[MUD-Dev] The importance of graphics

[eric]

From: "Zach Collins (Siege)" <zcollins at seidata.com>

> I was chatting with some friends last night, and we got onto the
> subject of graphics in games.  One of them made the claim that
> graphics will make or break a game, while another made a very
> interesting point, that it's the *consistency* of the art
> direction instead of just how pretty everything looks.

>   How important is it to have graphics?

Picture...thousand words... Thinking in terms of bandwidth, the eyes
take in the most data. I think its the only thing of
importance. Myst sold millions on that one concept, of course Myst
was more than just a static piece of art on your monitor, but not
much more.

It sets the tone, creates the most immersion, and obviously is much
more agreeable for the mass market. I read books as much as the next
guy, but books, while often give more depth than a movie, force me
to pause my immersive entertainment once every 3-5 minutes when I
turn the page. Another thing of note in relation to much of the MUD
knowledge base, a book doesn't offer much in the way of exploration
and thats a strength of MUDs.

But back to the bandwidth thing, because I can take in more
graphically than text-ually, exploration gets subdued in a grapical
game. Especially when the cursor changes when I mouseover an object
I can manipulate (exploration by numbers, or something). This
follows though, since we are humans and we do live in a world where
visuals serve most of the information gathering needs we have. Are
there any statistics taken from a large population that place people
into those MUD groups, I'm sure some nutty professor has done
something like this. I don't know the terms used to describe or I
would search. I would bet the smallest percentage would be
explorers. Anyway, moving on...

>   What level of visual quality (slickness, flashiness) is
>   acceptable versus bandwidth or rendering considerations (assume
>   that the graphics card has no effect)?

My personal opinion on the subject is "be subtle", I think clean
effects are more immersive than flash. In other words some effects
look cool and neat, but don't particularly add anything to the
experience, and for some actually detract. A popular one that I
really dislike is lens flare, as soon as I see that my brain
interprets the entire image I'm seeing as if it were thru something
that actually has lens flare, my eyes sure don't. So its not me, or
a creature that has eyes in any fashion similar to humans. (This is
pretty lame on other levels as well. A good example Tribes had it,
they also had jetpack suits, but unfortunately on Tribes world
sunglasses don't exist or budgetary concerns prevent the military
from using them, spent it all on jetpacks no doubt.)

Personally I would let the user determine the flashiness of their
fireballs and lightningbolts, of course it would cost more mana if
they want to fill a room up with smoke and particles. I doubt it
would really require that much effort to create a personalize-able
spell effects system, would even be an interesting experiment to see
what users prefer themselves. Giving control the users, oh my,
blasphemy, not my view of course.

>   How is visual consistency important, how do you create it, and
>   how do you maintain it throughout the life of a project (MMOGs
>   being continuously expanded)?

Good art directors/direction, great artists.The more complex your
art the more work it would become to maintain a consistant
vision. Disney no doubt has a large pool of good to great artists,
and they are working with a simple medium, so consistency is
assured.  A long term, long life project like a MMOG would require
herculean efforts to gain the same. Or novel methods like sectioning
the world into subgroups where consistency can be easily handled on
a smaller scale (For example DAoC did this by having 3 separate
worlds that were internally consistent, but not nessarily all
together consistent. I would bet the artists were in different
groups too, since the quality varied overall between each world as
well.) This can be seen as a managerial solution.

You could easily think up a variety of situations that are similar
to simplify the art. If the world is very large and there are lot of
art assets you can group them by culture, climate and a variety of
different ways.  There are hundreds of varieties of grass, so they
don't need to all look the same, same with trees, as well as human
made objects. Compare ancient european, indian and eastern
architecture.



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