CuppaManga

Darn it, and I wanted to be able to summon a mob of minions all wearing their own unique clothing and designer dual pistols, while immersed in uniquely swirling particle effect fog--

...anyone have a mop? I think BaB's head exploded.

There will be a way to report those, and me and other people will re-test it.

Water is one of the few exceptions, along with FSAA (and both have caused problems with various video cards at one point). It appears to be still rendered in layers, but it has an additional software effects mode if the hardware-based effect fails or is turned off. This is likely to ensure that supported hardware that's unable to render the water effects properly can still see water as it was intended to look, since it's one of the foundation effects of the game.

You can see the effects layering at work if you play with the Water Effects and the Shadows toggles in Graphics Options. There's a blue floor, a bluish tinted material. If you have water effects off, there's an animated layer on a top surface that players can pass through. Turn them on, and the effect happens throughout the blueish tinted material instead of just the top surface. Then you can play with the shadows toggle to see how light reflection and shadow bounce off the top surface.

Ultra Mode, and I'm guessing here again, would add an additional layer of effects to the water so you can see yourself reflected and distorted in the surface as you move around, as well as players next to you. Because that effect would be semi-transparent, you would still see the original water effects and light/shadow effects through the reflection. You probably could even turn off Water Effects and see the old software animation through it as well.

Like I said though, the old disclaimer again: I haven't seen Ultra, and it could be something drastically different from my guesses. I'm assuming it's an evolutionary step (to preserve as much backward compatibility as possible without creating too many new bugs) rather than a ground-up replacement/alternative.

From what I've been observing I *think* the source of the communication hiccup is the "multiple rendering path" bit. In my experience watching the way things render in CoH (and I had to do that a lot while the Mac client was in testing) there aren't multiple paths, but it's built up in layers instead.

Again though, this is only my observation, there's likely a whole lot of stuff going on in the background that I can't see and don't know about.

I believe the swirly thing you speak of would be rendered like this: First it would be a geometric shape made in some 2D software and animated to spin in CoH. That wouldn't look like anything yet, because it doesn't have a texture applied yet (it would appear transparent). Then a texture is applied by the game - there would be multiple resolutions of that texture available, and just one loads depending on how far away you are, and what your video settings are. No matter what hardware you have, the polygons will be rendered, and some texture will be applied, because the game is designed to render up to this point no matter what, even if it has to do it all in software (though it will take advantage of hardware acceleration if it can). It can even have some kind of particle effect applied, varying in count by settings and hardware. By this point, the spinning swirly thing would look pretty cool already, with a palpable shape and form, and a colorful texture, and particles of dust floating off of it.

But then there's the part about the bending light effects. Those are not rendered as part of the object, but would be done as real-time after-effects. The best comparison for these after-effects would be like applying a Photoshop filter to a masked area of the display - only different levels of video cards support a different set of effects. The bending light affect is applied to a "mask" bordering the swirly thing so anything that gets near it, including players, are warped and smeared. That's why it's a real-time effect.

Unfortunately, if the *supported* video cards at the low-end are incapable of that effect, you have some players able to see the light-bending, and others who can't. Imagine moving your player close by, and it's not effected at all by the light effect, so it looks stupid. Then a determination has to be made by the devs whether that lack of visual information will impact the game negatively or not, and decide then whether to include it.

FYI, if you've ever tried to load CoH for Mac on Intel GMA 950 video you'd see what I'm talking about first-hand. The lighting and shadow effects are badly broken (which is why it's not supported) so everything has a Lego grey plastic feel to it. Textures don't render entirely, so there are holes in things. This is the kind of experience the devs try to avoid for the minimum supported hardware, and why they have to avoid using certain effects that might impact all players.

Let me see if I can help as someone who recently researched OpenGL (the graphics technology CoH is based on). Hopefully without making things even more confusing.

OpenGL has certain sets of version numbers - 1.1, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0, and maybe some in between I can't remember. They're actually designed to make game minimum/maximum requirements very easy to determine, because each version supports a certain set of visual effects that can be activated by software (like CoH).

The game devs can decide that at minimum they want a game system to support OpenGL 2.0, and at maximum 2.5 - which gives them a pretty clear picture of what features they can and can't use when designing the game. But the complexities don't stop there.

The graphics for CoH, and pretty much any game decided for PC or Mac, have to be designed in *layers*. The minimum layer is the "lowest common denominator" that BaB referred to - it *MUST*, and this is an absolute law of video game design, *MUST* contain ALL visual information required for ANY player to complete the game. This minimum layer usually complies with the OpenGL featureset they select as the minimum, and is commonly generated using very simple *software* rendering techniques to ensure that they will always appear no matter how crippled the system it's running on may be. Unfortunately, software rendering techniques are very labor intensive for the devs. More on this in a moment.

After that minimum layer, advanced layers can be added that enhance the appearance of the minimum layer using visual effects. This is commonly generated using *hardware* rendering techniques, depending on what the hardware supports, and includes such things as lighting effects, shadows, particle effects, etc. This layer is where Ultra goes - you need to see windows on a building, but you don't need to see your reflection in them. They're done mostly using hardware effects because that way they're less labor intensive to implement, and not very power hungry (if you meet the requirements).

If you notice the last thing I mentioned in the two paragraphs above, it's also about conserving CPU power. Working out a way to duplicate OpenGL hardware effects in software for lower-end systems is highly labor intensive, and risky - because it's quite likely those systems won't have the horsepower to render it anyway. If you want an example of what can happen when a software workaround is created, I believe FSAA in CoH is a good one (I'm not sure if it's been fixed since).

Also, as a side note, console systems (PS3, Xbox) don't have this problem, as they have a very narrow set of capabilities, and anything written for them can take advantage of the maximum pretty much all the time.