An example of what city immersion would look like in a truly next gen Open World game...

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An example of what city immersion would look like in a truly next gen Open World game...

While there are limited exceptions here and there, but when we are talking about the entire city or downtown areas as a whole, currently there are no open world games, not GTA, not CP2077, not Watchdogs series etc that have internal structures viewable through windows in skyscrapers, or otherwise large buildings in mass, as in largely applied to the entire open world city at large... For example think back to one of the Jason Bourne movies in which he gets the combination to the safe/code by using a binocular to scope out that CIA director's office etc etc...

They say all the world is a stage, but so is in gaming... the GPU only draws what you are looking at in any given moment, if you head turns around, all the scenes behind you stop being rendered (culling), but since its done so well and effectively you never realize it. In all open world games to limit resource exhaustion there is dynamic bubble around the player's current position in which NPCs and NPC vehicles are spawned in and rendered within the radius of that bubble/sphere... the rest of the city that is outside of the bubble is lifeless, static and otherwise dead... if you move fast enough sometimes in certain situations the player can outrun the bubble/sphere and realize a situation in which he suddenly turns the street corner and see no cars, no NPC players, when it was just full of people and vehicles a few moments prior before he turned the corner, which is very immersion breaking and goes to show the open world is in the end ultimately still a facade...

But there are different layers of facade-ness, so to speak. In all open world games the NPC/cars/assets that are spawned/rendered within a radius bubble sphere of the player are done so rather in a dumb manner and it's not done smartly... What I mean by this is if you get into a nasty crash at an intersection, and bust out some traffic lights, with severe cars getting totaled or caught on fire, but then drive a couple blocks down (enough for your bubble/sphere to cross out of the location of the incident/intersection) and do a U-turn and come back then everything is gone! or replaced with a perfectly fine scene as if nothing bad had happened... so there is not even the semblance of a semi-permanence or quasi-persistence in these open world games...

What they COULD do, to make it more immersive and SEEM more realistic, is whenever despawning an area that had anything out of the ordinary happen (a major car wreck definitely would be in such a category) it writes the assets and configurations to memory or even to disk, so basically saves a configuration database of which car types involved, the NPCs within each car, etc etc and writes that to a stack as a push... then when needed, when the player comes back to the same location, it pops it back out but with a "turn based" (CPU) processing based on the time that has passed... so say the player went out of range during the beginning phrases of the car wreck scene, depending upon on much time has passed since he went away when he comes back to the scene the game will intelligently guess what stage in the car wreck cleanup the area should be in, so not only realistically rendering back the cars, NPCs etc involved but also setting the stage currently so that it matches the time that has passed (most car accidents have a progression from accident to cleanup to ambulances being called if it was severe enough to finally the tow truck taking totaled cars away to the junk yard etc)

So imagine you want to people-watch as a player in a large open world urban environment.... one of the things you might want to do is watch people enter their office buildings during the day and finally watch them all exit in the evening when workday finishes... A shortcut way to go about this for example would be making all the window offices in a particular skyrise building visible, so that the windows are real, and the desks and offices immediately behind these windows are also real... but no other offices, hallways, rooms, structures, etc beneath/behind the outermost layer of the buildings actually exists, but since they are all blocked by the outer window offices, the illusion is never discovered and doesn't make a difference.... so you watch a NPC walk on the street and head towards his office building, then he enters the building, and then moments later you see him (through one of the office windows) show up at his office and sit as his desk to start his workday... (assuming he has office desk etc)... then if you get binoculars you can even see what he is typing on his computer and it appears to be accounting spreadsheet or accounting related work... and after five he shuts off his computer and exits his office, minutes later he is shown appearing out of the building and walking home headed to the nearest car garage or public transportation...

