Shawn Robertson of Irrational Games observes that, with game engines getting more powerful, in-game assets are reaching the same level of detail that pre-rendered assets have.

Joe Gunn, applications specialist at Autodesk, suggests, “There will always be room for speed improvements when you talk about rendering. With 3ds Max 8, the animation system that is in place is very robust and will just continue to improve as pipelines adapt the new feature set. During that process, that’s where we will find areas for improvement and will invest.”

Equally important, according to Gunn, are improvements in asset management and the ability for software to deal with larger datasets. ”The production pipeline is growing larger even for very small facilities of just a few artists. Being able to manage the assets will become critical and Autodesk stepped up to the plate with giving their Vault system away with 3ds Max 8. Also, with next-gen games, poly counts will be larger thus increasing the datasets. Levels will become bigger and more detailed than ever. This is intensified with the industry adoption of normal map technology. The next gen consoles can handle large datasets, but the source files to create those larger data sets will be even larger. In some cases, we will see the source files contain 20x the level of detail that the final game can display, which is already 8x-10x the previous generation. The issue of scale and how to manage all of this data is the core issue in-game development today,” says Gunn.

When asked about tools artist have yet to see available, Robertson says he hopes for “… better tools for dealing with transitions between animations. It’s a shame when you watch really nice animations fall apart because the transitioning between two animations never quite feels totally natural.”

Autodesk’s Michel Kripalani concurs that the role of pre-rendered cinematics will diminish, since next-gen game consoles are fast enough to display great looking cut-scenes.

Chouls is hopeful that “… animation tools that work at a higher level of abstraction (e.g., Director), may be incorporating database training, or learn by example techniques starting to emerge in academic research.”

Bruce Blumberg, project director for the Synthetic Animal team at Blue Fang Games, explains, “We are using a mix of proprietary software as well as off-the-shelf solutions. Part of the problem is that as you push the envelope in terms of developing a new type of user experience, existing frameworks become less attractive. This isn’t because the existing solutions aren’t well engineered, but rather because they are too tightly bound to existing game experiences.”

Next-gen game development is sure to appeal to a wider audience than ever before. This is part of the natural maturing process for the medium but it also poses some unique challenges to developers. While we’ll most likely always see new variations on classic gaming genres there are many other ways to entertain a mass audience besides high-powered virtual gunplay. From a game developer’s perspective, these challenges aren’t limited to tools alone. Of primary concern is the astounding time it will take and the cost developers will incur to detail a level in a next-gen game.

Wonders Robertson: “One challenge we are facing…is how do we create all this art? You can’t get away with just an old fashioned diffuse map anymore. Now you have to make sure the normal maps are correct, the specular masks are in, plus any number of maps to support new rendering capabilities. Now, if you want to create a piece of level art, like a piece of machinery, you can’t just make the low-poly mesh. You have to make the high-poly mesh, generate normal maps from that and then apply that to the low-poly mesh. With new rendering features, time also has to be spent tweaking materials in engine to get the right amount of specular or sub-surface scattering, or gloss. This has increased the art production time quite a bit. I think more and more studios are looking to outsourcing modeling tasks for this reason.”

Improvements in asset management and the ability for software to deal with larger datasets are also important, suggests Joe Gunn, applications specialist at Autodesk.

In terms of other trends in game development, Blumberg sees cross-disciplinary teams and tools becoming more important. “Right now the industry seems too compartmentalized: designers do their thing, artists do theirs and engineers do theirs. Great characters require everyone investing in a truly collaborative way. And, of course, this will require the development of new kinds of tools. Animators, for example, should be able direct the in-game behavior and motion of their characters so as to reflect their vision for the character. We are doing a new type of game experience that relies on our ability to develop expressive animal characters. This presents challenges from animation to behavior to interaction.

“A simple example: most animation tools are optimized for modeling bipeds, and their solution for modeling quadrupeds is: ‘That is easy, just have the biped walk on all fours.’ Well, it doesn’t take much of an eye for motion to realize that this is hardly a solution if your goal is to develop animal characters that move with the grace and agility of real animals. And, of course, modeling behavior is a huge challenge. But we have some interesting ideas along these lines, and, in fact, some of the next-gen capabilities may figure prominently in some of our solutions.”