Are we already seeing 'graphical improvements'?

When was this? o_O

Mid-rendering?

Disagreed.

As Rorschach said in Antarctica "Fine like this."

Don't get me wrong, my numerical compatriot, I have no complaints with our current graphics. I'd simply see some improvement on said graphics to be a slight perk.

See, that is why I disagreed. I don't see it as a perk at all, because it would likely force a large number of people (myself included, yes, I have a bias in this) to upgrade our computers. Mine is just good enough that I am satisfied.

I'm edging into territory where I may or may not be technically correct.

There's.. .well... several assumptions being made in the thread so far.

One of the assumptions being made in this thread by me is that the engine depends heavily on texture rendering rather than shader rendering. I don't know if this is actually true or not. I don't actually know how much of the game engine's graphics code is based against OpenGL 1.4. I presume based on the timing and the patch notes that a large quantity of the underlying graphics engine is built against a graphics standard that's well over 5 years old. If the engine works as I think it does, I think there is performance headroom to be gained out of re-writing the graphics engine to leverage shaders where textures are being used.

***

Another assumption being made is that an upgrade to the graphics engine automatically means lower performance across the board to handle higher-resolution textures, higher resolution particle affects, additional particle affects, better lighting and so on. Well, if there is shader headroom to be had in the engine, some of these effects could be enabled without any sacrifice of frames per second performance.

In other words, you could actually gain a performance advantage on Shader-enabled hardware.

You would only loose performance... or support... if you're using a graphics card that's reliant on texture rendering and has poor to no real shader support. Well, lets be honest, if you're using a Radeon 8500 or one of it's spin-offs, or your using an Nvidia Geforce FX card or one of it's predecessors... you need to bite the bullet and upgrade. Not just because your hardware is ancient, but because neither AMD nor Nvidia are supporting these cards anymore.

The big question here is the Intel Graphics. The Intel Extreme Graphics are most certainly out of the question. That's actually where I got that cute de-texturized picture from. As of Larrabee, Intel chips are going to be a non-factor for graphics support. The question is the stuff they've shipped between Extreme Graphics and Larrabee. Most of the Intel graphics hardware does advanced shader functions on the processor anyways.

***

This raises another assumption that the current graphics client has to be discontinued. The empirical case in point here is Eve Online. They recently dropped their Shader Model 1 graphics client completely, and only support Shader Model 2 and onwards.

However, if we go back a few years, we'll find games like Half Life and Unreal Tournament that shipped game clients with two different GPU rendering paths... DirectX and OpenGL. Technically, it is possible to select two different rendering engines for a single binary game. Nobody does it anymore for one good reason: development time and cost.

NCSoft might be in the position where they can afford to finance Paragon Studios having a small team to bug-fix and maintain the current graphics engine for those that refuse to upgrade, while having a majority of the development team focus on building a better and more interactive interface.

***

That of course leads to the assumption that at some point NCSoft will have to tell Paragon Studios to drop the older engine and just focus on the main development branch.

***

As I see it, Paragon Studios does have an issue on their hands. A lot of the stuff players want... animated hair, animated tails, rag-doll based figures and clothing... is going to require a significant amount of rework to the underside of the engine. It'd make BaB's and Jay's lives a heck of a lot easier if clothing would naturally overlap on a physics basis rather than on a hardcoded geometry animation tied to skeletal frames.

In order to deliver what the player base wants, at some point users are going to have to upgrade... whether or not they like it.

I'm honestly not sure how to respond. I think if I understand what you're asking... it's like this:

Will there be an overhaul of how powers and chat are presented?

or

Wiill there be continuing incremental upgrades of the UI system in place?

I think we are seeing Paragon Studio's responding to long-time playerbase requests, and refinements to the UI itself. I expect that trend will continue.

And animated and more detailed faces, and more details hands, and more realistic bust shapes, and turning and bending waists

*wagwags*

Yeah, that'd be cool...
Aside from that (and they really should FINALLY add some of those really generic missing costume pieces, not like a different shirt would break your character, but some things from that long list of things that aren't there at all, like canine tails )
It would be very cool to see some graphic improvement, optimally optional (old engine or new engine for you?), one where e.g. shadows work.

But just as much I hope for a remake of the maps, with a few more and less awkwardly placed train stations, lines meeting somewhere, water being more than two feet deep.

In a game based on comic books? I fear you may be misapprehending the genre somewhat.

They can still be big - that's ok - but I'd like them to look more like real life

Bianca Beauchamp?

(edit: if you didn't get this joke, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SiN_Episodes :: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...s_Sinclair.jpg )

...depends on your definition of "realistic". Liking her taste in clothes, though.

I suspect this will come into play in a future issue. Roughly the same time that the lawn in front of Freedom Court in Galaxy gets turned into a beach volleyball court. BAB's training point would move to a referee's chair at the bottom of the stairs.

EDIT: reminds me, I'm not sure realistic physics would be useful here. Even with the slider on average, my toons would need a sports bra welded by the same guys who made the Golden Gate.

...also, none of them ever use Super Jump. Ouch.

That's ok - they're normal looking - but we can't get that effect with the chest slider - right now, it calculates the expansion totally the wrong way - it separates instead of pushing together, so the bust actually becomes wider than it should be - they shouldn't point away at an angle, they need to point forwards in the same direction.

