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Unreal Engine 4Понеделник, юни 11th, 2012 Това е правилна Запознайте се с автора, но има ужасно много да се вълнува в два клипа по-горе. Без да обръща внимание на много стилизирана и фантазия вид на демото, UE4 изглежда, че ще бъде невероятно средство. В реално време на глобалното осветление! Това е масивна. Милиони частици. Фактът, че цялата работа е в редактора! Разширяването на функционалността на Kismet. Което също е голям проблем, защото това означава, че не е нужно да си програмист да се мъчат с играта механика в двигателя. Фактът, че те възнамеряват да го даде на UDK лечение по-рано, отколкото те са с игра на UE3 и т.н. и т.н. Аз се опитвам да се реши по какъв начин да скочи върху моите лични проекти, базирани на опита ми от последните няколко години. В крайна сметка съм дошъл до заключението, че не ми пука, ако нещо не работи онлайн или на ниска спец. хардуер. Това е скучен загриженост, и има потенциал да сортирате дизайн неща в обратната, като се започне с най-голямата пречка. Също така проблемът е, че в дългосрочен план, решими . Така че махай, аз отивам да се научат UDK, с оглед извършване на работа през UE4 в една или две години.
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Shapes on a painting are just shapes on a canvas unless they start acting on each other and really, in a sense, multiplying. A good painting has a gathering, interactive build up in it. It’s a psychic build-up, but it’s also a pure energy build up… …there’s no such thing as a neutral gesture, because by the very fact of being there, it draws a certain amount of perceptual attention. Let’s say it drags a weight of .06 in the overall thing; well, then it’s got to give back- I don’t know how much- and some elements contribute more than others. If it’s drawing .06 in attention, let’s say it’s got to give back .12 in energy. Otherwise there’s no reason for its being there… …at this point I began to recognize the difference between imagery and physicality, that everything had both imagery and a physicality, and furthermore that for me, the moment a painting took on any kind of image, the minute I could recognize it as having any relationship to nature, of any kind, to me the painting went flat. The disk paintings (above) were his last works that could be described as paintings. MOMA has one of them in it’s collection, and this is what is written about it on it’s “MOMA highlights” page; This untitled work is a convex, spray-painted disk held a foot or so out from the wall by a central post. Its subtle, tactile surface modulates delicately from center to edge, and it is softly lit from four angles, creating a cloverleaf pattern of shadow. The white center of the disk can seem to lie level with the white wall, so that the eye spends time trying to understand what it sees—what is nearer and what is farther, what is solid and what is immaterial light, or even light’s absence. For Irwin, the result is “this indeterminate physicality with different levels of weight and density, each on a different physical plane. It [is] very beautiful and quite confusing, everything starting and reversing.” Evading confinement by the rectangle of the conventional painting, Irwin’s disks literally extend past their own boundaries—spread out into their environment, which is as much a part of them as their own substance. The idea, in part, extends the Abstract Expressionist notion of an infinite, all–encompassing, allover field, but with the qualification that for Irwin, “To be an artist is not a matter of making paintings or objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perceptions.” After making this series he abandoned painting altogether and started the “light and space” movement- for example one of his later works; It’s interesting to think about in relation to a virtual space. The idea of presence. Game designers spend so much time trying to make a space believable, that the idea of creating some kind of perceptual dissonance doesn’t fit with the convention. I guess something like UE4 (in the previous post) will have the capacity to use things like particles, light and shadows in very complex ways. Anyway, here’s the great man giving a lecture aged 80 something; This is proper geekery, but there’s an awful lot to get excited about in the two videos above. Ignoring the very stylized and fantasy look of the demo, UE4 looks like it’s going to be an amazing tool. Realtime global illumination! That’s massive. Millions of particles. The fact that the whole thing is running in the editor! Extending the functionality of Kismet. Which is also a big deal, because it means you don’t have to be a programmer to muck around with game mechanics in the engine. The fact that they intend to give it the UDK treatment sooner than they did with UE3 etc etc… I’ve been trying to decide on which way to jump on my personal projects, based on my experiences of the last couple of years. In the end I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t care if something doesn’t run online or on low spec hardware. It’s a boring concern, and has the potential to sort of design stuff in reverse, starting with the biggest bottleneck. Also the problem is, in the long run, solvable. So sod it, I’m going to learn UDK, with a view to doing work in UE4 in a year or two. In day one of the Critical Play talks at MOMA (above) curator Christian Rattemeyer, around 1.30.35, launches into a question which leaves the gaming academics on the back foot for the rest of the conversation. He uses Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, that “still looks like an incredibly strange painting”, as an example of the ability of art to propose radical models that “cut so radically against what we imagine to be even the most marvellous moments of contemporary life”. He goes on “…the examples you’re giving in technology seem like they might date quicker… where are those examples in games that have the effect of radically unhinging us from what surrounds us?” It is an incredible painting, but comes after the technology of painting had evolved for thousands of years. Perspective, the ability to accurately render human likeness, the camera obscura and all the developments in mixing and preserving colour took an astonishingly long time to develop. It reminds me of David Deutsch’s Ted Talk “A New Way To Explain Explanation”. “I bet those prehistoric cave artists wished they knew how to draw better”. The vast majority of painting does not propose a radical model for its time, it simply reflects the prevailing know-how and mental model or world view. Once those practices become so established that they’re conventions, then there’s something to pull down. Picasso was reaching into the past and borrowing from African