The most technically-advanced game for each year

1983: B-17 Bomber(balmer) for intellivsion.

the voice was a nice touch but the game required you to switch to seven different views and presented quite a few challenges to the user.

B17BomberBoxart.jpg
 
If people want to disqualify Unity on quality merits then games like Outcast have to go too. That game required a patch just to make the installer work!
 
UnrealEck said:
Are people saying Uncharted 2 is more technically advanced than Crysis now?
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Not at all, but it is interesting to me that Uncharted 2 lead a movement towards "set pieces" in gaming a whole. I would argue that in an effort to maximize the graphics of a console, they push the medium forward in different directions. Very few PC games really push the bill forward in terms of character animation in my opinion, you have your few standout companies obviously, but animation I feel is one area that consoles really push forward.

Driveclub is another interesting example. Racing games run at much higher framerates and resolution on PC's, but none of these games really had the resources behind them to creating a weather system as robust as driveclubs. It wasn't deemed a worthy cost to impact for most devs, but I guess Evolution felt otherwise. So it's a harder call. One one hand, the hardware is considerably weaker, on the other, it's still pushing tech that no other company really is.

These are all just my opinions of course, but I find this topic very interesting :P
 
KKRT00 said:
Nope.

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:O Thanks, didnt know that SC will have talk on GDC about graphics, excited :)
Yeah, volumetric smoke being talked about, very freaking excited.
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Yeah Star Citizen looks like it's gonna hold the crown for a very long time. I don't know any game that's even doing half of what it's setting out to do. It's gonna need a beastly PC to play around in those 30+ million poly scenes though :P
 
iapetus said:
Elite wasn't just ambitious. It was a technical masterpiece. It did so much more than any other game of its period, and it pushed its hardware way beyond what more powerful hardware was delivering at the time.

Impressive sprite scaling in such a limited game as TX-1 just doesn't compare to a fully fluid 3D world with the scope of Elite. That the hardware TX-1 ran on is technically more powerful just tips things further in Elite's favour - it's a technically superior game on theoretically lesser hardware.
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Agree 100%, there is no way Elite can't win 1984. Not only were the graphics and scope a technical marvel for the age and hardware, but also the use of procedural generation to create a massive living universe was brilliant. Some good sprite scaling really doesn't cut it on a technical level.
 
Dictator93 said:
It didnt have per pixel hit detection or fully real time lighting. Its kinda hard to put it ahead.
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rashbeep said:
Maybe in water rendering. That's all I can think of.
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Doom 3 had better lighting overall, but Far Cry had much bigger levels, foliage, reflections, refractions, offset mapping, vehicles, eye adaptation etc... Also it used stencil shadows for interiors, although i don`t remember how did they compare to Doom 3.
 
vio said:
Doom 3 had better lighting overall, but Far Cry had much bigger levels, foliage, reflections, refractions, offset mapping, vehicles, eye adaptation etc... Also it used stencil shadows for interiors, although i don`t remember how did they compare to Doom 3.
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"offset mapping"

Like normal maps? I am pretty sure it did not have any parallax texture effects. Not that I remember at least.
 
nkarafo said:
Doom had much more complex level design. Ultima looks more like Wolfenstein with textured ceiling/floor and some ramps here and there. Its nowhere near Doom's level. System Shock is more advance though, yes.
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?

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I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm not very knowledgeable about this stuff. You'll have to elaborate.
 
I would cast in a vote for the 360 version of Titanfall. It's really impressive that they actually made it run pretty well while looking close to the Xbone and PC versions.
 
Jaagen said:
I would cast in a vote for the 360 version of Titanfall. It's really impressive that they actually made it run pretty well while looking close to the Xbone and PC versions.
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This thread isn't really about how impressive something is as a development effort, as it is about how much impressivity is being spewed out at the output. So for instance, the XB1 version of Titanfall would rank ahead of the 360 version even though it's comparatively pathetic given the capabilities of the platform.
 
