1/ This trivial looking, but incredibly important impressive video (watch to the end) shows why video game engines like Unreal and Unity have become so important today. https://twitter.com/R_Nikaido/status/1274142361635876866

2/ Game engines have long lagged the visual fidelity of CGI tools use for film/TV because they are focused on reproducing specific real world things (e.g. motion capture, a building) in a very specific way (e.g. Thanos doesn't parachute, Avengers Tower from angle x & distance y)

3/ Game engines focus on a far more difficult task: simulations.

They must not only process enormous amounts logic from up to dozens of concurrent users, and do so in real-time and without hiccups, and with severe limits to what is predictable and how far out it can be predicted

4/ And visuals don’t drive games as Thanos’ realism does The Avengers.

It’s also limited by consumer hardware (Xbox One came out in 2013 and used tech that was relatively affordable at the time, not cutting edge). Film graphics don't process on a DVD player; they “played back”

5/ At the same time, local processing of graphics are obviously getting much better as the devices improve in power/cost

And cloud gaming promises to place compute outside the consumer home and on what Bezos calls “computationally ridiculous” machines

6/ CGI tools, though, remain mostly focused on animation. Here’s how the rope will look when Coco pulls it from here to here, not here’s how the rope will *behave* in environments A-Z and when users does α to Ω

7/ Many companies do still have strong, though mostly purpose build simulation tools

LoTR’s Battle of Helm’s Deep was stunning and unprecedented in its realism + scope at the time, and used procedurally generated/variable orcs that fought uniquely based on height/size/item, etc

8/ But this is what engines do professionally. And they are constantly improving thanks to an ever-growing number of simulations, thousands of hours of end-user bug testing, expansion into new categories/games, etc.

This is especially true for the general purpose Unreal/Unity

9/ This is why, today, these engines are the most sophisticated/capable simulation tools in the world. Unreal is used by the military for simulations, Hong Kong International Airport was designed in Unity to better plan for impact of weather, model passenger traffic, emergencies

10/ There isn’t really a business case to build custom tools for such specific applications. Consider the rope. Not only is that incredibly sophisticated, it requires SO much prior logic around physics (e.g. how fast it’s moved, how hard it’s thrown, how it affects what it hits)

11/ Unreal was used in real-time to film "The Mandalorian", giving director Jon Favreau perfect live control on set of every rock, the placement of a sun and the role of its light, at any time of day, representing any planet.

Disney can't just go "build" this

11/ This all reminds me of the @cdixon line “The next big thing will start out looking like a toy”

In this case, "game" engines were built for games, but now they're often the best at running any virtual simulation. And that's a BIG opportunity

12/ Our lives, concerts, dating, ecommerce, socializing are all moving online. Visual fidelity is important here, but more important is the "reality" of cause and effect, coherency, the ability to "do" and especially do "together"

Just sitting in a room as floating orbs is dull

For everything you need to know about Epic Games / Unreal Engine, click here! https://twitter.com/ballmatthew/status/1272640830180864003?s=20

And if you're interested in how live multiplayer simulations work, how weird they are, and what cloud gaming might allow: https://twitter.com/ballmatthew/status/1258482103156604929?s=20

Lastly, I should add the rope example is from @Naughty_Dog's "The Last of Us 2", and uses the company's proprietary engine. Here's one of those responsible talking about it https://twitter.com/MaksZhuravlov/status/1274384129975410688?s=20