Task A understanding hardware technologies for game platforms
Charles Hardy
HCI (Human Computer Interface)
Joysticks
Joysticks are made for the purpose to make games like Mario cart play better and they give a better experience and they are more fun to use and look very cool on display. They move when the player grips them and moves his hands side to side or forward and back
Keyboard and Mouse
The key board and mouse very good because allow functions that other HCIs do not allow. You can use it to type quick and the aim with the mouse is the most accurate. You can also do more with the keyboard and mouse as there are lots of different buttons which means you can bind keys very easily.
Wheel and pedals
These add a new way to play racing games which are among the most popular genre of gaming and very fun to play with friends are alone. This takes away the risks of driving and makes it fun.
Controllers
Controllers are used for gaming and are often for more relaxed gaming as you can sit further away from your Tv. The controllers are set out differently on each one but they are all similar with analogue sticks and buttons on the back to aim and shoot and buttons on the side that are for other actions within the game.
Motion sensor
Motion senors are the latest type of gaming and detect movement, they are very new types of technology and they are still in development and will not replace controllers or keyboards because they are more of a different type of gaming.
XBOX 360 VS Atari Jaguar Controllers
Xbox 360
The Xbox 360 is a newer controller and it is one of the controller that is made for comfortable feeling and it is for sitting back and chilling out, The controllers feel is the most important thing about the controller and it is comfortable and easy to use without having to reach your hands across the controller. The controller looks great and it looks better than the Atrai jaguar and feels better
Atari jaguar
This is one of the most hideous controllers I have ever seen, it looks clunky and trash because the handles are not comfortable, it looks disgusting and the buttons at the bottom are very difficult to press which is a huge problem because the controller is meant to be comfortable and easy to use. Controllers looking nice but feel and how easy it is to use it the best thing for a controller which the most important thing for a controller.
There is no contest and the xbox controller is far better than the atrai controller in almost every single way which shows us the the games company's learn from their mistakes
Level 3 games design unit 78 detail graphics for computer games Charles Hardy
Game Comparison
Enclosed inside this document is two games which are
compared in many different ways to show the difference between each game and
how some games are on the complete opposite end of the spectrum when it comes
to graphics, game play etc. The games I have chosen are "GTA5" or "Grand theft auto" ("GTA5" will be used for the rest of the article) and
"Risk of rain" because they are very different games in game play,
visual effects and even behind the scenes are completely different.
Graphics
The art styles are completely different and are not meant to be similar because of the way the games plays, if risk of rain had the same graphics as GTA5 or vise versa it would look out of place. GTA5 has photo realistic graphics and they are as real as possible and with graphic enhancing mods it looks even better. Risk of rain however looks completely different with its very pixelated graphics and almost shoddy with a very exaggerated look. First lets look at risk of rain and how the graphics work and make the game look good while keeping that new look despite looking old.
Risk Of Rain Graphics
As you can see from the image, Risk of rain has a very strange look to it as the game looks very old with its pixelated look. The game uses some basic art styles such as exaggeration for the size of some of the monsters and also uses a pixel art style but does this in a very clever way. The way the background looks further away than the main screen could suggest some clever cell shading and the HUD looks closer than the rest of the screen. The graphics look basic but have a polished look which make the game look nice. I choose this image as it accurately depicts what the game is about and how the art style makes certain aspects of the game look really further forward or backwards compared to the other things on the screen.
Grand Theft Auto Graphics
GTA5 has some very photo realistic graphics and the textures with the shadows make the photo realistic graphics make them look very elucidated. The graphics are not exaggerated and the smooth surface with no ruff edges look phenomenal, the sheer amount of quality is fantastic and is one of the most photo realistic looking open world games ever made. GTA5 looks even better with graphic enhancement mods. The reason I choose these images is because the first image shows a decent shot of the character and buildings with shadow and the second image is very good at showing a before and after.
ComparisonGraphics
The graphics in both games are completely opposite and they look different with no art styles in common at all. They both have there strengths with no real negatives. Some people will hate risk of rains look and some will think the art style is very clever and will appreciate the art style. With GTA5 not many people will say that the game looks bad and most will be very impressed with the beauty of the game. The art style suit the game though as GTA5 graphics on risk of rains would look ridiculous and over the top for such a simple 2D game and this would be the same case as risk of rains graphics on GTA5 would make the game unplayable.
