BTW, Not impressed with Max Payne at all. Textures look detailed, lighting looks impressive, models are so-so. Polygon count looks pathetic, all the walls and floors are completely flat. I would guess most of those levels only display 1000 or so polygons at a time, which is really sad for any next-gen engine.

Well I don't think things will get extreme as Otherland(getting sucked through the Internet into a virtual world), v.good book btw, damn long though. But look how far we've come over the last 100, 50, or even 20 years, and the pace of change is just getting faster and faster - the future is very exciting.

Although it's dangerous times too;
Genetic engineering - The movie Gattaca portrays a grim and frightening view of what might happen if we allow ourselves to 'enhance' humans through artificial means.

Reliance on machines - That H.G. Wells novel, I forget the name. The day the earth stood still or something similar.

Artificial intelligence - The Matrix comes to mind, note the alarming increase in CPU speed, and you can realise just how intelligent machines may get, it won't be long before they surpass us in every way.

War - It was all summed up in this quote by Einstein: "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

Edited by - IDC on July 21, 2000 7:11:30 AM

>>
According to Moore''s law:
Average CPU speed in 12-15 years(based on 800Mhz): 819,000Mhz (819Ghz).
<<

The problem is that I believe that we are reaching the limits of the current technology. Unless we find a new technology we will probably have to use more CPUs and make them larger.

it''s a nice engine and all.. but what makes the graphics so pretty in that game is really the textures. my gawd, all i have to say is the texture drawer has a friggin gift.

Octarinne: People having been saying we were reaching the limits for ages. But our CPU design keeps getting more efficient, we find better ways to cram in more transistors, we figure out how to make them use less energy, and do more.

Sure, it DOES have its limits in transistor size, but those limits won''t be reached for at least 20-30 years, and when it is, we will figure out other ways to make processors go faster.
A team at Cambridge recently figured out a way to shrink microprocessor transistors by 40,000x! And all over the world in laboratories people are working on these very problems even though they are far far in the future. There is absoloutely nothing to worry about.
Have you looked the the latest Coppermine chips? They are about half the size of a first-class stamp, and most of that is just plastic coating. And these chips manage 1Ghz+!

As others have already said in this thread, those shots are ALL about textures. The models are low poly, the environment is low poly. Those textures are from a texture GOD(s). The only problem with having textures done like that though, as someone already pointed out, is that you have to add a lot of the shadow detail in the texture, rather than letting the geometry cast the shadows (since there is no supporting geometry there). This gives the effect sometimes of not fitting into the environmental lighting, not to mention when you see the outline of the object, which looks all nice and detailed on the texture, but a disconcerting straight line where your eyes are expecting folds of, say, cloth for instance. A perfect example of this is in the image to the left of the last bottom image. Look at his right arm.