Remote brains

I found a old post written about creating animations on an old re

gular read of mine at webmastersdesk. Creating animations is easier now than it was,

and as always technology has advanced to allow some of the most amazingly detailed graphics yet. I had a go at playing Lord of the Rings online, and for an online game the images are amazing. The graphics are so good, I wouldn’t be complaining if the game was off line only. Yet with all the advances in graphics – is it really better?

A friend of mine was talking about buyinga graphics card at about £100 in order to simple be able to run a program – not to enhance it mind, just to make his machine powerful to run it! He doesn’t even know if it is any good yet – and the card will cost him more than the software in the first place. I can’t afford to purchase some of the latest software because I can’t afford to buy the hardware necessary to run it! Why is this?

I’m not a programmer, but a friend of mine suggested that computers are so powerful in todays world, that coders have gotten lazy. I remember as a teenager spending hours playing with my config.sys and autoexec.bat on my boot disc to optimise my computer to run X-wing on the PC the fastest I could possibly get it. Coders once they had produced a game or a piece of software would spend time making it as compact and efficient as they could in order for it to run the fastest and smoothest they could get it. Now of course this isn’t necessary IF you have the latest computer. The IBM P6 processor runs at 4.7GHz, and is the quickest – not taking into account super-cooled or specialist hardware. Yet even now by the time you have read this, it’s probably out of date information, and I’d have to sell my house in order to be able to buy it.

With all this high spec technology easily available we have a world of high detailed graphics and animation – is it what we want though? The obvious answer is yes of course! Who wouldn’t want the finest screenshots and the most realistic looking avatars? I am going to leave you with an example of why not as something to let brew.

Southpark.

While the program first aired in 1997, a full decade ago when graphics were simpler, they made a conscious decision to not make their cartoon at all realistic. In fact – the images are awful (technically)! The picture quality is reasonable at best, the drawings are crude and the animation simplistic. Technically it is probably one of the worst cartoons to be released in 1997. Yet it is hugely popular – and I myself love it. So what makes it good? Content, characters, story and plotline. These other elements are so strong that the show is superb. So do we really need the latest technology in our animation?

I’m not saying it shouldn’t be used, but not at the expense of the other elements. A game/cartoon that visually looks spectacular won’t stand for long if it has no substance under the visual delivery. Given the choice between something that looks and runs brilliantly but has no plot, and something that looks awful but is held together with strong story and plot – I’m taking the latter everytime.

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