Graphics engine improvement

[bn880]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Heatseeker @ April 24 2003,16:11)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">Yeah, Take that Black Hawk Down game for example, it uses lotsa pixel shadding efects and all that but overall it has too many low res. textures and its colors look cartoonish.

one thing bis should look into is light efects during the day, while opf looks amazing at night, and awsome during sunrise/sundown it looks a bit watercolored during the day .[/QUOTE]<span id='postcolor'>
Yep, I think that&#39;s actually where pixel/vertex shading can be helpful. In moderation.

You also noticed how the cars in R3 RVS look cartoonish? too funny Having said that, R3 RVS does actually have some really nice sun and shadowing effects.

I think BIS will kick butt with it&#39;s decisions on graphics next time around.

[Dwarden]

Hopefully something like this comes (trilinear displacement mapping on flat surface with vertex shaders)

http://users.belgacom.net/xvox/

http://users.belgacom.net/xvox/Xvox.zip
http://users.belgacom.net/xvox/Xvox_source.zip

of course more optimized ....

and techniques used by this guy here

http://esprit.campus.luth.se/~humus/



i&#39;m sure more can be added than i can find and imagine

[bn880]

Only problem with tesselating terrain much is the size of OFP islands. Man, this is a fine balancing act they have to perform. Although it will be ok as long as there are configuration options to use very low detail. Like current engine.

HEY, this was bn880&#39;s 2880th post. Nostradamus would be impressed.

[Heatseeker]

I can imagine a island the size of nogova without cliping probs inside buildings and with deformable terrain and better fisics... but current hardware would not be able to run it, maybe in the next 10 years or so .

[[SZ]Vladimir]

good idea bn880 using of ATI&#39;s trueform and other DX8 (DX9 too ?) functionality

Vladimir

[Hovmand]

I dont want to much of all that new and "cool" graphics it doesnt look realistic at all, i will be extremly dissapointed if it will turn out to look like BF1942 or Unreal2.

[Antichrist]

I&#39;ll be happy as long as BIS don&#39;t make the game for a specific videocard manufacturer like retards at Epic did&#33;

[Franz_Schall [SWAF]]

I hope you guys aren&#39;t biased only on OFP - it&#39;s an excerpt of the developers diary about Söldner - Secret Wars.

There&#39;s something very interesting about creating these huge environments, and the difficulties it might bring for customers as well as developers which would target the same problems as BIS might encounter while programming OFP2.

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote </td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">3D HARDWARE ACCELERATION
As you know, Söldner requires DirectX8.1 and a hardware accelerator. The job of a PC game developer is made difficult by the myriad of different cards on the market. Even if brand new GeForce FX or Radeon 9700 cards are in the stores, there are still enough users with Geforce2 or even TNT2 cards out there. So which cards to support? Tough question.

Somewhere you have to draw a line. Currently this line is a GeForce2 for Söldner. We support all sorts of scaling down the game to run on those cards; whether or not we can lower this line to GeForce1 is unknown as we don&#39;t want to upset those people with high end cards, right?

The reason I touch this topic is something called static meshes. Due to the history of 3D acceleration, specifically the way hardware manufacturers tune their cards to play Quake-style games, is limiting games in big way. Modern cards are optimized to run static meshes really fast. Static meshes are the Object 3D data uploaded into the memory of the 3D card.

Once inside the card, this object can be displayed really fast: awesomely fast in fact. The drawback? Its static, i.e. it can&#39;t be changed.

So if you play a FPS game walls are concrete; they can&#39;t be changed or shot at. Remember Duke? That game was far more flexible and dynamic in its environment than for example Doom was. Check out the latest FPS games: even more static, but much more beautiful than the past. In fact recent games display less stuff but spend more time displaying it great.

Check out the Doom 3 movies. How many monsters do they display? Three? But oh boy, they look awesome. But forgotten were the days where you could kill 50 monsters in Doom with a single rocket from your launcher...

In other words the graphics card&#39;s power is spent on making things look better, but not making the 3D environment better, interactive, dynamic.

Söldner tries to change this with a lot of effort. In our game everything can be destroyed. This means that we need to update our objects in the 3D card constantly. As the AGP bus is pretty slow compared to the masses of data, we have to optimize everywhere we can. Would the 3D world optimize their hardware to run dynamic meshes we would be in a much better position and even support older cards than GeForce2.

Recently, the vertex shaders and buzzwords like cg compiler are heading our way: a programming language inside the 3D card where we can change meshes already uploaded. But its not here yet, less than 2% of the market has those shaders. So we need to wait.

What I want to say with all this? Well, this is the single reason why Söldner is a tactical shooter. Tactical shooters have the advantage of not needing 100 frames per-second. They can run with less, easily.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/r....ge=http [/QUOTE]<span id='postcolor'>

[[SZ]Vladimir]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Antichrist @ April 25 2003,14:53)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">I&#39;ll be happy as long as BIS don&#39;t make the game for a specific videocard manufacturer like retards at Epic did&#33;[/QUOTE]<span id='postcolor'>
No for a specific manufacturer, but incule support of ATI&#39;s Trueform for personn who have ATI&#39;s videocard... there is no difference for personns who have other card

And why not any DX8 effect for water (Morrowind make that personn who haven&#39;t a DX8 videocard (GF3, GF4Ti, Radeon8500, Radeon9X00(Pro), GFFX) can play this game without this effect, that&#39;s all) ?

And OFP2 is released in 1 Year 1/2, you have time to change your videocard

Vladimir

[Hovmand]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote ([SZ]Vladimir @ April 25 2003,17:29)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">And OFP2 is released in 1 Year 1/2, you have time to change your videocard [/QUOTE]<span id='postcolor'>
My videocard is just fine (gforce 4 ti 4200), I just dont think all those effects have a place in OFP.