Breast physics and hair
I confess, I just wanted to use that in a post title. But I’ve been using 3DMark to get a sense of which of the three main machines I use is the best performer. The answer, depressingly, is that all three are below the standard of a ‘gaming laptop’, and less than a third of the performance of a ‘high-end gaming machine.’ Not that I chase the bleeding edge of performance, I’m far too cheap for that. But my usual tactic of staying 3-4 years behind that edge does mean that I occasionally have to see how far things have come along since I last splashed out on new kit.
How does that relate to breast physics you ask? Well while watching the Sky Diver test one of the most prominent views you’re given of the sky-diver in question seems specifically designed to show off the rippling of their breasts in the wind. Or perhaps it’s the ASUS logo that’s plastered all over the suit (although curiously, not in the shot they use in their benchmark listing).
Not that I have anything against more accurate depictions of the human form in motion of course. I think the reason that it jumped out at me though was because it didn’t look natural. I can almost imagine the animator’s reaction to their initial feedback. “You want them to do what? Are you sure? Would they even move like that…? I don’t know, I’ve never worn a wing-suit. How about you go find me some video footage of an actual female sky-diver and I’ll work from that instead of your imagination?”
The reason this popped out at me as more than just an off-hand amusement at the benchmark graphics was my flabbergastedness at certain tweets this week, accusing game developers of sexism, for the crime of not devoting as much effort towards hair rendering as to shiny and reflective surfaces. This grinds my gears on several levels. The last time I shipped a console game (Brave), we spent a quarter of the entire frame calculating and rendering Brave’s hair, and exactly zero time on shiny or reflective surfaces. So to pretend that we’ve just never concentrated on hair is disingenuous.
Secondly, the reason why there’s more shiny stuff in games than fabulous hair is not because, you know, screw women, but because rendering hair is hard. Not just developing it, making sure it moves properly and looks good, but actually getting it on screen is costly. Like fluid dynamics and other similar technical challenges, you’re having to simulate many, many small things at once, and then deform geometry and alter texturing every frame as a result; something 3D hardware would really prefer you didn’t do. Fundamentally, that’s costly, and the cost doesn’t go away just because you spend more development time on it. Whereas good lighting and reflections comes almost for free, from the way that hardware 3D rendering works; spend some development time on getting the lighting calculations right, and then they can be done for every fragment you see on screen, at only slightly more cost than just rendering the thing in plain lit colours. And once it’s done it works for everything, not just the subset of characters who happen to have long hair, but for everything in the environment and all the characters, even the short-haired ones. So from a development point of view it’s a no-brainer as to which gets you the most pretty for the least cost. Trying to make it an issue of sexism only serves to show how little you understand about the challenges of making games.
No-one is avoiding making the hair look good because they’re sexist, if it was affordable then they’d be doing it all the time. Because when your characters’ have long hair that looks good (regardless of their gender), reviewers gush over it, it’s immediately noticeable. When your environments are a little bit more shiny than before, no-one bats an eyelid. At best it’s acknowledged as part of a wider judgement that your game looks good. Why wouldn’t we want to go for the hair? Because even though it’s nicer to have in, it still costs too damn much to get right, both in development time and in runtime resources.