Gravity bending Light

Broken Voltage (War Mace / Electric Armor Brute) Main Toon

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.

We always have to design VFX around the lowest common denominators, and that kind of distortion effect wouldn't work on all video cards.

Just like the ripple effect on some fire shields/water does not work on all card ;P.
Add motion blur plox.

wouldnt a cards in ablility to reproduce that effect properly cause glitches that would look just as cool? lol

They would have to have some sort effect on top of it so the lower cards see something.

The lowest common denominator would be the cheapest card that nevertheless had every single feature or capability of all video cards. The greatest common factor video card would be the best card that had nothing but the features everyone else had. You target the greatest common factor, not the lowest common denominator.


Sorry, pet peeve. Carry on. Gravity, light, swirl thingy.

No. A card that can't do the job would probably just show a black circle where the effect should be.

Ok then explain grandville, and the 3rd mission of th ITF? Both of those totally murder systems.

No, they try to support the lowest rung from system specs. They don't want to push features that would drop the low end out of the game.

The "lowest common denominator" is a number is a term from fractions, and is lowest number which could be a denominator for all fractions involved. If you have 1/2, 1/3 and 1/4, the lowest common denominator would be 12, because it can be a denominator of 6/12, 4/12 and 3/12, which correspond to the initial fractions. In other words, this is a number which can be divided by the denominators of all fractions. In a more abstract sense, it is as Arcana says - the lowest/cheapest card which nevertheless has ALL the properties of all cards concerned.

The greatest common factor is the largest number a group of numbers can be divided by, and in my experience tends to be useful in group theory, among other fields. If you have, for instance 12, 16 and 32, then the greatest common factor of all three numbers would be 4. Divided by it, the above numbers become 3, 4 and 9, which have no common factor between them greater than 1. Taken in a more abstract sense, the greatest common factor of video cards would the be best possible card which had everything all cards concerned had and had nothing but this.

Arcana's tangent is the semantics of what is actually a mathematical term, and that tangent actually has a point.

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.

Broken Voltage (War Mace / Electric Armor Brute) Main Toon

Er, no, it wouldn't crash. It just wouldn't render the effect. Software is supposed to check if an OpenGL feature / extension is supported before using it. Try running COH with the -console switch sometime; one of the lines on startup will read something like this:

Render features: WATER* BLOOM TONEMAP MULTITEX* MULTITEX_DUAL* HQBUMP* FPRENDER WATER_DEPTH DOF BUMPMAPS* BUMPMAPS_WORLD* DESATURATE

That's the list of features that the game detected the video card can support. If it doesn't detect one of those, then it just doesn't use that effect. No crashing involved.

Come on BaBs, if you build it, they will come.

Very much so. If the game cannot display a graphical component and there is no safeguard in the programme to prevent you from starting it in the first place, you're more likely to get graphic corruption via missing effects than you are to experience a crash. Programmes don't crash over every little thing. In fact, for the longest time, the game lacked shader-less textures for a lot of the shiny metallic surfaces, so disabling shaders disabled the whole texture, producing the problem of the "White" Helicopter Line, and disabling certain graphics options would turn off effects that weren't intended.

Basically, the key problem with creating something not all cards can display is creating something ELSE that they will display, instead. But, again, this isn't an issue of support. It's an issue of performance. The game and our cards very much support this exact effect, because it's already in the game in the form of Corrupter Thermal buffs. This isn't future technologies, and both games and cards have supported it for a long time. It is, however, a rather heavy effect which may overload older systems and cause unpleasant graphics lag.

Personally, I'd like to see the game move forward and add another layer of cool graphics while retaining the old settings for old machines. And, surprise, surprise, that's what Going Rogue is going to bring.

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.

Personally, I wish that some players would realize that when playing a long running MMO like CoH, the minimum system requirements need to play may change over time. Since I started playing CoH 5.5 years ago, I've been through 2 different MoBo+Processor setups and 5 different graphic cards (2 AGP, 3 PCIe). A few years ago when the specs for CoV came out I realized that my graphics card wasn't powerful enough. Did I whine and complain in the forums? No. I saved up and bought a better card. A few months ago I noticed I was having frame rate issues when the camera would zoom in on my aura heavy characters. Again, I saved up and spent a whole $70 on a new card that solved the problem (NVidia 220 with 1 GB ram).

Now I understand that some people do have limited incomes, and can't upgrade at the drop of a hat. I can't either. I have to plan ahead and save up to do any upgrade. But at this point and time if you're still using an AGP graphics card, you need to upgrade your system to one that supports PCIe. If you do some shopping around you can find a $300-$500 economy desktop with a PCIe x16 slot that would make a perfectly good gaming rig for CoH with the addition of a $50-$100 dollar graphics card. Some of those economy systems have better specs than my own gaming rig (except for the graphics card).

Bad design.

Separate from the semantic point that Sam pointed out, your statement above is not true either. They attempt to "support" the minimum system requirement, but "support" only means the game will still run on that system in theory. Even without Ultra Mode, the current game engine will not run on the minimum system specification with all features turned to maximum. The minimum system is too slow for that.

What the programming team does, and is supposed to do, is target the *best* system that nevertheless won't completely orphan the stated minimum supported system. In other words, if they can add a feature that degrades reasonably on the minimum supported system, that doesn't break the minimum system support.

Which is why I even pointed out my little semantic pet peeve in the first place. I know the reason why "lowest common denominator" has semantically drifted to colloquially mean nearly the opposite of what it is actually defined to be. The concept of "low" is getting stuck on "lowest." The system the devs have to target is lower than the average system out there, so its probably the "lowest" something or other.

But their target should not be the lowest anything. It should be the highest target they can get away with.

They should be targeting "greatest common" - the best that we all share. Not the worst or the lowest possible target. So even colloquially, the term "lowest common denominator" has a poor connotation. It suggests the devs should aim low. They should aim high. Just not so high that we orphan too many customers. But as high as possible. The Greatest target that we all can Commonly play.

You meant 3, 4, and 8, right?

*sorry...math teacher spoke up.



I agree with Arcana. They should be shooting for maximizing the graphics, not aiming low to accomodate older cards.