Forum Archive Index - May 2000

["Nigel Bree" <nbree@kcbbs.gen.nz>]

Christian Mair wrote:
> Please correct me if I am wrong:
> EA Sports = Computer games = PC/Playstation etc.
> Virtual Spectator = Computer animation = Television

Short take: games *are* animation, just tuned for real-time rendering
performance. VS's internet site uses *exactly* the same kind of rendering
as the games, except the games can do *more* sophisticated stuff. And have
you noticed that Playstation logo on the VS home page?

> So Virtual Spectator is in no direct competition with EA Sports.

Unfortunately, the division is not quite so direct. For instance, while the
EA Sports titles are built for rendering on PCs, like most PC games
companies
at present the animations they produce are targeted around the capabilities
of the high-end PC 3D accelerators, and the war between 3Dfx, NVidia and ATI
is not slowing down at all with this year's crop of accelerators featuring
more capable anti-aliasing and other effects (3Dfx, for instance, have
motion
blur and depth-of-field) combined with fill rates of over 1Gpixel.

One of the nice things about EA Sports is that with re-issuing titles
annually they are constantly keeping up with these developments, and they
have a *huge* stable of existing titles over which they can spread the costs
of improving their technology.

Given that the EA simulators - and they are simulators, capable of producing
any sports situation you want - produce graphics at over 1k*1k*32bpp, and
you
compare that to the piss-poor resolution of single-def TV (you can get away
with as low as 360x288), the distinction between off-line animation products
and on-line ones is decreasing rapidly. Give a thought to the rise of the DV
format and how easy it is to shoot on a $5000 DV camcorder and edit on a
home
PC with a FireWire interface these days!

If you're a NASCAR fan, you may remember that a couple of years ago the
folks
at Sierra Sports hooked up their NASCAR 2 simulator into a purpose-built rig
with multiple monitors and force-feedback stuff so they could use it as a
training simulator for the NASCAR teams, who pronounced it *superb*. Not
that
testimonials like that necessarily mean a lot, just like marketing phrases
"ground-breaking", "photo-realistic" and so forth rarely represent reality.
It does, however, provide a neat demonstration that there is no *technical*
barrier present stopping PC players moving into other areas.

[ It's also generally pretty easy to use the gaming renderers in an
  "off-line" mode with higher quality. The commercial PC-based 3D rendering
  engines are mainly used for games but can do much more. ]

The simple truth of the business is that at the moment, the rendering
aspect is almost a non-issue. The bulk of the cost in producing a game goes
into creation of the graphics and sound "content"; modelling the entities
to be rendered, motion-capturing actors to animate the models, getting the
textures to put on the polygons, and recording voice. Plus, of course, any
licensing fees. EA, of course, have so many titles on the boil that they
can share a lot of the key resources (artists, animators) among them.

VS have done well with the "low-hanging fruit", choosing sports which are
easy to animate and where the necessary telemetry has been in use for years.
They may well succeed selling to the broadcast TV markets, if only because
the big players (like EA) view that as too far from their core business. But
for on-line services, for viewing on home PC's, VS are hopelessly
outclassed.

Their best hope is based about being able to use the TV side of things to
get an exclusive lock on the data to use for the on-line service; i.e.,
shutting out the other players through good old-fashioned business tactics,
*not* technology.



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