HTupolev said:
This thread isn't really about how impressive something is as a development effort, as it is about how much impressivity is being spewed out at the output. So for instance, the XB1 version of Titanfall would rank ahead of the 360 version even though it's comparatively pathetic given the capabilities of the platform.
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Fine, but Rebel Strike should at least be a runner up for 2003. It did light scattering and other complex effects.
 
not sure I'm impressed by this list. I don't like the idea of what makes a game the most technically advanced as the greatest looking, or hardest to run. What about game play mechanics, those could be advanced In a technical way. Game design could be technically advanced, 1981 ultimate I, the first open world game. That just isn't an evolution in game design that's technically advanced in gameplay mechanics plus design. Open world+parkour+flying, or open world, or what about something like open world plus powers like prototype. I'd put watch dogs as bad as a game as it was above grand theft auto in its technological advancements. Parkour, environmental interaction, some weather effects, Etc etc. What about animation advances, that life like movement if the face and body, or physics and spacial recognition in space and flight games. I think we take a lot for granted on what is done in video games, advances are everywhere just not always in the looks and can you run it division
 
Saintruski said:
not sure I'm impressed by this list. I don't like the idea of what makes a game the most technically advanced as the greatest looking, or hardest to run. What about game play mechanics, those could be advanced In a technical way. Game design could be technically advanced, 1981 ultimate I, the first open world game. That just isn't an evolution in game design that's technically advanced in gameplay mechanics plus design. Open world+parkour+flying, or open world, or what about something like open world plus powers like prototype. I'd put watch dogs as bad as a game as it was above grand theft auto in its technological advancements. Parkour, environmental interaction, some weather effects, Etc etc. What about animation advances, that life like movement if the face and body, or physics and spacial recognition in space and flight games. I think we take a lot for granted on what is done in video games, advances are everywhere just not always in the looks and can you run it division
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OP mostly focused on rendering technology, but sure You can create thread about tech progress in games in general :)
 
Corine said:
Yeah Star Citizen looks like it's gonna hold the crown for a very long time. I don't know any game that's even doing half of what it's setting out to do. It's gonna need a beastly PC to play around in those 30+ million poly scenes though :P
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CIG would have to be one of the most incompetent development studios if it wasn't the most advanced game of the next few years, or even the entire generation. Catering for high-end PCs with that amount of money they can push pretty much anything they want without compromise.
 
TheRedSnifit said:
?

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I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm not very knowledgeable about this stuff. You'll have to elaborate.
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I didn't say it has a more complex map. I said a more complex level design, meaning that the levels themselves look more complicated in architecture detail, geometry, etc. Ultima is like endless tunnels and corridors with very little geometry detail and even has a short draw distance. Dooms levels look complex with many details and geometry while having unlimited draw distance.


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VS

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The above image of Ultima was the most complex/detailed looking i could find. While Doom has even more complex looking architecture in later levels.

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Saintruski said:
not sure I'm impressed by this list. I don't like the idea of what makes a game the most technically advanced as the greatest looking, or hardest to run. What about game play mechanics, those could be advanced In a technical way. Game design could be technically advanced, 1981 ultimate I, the first open world game. That just isn't an evolution in game design that's technically advanced in gameplay mechanics plus design. Open world+parkour+flying, or open world, or what about something like open world plus powers like prototype. I'd put watch dogs as bad as a game as it was above grand theft auto in its technological advancements. Parkour, environmental interaction, some weather effects, Etc etc. What about animation advances, that life like movement if the face and body, or physics and spacial recognition in space and flight games. I think we take a lot for granted on what is done in video games, advances are everywhere just not always in the looks and can you run it division
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Same here. I would go so far as to say that graphical effects today are being overdone already to the point that they no longer affect the gameplay one iota. I marvel more on the subtleties of game programming. For instance, I find it revolutionary the first time I saw how independent the ball was moving in relation to the players feet in Winning Eleven (as compared to FIFA where the ball was simply glued to the feet). I also loved the way limbs exploded when shot and how zombies would move after in House of the Dead (Sega did the same thing in Binary Domain).

Lastly, sport simulations like NBA 2K, NHL and Madden aren't even mentioned in this discussion. This particular genre happens to be the most difficult to recreate and that is why not many developers are developing sports games today (compared to open world shooters that are relatively easier to develop thanks to middleware). As such I would say that NBA 2K6 for Xbox 360 with its smooth animation and cloth physics was the most technically impressive video game in 2005.

For 1999, it's got to be NFL 2K for the Sega Dreamcast.
 
Maxing out hardware is generally a bit hard to judge, technically everything that drops frames maxed out its hardware by demanding more than the HW could do, game development is all trickery to produce the best output with the least resource cost. I'm not sure if this thread is meant to convey how badly old technological marvels age, if that's the case then obviously it should always be the graphically most advanced game of a year but otherwise, yeah, there are tons of other areas where a game could be advanced especially during the early days of gaming when having multiple stages in a game was already an insane achievement.

E.g. Rage is an achievement in optimization, it's surprisingly undemanding for what it does. Same goes for Doom 3, I remember the hype in advance of its release pointing at 3D Mark's normalmapped scenes and saying "this is how Doom 3 will run on your hardware", turns out D3 ran waaaaay better than that.
 
