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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

The biggest thing to me is that video games do not have very many independent objects, compared to reality. Go outside and look at the real world and you will see the ground has little pebbles and bits of mud and all this stuff that gets kicked around. No video game will let you inspect the leaves of plants to look for little bugs, the way reality will. Or for indoor scenes, there is no video game that accurately captures the experience of "picking up a living room with a bunch of toys strewn about".

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> Go outside and look at the real world and you will see the ground has little pebbles and bits of mud and all this stuff that gets kicked around

We are getting better. Like snow deformation in RDR2, for instance(works even in a PS4).

But random bits of debris that can get kicked around - and subsequently inspected - no. That's a problem.

> No video game will let you inspect the leaves of plants to look for little bugs, the way reality will

That's an easier problem than tracking all the debris. Before you inspect, you have no idea what will be there - the computer also doesn't have to and it can be optimized away until there's an observer.

Think heisenberg uncertainty principle but for virtual worlds.

Yes, I actually thought of the snow in RDR2 as I wrote that comment! The beginning of RDR2 with the deep snow is one of the most impressive visual scenes in a video games so far, visually, to me.

You could implement little bugs without all that much trouble, true. Maybe a better way for me to think about it is more like, the real world has an incredible diversity of appearances at a small scale, that's hard to reproduce in a video game. The bug isn't the part that causes trouble, it's the fact that every leaf looks different, some leaves are oddly discolored, some leaves have bug bites on them, some got a little torn up, et cetera.

Level of detail and foveated rendering work on this principle.

That would require programming lots and lots of procedural generation algorithms, one for each kind of thing.

Sounds like a fun project for the next generations. Something to play when I am older.

Procedural generation for plants is actually pretty common already Most trees you see in video games are from middleware like Realtree

That's just one procedural generation algorithm.

Now suppose I want to take some fruit from the trees. And I want to slice and dice the different fruits. Peeling the skins when appropriate.

Or I want to plant a new tree. Or I want to remove it, with say, a lightsaber.

That's a couple generators more. Now add birds, dogs, insects, moss, moist surfaces, and so on. Hence, my point on needing several generators.

I mean, fine if you want to make an actual virtual world. But when it comes down to it, it's a video game. Why in the world would any of this be in COD or Battlefield or Fallout? It would take more time than making the actual game part of it to do this pointless garbage that nobody would care about and consume the majority of computer resources. Not to mention a lot of video games remove realistic aspects that would otherwise make it a chore to play.

There are lots of things to be improved in games, but what you're describing are improvements to a real life simulation.

And so you start to wonder, why you should buy a new version of COD, Battlefield or Fallout? Because it uses more energy and you need a new GPU then?

> No video game will let you inspect the leaves of plants to look for little bugs, the way reality will.

Why not? With procedural generation and LOD rendering it's not impossible. Not that it's easy, but not impossible?

Presumably you're not a native English speaker. "will" here does not refer to the future, this is a subtle grammatical thing that I can't explain well, but it refers to presently existing games.

Still, there is no reason I can think of that the game described couldn’t be created right now besides it not being a very fun/Marketable game.

But that's theoretical, the point is more how current games actually look, not what people could make potentially with today's tech.

Also, some games are intentionally cartoonish as an artistic choice so photorealism isn't always the goal.

Everything has a cost, either computational or human.

We've probably reached the point where human cost exceeds computational cost, which is to say that developing and QA testing such a feature would probably cost more money than it's worth. How many users of software would gain from such minutiae?

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