Are we already seeing 'graphical improvements'?
By
Aisynia,
Posted on: 2009-10-03 07:28 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
Couple of quick points:
War Witch is on record as saying that the game engine is nowhere near running at capacity. There is a lot more that can be done with it (and the intimation there is that the dev's don't actually yet know how far it can go but it's a long way.) The limiting factor is policy - not to leave players with older/lower spec systems behind. (Which IMNSVHO is a good policy.) But given that CoV launched almost 4 years ago, most people will be on a machine of higher spec than they had then I would guess so there is room for a good deal of improvement I'd imagine.
Also the ATI/nVidia tends to be horses for courses, as does the AMD/Intel thing - they keep interspersing positions and status and will often have problems but for the lay user generally one tends to be as good as the other for the most part. It's only when you start to look under the hood that you notice much difference in my experience.
Thelonious Monk
I was thinking more along the lines of fixing the broken water reflections and post-processing effects. It's certainly not ATi as I have played other OpenGL games that rendered reflective and liquid-reflective surfaces with the proper projections and orientations on them.
I'd just like to see the transparency of toons eliminated when you zoom up close, for example when steamy mist is firing. ( ' :
@Texarkana
@Thexder
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What are you smoking? Don't get me wrong... nvidia's got their own issues, but if ATI's opengl support was so magically fixed at some point, why can't we use FSAA with depth of field here with ATI cards when we can with Nvidia cards?| Yes. OpenGL support /sucked/. That support has been fixed. It was fixed almost literal years ago. |
ATI's opengl support sucks just as bad now as it always has and always will.
EDIT: Just to throw this out there, I was an ATI fanboy for a long time. I went from 3DFX to ATI and didn't touch nvidia until I bought a 8800gts-512mb. I agree that nvidia has recently taken a nose dive, but when it boils down to it, I've decided that both companies suck.
Be well, people of CoH.
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This is probably the gospel truth.
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Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
EDIT: Just to throw this out there, I was an ATI fanboy for a long time. I went from 3DFX to ATI and didn't touch nvidia until I bought a 8800gts-512mb. I agree that nvidia has recently taken a nose dive, but when it boils down to it, I've decided that both companies suck.
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(whopping great rant redacted)|
Originally Posted by je_saist
Um. Please get out of 2002.
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Um. Please try not to miss obvious jokes so often.
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Just no to this, unless it was done differently than in CO. Moving the avatars there is like driving a tank, upper body spins, and then the rest follows in a twist when you start to move, ugh.
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Originally Posted by Golden Girl
turning and bending waists
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No. Never said that. I said we'd have to re-engineer the power/animation/VFX system and then convert all of the existing scripts to utilize that new format. Which we did. I also never said we needed a good reason, just the commitment of time and resources that it would require. Both of those were scarce commodities prior to NCSoft bringing the game into its fold.|
Originally Posted by Monkey_King
I remember a long while back, before NCSoft took over, BaB mentioned that power customization would require rewriting the graphics code almost completely. They weren't going to do that unless there was a good reason to do so.
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It was never a limitation of the engine itself. It was the systems bolted into the engine that were designed in the traditional way that pretty much all powers/abilities systems for all games are designed.
It's only when looking back, with the full knowledge of the present, than you can even conceive of it being done a different way. Much like how even now, looking back on Issue 16, I wish we'd have done a few things slightly differently...and were we to start from scratch, I'd want to do a lot of things very differently.
Like use D3D instead of OpenGL?
Be well, people of CoH.
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No, use GLIDE!!! |
Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
Like use D3D instead of OpenGL?
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Nah. 3DFX is where it's at.
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Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
Like use D3D instead of OpenGL?
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Wouldn't that have made the Mac port a practical impossibility?
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Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
Like use D3D instead of OpenGL?
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All that having been said, most of it correctly (though clearly not entirely objectively), I will never, ever buy an ATI card again.|
Originally Posted by je_saist
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.
[snip] 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. |
Why?
I've had two (out of 2) of them spontaneously melt on me, in different cases, with good airflow, and one took my mobo with it. Never, ever, had those problems with an NVidea card.
A good friend's laptops kept overheating when he had ATI cards in them... one of which, again, melted and took out the mobo. As soon as he got a laptop (from the same manufacturer) with an NVidea card, those problems went away.
YMMV, but I've been burned (literally) once too often to trust ATI (and I was originally a big fan).
I remember when they had an ATI rep on the forum (ATI Ruby or something like that) and although she put on a brave face, it was like watching someone getting lowered into a tank of hungry sharks.
Has there been any update on the ATI problems in the game since then?
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Of course not. But ATi is still listed on the bottom of the coh.com mainpage. And ATi cards are being given out as prizes.| Has there been any update on the ATI problems in the game since then? |
Strange that. Marketing truly is completely lacking any connection to reality everywhere, isn't it?
Be well, people of CoH.
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You should reengineer the vfx system to allow multiple skeleton types when power customization V2 comes out next year.
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Originally Posted by BackAlleyBrawler
No. Never said that. I said we'd have to re-engineer the power/animation/VFX system and then convert all of the existing scripts to utilize that new format. Which we did. I also never said we needed a good reason, just the commitment of time and resources that it would require. Both of those were scarce commodities prior to NCSoft bringing the game into its fold.