Saintruski said:
not sure I'm impressed by this list. I don't like the idea of what makes a game the most technically advanced as the greatest looking, or hardest to run. What about game play mechanics, those could be advanced In a technical way. Game design could be technically advanced, 1981 ultimate I, the first open world game. That just isn't an evolution in game design that's technically advanced in gameplay mechanics plus design. Open world+parkour+flying, or open world, or what about something like open world plus powers like prototype. I'd put watch dogs as bad as a game as it was above grand theft auto in its technological advancements. Parkour, environmental interaction, some weather effects, Etc etc. What about animation advances, that life like movement if the face and body, or physics and spacial recognition in space and flight games. I think we take a lot for granted on what is done in video games, advances are everywhere just not always in the looks and can you run it division
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more info please - not sure what you're talking about?
 
nkarafo said:
I didn't say it has a more complex map. I said a more complex level design, meaning that the levels themselves look more complicated in architecture detail, geometry, etc. Ultima is like endless tunnels and corridors with very little geometry detail and even has a short draw distance. Dooms levels look complex with many details and geometry while having unlimited draw distance.

The above image of Ultima was the most complex/detailed looking i could find. While Doom has even more complex looking architecture in later levels.
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In all fairness Ultima Underworld was a little more advance than Wolfenstein 3D in some respects. As it has textured walls and floors, and varying degrees in height for floors and walls that could be at 45 degree angles. Three things that the Wolf3D engine couldn't do.

The most advance version of the Wolf3D engine was used for Rise of the Triad, which did add textured floors and ceilings and diminishing lighting (fog) as well as a few other tricks. But it was still stuck with a 90 degree wall limitation and could not do elevated floors or ceilings. RotT faked higher and lower areas on the map by using sprites that the player could stand on.

The Doom engine is much more advanced though, as it has walls that could be displayed at any angle, has sector based lighting for shadow and highlight effects, used binary space partitioning, which allowed for large areas to be rendered at fast speeds as it would render only what is on screen in relation to the player. And it also has skyboxes.

The Duke 3D Build engine was simaler to the Doom engine, but was a little more advance as it could do sloped floors and ceilings, voxel rendering support (Shadow Warrior and Blood displayed voxel sprites in areas), and also used teleportation tricks to fake rooms over rooms and pools of water that the player could swim in. It could also be used to create DR. Who like TARDIS rooms. Build could also do moving sectors that could be used for things like trains or the spinning objects.

Ken Silverman's Build engine was a pretty brilliant take on the Doom engine for its day. Even John Carmack was impressed by it, but also described it as 'an engine that felt like it was being held together by bubble gum and paper clips', or something like that. But a few months after Duke 3D was released, Quake came out, and the Quake engine was a whole new level of tech. But I do think that some of the features from Build were also achieved in later source code ports of the Doom engine.
 
Dictator93 said:
"offset mapping"

Like normal maps? I am pretty sure it did not have any parallax texture effects. Not that I remember at least.
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IIRC, they are in the paks but not used in the game. You could see offset maps using this user map

http://farcry.filefront.com/file/Far_Cry_Polybump_Offset_Mapping_Example;26574


Btw, what they called "polybump", was better implemented than character bumps in Doom 3

http://sabia.tic.udc.es/gc/Contenid...s graficos videojuegos/crytek/polybump_02.jpg
 
HTupolev said:
This thread isn't really about how impressive something is as a development effort, as it is about how much impressivity is being spewed out at the output. So for instance, the XB1 version of Titanfall would rank ahead of the 360 version even though it's comparatively pathetic given the capabilities of the platform.
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The OP could really have benefitted from an example such as this. May have saved us from quite a few posts arguing for stuff like DooM over Daytona USA, or Mario 64 over Virtua Fighter 3.
 
I think the thread maybe should have been called the most technically demanding games year by year
Technically advanced does still fall into that category but there was many games that was technically advanced (not technically demanding) and pushed hardware beyond what was thought possible on any hardware because of the advanced technical methods used to make the game which other games followed after with.
 
I would pretty much agree with you. The mid 80s to the late 90s Sega Arcade ran things. PC after 99 for me pretty much took over as Naomi board games were pretty much everything Sega was putting out.
 
MaLDo said:
IIRC, they are in the paks but not used in the game. You could see offset maps using this user map

http://farcry.filefront.com/file/Far_Cry_Polybump_Offset_Mapping_Example;26574


Btw, what they called "polybump", was better implemented than character bumps in Doom 3

http://sabia.tic.udc.es/gc/Contenid...s graficos videojuegos/crytek/polybump_02.jpg
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Wow, that is really cool (the offset mapping). I had no idea.

