Telling the AI people that their efforts are wasted on an arms race with little effect on the game play is a much weaker argument than 'hey, I need to revisit what _I_ am working on'.
Guess what? I booted HL1, and that wasn't just nostalgia tinted memory. Smartly applied low tech produces fantastic results in the proper hands.
Game Engine Architecture(non affiliated)
http://www.amazon.com/Game-Engine-Architecture-Jason-Gregory...
That said, I'm sure Pops could handle just about any trumpet you threw at him!
It's said that Charlie Parker played a plastic saxophone at times because he would pawn anything he owned of value to buy heroin. Bet he still sounded great!
I'm not sure how this applies to AAA game dev, though... maybe something like, every new performance venue built is larger than the last, which results in bands getting more members, longer arrangements, lighting and set design, signers, dancers, etc.
That's interesting. I know next to nothing about trumpets, but the situation appears to be different than for guitars. Generalising, guitars are setup differently depending on the style of music and the technical demands, which has an impact on how easy they are to play. For example, tonally you can get a richer sound with slightly heavier than usual strings and higher than average playing action (more space for the strings to vibrate), however from a speed point of view you generally want lighter strings and lower action. These are just general rules of thumb, it's possible for heavy strings to sound 'muddy' and possible to get great tones out of lighter strings (guitarists like Page and Iommi are reported to have used light gauge banjo strings on their guitars, and I don't hear too many complaints about their tone).
> "I'm not sure how this applies to AAA game dev, though... maybe something like, every new performance venue built is larger than the last, which results in bands getting more members, longer arrangements, lighting and set design, signers, dancers, etc."
It tends to be the larger the team, the harder it is to build something with an interesting personality. Plus, to use your concert venue analogy, more creative effort is spent in overcoming how to fill the venue with sound, rather than exploring what that sound could be.
It may well be that PC gaming producers have gotten "lazy", as they are working with a ever improving platform. Thus they can target "future" hardware rather than attempt to optimize and push what they already have.
This because we see something similar to the micro era in gaming consoles. There games towards the end of a platform generation are more refined and elaborate than those released at platform launch, because the producers have gotten to know the ins and outs of the hardware.
Look, I get it, it's cool to see hardware get pushed beyond what people previously thought was possible, it demonstrates ingenuity and can produce a captivating spectacle. But it doesn't make the games better (beyond the wishy washy 'immersion' stuff).
To be honest, this sort of 'pushing the hardware' focus makes me look forward to the end of Moore's Law. When games can no longer meaningfully compete just by looking prettier, when there are no new console generations, I hope there'll be a renaissance of games as a form of expression and interesting experiences.
The latter have all kinds of one off and crazy mechanics (walking behind the apparent background, a sun that attacks, windup shoes one and enter and exit) that keep the various worlds fresh, in part because they show off the greater understanding the developers have of how to work the hardware available.
Then again i may be that working with two dimensions provided the ability to put in more elaborate game mechanics because the player had better situational awareness.
3D games seems to have a severe issue with this because enemies can walk behind the camera. Thus many games with free camera movement and/or zoom ends up being played in a kind of overhead position at the furthest zoom possible to improve situational awareness.
something that ends up defeating all the work put into elaborate detailing on both characters and enemies unless there is heavy use of cinematic pans etc.
The latter have all kinds of one off and crazy mechanics (walking behind the apparent background, a sun that attacks, windup shoes one and enter and exit) that keep the various worlds fresh, in part because they show off the greater understanding the developers have of how to work the hardware available."
For the most part, the evolution of game mechanics doesn't rely on improving hardware usage.
Using the SMB1 vs. SMB3 example, the ideas from SMB3 could've existed in SMB1, they might not have looked as good but they could've been done.
If the 'hardware enabling game mechanics' hypothesis was correct, every new console generation would be able to add new mechanics just by being faster. Taking 2D gaming as a whole, I'd suggest the horsepower needed for 2D gaming peaked around the Dreamcast/PS2 era, I don't envision any 2D game type being built that couldn't exist on those consoles.
If VR is to take off, gaming hardware will need to evolve, but beyond that we won't need new hardware to enable new game types anymore. VR/AR is the end of the road.
What changed was not a matter of experience, but that cartridge game technology grew massively more powerful and changed the whole nature of the platform within the span of a few years. This was very much a case of "more is more." You could get a few of the ideas in SMB3 in the space of SMB1, but not all of them at once. And development costs rose sharply in the latter half of the 1980's for precisely this reason - you could feasibly make a "big" game that evoked a whole world with a variety of interactions, and doing so was a huge spectacle which necessitated a team dedicated to content creation, rather than a solo dev, yet was also largely independent of the graphics fidelity. Sierra Online built its name in this period by capitalizing on exactly this quality - presenting a world just a little more fully realized than the text adventures preceding it. It was a golden era for role-playing games, too - Ultima, Wizardry, Dragon Quest, and Final Fantasy all had big entries during this period.
The picture changes as you get into the 1990's. Most of the advances are pretty firmly on the side of "graphics treadmill." Games do keep getting more complex, but by the end of the decade, with stuff like Baldur's Gate, Jagged Alliance 2, Starcraft, Counter-Strike, or Deus Ex, you can find pretty much all of the design templates that AAA leans on. Design has mostly trended towards efficiency and simplification since then.
Or will the AAA games just continue their graphics treadmill?
And indies have always had it tough, but they've experienced a sudden shift from a private market with the most prized audiences available only to the well-positioned and connected(e.g. get on XBLA in 2008, or Steam in 2011), to a market that is saturated everywhere, with few opportunities to stand out of the crowd. In theory, this means people should be more creative and adventurous. Anyone who intends to make a business of it is obligated to shrink scope, derisk and focus on getting a great promotional story together, though, and so it's hard to remain optimistic if your approach is more technically-inclined and favors design risks. I got to be in the thick of all of it as it happened and gradually concluded in the past year that I couldn't make it work full-time, not within the context of the projects I genuinely wanted to work on.
There is still room for AAA where it feeds into the F2P business. So MMOs will definitely stick around, and competitive games like League and DOTA. But that model doesn't favor the typical single-player campaign experience. All the paths to sustainable, growing success in gaming right now lead to something that involves F2P marketing tactics, community-building, platform ownership, or preferably a combination. Anything less than that faces a huge uphill battle to not simply get lost in the shuffle.
All of that said, the market is not dead by any means. The graphics race is on its way out - it'll continue to be advanced by dedicated engine devs, but the ability to render things is entirely a commodity now, borne witness by the frenzied price wars between Unreal and Unity. That, along with the shift to digital, has shaken the industry's dynamic into something way more unpredictable. It's great if you're enterprising enough, but most devs aren't, when it comes down to it.
The tiny SMB1 board: http://blog.grunick.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/IMG_9484-...
On SMB3 you will find the level data stored at 6000+ which is inside the SRAM. This level data is what allowed you to go back to areas in the level you had already played and find consistency. In SMB1 you couldn't go back because it didn't store that data and so the bad guy you killed and the blocks you destroyed would have to appear again.
It's not that. There is a lot of optimization going in there and often the reference target is actually the common denominator of mainstream game consoles (lower than what each of them individually-taken have). Only on top of that there are optionally-added (and activated by-default, out of marketing reasons) layers that attempt to use more resources and which gives you your stated impression. And yes, it's true what you say about "the end of a platform generation" because the optimization efforts (including platform-specific ones) are stacked trough time.