/v/ - Video Games

Most open world games, including GTA have it so things just spawn in your immediate area and despawn when you get too far away. Mission critical shit is the only stuff that persists in the game world.

Incidentally due the memory constraints GTA games (at least the older ones, not sure about the more recent ones) have it so it only spawns cars of the kind which have already been loaded, which is why you often see multiple cars of the same type at once.

stalker a-life is a russian masterpiece that will never be topped

>GTA

>large scale simulation

Have you ever played actual sim games?

The real limiter of these games is rendering polygons and textures, not keeping track of objects.

>>15577492

It's just a draw distance for objects that isn't terrain.

Distant cars have their physics disabled, are glued to the road and move in a uniform manner to save processing power.

>>15577517

IV definitely had it, and R* claimed to have got rid of it for V but it was clearly still present in the 7th-gen version. I remember breaking my neck trying to find another Ruiner only to find hundreds once I actually got one.

>>15577492

>what will the future of open world look like

Assuming we get to a point where quantum processors are in home computers (alongside classical processors), the QPU would probably be able to simulate physics and AI across wide areas. But like one other anon said, the primary limiter on putting more things in a game is being able to render everything. I don't know if there's a breakthrough in GFX cards on the horizon, but if there is I fully expect nVidia to shit all over it.

>>15577492

Why make it bigger if it is not fun?

>>15577626

If you want to stress test how many objects you can handle without rendering a whole bunch of shadows and physics just slap in Doom's Nuts wad. See if your PC can handle 10,000+ sprite objects in one go.

The constant push for the most latest technology in graphics even though it's not really all that good compared to it's demands on your CPU and GPU combined with amateur coders ensures the pretty looking regression in capability will continue for a while more.

>>15577646

The problem is, short of autists like Toady or the crew Notch originally assembled, open world/sandbox games simply do not get made because they cost too much. They are similar to MMOs, except if you're dedicated enough you really can make the game without external help like server hosting. So, the open world games will not get made (aside from maybe one or two autists who may shake up the industry somewhat) unless the "AAA graphics" can be made to represent them. Bethesda isn't going to make another game with Daggerfall's graphics even though they could probably make an incredible open world game with literally city-sized settlements and city-sized populations with actually radiant AI.

GTA games don't have large scale simulations. The game simply spawns in relevant NPCs when the player gets close to an area. So in a ghetto, the engine might spawn nigNpc006, or in Brooklyn, it might spawn jewNpc002 The behavior of that npc is usually handled by the npc's code alone.

Dorf fort and prison architect are two games that use large scale simulation, and it shows. Both games will take more processing power and will eventually slow down when there are lots of agents. There are some behaviors that can be simulated more efficiently, such as using flow maps: invidio.us/watch?v=Bspb9g9nTto

>>15577683

>open world/sandbox games simply do not get made because they cost too much

The 2 biggest items which take up the budget is Marketing and Graphics, Daggerfall relies on a draw distance and it uses sprites. MMO complexity is the interaction of objects with other objects on a massive scale not it's own graphics.

>>15577812

Don't forget the ballistics system that actually worked well and simulated flares and chaff perfectly.

>>15577492

>obviously they dont actively handle all cars live, they do some weird pooling mechanism?

no they do. games have a main infinite loop. in that loop they do all their business logic. only some of that business logic requires sending data to the rendering pipeline. that doesn't mean logic is computing things "off screen".

ie, there's always some logic flowing, and some main timer, and the "simulation" is constant until you exit the main loop.

>>15578206

>that doesn't mean logic is computing things "off screen".

doesn't mean the logic is NOT computing things "off screen"

>>15577875

I mean they are comparable from an investing and marketing perspective, not a technical one. Indie studios typically don't make MMOs for the same reason: too much investment needed.

>>15577492

>how do games like GTA handle mass simulation?

They don't. They don't do anything like that at all. They just spawn things in in view, and in GTA 5 they even swap the physics out for vehicles that aren't extremely close to the player.

>>15577492

>>15580033

And re: my comment of "They Don't. They don't do anything like that at all."

Do you see why people are so unhappy with the state of videogaming?

>>15580058

>>15580033

I'm not unhappy because a game developer understands its target goals. If you want an in-depth global simulation with vehicles then just play BeamNG.drive

>>15577544

Jurassic Park Operation Genesis and The Sims have better A-life.

>>15580074

So BeamNG Drive is to you what GTA is to the OP? That doesn't really work at all, now does it?

C'mon, you're just baiting here.

>>15577604

interesting, so its not "open world" at all, and more like a fake simulation

>>15577731

thx

>>15577812

like I said, my point is we currently cannot even really simulate the smallest real world town without using fake stuff (with 10k ppl and buildings and cars)

>>15580066

accoridng to (((steam))) the game is unoptimized potato, so i assume you mean that specific algorithm is efficient? as opposed to graphics

>>15580120

idk that game but judging from steem it seems like a high-quality phyisics simulation that can handle only a handful of live cars

thx for replyin guys <3

>>15577544

Not really, all in all, having done some modding all it seems to be is:

>smart terrains are basically just a zone with a given coordinate

>may have things that can be interacted with like beds or designated lookout duty spots

>things are spawned into the smart terrain with a given chance, e.g. 30% advanced stalkers, 20% novice stalkers, 50% dogs

>can hang around in the area, with individual stalkers switching between various behaviors such as sleeping, relaxing or being on lookout duty

>alternatively can be directed to travel to another smart terrain, where they may clash with any present hostile AI, if they take it over they will resume looping through various behaviors

That's pretty much all there is to it, you can also script timed "base attack" events, set the respawn timer on each smart terrain, make spawns conditional/occur on a trigger, restrict certain things to only spawning at night/day, etc. But it's a pretty simple system. Although I guess the fact that most games don't even bother attempting something like this still puts it head and shoulders above the rest.

>>15577492

First off, throw away everything that's off screen if you don't need it: out of sight, out of mind.

Build some kind of graph of what agents are close to each other and might interact, then dispatch workloads to different threads ensuring that they don't step on each others' toes or have to wait for each others' blocking calls to finish. Assign priorities to each entity, staggering the update rate of entities to every N frames if they aren't really important while your frame budget is being stressed. If it's a lot of simple calculations and you can afford to sacrifice a chunk of the rendering budget, then you can offload some calculations to the GPU as well.

I know Intel and AMD get shit on for MOAR CORES, but there's no excuse for how shitty current utilization of the available resources is. Moore's Law is over for silicon, get used to it.

>>15577574

when do you think it will be a feasible optimization technique for games to be made purely of abstract data that the computer then interprets and pieces together the best it can, like what our brains do to this universe?