Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> I was wondering, will there ever be the Ultimate Game Engine
> 
>   That's like asking if there will ever be the ultimate renderer.

Sure. Your eyeballs. :-)

>   Technology progresses and game engines must keep up. 

Of course. Maybe I phrased the question wrong.

What do you think of a game engine possibly being feature-complete? 
Obviously, when new hardware comes out with (say) better lighting and 
shadows and such, the game engine would be upgraded to account for that. 
But I don't think you'd necessarily need to upgrade the games to account 
for that. And once the engine can render in realtime, something so 
realistic you can't make it *look* noticably more realistic, the 
incremental cost of building a better renderer might be not worth the 
cost of doing so.

> It's a question of whether the
> authors of the game engine can keep up with technology.

That's kind of what I was considering investigating with the question. 
I.e., not so much "when does development stop", but "what features are 
lacking to make the perfect game engine?"  And I don't mean "engineering 
trade-offs" due to commodity hardware being too restricted, but stuff 
that just hasn't been written at all.  If you could combine 
Black&White-style scaling with DOOM3-style lighting and still get the 
performance, what would be left to solve rendering-wise?

For example, a while ago, one might say "sucky physics". This seems to 
have been pretty well solved.  One might have said "difficult to write 
online versions". This is obviously either solved or relatively simple 
to solve, and getting simpler as one can count on more bandwidth.

Some hardware advances will make for some fairly incompatible changes.
Obviously, when new stuff like full-body VR suits come out, the game 
engine will have to change drastically to take advantage of it.

Just as obviously, NPC AI isn't anywhere near what you'd call "the best 
we can imagine doing".

What's left to solve?

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     Remember the good old days, when we
     used to complain about cryptography
     being export-restricted?

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