Is it just me, or does everyone else just not care about realism in games?

I'm confused on what technology there is out there as to how games are developed.

Does anyone here care at all about realism in a game, or is it all about gameplay. Sure gameplay is what makes a good game, but IMHO, I think realism plays a big role in this.

I just bought World in Conflict, and started playing it, but the realism just wasn't up to my expectation.

What I mean when I talk about realism is...

• Dead guys not just "vanishing" after they die
• footprints on ground should NOT dissappear magically
• explosions and building pieces should not dissappear either
• In world of Conflict, 6 guys could be in a jeep, but if you zoom in and look through the windows of the jeep, all you see is 2 guys.

Those are some things I'm talking about. Sure if you left dead guys and all these extra particles in the playing field, then it may get more laggy or something, but isn't there technology out there already capable of handling this kind of stuff?

There is so much realism put into the sounds of the game, and the exploding animations and the environment and even in Company of Heroes, the guy's body parts get blown up, and that's the first game I'm seen that in.

Anyways, I'm just curious to know what everyone else thinks of this. I was hoping for more realism in WOrld of Conflict, but as soon as I started playing my first game online, I saw guys dissappearing out of no where, and things just poofing. I'm like wtf is this. The graphics sounds are all great, but then these little details are just garbage.

Comments or remarks?

 

In RTS's there has to be a balance between realism and performance. WIC is already a demanding game, keeping all the characters, particles, and footprints would bring most systems down to a halt. A game is no longer a game when it runs at 3 FPS. Things "poofing" online is just lag. There's a difference between the position of the guy in the server and the drawn position on your screen. When the screen updates, it puts the guy where the server tells you computer to put him, and thus he may "poof".

 

As Lithus said, it is ALL about performance. That's one of the reasons the Ageia Physx card was even developed. It is too much for the game to keep track of every single particle and do physical interaction calculations, perform good audio/video sync, AI, pathfinding, etc., and keep up a good framerate.

BTW, if you are gaming online, make sure all the computers on your internal network have P2P software, voip, etc. kept to a minimum, to ensure you don't lag. A lot of games will tell you your latency from the server, which will give you a good idea of how far back things really are. A good latency would be < 100-150 ms.

Regards,

z.

 

For online play in World in Conflict, I'm not talking about the lag, but I was talking about I think when soldiers were capturing positions in the game.

I haven't fully understood how to play World in Conflict because I only joined a server once and tried playing, but there were guys capturing positions and then just disappearing like nothing.

As for the rest of the stuff, I assume then that all this is based on technology. I guess computer hardware hasn't advanced far enough to the point that they can handle this type of performance in a game. I'm sure there will be that day when everything that I'm talking about will appear in a game, but for now I guess there truly is nothing that can be done.

How long do I really have to wait....

 

the reason why we all get disappointed and unhappy nowadays is because we set so many expectations...

"Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed"
-Alexander Pope


lol...but who's actually going to agree with me right?

 

well i think the older games, with less "realism" are much more fun to play.

 

Hardware should be already able to handle these kind of stuff but its not yet commercialize. No one will want to spend millions to buy a super computer which also eat up lots of space to play a ultra realistic game.

Thus, as Lithus mentioned, game developers will tend to find balance between realism and performance according to todays hardware that public can buy.

Maybe in the future when things get cheaper and this might happen.

 

There's no fog of war in WIC, so when enemies are far enough away from your units, they just disappear.

 

I don't. Is Star Wars realistic? C&C? (Green crystals and aliens? Come one...)
Beyond Good & Evil? Super Mario? The only "realistic" games I can think of are racing and sports games.
It's not realism that matters, it's suspension of disbelief. Realism means it must be like the real world (and most games take place in made-up worlds, so that makes no sense). But the world they portray must be cohesive and consistent, and maintain the illusion that it *could* be real.
But don't get it confused with realism.

Not really, no. Not efficiently. How much performance are you willing to sacrifice? How much memory consumption?
Because you'd have to sacrifice quite a bit.

What it boils down to is this:
Games aren't real. Game do not simulate reality.
Reality is complicated. Computers are too slow. Computers will always be too slow. Two hundred years from now, we will still be unable to simulate reality.

Graphics in games are fundamentally unchanging. When a character moves, his model isn't modified. It's the same model that's used for all units of this type, and if we had to actually modify it, we'd have to store a separate copy of the model. Now let's say we want to model realistic damage on your tanks. Sure, we can do that, but then we have to store separate models with separate deformations and dents for each of our twenty tanks on the map. That's twenty times the memory consumption.

And if your game can handle, say, 1000 units on one level, how many of them are you willing to set aside for "dead bodies"? Once 999 units have died, is it ok to only be able to have *one* unit alive? The remaining models are dead, after all, and if we make new ones, we get more than the computer can handle, and the game will run like crap. We have the 1000 unit cap, so wouldn't it make sense to give the living units priority? If we have 300 alive, 700 dead, and I build a new unit, should the game:
1: Crash because we exceeded the limit
2: Cancel construction because we've hit the limit
3: Remove one of the dead bodies

No hardware is capable of handling this. Better hardware might raise the limits abit (then you can replace 1000 with 1500 or 3000 in the above example. But it doesn't solve the problem. Sooner or later we'll still have to recycle units. And if the computer can suddenly handle 3000 units, the player wants to be able to control 3000. Saying "You can only use 1000, because the remaining 2000 are set aside for modelling dead bodies" is just stupid.

 

thats why its just a "game"