Quote: "Why oh why aren't there more games that look like this??
I really think it's the way to go for indie games at the moment.
Until there is amazing middleware that can generate realistic faces, and facial animation - and do clothes physics on everyone, and universal realtime lighting, then indies just can't put out photo-realistic stuff to compete with the big studios.
If we go this route though, we can make amazing looking games!
Imagine a kid's action game for XBLA that looked like the snowman example in the vid..."
While I'm not going to say using similar techniques would be impossible for current generation technology, especially given these technology demonstrations are often done at less than top-end hardware due to research budgets and such.
Still to achieve the same level these guys have would be quite an undertaking (particularly for independant developers with limited resources and time), more importantly I'd say is that often technology demos are not designed with optimisations but rather to show something is possible.
Intel for example last year were showing off a Real-Time Ray-Tracer version of Quake 4, however while impressive; something I had to explain to someone who wanted to do something similar himself, was that Intel posted no specifications for the hardware they were using for the experiment... plus the entire engine was clearly not Ray-Traced, but rather there were elements within it of basic Geometric shapes (Spheres, Cylinders, Boxes and Torus) that were using ray-tracing for perfect world reflections.
Intel also never mentioned what framerates they were even able to achieve. It is quite difficult to dissern (particularly from videos running at 25/30fps anyway) what sort of performance something has.
On the matter of the Real-Time Ray-Tracers, I surmised that it was probably running at around 30fps; and that the limited way it was being used probably worked in a similar fashion to defer shading, where the limitations on screenspace used allow you to only calculate exactly what is necessary rather than a truely global solution.
In the case of this "hand-drawn" technique the performance on even single objects seems to suffer greatly, on the tea-cup it's alright but if you notice when they move to show the cog and then the edited cog.. suddenly the performance drops noticeably.
Even if someone did take the time and energy to figure out how they have done what they have done, which I could guess at how they've done it; but that said the cloning of a graphic style to the lines would be quite demanding for a GPU... not so much for a CPU though. Just don't see that being really feasible for real-time game graphics just yet.
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