Gaming Program

edited in Projects
Hello My name is Sergio Williams
I've recently came up with a computer program that I had to pitch as a business idea in order to complete my course I've been doing and I feel that this is an awesome program which will change gaming forever! So if you are interested which I hope u guys will be contact me on:

Cell:0715651579
E-mail: sergiowilliams1612@gmail.com

Comments

  • Do you want to tell us more?
  • I like living dangerously. I'll take two.
    Thanked by 3dammit Chippit Merrik
  • Interested in... helping with development? Buying it? Going into business with you? Doing some marketing? Testing your program? Hard to even guess when we have no idea what your program is, or what it does.

    You may be scared someone might steal your idea, but believe me, ideas are cheap. Everyone here has plenty great ideas of their own, but not enough time to work on them all. They may be able to help you with your idea, but you'll first have to convince them that your idea is better than any of theirs.

    With the information you've given, I'm curious, but far too sceptical to be particularly interested. You'll have to give me some more information to get me interested in whatever you have to offer.
  • This super important starting bible of MakeGamesSA. We've all read it, and it is an important first insight into all of this:

    http://makegamessa.com/discussion/749/read-first-the-makegamessa-faq#Item_1
    Thanked by 1mattbenic
  • Here let me tell u guys more about the idea. You all probably know what’s a DVD converter right, it lets you convert HD and Blue-ray movies to any other format for example AVI AND 3gp. Which is brilliant, because it allows you to watch new high-definition movies on a ordinary DVD player or any other media player. This is very convenient because everyone cannot keep up with new technology.

    Now how many gamers out there and most likely on this site, had the problem of having a new computer game but is incapable of playing it due to the lack of specifications your computer is required to have in order to play the game. What if we had a program that does the same thing for computer games, as a DVD converter does for movies. What if we have a program that could convert the graphics, ram and the CPU required to play the game to a lower standard. Now the video game wouldn’t be the quality and standard it was originally designed to be, but at least it would be playable.

    This program will ensure no unnecessary expenses
    How many mothers out there has to deal with kids wanting a new console or computer. Why because new games are coming out everyday and sometimes, children don’t want to have games with better graphics and the only reason they want to upgrade their console or PC is for the sake of having new games. But the problem is no new games are made on there old consoles anymore or on their PC’s level of hardware. But with program all they have to do is buy the game convert the game, and there will be no other expenses necessary.
  • edited
    Very cool idea! I don't even know the technical wizardry needed for something like this, games are far more complex in scope than screen resolutions... a video is high def because it's got a sequence of larger resolution images, scaling that down is just changing each image downwards and recompressing it to another format.

    Games however are written in different code by different people with different assets saved in different formats loaded and manipulated in different ways by different... Blah blah fishpaste. What makes the last of us lag will not be the same way as what makes, say, sim city 4000 lag. There would need to be coding standards that everyone MUST work with to allow something like this to even be possible. I think the closest to standards we have right now are stuff like DirectX and the various engines like Unity and UDK.

    But hey let's see what others say about this, I'm actually technically not that awesome :) if this could be done I'm sure a few people would be interested... Except, most games these days have details settings already, and I don't think going below the minimal is helpful...

    I'll just leave this here, it's Skyrim on super low detail:

    image
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    I love this idea! Seriously, this is the best example of this kind of thread, ever...

    I'm also going to assume that this isn't trolling, merely a lack of understanding of why video converters can work on multiple videos and why the same sort of thing won't work on games.

    See, all digital videos are compressed. That means that each video file you watch (and Blu-Ray and DVD videos are indeed files, which is why computers can do things to them, unlike photographic film) has certain parameters that it's optimised for. Things like the resolution and bit-rate (how much information needs to be moved around for the video to not appear jerky) are encoded in compressed formats by algorithms that do a lot of processing really fast called codecs. Codecs are standard, you mentioned some of them in your post. This means that converting video data between codecs is not only possible, but trivial. Just like it's possible to change the font size on a document easily.

    Games are not standardised in the same way - even games that use the same basic "engine" will have completely different sections of code written for them specifically. Games are also interactive, so they're going to provide different experiences when played, thus they're not just going to be performing the same algorithms over and over, like a codec does. This means that you can't really "compress" a game in a standard way, just like you can't translate a book automatically - it will always take a ton of work to change the actual content of something, which is what you'd have to do to make your idea work for games.