File extensions and File types
The file types for each game are different because of the game texture quality and how big each file has to be which means risk of rain and GTA5 will be different. Risk of rain uses ini files which stands for initialization and they are on the same lines as txt and cfg files. The textures are vector images because when you have the option in the games menu to zoom in and out giving the player a chance to see more of the layout of the map and because of this the images never lose out on quality. GTA5 could uses a mixture of raster and vector images as when zooming in on walls it because pixelated and blurred but because it is a background not many players will care about such a small flaw and people or cars stay the same quality because you will zoom in on them with a sniper etc. This means that risk of rain likely just uses jpeg files while GTA5 uses both jpegs and tif files to make sure the player gets the best experience. The trailers above are prove that for the above text.
HUD
The HUD in both games are very different as each one is used in a different way. The gta5 HUD is simple with a fair amount of information on the screen and only shows half of the information until you press a button and the rest of the HUD shows. I choose this image because it very clearly shows the games HUD and labels it. The Risk of rain HUD is different because it shows all of it at any given time and there is no way to show more or hide more with the game. The reason that the game does it like that is because all of the information shown on screen is required. I choose the image because it only shows the basics of the HUD and nothing else on the screen.
Compression
Compression is used when an image is to big and needs to be smaller. This is done by reducing the amount of pixels on the sprite/image. This does lower the quality of the original image but this does not always matter because the image could be a large sprite meaning that pixels will not been shown. Risk of rain is clearly very compressed because the images are almost always so pixelated that you can see the pixels even if you have zoomed out the furthest possible amount. GTA5 has been compressed but not as much as the pixel count is very high because of the texture quality. The reason for compression is so other machines of less power can run the game as well as the developers machine. I choose this image because it highlights of the main points of what I was saying earlier about how the texture only changes quality if the image is small or has small details.
Box Art
The box art is used to shot the player what they are buying before the actually buy the game, this helps give the player an insight into what they are buying and even some screen shots etc. Because risk of rain is an indie game and this means that there was never a physical copy made, I will be using the closest thing to a box art. Both of the box arts shot detail about the games and it is clear what each one is about and what the general gist of the game is. The box art on GTA5 is what happens in the game and players who have never heard of the game will know what they are buying when they pick the game off the shelf, while risk of rain has more mystery it certainly has somethings about it that are obviously there for a reason, the art is pixelated and the background is very simple. The art styles on the box are even different and because both games where released in the same year, it really is amazing that they where both successful dispute being so different, even for the box art.
Conclusion
The final conclusion is that these games despite having almost nothing in common are still huge hits with one game yielding more money than any video game ever made and really will be remembered in the gaming community as a masterpiece, as for risk of rain it did so well that the two man team that made have since started a company and are making more games for their fans to enjoy. Both games are fantastic examples of how to do art styles correctly. These games may be different but the one thing they have in common is success and are both insanely fun games, made by two different teams with two people working on one game and thousands on the other with different budges and art styles which is what makes these games stand out among the crowd of games released each day.
Level 3 games design unit 78 detail graphics for computer games
File extension
File extensions are used to make the image a certain size and are all used for different things. A jpeg file is bigger than a Tif file because a Tif file compresses the file down into the most efficient file possible but a jpeg file is bigger but takes little time to make. Tif stands for tagged image format and the image compressed by Tif loses NO quality making it very useful for mobile games. The file size is bigger for a jpeg but it is quick to compress as a Tif file takes a lot longer and if you are making lots of Tif files then you are going to be idling for awhile. I used this image because it shows the logo for the Tif image which less people have heard of making it.
Compression
Compression is used in a lot of ways, the basic premise of a compression would be to condense something as small as possible without losing the original quality of the image. Compression is not only used in file extensions but is used for things such as compressing metal. A compressed file would be a zipped up file but it would lose some of the original contents.
Image Capture
Image capture is done in many different ways, it can be done in many different ways. The first way is simply taking a photo of something, this is the simplest way of doing image capture and anyone can do it. The others ways of doing image capture are:
Drawing/Sketching
Video recording/screen shot
Scanning on a printer
Image capture is important because you need it for ideas and it helps the developers. The reason I used this image is because it shows a common method of image capture and that it is recording and the person is previewing it to make sure the file has not become corrupt.
Optimising
Optimising is to make something as efficient as possible, so that weaker machines can still run your game/program without hurting the original content. Optimising is very important because it does not matter how basic or good your program if it is poorly optimised no one will play/use it because they do not want to have their machine fuse. I used this image because this is a prime example of how NOT to optimise your games, the game which had and original recommended gpu of a 660, a person with two titan z's was unable to run it (5)
Storage of image assets
Storage of image assets is where you store images for your games, for example you would put all of your "background" images in a "background folder". It is for easy access to images if they need changing or replacing, it would be easy if all backgrounds where in one folder but if all images where is one folder and they where all called "untitled *number*" then it would be very difficult to find the image and change it. I choose these images because the first image is very neat and is what you should be doing and the second image is what NOT to do. Another thing is that the hard drive space needs to be enough and that if you are making a 64 bit game you need lots of space.
