Article 2 - About graphics
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@dedgren: Thx. I dont have any yet. Im using a very basic laptop, just to internet and MS Office. Nothing heavy is demanding for now, and I dont pretend to get back to gaming at PC anytime soon.
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Before getting started, let me let you know that there have been rumors over the internet about a new sim game that received little attention lately. In these last days, it was leaked the text and the images of this new sim homepage (front page of its website):
Create your own Cities!
Create your own towns!
Create your own ghost towns!
Create your own old (or scary) touristic area!
Create your own movie!
Create your own beautiful nature scenery!
Create your own beautiful shot with image editing!
It’s up to you!
(end of the page)
It is a surprise, isn´t it? Or not?
Would you buy it?
I would. I actually did.
Sadly, for those who got a bit excited, and for the confirmation of those who were somehow suspicious about it (those who wondered: “Too good to be true”, “What kind of computer would run something like that?”, “I already saw that somewhere”), that´s not a new game, and it is not a City Builder.
It is DriveClub, a non-simulation racing game. It looks good, right? Yes, and it is not alone. There are several others games with nice looking graphics. And some of them have nice looking cities. Haven’t you already noticed that city building games are having trouble with that?
A City on Gran Turismo 6
Article 2 - About graphics
City Building is a category of game that includes a massive quantity of details to be rendered, considered and done. The problem is not only get a big city rendered, but the fact that the city must be very customized (otherwise it wouldn’t be a city builder at all). And it just get worse when you need to process a huge amount of data to decide what is going to grow, where it is going to grow and why it is growing. The city changes all the time. It is “alive”.
In some games, you walk through a scenario, or drive through it, but you always do that on a pre-made scenario, with no amount of data to be processed, equal for every user and usually it is not needed to detail every place on the city (unless you are on completely free-roam game, where you can walk or drive anywhere on the city you want). Even in the free roam case, the maximum speed of the user is usually not as high as the speed of movement of a camera of a City Builder.
That it is the reason – or at least what I believe it is – for the fact that, when compared to games released on the same year or close years, city builders looks worse than them.
But there is Sim City 4.
If you compare Sim City 4 to others from its time, it is clear that SC4 look, at least a bit, ahead from them. But it is a City builder, shouldn´t look worse than the others from its time?
Yes, it should. But SC4 got a trick: Camera restriction. What generated some complaints, the constrain of the camera to perspective view, allowing only moving horizontally and zooming, were undoubtedly the main factor for giving Sim City 4 an graphical advantage. If the camera were free, Sim City 4 would look far worse. Some BATters probably have a good explanation about why constraining the camera saved your money on not needing a Super Computer for the work and improved the appearance of everything on 2003 Sim City´s. Since I never got any serious BAT done, Im not an expert at this, so I cant get very far about this subject.
There were some few discussions on a brazilian forum (used to be www.simcitybrasil.net, but now it´s gone) about how the Sim City released in 2013 looks when compared with Sim City 4. Maybe this subject come to discussion here too. Not all people were convinced that the new Sim City did look better in comparison of the old one. Indeed you were free to take your shots from almost anywhere you want, at any angle, and that’s a good evolution. But I believe it came for a price: In terms of graphic and appearance.
Even if you say: “But, hey, I dislike the new Sim City”, it is very difficult to deny that the same phenomenon happens to the others. I believe that for that very reason SC4 is still alive and it is hardly and slowly being replaced. You can still get shots that looks fairly realistic from a game with 12 years old just because of the camera constrain (and, of course, a nicely done work from Maxis). Some of them look better than any other city builders competitors that try’s the very same angle of view. Following that, you got thousands of buildings, hundreds of mods, which fix some bad aspects of the game. It is difficult to “win” that, but someday, we will get something better. Some say we already did. But for now, we can look at other games, specially racing ones, to have an idea about what “graphical” future is coming for us.
PS: The driveclub pictures were taken from:
https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/threads/driveclub-scenery.320510/
The picture from Gran Turismo 6 I took on my own.
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