We take a lot of things for granted in life whether it is utilities or things we enjoy. This is especially true when it comes to game development since a lot of us do play video games but it is very hard for us to say anything about them or how they are made. Since the early days of doom, the technology of game development has changed a lot, and understanding how modern games are made is quite interesting once you dig a little deeper than the surface. There are many more ways in which video games have developed than easy ways to hack escape from Tarkov or the quality of skins in Fortnite. So let’s take a look at certain technologies within game development of evolved over the past few decades and how current video games are made from gameplay to graphics.
One of the things that puzzles a lot of people is of course how high the graphical fidelity of video games is in the current generation. Whether it be for the environment or the character models we are definitely at an all-time high when it comes to quality as well as detail when it comes to 3D modeling and texture mapping. This is an extremely fascinating process to understand how many companies have managed to achieve this level of quality. Believe it or not many companies have been allowed to use satellite scans of certain regions when recreating actual real-life regions in video games. This means that when it comes to the topography as well as the geography of the actual environment they are one-on-one when it comes to accuracy. While this sounds crazy you need to understand that the actual level of quality of certain games had real-life applications.
For example when the Notre Dame cathedral burned Ubisoft’s model of said cathedral was so accurate that it is being used by Paris authorities to rebuild it. As you can imagine there is this much detail as well and this much technology behind how we can replicate human faces especially when we look at models based on actual people. One company that is well-known for scanning faces is of course Kojima Productions. For Hideo Kojima’s next project, we have been able to see scans of Hunter Schaefer’s face as well as Sophia Lillis’s face. The way the works is the star sits in a chair surrounded by an under of cameras that take photos from every single angle of the person’s head. Then using the algorithm of the 3D modeling program the program can recreate the face based on every single picture only to then be tweaked by a 3D modeler. This is why a lot of faces for example in Resident Evil 4 the remake are so close to their models.
Speaking of characters it is not everything to add a very accurate character model it also needs to move in a very natural way that reflects our human beings move. This is where the incredible technology behind motion capture comes into play. The way it works is two motion capture movements for video games people will be put in motion capture suits which are full-body suits covered in sensors that allow a computer to follow every single movement that the body does. Paired with the scanned model an animator can then tweak the animations to fully fit the model and allow for an incredibly lifelike depiction of the motion capture actor or the model used to create a character. In certain cases, like Red Dead Redemption 2 game developers will even use this technique to get motion captures from animals like horses or dogs to allow the animators to have a stronger basis from which to start and to spend less time doing work on basic things like that.
In the same vein, video games are now also trying to make characters in their game react in a lifelike way that is similar to their looks and their movements. This is why the use of predictive algorithms allows NPCs to have organic reactions to player interaction. What this means simply is that every NPC has a Bank of actions and a reaction they can take and the algorithm exists to read player behavior and allow the NPC to act by what the player does. Whether it means anticipating a recurring pattern of attack from a player or two moving out of the way of a player that is running through a city or things like that. These tools are extremely advanced and are still being developed with the help of artificial intelligence which means that we could see even more technological advances on this front in the future. Only time will tell what kind of insane technology we will see that will make our games even better in the future of the video game industry.
