thoughts on un-biased gaming engines :)

[acc24ex]

It came to me, after I installed a new game just yesterday and played for a while, that it just isn't good enough any more.
After using octane for a period of time, you realize that the technology for realistic lightning is here. You only need like 5 GPU cards in order to process real time, physically correct 3d stuff, but this is actually achievable now only costs a lot - and there are some crazy gamers out there ready to spend a lot.
I would guess it is now just a matter of someone producing a new gaming engine, that uses this technology.

Anyway, another thing that is killing my brainwave is the fact that the software companies producing games are doing some amazing stuff, a lot of work is put into a project, a lot of technology used - well why don't they put all of that hard work in a really user friendly gaming environment (it has to be user friendly if it's meant for a lot of people to use it). And after all of that money spent into making a game, the manpower, the hours and days of work, you as a user get the game, finish it in say 5 hours (if you are a typical addictive type like myself), and after that you get that feeling like you spent the last five hours with a whore.
You achieved nothing, you only spent hours doing non-creative (almost destructive) work, and the only first half hours is interesting.
Gaming basically is non-creative, but a lot of man power and money is spent on it, it's a huge money/making industry, helping people feel worse about them. Like spending time with a hooker, it's fun while it lasts, but gives you nothing but emptiness.
Why not turn all off that creative energy and create more user friendly programs that can make you produce creative stuff. That's what we need, octane is ground breaking stuff, and we have a few people humbly working on it.

Actually I don't know the number of the octane team guys, but I know you are really making some great stuff that has the possibillity to change the industry standards. - a lot of architecture people will be thrilled when they find out they can get great instant visual results out of their crappy CAD programs, but still, autocad is full of bugs, and they can't seem to make it right, and it's an industry standard - and has crappy rendering options - but the autodesk company bought a lot of other big companies and merged them - and still has buggy and totaly user unfriendly environments. I have no idea why is this supposed to be like that.
Maybe a fresh start here and there is often required.
Like octane I guess, it really is fresh, more than Arion render, which is still based on fryrender, and uses the same identical workflow.
Octane makes the user have fun rendering, and playing with settings and materials, this time you can really focus on the mood and the materials of the scene, you don't have to think how to setup the scene so it has realistic lighting, it already has it, you just need to make a good model. This really is revolutionary.

Oh and a note to user friendlienes to Octane you should really consider putting up a "Load object" and a "Start render" button somewhere visible on the menu (you have the space) - so that people turning it on for the first time can get some really intuitive feel for the program, and know what to do, so you really do not have to read the manual in order to start doing stuff. (I know I was so anxious to get it working but had to look through the introductory video really carefull to notice what the hell am I supposed to press to get it started - that is not intuitive.

[Proupin]

What a brick!

Autodesk software is not that buggy if you take into account all the features it has... actually maya, max, cad and mudbox (Autodesk apps I have experience in), are solid software. My mum can't even draw a box in neither, but then I don't expect to fly a Boeing-747. Complex stuff is just that, complex, it's meant to be this way so we can accomplish greater feats.

About videogames, it's an industry like any other, it's not meant to benefit you in a medical way. It's not even meant to entertain you. It's meant to make huge amounts of money if possible. But there's a lot of creativity put in there so it attracts an audience, who is very picky and get bored easily. A unbiased gaming engines would only mean a visual breakthrough but you'd feel equally empty after a while. I recommend you to stop caring that much about the visuals and start playing the true classics of videogames. Today's games are all the same FPS formula over and over again, just skip those and look for what really suits you.

[candide]

In addition to what Proupin said - I don't think there's any lack of creative output either. There are tons of books/movies/music/games/whatever being made, more than ever, and nobody has enough time to even read about it all, not to mention actually experiencing it.

I also don't believe having easier tools means anything in the grand scheme of things. Much more people have access to great tools now than 250 years ago, yet the second Mozart is nowhere to be seen/heard.

[havensole]

Having done quite a bit of game programming I can say that realistic lighting does become very difficult when taking all the other stuff into consideration. Generally the realism that most game companies are able to get is faked in many ways. Lots of baked textures and hard edges. We're talking about rendering high quality scenes at high resolutions with lots of independent actions by anything on screen and all that, roughly 25-30+ times a second. Things are getting better, but not yet. I'm also getting tired of so many gaming companies focusing so much on how real they can make the game, and not enough n how much fun the game is to play.