- Sunday, 12 July 2009
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Vietnam was the first TV war, this could be the first Internet war - Wall St Journal
AMD reckons Cinema 2.0 will change the gaming scene
FOR YEARS, THERE has been a massive chasm between the worlds of movies and games, and those who attempted to cross it have usually fallen short and plummeted into the inky blackness below.
That gap is getting smaller and soon the line between interactive movie and immersive game are going to become increasingly blurred, according to AMD's director of digital media, Charlie Boswell.
Boswell recently had a few minutes to sit down with The INQ to discuss Cinema 2.0, which he describes as, "a vision and a roadmap that is going to usher in a new expectation that users are going to have about the technology experience. "
Bold words indeed, but Boswell was able to back them up with a lot of information about the idea, calling it an "amazing immersive experience on an AMD based platform."
"I can make this statement because of AMD's involvement in both the entertainment industry and the gaming industry," he added, explaining how the company had spent the last eight years working very closely with some of the most famous Hollywood directors including the likes of George Lucas and Robert Rodriguez.
He went to explain that now AMD is seeking to take the, "cinematic quality of what those folks are doing while working with the interactive folks in the industry to really help move those two vectors together."
Boswell explained that these days the cinematic guys crave more interactivity, while gamers want more cinematic immersion. "Cinema 2.0 is a technology base that allows those two technology vectors to come together," he said.
He pointed to the success a basic amount of interactivity brought to DVDs, with the inclusion of things like menus, bonus features and director's commentary.
According to Boswell, AMDs technology is now at a stage where high fidelity objects can be rendered in real time at 30 frames per second on normal PC hardware. In the very near future, green screen directors will be able to directly transport all the digital assets created for the movie directly into the game with no changes or stylisation.
Given that the creation of these models is often extremely expensive, this has both economic and aesthetic benefits and fundamentally changes the way a director shoots a movie.
When we asked Boswell why ports between the movie and gaming world, in both directions, are often so poor, he explained: "Often the director has a vision for the movie and that movie is successful, but when someone makes a game about the movie it's usually a representation of what they think the director wanted, or a completely different interpretation of the movie."
He went on to explain that this is precisely what AMD is trying to change with this new technology saying :"Cinema 2.0 means that the game can now be considered an interactive version of the movie and not just a stylised version of it. High fidelity characters, sets, environments, camera angles that brought your mind into the movie are now directly translated into the game."
Again pretty big words, and there are some videos out there which showcase the kind of thing that Boswell is talking about, but surely this is still years away from the grubby paws of the average person.
According to Boswell, no it isn't. "That's the best news of this conversation," he told us.
"This is technology you can buy today. Cinema 2.0 is capable on AMD's 4800 family of graphics cards and existing AMD CPUs," he said, adding that content is being created now by movie makers, so we should start seeing it trickle down into the market over the coming months.
For the near future, content is going to be limited and the necessary hardware to enjoy this properly is going to be on the pricey side, but over time both of these factors should become increasingly negligible. For the sake of never having to play another crappy 'video game of the movie' again, we can only pray this comes sooner rather than later. µ
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So basically, "Cinema 2.0" is about as useful as Intel's VIIV.

The movie people use the same 3D rendering tools the game people do. What's special about copying over a model from one project to another?

As far as I can tell, "Cinema 2.0" is merely a badge. If your GPU and CPU combo are badged as Cinema 2.0, then you'll be able to play games badged as Cinema 2.0 at a decent framerate.
To badge your game as Cinema 2.0, you just say you're using the same "digital assets" as the movie.

The claim is that you don't need to change anything. This is a load of bull.

There's no way in hell a developer will use a model that is far more complex than necessary, that isn't fully designed (for movies, much of the 3D modeling is only half-finished because you only ever see it from a few camera angles), and adds nothing to the game.

Well, there is one way: Money. We'll see some tech demos, and 2 or 3 sub-par games based on movies with "Cinema 2.0" blasted everywhere. Then AMD will realize that they don't have money to be bribing people to badge their games, and Cinema 2.0 will disappear.
"Boswell explained that these days the cinematic guys crave more interactivity"

Yeah, what the movie makers want more than anything is for people to mess with their story. That would only be true if they could charge you for every variation. Interactivity would require at least a minimal amount of creativity... something not seen in hollywood in years.