It was never a limitation of the engine itself. It was the systems bolted into the engine that were designed in the traditional way that pretty much all powers/abilities systems for all games are designed. It's only when looking back, with the full knowledge of the present, than you can even conceive of it being done a different way. Much like how even now, looking back on Issue 16, I wish we'd have done a few things slightly differently...and were we to start from scratch, I'd want to do a lot of things very differently. |
Virtue: @Santorican
Dark/Shield Build Thread
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Isn't that what "marketing" means? Heh.|
Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
Of course not. But ATi is still listed on the bottom of the coh.com mainpage. And ATi cards are being given out as prizes.
Strange that. Marketing truly is completely lacking any connection to reality everywhere, isn't it? |
--NT
They all laughed at me when I said I wanted to be a comedian.
But I showed them, and nobody's laughing at me now!
If I became a red name, I would be all "and what would you mere mortals like to entertain me with today, mu hu ha ha ha!" ~Arcanaville
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One source of confusion is that in an early post you said it would probably be better if power customization was implemented in a CoX-sequel rather than expending limited resources into retrofitting the feature in the existing game due to the amount of effort required. People latched onto that comment significantly before you began posting more informative power customization-related posts and were quoting it as saying power customization was impossible with the current engine. I remember because I responded to a couple by saying that a) BaB didn't say it was impossible and b) I don't think its quite as hard as he thinks it is myself.|
Originally Posted by BackAlleyBrawler
No. Never said that. I said we'd have to re-engineer the power/animation/VFX system and then convert all of the existing scripts to utilize that new format. Which we did. I also never said we needed a good reason, just the commitment of time and resources that it would require. Both of those were scarce commodities prior to NCSoft bringing the game into its fold.
It was never a limitation of the engine itself. It was the systems bolted into the engine that were designed in the traditional way that pretty much all powers/abilities systems for all games are designed. |
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| It's only when looking back, with the full knowledge of the present, than you can even conceive of it being done a different way. Much like how even now, looking back on Issue 16, I wish we'd have done a few things slightly differently...and were we to start from scratch, I'd want to do a lot of things very differently. |
But the reason why the I16 implementation seems relatively straight-forward to me is because I always assumed that if the resources became available one day, this is more or less the way it was going to be done. I'm actually kinda surprised to hear you imply that the I16 implementation supercedes some other possibly less efficient way of doing it. I have to assume they involve data-side implementation specifics I'm not privvy to.
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Originally Posted by Gehnen
Wouldn't that have made the Mac port a practical impossibility?
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I don't see why it would. That would imply that what is being used for *nix users to run games ONLY work with OGL games and I don't believe that to be the case, but I've been wrong before.
Aren't current Apples nothing but a proprietary GUI on top of a *nix kernal running on PC hardware now?
Be well, people of CoH.
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Well, that would be a simplistic way to describe it, but in essence OSX is an Apple operating environment sitting on a Mach/BSD hybrid kernel and a Posix-based Unix operating system. And Macs are now basically all Intel-based.
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Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
I don't see why it would. That would imply that what is being used for *nix users to run games ONLY work with OGL games and I don't believe that to be the case, but I've been wrong before.
Aren't current Apples nothing but a proprietary GUI on top of a *nix kernal running on PC hardware now? |
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Sooo... yes.
Be well, people of CoH.
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Same here. I guess we're the *only* two "exceptions" to that rule...hah.|
Originally Posted by Hallowed
All that having been said, most of it correctly (though clearly not entirely objectively), I will never, ever buy an ATI card again.
Why? I've had two (out of 2) of them spontaneously melt on me, in different cases, with good airflow, and one took my mobo with it. Never, ever, had those problems with an NVidea card. A good friend's laptops kept overheating when he had ATI cards in them... one of which, again, melted and took out the mobo. As soon as he got a laptop (from the same manufacturer) with an NVidea card, those problems went away. YMMV, but I've been burned (literally) once too often to trust ATI (and I was originally a big fan). |
"Alien"
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Originally Posted by Infernus_Hades
The way you play changes your IO slotting..
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76 characters and Twenty-four 50s later, I still love this game.
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Well, if I have to give a yes or no answer, then the answer is no.|
Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
Sooo... yes.
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The most important part of any operating system that non-professionals typically ignore is the operating environment. SUSE Linux is a Unix with a custom GUI.
OSX has a Unix operating system below, but the GUI is only the superficial component to OSX. The important part from an application point of view is the operating environment. Probably the best analog I can think of is WINE. WINE is a significant percentage of the Windows operating environment ported to Unix. The rough equivalents in OSX are the Carbon and Cocoa APIs and the subsystems that support them.
Graphically speaking, I'm not current on what version of X11 OSX supports, which is in essence another operating environment component, and what if any portability issues it introduces. Because of that, I don't know if porting a game from Windows to Unix to OSX is a trivial exercise on the second hop because of that. It might be, but its not certain to be.
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I'll let marketting handle that.
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Originally Posted by Santorican
You should reengineer the vfx system to allow multiple skeleton types when power customization V2 comes out next year.
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I would really like to be able to select shaders for each piece of your costume. They have it implemented on shoulders. Various costume pieces are already metallic looking such as the Valkyrie booster packs and the Arachnos Widow costume, so it has the groundwork laid out.
Something along the lines of "Cloth" "Leather" "Metallic".
CO does this and I love it.