While this scene seems overly complicated, there are a lot of shortcuts that can be taken to give the illusion of this immersion wouldn't have to physically simulate it (nor render parts that cannot be directly visible) and this simplifies the process and makes it scalable where it can be applied to hundreds or thousands of NPCs throughout the city in any particular day/night cycle... for example when the NPC enters the building he as a character is no longer visible and in fact effectively despawned... now just like in turn-based games its no longer taxing the GPU and becomes a guesswork of CPU calculations (much like say SimCity or Cities Skylines etc) in which the game simply calculates the math of how long on average it would take him from entering the building to showing up at his window office... it can be a simple calculation or if need be it can take into account how tall the building is, how high up is his office, or even incorporate other "math" or formula based such like based on a preset elevator capacity and speed and the number of floors it has to traverse (how tall the building is) and the number of elevators that exists etc etc ... now the elevator doesn't even have to exists as an asset and is never rendered, here elevator is simply a math construct that serves to more realistic functionally guesstimate a more accurate time that it takes from entering building to arriving at office... so it can easily simulate that for thousands or tens of thousands of NPCs without breaking a sweat... so say the game calculates a set time for this particular NPC and then when time is up, the NPC is respawned but this time respawned in his window office where he is now visible again to the player... everything in between from the time he entered the building to the time he showed up at his office for all intents and purposes didn't exists, he was despawned that entire time...

Say a particular office building that most of the workers from that office come from a certain part of the town that uses a certain highway... so if you cause a major wreck on that highway that morning, and then fast travel to that office, you would see the workers arrive to work that day a bit late/later at the office... so its not that the game is rendering all office workers and following them from their apartment to their office, its that it using statistics, formula tables, and other shortcuts, so that it isn't as resource intensive since they aren't being kept track in real-time (and in fact are despawned most of the time and only exists a probability function etc) but it still emulates the immersion of say from a functional perspective if a major wreck occured on a highway leading to the office building then it would make sense many workers would be arriving a little later that day etc .... its these small things that add together to make an immersion that is greater than the sum of there parts...

Instead right now in CP2077, the player turns around, and when turn his head back, the cars are all gone or instantly replaced with a respawn of a different set of cars on the street.... yeah.... that ain't no next gen open world game fo sure


There are other short cut optimizations that can be applied to this method whilst still retaining the illusion of immersion but this is just one example of how we can add immersion to next gen Open World game by in this instance immersively simulating/emulating a quasi-realistic foot traffic pattern of hundreds if not thousands of NPCs that arrive to work in a busy downtown skyrise district early in the morning and leave for home later in the evening....
 
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Before the 'new generation' of games, this thing that will not be reality (fight with the economy) ... we will have to solve the current generation of games ... and AI. And if anyone wants to venture into the new generations, good luck ... they will sell little ...

:)
 
If you think that's possible, look at what CP77 did to consoles.

Consoles are the big reason we don't get -truly- big games any more. They simply use obsolete hardware and cause games that want to be profitable to need to shackle themselves to said obsolete hardware to not go bankrupt.

A game like this would have to be PC only. That's a huge loss of potential markets that the corpo suits will simply not be so eager to fund.

I think what you're looking for is true simulation games, like Kenshi, or Dwarf Fortress. Those games do a 'true' simulation of the world, at a cost of being hard to get into (The UI is atrocious), as well as lacking graphics. (You simply don't have the resources, even on the best PCs in the world, to simulate the entire world -and- have every character's physics calculated).
 
If you think that's possible, look at what CP77 did to consoles.

Consoles are the big reason we don't get -truly- big games any more. They simply use obsolete hardware and cause games that want to be profitable to need to shackle themselves to said obsolete hardware to not go bankrupt.

A game like this would have to be PC only. That's a huge loss of potential markets that the corpo suits will simply not be so eager to fund.

I think what you're looking for is true simulation games, like Kenshi, or Dwarf Fortress. Those games do a 'true' simulation of the world, at a cost of being hard to get into (The UI is atrocious), as well as lacking graphics. (You simply don't have the resources, even on the best PCs in the world, to simulate the entire world -and- have every character's physics calculated).


The city in NightCity already exists, its the everything else part that needs to be created...
Perhaps CDPR can license the city to other developers or gamers
Perhaps the modding community can make enhancements or even charge them as paid third party addons if they are good enough to market, see PMDG and FSlabs and Orbx of the Microsoft flight simulator ecosystems...

As for it would have to be PC only, I agree with that, but there are optimizations that can be made to quasi-simulate the entire environment (I already went into some detail on how to go about this in my long post above) in which I could reasonably see something like this possible in a modern high end PC system... say 128GB memory, at least 8 cores or above, multi TB Nvme etc

I was not asking for a 'true' simulation of the world, nor "simulate the entire world -and- have every character's physics calculated"... however now that you brought that up, the way to go about that is to make a hybrid gaming system in which the baseline version of the game is local/offline just like how cyberpunk 2077 exists right now, but if the user wanted to toggle max realism he would have to 1) be online persistently and 2) have a fast internet connection... so there is a super realistic persistent world instance ran inside a datacenter by the game developers with all the NPCs being calculated and stats for all NPCs, realistic unique voice banks, super high res textures etc etc... and when on as needed basis this information is downstreamed into the players world to make it more enhanced realisms...