Overplaying is a huge issue if you play too much. Playing too much can lead to to many problems both mentally and physically. Physically it can damage your eyes and you will be left physically unfit, mentally playing to long can cause social isolation which could resolve in your family being concerned for you. In very rare cases people have died from playing too many video games but they would have played for a very long time:
social problems can occur when the person playing games does not go and talk to anyone or go outside. The will get more and more anti social making it harder to become a normal member of society. This will also affect them mentally as they might think that what is on there game can be done in real life, for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Petric
These types of events are very rare and do not happen very often.
Benefits
There are many advantages to playing videos games and they are very useful and sometimes life saving. There are many uses for people around the world and they can be used for soldiers in the army for training help. People reaction time is also faster which can help avoid an accident because they are faster than the average person. Video games have had a massive impact on the world and
1952 was when the first video game was ever made, it was called OXO and it is a very basic pixel game in which you press buttons to do commands. They are very basic but where evolutionary for there time. 1970's is when games kicked off and got its first real games consoles. Nintendo really raised the bar with there console and made video games more popular over the years.
1967-68
The first video game console ever made was called the "brown box" and it is just a box. The black box was very basic and had massive controllers which would not fit comfortably into the players hands. It was created by Ralph Baer. It only played a very small selection of games such as pong.
1970's
1970's was the year that many game consoles where released and this was the first major year for video game console, the main console was the Magnavox odyssey:
Generation:First generation
Retail:availability
NA: September 1972
EU: 1973
Introductory price:US$99 (equivalent to $560.05 in 2015)
Discontinued:1975
Units sold:350,000
Though out the years many consoles where released and none of them made a bigger impact than:
Atari vhs - made in 1977 in November and it was one of the best consoles.
The atrai 2600 was a big console and one of the very popular ones back in the 1970's and because this year had such huge advancements the games became more
Arcades
Arcade games are older but can still be found in old arcade parks and they can still be bought but they cost 100£s. They are old games that are very pixelated and the games would require you to put a coin into the arcade machine and you would be allowed to play the game until you died or won. These machines are very old and are where made popular in the 1971-1978 but really became popular in the 1980's.
1980's
The 1980's was known as the "dark ages" because the consoles where bad and they had no impact in the gaming community as the consoles where actual really bad. There where awful games like et made and there really was nothing good for years. Later in the year the nes was released and that changed gaming as we know it. It changed gaming and games that even people who don't play games know who Mario is. The console is the first huge hit and it had a total of 61,000,000 sales for $199. Later in the year the sega gensis was made and it was a huge it but still not as big as the nes with only 40,000,000 sales.
1990's
In the 90's there where many consoles made but only a few where really good such as:
n64
dream cast
PlayStation 1
Playstion 1 was the biggest hit with its ground breaking and it was the first of its kind. There many good consoles made this year and many where huge successes.
2000's
This year was the biggest jump in gaming as you went from 3d games with old graphics to very good graphics and very different games. The consoles changed so much for the better that t really changed gaming for the better and the community blow up with YouTube and other websites such a Reddit. PC became a viable way to game and that. The release of the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 changed the community. Early in the 2000's in the year the PlayStation 2 was released and that's what really got me into playing games as a young kid.
Today
So the gaming community today is very advanced and is advancing even faster every day. With games back on the PS2 looked great for their time, they would be completely dated today and would look really out of place. Games like the last of us and call of duty have photo realistic graphics that really make games from 10 years ago look old and because of the way technology is advancing, some day games that we think look great today will be blown away which is great for the community as more games are made and the industry grows. With new releases such as VR and Oculs rift coming out, the world of gaming is a rapidly growing multi billion pound industry and this is great news for gamers, casual or hardcore. With a large range of cards to pick from the only problem would by the price but if you really want to powerful pc then you will have to spend lots of money but it is worth it if you are really into pc gaming.
The key board and mouse very good because allow functions that other HCIs do not allow. You can use it to type quick and the aim with the mouse is the most accurate. You can also do more with the keyboard and mouse as there are lots of different buttons which means you can bind keys very easily.
These add a new way to play racing games which are among the most popular genre of gaming and very fun to play with friends are alone. This takes away the risks of driving and makes it fun.
Controllers are used for gaming and are often for more relaxed gaming as you can sit further away from your Tv. The controllers are set out differently on each one but they are all similar with analogue sticks and buttons on the back to aim and shoot and buttons on the side that are for other actions within the game.
