So... Is spidweb dying?

[Alorael at Large]

I think Lilith and SoT have the answer between them. BoE really hit a sweet spot. It isn't hard to make a scenario, though of course it's hard to design a good one and there's challenge in using the limited node system to eke out some of the impressive effects that were brought into later scenarios. But it's easy. Powerful modding tools are often ugly and difficult. BoA is; you essentially have to learn how to program a little bit in C for the scripts if you want to do anything. And if you're going to put in that work, you might as well do it in a game with a wider audience and more recognition.

 

—Alorael, who suspects that BoE-level ease of use in a modern engine for a major game would really produce an amazing profusion of mods. Most would be terrible, of course.

[Enraged Slith]

I guess I'm a chump because I learned how to BoA from scratch and still tinker at it now and then.

[Student of Trinity]

I'm waiting for the day when an ordinary chump can tell Siri or Google, "Make me a villain with a big axe and really cool hair," and Poof! they've got a photo-realistic 3D model ready to be inserted in an action game or a movie. And in effect producing movies and top-grade games will be about as easy as writing a novel is, now. That is, it will be a lot of hard work to make a good one, but the tools and skills needed to finish one at all won't be the bottleneck.

 

I doubt it will ever get quite that simple, actually. At least not in my lifetime. But I can imagine an awful lot of basic sound and graphics getting provided rather cheap by companies that cater to the amateur artist market. Siri probably won't make your villain that easily, but BitParts.com will, for twenty bucks. Sure, that particular villain will then be pirated all over the world; but I'm thinking that BitParts.com will do just enough customization of your villain, based on the background you provide about your game/story/movie, that you'll pay them for the customization, rather than taking a stock character for free.

 

Along with the above I predict the eventual entire collapse of film acting as a profession, though I expect that the convention of having many different characters in many different stories all be Brad Pitt will survive, in the sense that recognizable base models and algorithms will appear in many places, and this will even be a selling point.

[Lilith]

I'm waiting for the day when an ordinary chump can tell Siri or Google, "Make me a villain with a big axe and really cool hair," and Poof! they've got a photo-realistic 3D model ready to be inserted in an action game or a movie. And in effect producing movies and top-grade games will be about as easy as writing a novel is, now. That is, it will be a lot of hard work to make a good one, but the tools and skills needed to finish one at all won't be the bottleneck.

 

well, rather, different kinds of skill will come to the forefront. i used to work for a small publisher, and while plenty of the unsolicited novel manuscripts we received were bad in all sorts of exciting ways (meandering and plotless, weirdly racist or sexist, a spec script for a bad action movie clumsily and transparently retooled into an even worse novel), practically none were unreadably bad on a simple technical level. seems like people who don't at least understand basic sentence and paragraph structure don't end up finishing novels, or at least know better than to try to get them published. certainly that's a lower bar to clear than being able to program though

[Student of Trinity]

I think that's where I'm maybe just naive and idealistic. But the way I think is: the villain's shiny axe and freakish hair are cool, and it's hard to go back to a story without such things, once you've seen the 3D glory; but the cool graphics are still really icing on the cake, gravy on the meat. What will make people really enjoy your production, and remember it, will be the same things that made people enjoy stories in the cave around the campfire, and remember the legend thousands of years later. The basic substance of the story itself will still be what really matters. Everything else, by itself, is at most a fad that will quickly pass.

 

On the other hand, let me argue on the other hand. All the good basic stories are basically simple, and already told many times. What matters is to get synergy between different elements of your story. There's a weird kind of threshold at which everything pulls together and the story's heart beats. It could be that the villain model's quirky hair is just the little touch that somehow picks up threads in the plot and theme and setting and makes it all click. Or at least it could be that the details of your models really work in creating a look and feel that sets everything else in a unique light.

 

But all right, try to synthesize. There's a limit to how much a human mind can take in. You need to reach a threshold of synergy between all your elements, but past that threshold, returns diminish. The right thing to do for a real artist is to reach that threshold, then ship. Exactly what parts of your production are used to hit the threshold can vary a lot. Webcomics are maybe a great sort of herald medium for what I'm thinking about, here. Serial graphics are a much lower bar than 3D film, but you can already see how affordable software has drastically widened the bottleneck of manual talent. And some webcomics still work mainly on story and dialog, with primitive artwork, while others are beautiful tapestries with minimal prose and obscure plot. All of them can work.

