Challenge: Shaders crucial to gameplay

#1 TSE is just a rendering layer, man. It can do anything you give it the polies and materials for. :)

How about the night/heat vision in Splinter Cell?

#2 That's what I'm asking for, Ben... ways it's more than just an enhancement or perty polish. :)

#3 No but I can come up with about 50 totally sweet GUI schemes that would use shaders. Like have all the GUI elements be made of mercury (or a liquid metal of your choice) and have them do kidn of a T-1000 thing where they just pool together and buttons form etc.

#4 Pat, I want this! A red "metal", simulating blood. Mmmmm!!

But seriously, there's something I want for my game: a mirror that reflects the environment and renders another viewport. A magic mirror, part camera, part mirror.

EDIT: It will work as a teleport to the place rendered by the "camera".

#5 That would be sweet Pat

#6 Adib - looked at the mirror code? It can do arbitrary portals if you like, too.

#7 A MYST style game could easily require it for anything as the visuals and sounds are a core part of its gameplay (to add to the puzzles and enviroment you are exploring)

#8 It seems to me that people have a very loose meaning of "gameplay". A field of tall grass rendered by shaders is NOT a part of gameplay. Stealth, using cover, hiding - those are elements of gameplay, and they can be executed any number of ways. Shaders are only one viable solution.

Visuals and Sounds are NOT a core part of gameplay, regardless how crucial they are to the puzzle and environment.

The difference is, you can change the rendering and sounds, but its still basically the same gameplay. But if you change the gameplay and leave the rendering and sounds the same, its a completly different game.

#9 I agree, Randall...I am hoping for better uses of shaders than my meager examples. :)

And Pat: The T2 GUI schemes would be neat, but it's still eyecandy, isn't it?

Mind you, I love what I've seen of the TSE. I'm just trying to get people to think outside the box. Finding some pretty great uses for graphical shaders as part of gameplay would seem to be "outside the box". Otherwise, it seems like they are enhancements. Enhancements to keep the game modern and help it look cool (given solid art content to begin with).

Or maybe I'm going for too much here? ;-)

-Eric F

#10

Quote:Or maybe I'm going for too much here? ;-)

No, I think this thread is completely valid. I am largely un-impressed by TSE, simply because any game idea I have could have been created with the original Torque. Anything within TSE is simply an enhancement. This doesn't mean I think TSE is waste of time, but its not going to make my game better. Regardless how its done, the GAMEPLAY has to be fun, challenging and solid.

So far, if ALL the IOTDs are any indication, there are very few games that have decent gameplay solutions- they rely too heavily on the rock-solid Torque structure. This is further crippled by "yet-another-shooter-just-because-Toque/Tribes2-is-a-shooter" mentality.

So if thread causes people to stop and think outside the box, I'm all for it. God knows we all need a kick in the ass once in a while.

#11 Better graphics help with immersion. The more a person can get into a game the better. I agree, graphics don't make a game - but they can add to it. Myst is a good example. ;)

A lot of game dev groups could probably make do with TGE, but it looks to me that TSE might enable some effects to be accomplished with greater ease.

#12 *sniff* But Randall, I put so much hard work into TSE...

:P

#13 In my opinion Shaders won't alter the gameplay in any way shape or form, as they are a visual aspect, gameplay is a design descision which is made (hopefully) before a line of code is written. Sure it will need tweaking, and planning on allowing the player to blow up buildings to create distractions might have been a good idea which may not now appear viable, but shaders don't add to that sort of gameplay as far as I can tell, from my experience Shaders add to the level of emmersion, they help to suck the player into your world. Here's a story:

Once upon a time, I owned a C64, and I had some games I loved to play on it such as Ultima III and Rally speedway, by todays standards, these games visually are worse than garbage, but the game play was what kept us playing them.

Today visuals sell. Even I am guilty of looking at the back of game boxes at the screenshots of games (although usually I will try and download a demo of a game before making a purchase $80+ for a game here in Aus is a little hairy). I have played some games which I found beautiful from a visual perspective, but the game didn't keep me comming back to play it. Morrowind is an example of this (I know there are thousands of people who love this game, and great! thats what games are about pleasing your target market, I however didn't enjoy playing it despit the fact it looked lovely).

Anyway my little rant, Shaders while great don't through their use make a great game.
Cheers

#14 I must admit I'm coming up short on this, too.

Perhaps we should expand the rules to include shader graphics that are so immersive or enhances the game so greatly that the game simply wouldn't be the same without? Or is that a cop-out?

Are Ben's suggestions of night/heat vision valid? Or is that an enhancement too?

This doesn't have to be a complex game--even 2D would work. Any ideas?

#15 I think that shaders can really help a FPS or FPCS, first person combat simulator, as I like to call mine :), look better. For someone making a multiplayer FPS, Torque already gives you most of the code you need to get going, and shaders are only the icing on the cake. Since the FPS market is so competitive, shaders might be just the thing to get someone to look at your game and potentially buy it.

#16 Well, I wouldn't call the shaders for night/heat vision in Splinter Cell an enhancement. Without them the game would be broken, since they're vital to the gameplay. AFAIK there's no easy/viable alternative to shaders for the heat vision.

#17 Ben, I know you weren't serious.

I didn't mean "I am largely unimpressed by TSE" even though that is EXACTLY what I typed. What I meant was: I haven't suddenly decided to jump on the TSE bandwagon because it looks so cool. And yes, it DOES look cool and has massive wow-power.

The way I see it, Garage Games has held up its end of the bargain to create an engine that rivals the latest technology. The least we (game developers, coders, artists) can do is make the best of that foundation by building solid and fun games. Instead, some developers use Torque as a crutch, and to create pretty screenshots.

Think Tanks is very solid, both in execution and community. Think Tanks can stand on its own- even if it used the Unreal Tournament engine, Q3 Engine or the aging Quake Engine. Its simply that solid. The added capabilities of TSE would be the icing on the cake.

I've seen all kinds of heat/night vision before splinter cell. I'm not sure what Metal Gear Solid used, or Aliens v Predator (the first one). Were shaders used back then?

#18

Quote:Visuals and Sounds are NOT a core part of gameplay, regardless how crucial they are to the puzzle and environment.

Wrong. Here is one example of a great FUN game that is nothing BUT eyecanday and ear candy!

There are many other games that rely almost solely on sounds for their game mechanics and "special" effects for feedback. So making a blanket statement that visuals and sounds are not a core part of gameplay is just wrong. If the game would not exist without the visuals and sounds then they are empirically CORE to the gameplay.

Just as an example play ANY game, even Tetris without SOUND, and the gameplay will suffer. Sound is so rudimentary and fundemental that it is often over looked as secondary. Even in a puzzle game like Tetris the sounds as simple as they are supply a much needed feedback loop, move to a First Person Shooter and there is definately no argument there.

#19 Personally. I can't think of any gameplay that can't be done without shaders. Shaders are just a tool. Personally the fact that there are shaders in the next-gen Torque is not what excites me. The restructuring of the entire engine, practically, excites me. Once you use GFX you will NOT want to use raw API calls anymore, ever. If you're a Direct3D programmer you'll look at the D3D calls for Vertex Buffers and go 'ewwwww'.

And that's not even mentioning the materials system. TSE will be fantastic, not because of the shaders, but because of the improvments made to the subsystems which easily allows shaders to be integrated. If that makes sense.

#20 I remember seeing a vertex shader demo where there were like 100 men running (in place) on the screen at once--is that what you're talking about?