    You're essentially asking for a magical program that could re-shoot an entire movie with different actors because those actors' facial expressions were easier to read on non-HD screens. That's not happening.

    Note that many games, especially PC games, have settings that allow players to tweak how those specific games run on different hardware. Sometimes these settings are buried in external files or hidden in other ways. Many self-taught programmers and game developers got their start trying to make a new game run acceptably on their old systems. I know that I'd spend hours tweaking things to try and get things to work that I shouldn't rightly have been able to run in the first place ;)

    Bottom line: Your idea, while interesting, isn't technically possible for a number of reasons. Games are complex, custom written programs that bear no resemblance to video files at all, barring that they're visible on the same screens sometimes.
    Thanked by 3Gazza_N Merrik Chippit
  • This problem is already being worked on by the streaming game console movement. There are still some hurdles to get over regarding bandwidth and latency, but they are making good progress.

    http://www.onlive.com/
  • Oh yes that's an interesting version of the solve - the principle of the onlive thing is for the processing to take place remotely and people play the game via streaming. So it's dependant on the bandwidth and latency, yes, but that's a pretty promising way of solving the problem.
  • Also not sold on it as a new idea.

    As has been said, games are made up of lots of different bits and pieces, and a lot of these things - meshes, shaders, post-processing, textures etc, can already be tweaked for lower hardware.

    Beyond those, other types of optimisations will need to be coded for. There's no "one solution" solution for this.

    And beyond that, most of the devs on here are small teams making small indie games that probably already run perfectly fine on 8 year old hardware.
  • farsicon said:
    This problem is already being worked on by the streaming game console movement. There are still some hurdles to get over regarding bandwidth and latency, but they are making good progress.

    http://www.onlive.com/
    I was going to mention this stuff in my reply, but it doesn't actually deal with the problem, it just shifts it - the game is still being run on hardware beefy enough to run it AND then compress a video stream in real time to send to you.

    Some games have even supplied custom builds to OnLive that work better on their virtualisation layer, which is the exact opposite of the OP's idea of having a general system. Also, OnLive was pretty terrible once you tried to use it too far from one of their data centers.

  • @dislekcia Virtualisation and cloud is the key to the future of computing. I'm not saying that game streaming is ready, or even that it is the answer yet, but this is where tech is going. As for the OP - there's no such thing, nor will there ever be.
  • If streamed games is the future of gaming, then please let us change the future now for that is grim.

    Worse, when the tech matures and we start seeing streamed-exclusive games, those are games that come right out of the starting blocks yelling "we're not here for the art, we're here for the money" since that creates entirely disposable content.

    But, I'm not too worried. It's just one thing in a sea of many things. There will always be different people doing different things, and there will always be press announcing some or other thing as "the future". As long as markets exist, there will be someone around to cater to them. This even goes for the less-than-desirable things such as F2P models.
    Thanked by 1Karuji
  • edited
    It's tricky, because every game is different. They're all written in different languages, compiled using different compilers, packaged differently, using different formats for levels and models and textures, and typically these are compressed into some encrypted package that the developers really don't want you getting into.

    One way I could think of doing this is have a community maintained database of scripts that work on a game-by-game basis to tweak the settings for individual games, automatically download low-res textures or simpler models if they exist and the game allows it, and other little tricks like that. Of course, you'd still need the minimum specs to be able to run the game, but it would make it easier to get the game working optimally on the minimum specs for an inexperienced user. What I'm imagining is something like what PlayOnLinux does for getting Windows games working in Linux by automatically running scripts for each game to configure your system and fix settings for the game, and add command line options, etc.

    The main challenge with that is that every combination of hardware acts slightly differently, so there may not be one best combination of settings for any given game. The best settings to be able to run a game will depend on what's limiting the performance... i.e. if it's a slow CPU, not enough RAM, a slow GPU, not enough video memory, ect.

    As for getting a generic program that will make any game work on lower than it's minimum specs, I cannot think of any way to do it, and I'm pretty sure it is not possible.
  • Wow I really never expected so much comments on this thread. Thank you guys for all your input and I understand where @AlphaSheep @dislekcia ect are coming from. This idea is tricky and would take a lot of work, most likely even impossible. But with technology today! Is anything really impossible? But hey its just an idea right..Thank you guys again for all your input
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