Take the Flight Simulator 2020 for example, its not exactly game streaming when compared to Stadia or GeForceNow, but it does take advantage of microsoft datacenter and live streams the entire world no matter where you are flying... the entire world of bing data is like 2 petabytes of data per Microsoft, no gamers system or harddrive can handle that size... yet since it only streams in places that you fly, this how Microsoft made it work... since the base installer of the Flight Simulator is only 200GB, that fits on a harddrive, and if you lose internet connection it reverts back to a base level of detail but once your internet connection is back up, the detail gets enchanced again.... so yes I can see a hybrid open world game in which you always have the offline singleplayer component but when you are online and have high internet speed the game can stream in the details and leverage the massive datacenter power that no individual PC could furnish by itself....
 
The city in NightCity already exists, its the everything else part that needs to be created...
Perhaps CDPR can license the city to other developers or gamers
Perhaps the modding community can make enhancements or even charge them as paid third party addons if they are good enough to market, see PMDG and FSlabs and Orbx of the Microsoft flight simulator ecosystems...

As for it would have to be PC only, I agree with that, but there are optimizations that can be made to quasi-simulate the entire environment (I already went into some detail on how to go about this in my long post above) in which I could reasonably see something like this possible in a modern high end PC system... say 128GB memory, at least 8 cores or above, multi TB Nvme etc

I was not asking for a 'true' simulation of the world, nor "simulate the entire world -and- have every character's physics calculated"... however now that you brought that up, the way to go about that is to make a hybrid gaming system in which the baseline version of the game is local/offline just like how cyberpunk 2077 exists right now, but if the user wanted to toggle max realism he would have to 1) be online persistently and 2) have a fast internet connection... so there is a super realistic persistent world instance ran inside a datacenter by the game developers with all the NPCs being calculated and stats for all NPCs, realistic unique voice banks, super high res textures etc etc... and when on as needed basis this information is downstreamed into the players world to make it more enhanced realisms...

Take the Flight Simulator 2020 for example, its not exactly game streaming when compared to Stadia or GeForceNow, but it does take advantage of microsoft datacenter and live streams the entire world no matter where you are flying... the entire world of bing data is like 2 petabytes of data per Microsoft, no gamers system or harddrive can handle that size... yet since it only streams in places that you fly, this how Microsoft made it work... since the base installer of the Flight Simulator is only 200GB, that fits on a harddrive, and if you lose internet connection it reverts back to a base level of detail but once your internet connection is back up, the detail gets enchanced again.... so yes I can see a hybrid open world game in which you always have the offline singleplayer component but when you are online and have high internet speed the game can stream in the details and leverage the massive datacenter power that no individual PC could furnish by itself....

ONE thing i know for sure...

Im playing here with a i5, 16 GB RAM. From this I conclude categorically and emphasize: Cyberpunk engineers are brilliant!
 
Perhaps CDPR can license the city to other developers or gamers
WAIT, HOOOOL' UP!

That won't even happening in a freakin dream. Why should they give up their own intellectual property if they have the chance to turn things around 180°.
 
WAIT, HOOOOL' UP!

That won't even happening in a freakin dream. Why should they give up their own intellectual property if they have the chance to turn things around 180°.

I said LICENSE not open source or public domain

Even Microsoft, the king of software, had to license its Flight Simulator code/source to Lockheed Martin to make a few bucks when there was a downturn in the FS industry
 
To me the most impressive feature of Red Engine is how fast time skip feature loads. It's like 2 seconds and I got night or day if I want to. It's even more impressive becouse my processor is below minimum requirements, and I am playing on HDD.

Never saw "time skip" done so well in any game.
 
To me the most impressive feature of Red Engine is how fast time skip feature loads. It's like 2 seconds and I got night or day if I want to. It's even more impressive becouse my processor is below minimum requirements, and I am playing on HDD.

Never saw "time skip" done so well in any game.