 

The element with the heaviest weight, in any extended production, is still the story. Great scenery can put a mediocre story over the top, but nothing can save a lousy story: people will just clip your single best post for a screensaver and stop following your comic. And a great story can easily carry some pretty crude artwork. So the skills of basic storytelling won't be the only skills, in the future, but they'll remain the most important skills. And while achieving magical synergy with elements apart from the story itself may remain as subtle an alchemy as ever, the obstacle of being able to achieve those elements at all will be much lower than ever before. So the skills of basic storytelling will have a wider scope for application than ever before.

 

Alchemy will still be the Ars Magna, but a lot more people will be able to get into alchemy, when you can get antimony from Amazon at a click.

[Harehunter]

,

[Necris Omega]

I think the biggest barrier between fullscale BoE styled modding and big name/production games like say Skyrim is actually the issue of voice acting.

 

Sure, good environment design can be a lot harder than it seems, but it can still a one man show.

Music is an art unto itself, but again, one guy with talent and a few digital tools can solo that.

Art? 3D modeling? Animation? Same thing.

Writing? Dialog? Scripting? No problem.

Sound FX? Tools, creativity, and devotion can get this done without an entire gaming studio.

 

Every one of these aspects can be handled by a single person, made publicly available, and conglomerated into a work of gaming art. The facets can be made indepentently, and made well.

 

However, once you throw voice acting into the works, you're talking a level of complexity that can't simply be done as a one man show. Suddenly you need vast amounts of coordination between multiple parties, and in my experience the technial equipment to make voice acting as professional as some of the other aspects of gaming is more miss than hit. While I've seen weapons and armor and monster design and environments and sounds and writing in custom mods for various sources that make the original game look like the developers weren't even trying, I've yet to encounter such content that was voiced to such an extent.

[Alorael at Large]

Speech synthesis is also getting better and better. It's not perfect yet, but I think the day is closer for having the game itself do all the voice acting than the day when the computer can provide all the animation on the fly.

 

—Alorael, who doesn't see live action film or TV dying anytime. Even when photorealism is possible there will be people wanting to do it with people. For art, if for no other reason. And audiences like real people behind their viewing too. Actors are themselves part of the story.

[Aran]

Even when photorealism is possible there will be people wanting to do it with people. For art, if for no other reason. And audiences like real people behind their viewing too.

 

(Ractors!)

[Student of Trinity]

Even when photorealism is possible there will be people wanting to do it with people. For art, if for no other reason. And audiences like real people behind their viewing too. Actors are themselves part of the story.

I'm imagining that live theater will survive and even rebound. But movies are already so artificial. The sense that there's a live person behind the role seems pretty remote to me.

 

I imagine there will still be identifiable actors who appear in multiple movie roles, looking slightly different; I think that's a convention people like. It helps set up a character by reminding people of all the other characters that actor has played; the actor is a sort of meta-character. I just don't see why the persistent meta-character needs to be a real human being. I think movie stars in the future will be like Mario and Sonic and Micky Mouse. Live actors may still work on films, but they'll be helping the modelers get the expressions right, not playing through every scene.

 

Maybe I underestimate the durability of the celebrity industry. Maybe the fact that actors have off-screen lives is an irreplaceable element of movie marketing. But I think the celebrity industry is more flexible than that. It can make celebrities out of anyone and anything. Movie actors aren't the only candidates at all. And even Mario and Sonic can have off-screen scandals. Just pop them into a controversial YouTube clip. Sure, film studios will lose some of the real human interest that comes from movie stars having actual human lives. They'll also lose the drawbacks of having stars crack up or need rehab. I'm thinking that the computer models will win out.

[The Reverend]

Getting back to the original topic of the the thread (I know, I know, that's not how we roll around here ...), I know that I have been posting less now that I'm not actively playing through any Spiderweb games. I come by every few days to see if there are any updates on Avadon 2, and will sometimes respond if I see anything posted that piques my interest (or any questions in the game forums that Randomizer hasn't already answered ).

 

But, I expect my post volume will go back up once Avadon 2 comes out. Unless, of course, it comes out right as I'm getting ready for my thesis defense - which unfortunately seems to be becoming more and more likely ...

[Death Knight]

We need Avadon 2 before the next superstorm knocks out my internet. Seriously, its happened already

[*i]

No.

 

We've had these threads since there was a BoE-centric community in the late 1990's with week+ long intervals without a single post to the forums at the time. I suspect this place will be around until Jeff retires, and even then for some time.

[Edgwyn]

Looking back at some of the graphs of posts that were posted a few months ago, a huge drop off in activity between game releases is completely normal and happens every time. Fall doesn't end until 21 Dec, so Avadon 2 may very well be part of our Christmas/Chanukah/Winter Solstice/Festivus shopping.