culture, with all the knowledge of his time and his own immense talent to draw from. Real time shading, rendering, animation and so on has not yet even got to the point where it’s realistic. It’s all in a state of fairly rapid evolution. Not to mention that there’s no real equivalent for visual primitivism in games- using retro pixellation carries none of the associations. And yet games most certainly are self-referential. Grand Theft Auto, for example, is Pac Man in the simulation of a city. It would not be hard to imagine that some day video games should be able to simulate different mental models and states of mind. Particularly if voice input becomes very sophisticated. Maybe even voice input enhanced with on-the-fly FACS analysis of the player. Input is one of the key factors, I think. If the player is simply navigating a space, then the contexts created by that space are of limited meaning. But if the visual qualities of the space are influenced by emotion and intent, that would be quite something. A shameless rip-off of Immersion if ever there was one (and Errol Morris “Fog of War”)- right down to the autocue, the remote control and interviewer. But quite funny, despite feeling very contrived. The poor old dears. I guess the oddest thing about this ad is the idea that it’s supposedly aimed at people over the age of 17. I’ve started learning about game design, and what a wonderful field it is! Many of my favorite areas of interest are relevant in this eclectic discipline- aesthetics, psychology, identity, neuroscience, technology etc. I’ve started looking at this because I’m interested in the user experience of what I posted about a few weeks ago in “Contact Through Images”. It seems likely that the combined effect of the internet, new reading devices, explorable 3D and so on, will create new ways of creating and interacting with media. That’s obviously a bit of an understatement. We know it and can see it now, but what’s unclear is how much this will blur boundaries between the different media. In his book “A Theory of Fun” , Raph Koster claims that; Mere entertainment becomes art when the communicative element in the work is either novel or exceptionally well done. It really is that simple. It has the power to alter how people perceive the world around them. And it’s hard to imagine a medium more powerful in that regard than video games, where you are presented with interactivity and a virtual world that reacts to your choices. “Well done” and “novel” mean, basically, craft. You can have well-crafted entertainment that fails to reach the level of art. The upper reaches of art are usually subtler achievements, They are pieces of work that you can return to again and again and keep learning something new. The analogy for a game would be one you can replay over and over again and keep discovering new things. I remember seeing Van Gogh for the first time. I had seen the images many times beforehand, and then walked into the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam and was really rearranged by them. It was an extraordinary experience, one that is no doubt repeated on a daily basis as thousands pass through the doors of that museum. The depth and movement in the paint creates a psychological sensation and emotionality, that most people wouldn’t have experienced before, through the medium of paint. But I don’t think I’ll ever get anything markedly different from that, other than whatever is created by own internal state when I’m looking at them. The almost psychedelic sensation is his achievement and there isn’t much more to learn from it. All the rest of it had been done before. That isn’t a bad thing, I just think that we tend to overstate the importance of individual achievements when they mark an influential departure point. Collectively those achievements add up to alot. But it creates a resistance to perceived value in spheres where those achievements are seemingly eroded by technical sophistication. Especially in a climate where the value of art is so heavily influenced by it serving the purpose of being interior decor for the rich. But, you know, who cares? Shakespeare wrote plays for entertainment. Dickens wrote episodic narratives that were read out from street corners, to people who couldn’t read. The art market is, in so many ways, unbelievably conservative. In a way pursuing that kind of value can be limiting. It always strikes me that video game makers are at once beset by the idiot demands of their market, and by their own sense of what purposes are served by their medium. The latter is way more corrosive than the former. I think things are going to get much more interesting as elements of game design become relevant to the production of online media that isn’t purely aimed at being entertainment. According to Tony Bartel of Gamestop; “By all indicators, we anticipate Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 will be the biggest entertainment launch of all time. As of today, the number of pre-order reservations we’ve taken for the game is the highest for any title we’ve ever sold in our 6,200 store network”. UPDATE: According to Activision, the game broke the record for single-day sales of an entertainment property, earning $310 million in North America and the UK alone in it’s first 24 hours. That equates to 4.7 million copies sold. The previous record was set by the GTA 4 launch in 2008, which took around the same figure world-wide. By way of comparison, The Dark Knight’s opening day was $67 million… I missed this story last week. Not that I read the mail. Internet Eyes is an online game that allows users to identify “criminals” by giving them access to Britain’s 4 million plus CCTV cameras. It aims to launch in November, players who help catch the most perps each month will win cash prizes up to £1,000. The website will also feature a rogue’s gallery of the so-called “criminals” along with a list of their offences and which internet user caught them; The instant a Viewer monitors an event, an alert can be sent directly to the owner of that live camera feed. The alert is sent along with a screen grab, identifying the image you have observed. Only the first alert received by the camera owner is accepted. The camera owner will then feedback (rate) the result of the alert. Their feedback is converted into points and entered into a Viewers monthly league table. At the end of each month the highest scoring Viewer will receive the reward money; this could be split in the event of a tie. Viewers register for free with no recurring fees. Each Viewer has 3 x alerts per month allocated to their account for free. Viewers are able to ‘top up’ their alerts through PayPal if they so desire. The free allocations of alerts are limited to prevent system abuse.