Pre 1999 graphics hardware can be regarded as systems with hard wired fragment & vertex shaders. Programmable shaders can be thought of making previously hard wired features accessible in software. But the fundamental principles of dumping 3D models to the graphics pipeline remains the same. Point transformations, hidden surface elimination, clipping, texturing, etc., must be still done the same way.

I’ve also used plant solutions like SpeedTree, they are good. They are still a small portion of the equation though.

Dynamic water/liquid I think just needs to be implemented, I’ve seen plugins for some engines, and there are some demos that do it. Most newer games seem to use normals and a shader with particles for collision.

Besides simple shaders, there have been significant improvements in lighting, for instance soft shadows, ambient occlusion, and environment mapping. You wouldn’t find these in a ’99 era engine. Particle systems are getting more complex(+physics), but I think we’re 1 generation of hardware away from seeing the really cool stuff – some of the water techdemo’s come to mind.

I haven’t used SpeedTree myself, but it seems like roughly the equivalent to MakeHuman for trees and shrubbery.

I’m not sure the term “quality” is very appropriate these days. Many professionally titles look fantastic, but they are riddled with bugs, and the game play is totally linear… and boring. That’s the best you will see, despite publishers pour a ton of money into these things.

The issues with bugs are the worst. Some games can’t be played for more than 5 minutes without the damn thing crashing. Games have become too complex and the project deadlines too stringent. The end result you get is a game that needs 10 patches for it to be playable.

I guess using an existing game engine has the advantage that some issues have been ironed out by the licensor. But that doesn’t stop you from introducing new ones ;)

You use the id engine for example you’ll end up writing thousands of lines of code just for a single character control. You also have to handle your own data types and do garbage cleanup. You might as well write from scratch.

With engines like Leadwerks and propriety licensed engines from major studios everything is highly abstracted while maintaining flexibility, and that’s how development has evolved and should be. It’s counter-productive to back-step with low level API code.

On that same note though none of the engines have things like collision morphing(the algorithm for meshes you use to emulate damage). So if you want bouncing boobs or car damage you’ll have to do it on your own with a state machine and physics engine.

This is just engine discussion though. The main problem is content development. A highly skilled modeler takes on average a week to do a single model because of many reasons such as poly reduction, texturing etc..

Non-Active objects are simple with the exception of quality texturing. Zbrush is about the only practical solution for that and they micro manage all the aspects of the interface like blender and 3d max do so it becomes a headache to work with.

MakeHuman is about the only software I feel has evolved for this problem, and their roadmap indicates the game dev features wont show for years, and most of the CG community want that project dead because it threatens job security..never-mind the blatant innovation is presents.

Also for noobs: Literally the only difference between a 3D game developed in 1999, and a ‘next gen’ one on the PS3/x360/PC is physics, and normal maps. The reflections and such are just new shaders.

@tj,
Thanks for showing us Leadwerks, I like what I see.

Also, XNA sucks for anything remotely complicated. It’s simple, and fast, but the managed system doesn’t allow for much freedom in memory and asset management, and the MS overhead is pretty high. If you want to make a game, learn C++ and use DirectX or OpenGL.

Console development isn’t really feasible with a system like this. Unless they make something like the XNA Connect system, it will be near impossible to deploy anything playable.