...oddly, this seems to work fine with the Witch and Bridal tops. (Hey Jay- we need proper decolletage on the Leather ones too. NOW! *cropcrack*)

Just to get away from the most common superpower for a moment: I've noticed the entire game running faster and smoother since Power Spectrum came out - even getting through a decent sized Rikti Raid this evening with few graphical lockups.

I haven't upgraded either machine (laptop, dualcore, 2GB, GeForce Go7600) or drivers, so I'm guessing there's some processing refinements.
Keen. Please don't spoil it with extra graphical doodads.

I can't help wondering if the improved realism of those is the result of the new female costume designer who started work around the time they came out

Yeah! Get right on over there to ATI's website and tell them you're sick of their crappy driver compatibility issues!

.... what?

Um. Please get out of 2002. ATi's drivers across Windows and *nix are currently far better than Nvidia's drivers, especially in the 64bit realm.

***

Edit. Okay, I decided I'm actually going to be nasty about this. Couple of background links first:
http://zerias.blogspot.com/2007/12/c...on-nvidia.html
http://mepislovers.org/forums/showpo...01&postcount=1
http://www.hardocp.com/news.html?new...VzaWFzdCwsLDE=
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/new..._abnormal_rate
http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/18/i...set-licensing/
http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/10/...mi-boards-gtc/
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=734

First off, Nvidia's driver support has been hands down absolutely abysmal for years. On my own systems across Geforce 6600 GT, Geforce 7900 GT KO, Geforce 6800 Mobile, Geforce 9500 GT, and Geforce GTS 250 I've run into countless problems with SLI not activating properly, cooling fans running at full tilt, cards downclocking themselves under 3D loads, and more X-server and Windows Blue Screens than I care to count.

On a front that's important to me, Open-Source support, AMD and Intel lead the pack. 3D support is already implemented across a wide range of their cards. Both Intel and AMD directly sponsor employees to write open-source drivers, and the hardware specifications are available to anybody : http://www.x.org/docs/intel/ http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/ : Nvidia? Well, they don't have an open-source strategy. Their Linux strategy simply consists of a binary driver... that's awful: http://www.mepisguides.com/Mepis-7/h...ati-64bit.html

On a front that's important to other gamer's is Nvidia's treatment of PhysX. Even if you've got an Nvidia card in your computer, if you're not using it to render the scene, you can't use GPU PhysX... and trying to lay hands on Ageia's actually Physics Processing Card? Well, hope you have lots of money for Ebay and lots of faith that Nvidia will keep updating drivers for it.

***

Then there's the Nvidia hardware. I mentioned the problems I had with the fans running full tilt. ALL THE TIME. Until I downclocked the cards. Well, Nvidia flat out lied to a ton of hardware vendors about their cards actual thermal envelopes. The result was a string of exploding laptops and product recalls. Nvidia's stock took a beating as the sheer scale of their hardware failures came to light...

If hardware problems ended there, that'd be nice... but they don't. Nvidia's pretty much abandoned the AMD motherboard market. The good news is that right now I can actually find a couple of Socket AM3 motherboards with SLI support... a 2 way SLI MSI at $99.. .and another MSI at $160 with Triple-SLI. The bad news is, these are MSI boards... so you know the bios is junk. Neither board supports Crossfire either... and Nvidia won't let AMD add Crossfire support to AMD based chipsets... but they'll enable SLI on Intel motherboards without skipping a beat.

Then there's the whole court case with Intel over the rights to the Intel bus technology... and the problems with Nvidia integrated motherboards having a higher failure rate than Intel or AMD/ATi counterparts... which again links back to Nvidia not telling the truth about their thermal issues.

Then there's the actual card supports. Nvidia's high end shipping cards... the Geforce GTX 200 series... is pretty much based off of the same architecture that spawned the Geforce 8800 back in 2006. Yes, their powerful cards, but OpenGL and DirectX have moved on since then... and come on, Nvidia helped write and ratify OpenGL 3.2. You'd think they'd be able to produce a graphics card that actually SUPPORTED everything in OpenGL 32.... which brings us to Fermi. Right now Fermi's a pipe-dream. Nvidia can't even demonstrate it in Ikos boxes. They've got a nice white-paper... but that's it. The card doesn't actually exist. Nvidia hasn't actually gotten any working samples from the fab.

AMD / ATi? Intel? Well, AMD / ATi just launched the RadeonHD 5x00 series... which... quite frankly blows Nvidia's best offerings out of the water... at lower price points. Intel's demonstrating functional Larrabee silicon. That Intel bit is the most panic inducing part. Right now Fermi and Larrabee are looking to be launching in the same time-frame. Intel has operational silicon. Nvidia. Does Not.

***

Now, I could continue on about how ATi cards and drivers perform better at certification tests... but there's not really a point. Anybody who seriously believes there's issues with AMD/ATi cards or drivers is quite literally stuck back in 2002. Yes. There were problems. Yes. OpenGL support /sucked/. That support has been fixed. It was fixed almost literal years ago.

So. here's my piece of advice. I'm going to look a lot harder at what everybody else but AMD is doing before I go knocking down their door again. You should too.