScript were not great. But again, there was simply no comparing the two imo.
What you still can't scale... Art assets... Especially if you're not creatively talented in that way. There's a reason so many AAA games these days have staff that are like 80% artists, 10% developers, 10% everything else.
At least in F2P, the 'staff' are 80% artists because cosmetics are ludicrously profitable.
Let's take for example Second Life. The content is almost all user-generated, and when it originally came out it looked a lot worse than other games that were available at the time. The difference is mostly: since the content is user generated, you don't have some army of artists touching up the textures and pre-baking the lighting to make everything look at least plausibly realistic.
What Second Life was missing was the technology to compute global illumination in real time against arbitrary content so that the user-generated assets look as good as if some artist had specially lit and textured each one. (Maybe even better, because computers are more thorough and exact than humans -- assuming exactness is what you want. Artists sometimes take creative liberties because unrealism sometimes looks better.)
I haven't paid attention to Second Life in a long time; if a few minutes looking at random youtube videos is any indication, it seems they haven't really made much progress on this front. I think eventually companies will figure this out. I haven't paid attention to Facebook's Metaverse project because I expect it to be a flop (for non-technical reasons), but maybe they're banking on the graphics technology being there to make user-generated content look not-fake. I think that part might be achievable now with modest hardware.
As far as this new paper goes, I'm not sure if it makes things easier or harder for content creators. It seems like it makes the rendering stack more complex and harder to understand, but if someone can supply came creators with awesome textures and they don't have to care where they came from or how they work then maybe that's fine.
Theres also non-AI work that can help dynamically fill scenes with world meshes to help create seamless transitions between spaces as a part of overall terrain development.
A lot of this tech will be proprietary in nature, and it may be a long time, think decades, if ever that we get to use it as general creators.
It means that the gap between studios and bedroom professionals who used to create the mods that became full fledged intellectual properties that dominated for years will widen and there will be fewer opportunities for individual authors and small teams to become the next generation of production studios.
This will happen while large organizations enjoy extreme technical leverage while not having many great ideas to execute on simply because there will be fewer fiction writers and fewer studios who have concentrated technologies.
I currently don’t see much room for the next Zoid to create the next CTF gamemode.
I don’t really see anything meaningful come out of community contributions to games anymore ever since the introduction of the UGC model which has superseded the traditional modding model.
Instead of modders using game software mechanisms to create something new and interesting organically, UGC structures in games are explicitly designed so that creators can only do nominal things like create hats and skins for the most part.
It’s shifted the mentally from, “Here are the tools we used to create the game,” to “Here’s what you’re allowed to create and put on a marketplace so we can take a cut of profits.”
It’s gross, it sucks, and it’s another example of rug-pulling. Future generations will completely miss out on the previous paradigm because there’s so much focus entrenched on user-generated content versus modding.
But imagine the impact on rendered art, VFX, etc. How long until you can ask ChatGPT for a model of a teapot with shaders for blue glaze? The labour involved from inception to render is going to be cut down to a tiny fraction of what's required today.
this gets less attraction, but I think it could be the next hit after LoRA.
aka procedurally generated textures. Clever for all the mundane repeating pattern/uniform surfaces.
Realistically, only the biggest triple A studio will be using this correctly and in the nice looking games that would benefit from this