What about polybump for characters is better than the doom 3 character bumpmapping? Better fitting to the base mesh?
 
Total war series should have made it some where on the list, at least an honorable mentions for rendering of mass A.I's, i still use Shogun 2 as a real world CPU benchmark test.
 
ShamePain said:
Some crappy examples there OP. Killzone 2 took a huge dump on Crysis when it came out, the lighting alone is a generation ahead, Uncharted 2 is no slouch either. Arma is demanding only it was badly coded and poorly optimized. Crysis 2 is another bad example, Killzone 3 raised the bar again and looked significantly better with larger levels and set pieces.
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Goodbye, sweet credibility.
 
nkarafo said:
I didn't say it has a more complex map. I said a more complex level design, meaning that the levels themselves look more complicated in architecture detail, geometry, etc. Ultima is like endless tunnels and corridors with very little geometry detail and even has a short draw distance. Dooms levels look complex with many details and geometry while having unlimited draw distance.




The above image of Ultima was the most complex/detailed looking i could find. While Doom has even more complex looking architecture in later levels.
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But wouldn't the superior draw distance and detail be because it's doing less? UU's world is made up of full 3D polygons, whereas Doom is raycasted. Throw in the far more complex physics engine, and I'd argue that UU (especially the sequel) is ultimately doing more, even though it doesn't necessarily look as pretty as Doom. There's a reason it barely ran on even high-end PCs back in the day. I always saw Doom as striking a balance between tech and being able to run on low-end hardware, not as some technical powerhouse.
 
Hm, I think we need to penalize dropping frames somehow, after all when you run at 15FPS you get 4x the computing time for each frame and obviously get prettier screens. I've played a filled polygon first person shooter on the C64, it just ran like crap at something like 0.5-2 frames per second depending on scene complexity.
 
Ah yes, Far Cry 1.3. I had a good time revisiting the game with all of the major upgrades they made to the engine. I hate that game but spent so much damn time with it. The lighting is way overdone by today's standards with 1.3 but I enjoyed it a lot at the time on my 6800GT.

Crysis redeemed them completely, of course.

We have evolved vastly. Can't wait to play VR in 20 years.
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The VR today is already quite good. It should be incredible much soon than 20 years.

Go play the New Retro Arcade using a DK2 and your mind will truly melt at the awesomeness.
 
Excellent OP and a really good discussion in the rest of the thread.

Just a few games that I felt pushed the boundaries in the early '80s- Encounter (Paul Woakes 1983), Mercenary (also Paul Woakes 1985), Rescue on Fractalus (1984) and Dropzone (Archer McClean 1984). Obviously not as good as the arcade picks in the OP from those years, but still good examples of technical excellence. Star Raiders from 1979 was also a little marvel for the time.
 
Dictator93 said:
In Crysis Warhead, which came out a year earlier... there is an entire train sequence but you can actually get off the train at any time... and it is not just repeating level sections.. .but rather driving through a real multiple kiometer long space. Similarly, the facial and body animation in something like Crysis is more than comparable. As well as almost every "set piece" moment in the game being driven by an actual physics engine, and not a play backed canned cut scene. Hence why something like Arma is technically advanced, it is doing everything via simulation.

I mean... I think all those games look great on their hardware, but they are just not doing things which are necessarily new and groundbreaking, but working their technical limitations well into their art.

On the other hand, rendering wise I think something like KZSF is doing quite a god damn lot, and deserves a great contender mention for 2014. More so than infamous for example.
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It's a bit different because the train section in Crysis Warhead does not affects animations in any way and the train only goes in a straight line...which was the major challenge while making Uncharted 2, not the fact that they had a still trail surrounded by a moving scenery.

And the fact that Crysis didn't have repeating section has nothing to do with it being more technically advanced int his area, it's simply because of the level design. Since in Crysis Warhead the level was to finish once the train reached a certain point and the train would move irrespective of what the player's doing (granted the path is clear), while in Uncharted 2 the level would just stop progressing if the player stops progressing by just standing at a point. What I am saying is that the progression of the level is tied to the player due to them wanting a "cinematic experience". They could have made a level like Crysis Warhead in Uncharted 2 if they wanted to easily but that would result in a much shorter level or a level that's badly paced (since there is no guarantee where or what the player is doing when one scenery moves from another)

Also Shadowfall is 2013, but yes it is comparable (even better in some areas) to Crysis 3 and Ryse that came out the same year.
 
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