It is a quiet irony of videogame technology that the more complex the hardware, the more games we'll see based in natural, organic environments. Considering the extreme difficulty and extravagant processing cost of producing something as seemingly benign as a believable tree, it's not surprising that so many games have dense urban settings. Buildings, after all, are squares with windows.
With next-generation consoles, however, game designers are finally getting a chance to truly indulge those latent green fingers. The combination of powerful multi-core processors, advanced graphics chips and lots of memory is working in nature's favour. The PS3 off-road racer, MotorStorm, features incredibly realistic mud effects, with each particle of dirt given authentic physical properties so that it flies up and splatters on cars. Tense first-person shooters like Prey, Far Cry Instincts and Call of Duty 3 feature dense vegetation: will it be safe behind this large leaf? Or has the programmer done his job, affording true protection only to the trunk of the tree? Increasingly, the latter is the case.
"I also think we'll see more effects for streams and jets of water, as opposed to just pools, especially now the Marching Cubes Algorithm patent has expired," says programmer Lyndon Homewood of Blitz Games, referring to a clever chunk of maths that makes moving 3D surfaces easier to create. It was patented by its creators, Harvey Cline and William Lorensen, in 1985, but is now free to use - perfect timing for next-gen developers. He also reckons that videogame environments will have lots of objects and natural forces acting on each other using realistic physics models - floods knocking down walls, avalanches crushing buildings, etc.
Increased processing power will also allow for the more intricate use of procedural geometry. With this technique, programmers create algorithms that build in-game objects on the fly, rather than storing masses of prefabricated environment data on the disc. Will Wright's forthcoming evolution sim Spore makes intense use of this to create rich organic worlds.
Earlier this year, Sony announced a PS3 game called Afrika, a sort of wildlife documentary sim in which you zoom around the Serengeti in a jeep trying to photograph exotic animals. I've little doubt that this heralds a new genre of videogame in which environmental exploration is the whole point of the experience. There will be no enemies and no missions as we understand them. Just vast intricately realised and unspoiled worlds, perhaps generated on the fly for each explorer, certainly employing Dolby 7.1 surround sound to generate aural environments as rich as the natural surroundings. Surely it's the ultimate form of eco-tourism.
