activision-blizzard merger

[Jon Shafer]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
Help me - I presume the reason you have more artists, level designers, etc, than programmers on a game project, is cause so much of the code is embodied (?) in the "game engine" which for many new games is taken from earlier games. A fortiori for xpacks, additional stuff in MMO's, etc. Eh?

Usually the reason is simply because there is so much art in modern games. Every single object in a game like Oblivion has to be modeled, textured and perhaps animated. That includes every cup, bucket, tree, character, plank of wood, etc. that the player sees. After a certain point, programming isn't really something you can just have more people work on to get more done.

Despite some common misconceptions, engines aren't "plug and play." If making a game work requires 100% programming time & effort, then using an engine might save 5-10% of that. Engines have to be customized so much these days that there's still a ton of work to do even if you use something as a base.

A related question - I see artist and programmer used as if there was no overlap - is there any demand in the game industry for folks who have talent in both areas? (not that POTM, who both enjoys art and loves the logic of coding that shes been exposed to so far, has any particular interest in the games industry, but a dad has to ask )

"Technical artists" have grown in demand in the last few years. These are typically folks with an art background who have learned programming and can use Action Script and 3D Studio Max to help other artists by creating tools and scripts to make asset creation easier. As getting stuff on screen has become more complicated, the need for those "in between" has grown.

Jon

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
Help me - I presume the reason you have more artists, level designers, etc, than programmers on a game project, is cause so much of the code is embodied (?) in the "game engine" which for many new games is taken from earlier games. A fortiori for xpacks, additional stuff in MMO's, etc. Eh?

Partly, but like Trip said, there's just a ton of art in games. Compare the size of the executable for a game to the size of its data files... every distinct object in a game has to have art associated with it, but code can generalize over entire classes of objects.

(e.g. in Civ4, you'd have code that deals with sea transports, not separate code for galleys, galleons and transports)

And despite the fact that engines are not quite "plug and play", there is still a huge amount of code reuse between virtually every application (games and otherwise) in the form of basic code libraries for e.g. allocating memory.

[Nikolai]

Jon: What do you think of the graphics-on-the-fly technology that Maxis is trying with Spore? Will it change the making of games or is it just a gimmick that will go away?

[Jon Shafer]

Originally posted by Nikolai
Jon: What do you think of the graphics-on-the-fly technology that Maxis is trying with Spore? Will it change the making of games or is it just a gimmick that will go away?

I think it's really neat, and tech like that and procedural animations will probably be the direction the industry moves in eventually, which should save quite a bit of artist time. Problem is, of course, not every game can take as long to make as Spore. I'm sure we'll still see a lot of very art-heavy games, but as the level of detail in games continues to grow and as tech improves I think a lot of the work will go from art to programming.

Jon

[vovan]

Originally posted by Jon Shafer
as the level of detail in games continues to grow and as tech improves I think a lot of the work will go from art to programming.

I agree. Already, artists are no longer required to draw things like clouds and trees. While things like character models and such will always require some person to make them, smaller, less significant details will increasingly be generated automatically.

[Kuciwalker]

I'm not convinced. As worlds become more complex they need more information to describe them. Fundamentally, that information has to come from people. Consider the art, models, etc. as being the most tightly condensed form of information about a world, and the engine as the information describing the rules you use to "unpack" that information. Even with a very powerful (i.e. with more information in it) engine that can generate larger structures from a smaller basic set of information, you still need a lot of that basic set for a detailed world, almost certainly larger than the ruleset.

An example: consider a MMORPG with autogenerated quests. There's just no way to generate quests as intricate and unique as a human can, so they'll all be minor variations on a set of patterns predefined on humans. The world can't be truly "large" because the quests would quickly get repetitive. OTOH, if humans write all of the quests themselves (and actually spend time and effort making them unique), you need a huge staff of writers to make a large world.

[Jon Shafer]

I don't believe that the majority of artwork will ever be computer-generated, only that things will shift more towards systems doing the heavy lifting. It's much easier for an artist to model a few basic trees, leaves, textures, etc. and allow the code to put things together. It's not going to look as good as if the artist did everything himself, but it'll save a ton of time, and with enough iterations, should look close. Now, this sort of thing is already being done, but I believe with more time and experience (coupled with the skyrocketing cost of making games) this will become more common.

Jon

[vovan]

You are certainly right. I never meant to imply artists or writers would be out of a job. However, I do believe that a lot of the work that they have to do now will be handled automaatically. There is still going to be a lot for them creative types to do, just their focus will be significantly shifted from what it is now, Also, with the technology playing a bigger role in content generation, the ratio of programmers to artists will swing more to the programmers side than it is now.

EDIT: X-post with Trip...

[Solver]

There's a reason Daggerfall is so famous. It was a good example of computer-generated content (quest & locations), resulting in an absolutely huge game.

[Kuciwalker]

1) Elite preceeded Daggerfal by a huge margin.

2) It also, according to wiki, was a very repetitive game wrt the computer-generated content.

[Dis]

never even heard of daggerfall until after playing morrowind.

[Apocalypse]

You could cut down on artists so easily. Chris Taylor (right last name?) made a version of Elite, Transport Tycoon, and Roller Coaster Tycoon, all over the coarse of many years while reusing many of the same interface graphics.

[Solver]

Damn 80ies gaming was fun.

[Kuciwalker]

I just can't believe I had to bring up Elite. It was made before I was born, for chrissake!

[DrSpike]

You didn't have to - you chose to.