Just a tip, its like another game in SSD, much better. When possible and if possible, try this. :)
 
I said LICENSE not open source or public domain

Even Microsoft, the king of software, had to license its Flight Simulator code/source to Lockheed Martin to make a few bucks when there was a downturn in the FS industry
Missed the point I tried to make.

I wanted to say that that would even worsen their reputation as devs, as giving away a project that you fucked up tells that you dont know how to do stuff.
 
Damn! I believed the hype of your Forum tittle. I clicked on it to see just how a truly next gen game would look and and got a wall...scratch that.....two walls of text instead. I feel cheated.

So many knowledgeable people here. You should get together and make an Open world game. Let us know when your done.
Seriously guys; just type unity engine or unreal engine in your search engine.
 
Makes me wonder what will happen when streaming games become more mainstream. I can see future huge open world games being streamed where the servers do all the heavy lifting and processing.
 
...

They say all the world is a stage, but so is in gaming... the GPU only draws what you are looking at in any given moment, if you head turns around, all the scenes behind you stop being rendered (culling), but since its done so well and effectively you never realize it. In all open world games to limit resource exhaustion there is dynamic bubble around the player's current position in which NPCs and NPC vehicles are spawned in and rendered within the radius of that bubble/sphere... the rest of the city that is outside of the bubble is lifeless, static and otherwise dead... ...
Except, there is one tiny little problem with this: reality works the same way, in fact. Quote:

"Werner Heisenberg, among others, interpreted the mathematics to mean that reality doesn’t exist until observed. “The idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively in the same sense as stones or trees exist, independently of whether or not we observe them ... is impossible,” he wrote." Source: https://blogs.scientificamerican.co...uantum-theory-actually-tell-us-about-reality/ .

And obviously, if "smallest parts" do not exist objectively unless being observed - nothing made of those smallest parts exists, too.

Mind-blowing, ain't it? :)
 
Hmm... this is a most interesting exposition you have made with all sorts of wishful projections which show how a single human imagination can always exceed the capabilities of the machines that other humans have currently devised.

In essence, science fiction has always revolved around that premise, first we had books, then films, then games, each genre encompassing our best attempts to bring the 'futurist' vision to life by different means, and each subject to the limitations of technology in one way or another as to how immersive that realisation can be.

In the long and winding road towards that ever elusive popular sci-fi vision of full sensory 3D / 360 degree immersive experience, (Star Trek's 'holodeck', or Caprica's VR) the 'lesser' forms of experience have all been at the time ( and still are) the very best ways available 'right now' for humans to 'dream the dream' created by writers, cinematographers, and game developers.

It's interesting that in CDPR's 'Cyberpunk 2077' we have an illustration of a screen based game that should (and does to an extent) reflect our current technological ability to progress the viewer/participant/player along that road, across the population as a whole. And of course therein lies the issue... because as you have aptly described, the experience is 'not enough'. It's still so much of an obvious simulation that it's not reached the 'Uncanny Valley' of our perceptions, it's not 'astounded' us, it's not taken our sensory inputs over so totally that we are lost to imagine how it can be improved or that in fact we forget that it's an 'it', with a constructed environment and can realistically believe it's 'Real' ...no, not yet.... we still dream of that....

The reasons are many and there's already been some interesting responses to your post which touch on some of them. Yes, we have super duper high powered 'Cray' computers and other tech in our world, which way exceeds what was deployed to make Night City and dwarfs what we poor users proudly display and use, be that PC, laptop, or console. Monster processors are not available to use in gaming, not deemed 'practical', not commercially viable, not affordable and so we struggle on with a blend of 'the best we can do at this time, in this market, at this price, at this technological pace of growth', It's a compromise, and we know it and I guess we all hate it.

When a game product comes along in which our long held sci fi dreams are unduly invested (CDPR marketing hype, plus inherited wishfulness, and 'we ought to be able to be here by now' ), then it carries the full brunt of the roller coaster of demand. As the lag-flying advance guard for our 'next level of thrill' it's instantly our 'drug of choice' overflowing with 'gimme, gimme, gimme' demand level. And what happens, duh well predictably it fails to reach those lofty heights and like the Duke of York's men 'all comes tumbling down' We reach for the stars and end up maybe having gone a few klicks down the road on the number 49 bus.. and it stings...