"while gamers want more cinematic immersion"

They do? While gamers want immersion its not graphics that provides that. Its an engaging plot, characters you can relate to and most importantly playability. The game studios think prettier graphics makes up for a lack of playability. They spend more and more making prettier and more realistic graphics but leave playability, story & substance to be an after-thought. When it runs over schedule they chop the important parts and you're left with a pathetic barely interactive story that bores the pants off most people.
You cannot jump the Chasm!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLsVWFGO7aQ
Games based on movies don't flop because of graphics. They flop because of weak plots, poor/unintuitive unterface, unimaginative gameplay, and other non-graphical reasons. The Wii is still selling like hotcakes, after all. At the opposite end of the spectrum: Disney's Pirates movies were a great trilogy, the online MMO is mind-numbing scorpion/skeleton killing. People get tired and stop playing. Great graphics won't fix that problem. Addind ship pvp, etc., may help a little.

Based on Episodes I-III: having anyone from StarWars is onboard is not very impressive. Just another way for them to make a buck.
"gamers want more cinematic immersion."
Did anybody even ask the gamers? I think they might have different priorities than it looking like a movie, looks are nice but don't make for a good game on itself.
And the camera angle thing is a bit dubious too, the reason for the angles in movies is because it's passive, you can't have movie camera angles in a game, only in cutscenes but nobody want those any more.
Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy anyone?
Sorry I'm from Missouri. The cinematic gaming will never fly, or much less float. 

I would argue that Cinematic gaming has already come in the form of games like Doom 3, Fear, Half-Life, BioShock, and System Shock 2, which immerses the player in a great novel-like experience. 

Cinematic gaming from the view of AMD and Bollywood is different. They're not thinking of storylines but rather just the visual thing. They want content to run at 1920 x1200 +. So in this regard current hardware can run this res without much problem. But, is that really a cinematic visual experience? Perhaps if your watching Wall-E or Shrek. It's not cinematic at all if your talking Matrix, Rambo, Godzilla. There's no massively immersive environments with hundreds of cars, people, birds, flowers, lights, trees swaying in the wind, etc. 

Strictly speaking about a cinematic experience visually, I would expect nothing less than and HD headset complete with head-tracking. Fully rendered landscapes and cityscapes with hundreds of cars, people, birds, flowers, lights, trees swaying in the wind, etc. All these would have to be photo-realistic, obviously. The game should put you effectively into the middle of the action more like the characters in a movie rather than the current way of seeing it through a two-dimensional screen. That fortunately will never happen because there's no processing power on the planet that can handle the exabytes of data every second required.
One thing read, NO AMD upComing Chipsets to Oggle. 890 mentioned few times, yet recent Roadmap holds NO Clue. As Cool Wind of Ultees' World Blows: X58 & Dunnington, wheres New Chipsets? NOT Many are complaining of BAD Processors, Not Since Barcelonia Mentos Rocket Testee thing. 

Yet No One has Map for Vista Ultimate64. Wheres Public? Wheres Chipset?
drashek

...cinematic experience. It's the make-up. Yes, folks, you've never seen anything like it: men made up to look like monsters! Monsters made up to look like men! Look-alike men made up to look different, different men made up to look alike! No expense has been pared...yeah, what with Christmas coming up and all. Evils will be quite pleased, as well as stinking Kevin. Do you suppose he'll recognize R2-3D? I mean, even now, since he's been turned into a hermit crab? Oh well, the day after tomorrow, it is then. Well that-that-that is-is- a long time, isn't it? Oh yes and believe you me, the poor are going to be, well not just absolutely thrilled, but also considerably less poor, aren't they? Are we sure we're not in somebody's bedroom? We don't know Him that well. We only work for Him. Block of ice to Beef Bourguignon in eight seconds. Lucky things. They didn't make history, they stole it! Oi! here we go again. Whoever ever heard of anybody starting anything on one?! 
He didn't have anything to spend on it, did he? Great streaks of misery. Well off we go for high spirits. Says you.
Did someone say interactive movie ? Cuz I heard someone say interactive movie.
But different. Not at all.

Heard this pimp speech quite a few times during the last 10 years.

I don't think cinema 2.0 will do anything much to improve my gaming experience.

I'd rather that the developers efforts went into good gameplay than more bells and whistles for the graphics.

I'd rather play Pacman Championship Edition than any souped up/hyped up FPS of the latest gen.
Well, to continue the theme...

"you are so mercifully free from the ravages of Intelligence"...
That was rubbish. Pictionary was much better, and it only needed a pencil and paper.

It's not how shiny it is, it's how much it pulls you in. Shiny helps, but its not the main ingredient in this pie.

And movie games usually suck because they are just aiming to have it out on time to match the movie date, and so long as the characters have similar moves then its ok. The Hulk game is a case in point. Average.