'Ain't there one damn song that can make me.... break down and cry' - David Bowie

But still we dream. Your forward looking piece contains within it those similar elements, the vision, the statement of our continuing desire to 'be there' in more immersive detail and the roadblocks and (as Montgomery Scott would remind us' ) those damn 'Laws of Physics' that will inevitably hold us back from the 'perfect wave'.

What you described as going so fast that you outpace the reality of the game, and re-enter a world in which time had changed back to a blank 'did it ever happen here' state reminded me of the Einstein's Law about speed of light...the game isn't letting us break that speed limit and escape the consequences. How ironic that as 'V' we are living in a game world in which 'braindancing' allows us to revisit incidences retrospectively and pick minutiae from the chatter, replay the sequences and bathe again in the flashback consequences of our actions and those of others. Yet in the #RealWorld we can't yet have a Night City game where we can do that. Our actions and past misadventures are ephemeral and wiped behind us, like a road worker conveniently sweeping the dead bodies, and wrecked cars under the digital carpet. It's that scene in 'Westworld' where at night the cleaning trucks pull up, recover and repair, touch up and camouflage and next day ' hey, it never happened'

Much of our dilemma is that war between science, technology and our imagination's demand. You also wrote of a world situation that is not unlike 'Schrodinger's Cat'...(and someone's already brought in Heisenberg's Principle!!) in that the elusive imagined NPCs going about their daily lives, in countless tasks in multiple locations, in ever changing logical locations in the game world should be 'alive' all the time we are logged in and yet without us being there to see them the engine HAS to currently treat them as if they otherwise don't exist., until that short fleeting moment we need to see them, and then off they go into the dustbin of non-observance again with a turn of V's head.

We're all dreaming of computers and game parameters we can't yet have.. 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep'? Do Gamers Dream of Clockwork NPCs ??... invisibly checking in at their desks, chatting by the watercooler and riding the NCart home to their significant others or to feed Nibbles' relatives. We all want to be voyeurs in a live braindance where we drop in and out of a game world where 'more real than real is our goal here' and we can peer away at the 24/7 lives of digital ants through the windows of V's Apartment or Mansion.

You are right, we war with our expectations and we are all stuck on the endless treadmill of disappointment. Gamers are amongst the most demanding of individuals; we want to keep pushing Scotty for more speed, whether the current technology available in the commercial video game producing market 'cannae take it' or not. Frustratingly, as you portray we WANT gaming companies to want the same as us, see past the corpo blindfolds of 'what sells faster and for more profit and costs less to make' than they do, and strive to create 'The Future', and we want it all NOW or at least in Patch 1.3. That's our nature both as humans and as gamers and until we really are in the Matrix and can enjoy games that are fuelled by such tech that we 'really cannot tell the difference' between 'virtual' and 'reality' I doubt we are even gonna stop dreaming of how this can be done and why it should be done.

No doubt a lot of the decision makers in gaming companies wish that we would simply 'accept our lot' and suffer the limitations. Game development companies probably think their audiences are a pain in the *** . They probably wish that we would follow sci-fi writer Jack Womack's mantra and 'Put the Future Behind Us'. As you wrote, we want them to invest in the tech, push the envelope and drive that future forward, even though we might end up paying $200 instead of $60... we want to see the capability of gaming desktop PCs and future consoles improve in a 'supersize me' way.. but we also need to be able to afford them. Catch 22.

Right now we are at a rather boring stage where the 'mass market' (that horribly practical and utterly limiting harness on our minds) is firmly stuck still on 'screen-based' experience.

'Ah, a keyboard... how quaint' - Scotty

Regardless, we want it to be ever more detailed. You have made some excellent suggestions here, but really, what we all want is to escape the screen and BE THERE... so we should all be driving the VR market as fast as it can go. Hopefully one day we are back on that speedway In Night City and do a wheelie to race back to see the results of our latest chaos while the flames still burn and the Delos/NCPD ground crew haven't had time to do a hard reset !
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Makes me wonder what will happen when streaming games become more mainstream. I can see future huge open world games being streamed where the servers do all the heavy lifting and processing.
This is a really good point and indeed a potential route to empower the user way beyond the petty limits of retail affordablity of kit, and to escape the constant need to upgrade it...and as you say to remotely access the power of much more serious computing.

Alongside this we will need the serious investment in superspeed broadband technology and often that is hindered by Govt policy, monopolies and slow progress in infrastructure roll-outs.
 
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