Graphics engine improvement

[toadlife 3]

On the other hand, the sun, as many other light sources on the map, is able to shine through mountains and objects... This is quite annoying, no ? When playing a night mission, and being able to see a light miles behind a mountain...

Or is it my video card ?

Nope it's not your vid card. I've seen this happen in OFP on Geforce2 MX, my old Geforce3 and my current Geforce 4. I don't know weather it happens with ATI cards. Tis' weird to have a streetlgiht flashing through a mountain.

[Wilco 944]

They should use the same engine as Stalker: Oblivion Lost. Its can suport large terrain areas, and extremely well handled textures, and it comes with the RAGDOLL EFFECT!! YIPPIE!

Ragdoll is a must, I just bought Hitman, and I'm hooked.

Stalker: Oblivion Lost Screenshots:

[Dauragon 0]

They should use the same engine as Stalker: Oblivion Lost.  Its can suport large terrain areas, and extremely well handled textures, and it comes with the RAGDOLL EFFECT!! YIPPIE!

Ragdoll is a must, I just bought Hitman, and I'm hooked.

Stalker:  Oblivion Lost Screenshots:

http://www.stalker-game.com/downloa...._15.jpg

Excuse my ignorance, but what is Ragdoll effect?

is that some kind of karam system from UT2k3?  

Chances to see ofp2 graphics like stalker graphics 1 out of 10000000

[Wilco 944]

The ragdoll effect is starting to get real big with games now. It's easily put as having the AI interact with the enviroment after death, they have no preset death scripts. Say you target an OpFor on a gaurd tower, after you kill him, gravity and physics will kick in and his death sequence will be different every single time. If you have ever played the Hitman series, it is used in that and it is a masterpiece, Hitman would not be as great as it is if it didn't have it.

[Phleep 0]

The ragdoll effect is starting to get real big with games now.  It's easily put as having the AI interact with the enviroment after death, they have no preset death scripts.  Say you target an OpFor on a gaurd tower, after you kill him, gravity and physics will kick in and his death sequence will be different every single time.  If you have ever played the Hitman series, it is used in that and it is a masterpiece, Hitman would not be as great as it is if it didn't have it.

The ragdoll effect has been requested many times on this forum. Can I point out that in OFP you are likely to have a considerable amount of soldiers dying simultaneously and the CPU intensive ragdoll effect would tax the PC much more than the linear 1 on 1 style FPSs.

Possibly the addition of ragdoll effects when only a single soldier is dying and standard sequences for large quantities but that isn't really what OFP is about eh?

[Wilco 944]

Quite true, maybe if you could possibly tone down the ragdoll to where only certain bodyparts move? Or have alot more then two or three preset deaths.

[Phleep 0]

Quite true, maybe if you could possibly tone down the ragdoll to where only certain bodyparts move?  Or have alot more then two or three preset deaths.

Good idea. Maybe use the ragdoll system to generate some death scenes and then "save" them as standard death animations. There are only a few ways you get hit really.

[quakergamer 0]

What I want to be added is more materials choices:

-Chromed Reflective/Refractive materials. We could have the water like that or just use them on planes!

-Metallic "Shiny Parts": It is not nmecessary to make it reflect things but it would be great if we could make metallic materials.

-Modifying Environnement Material: We should be able to make a material that would modify the environement. An example should be the heat at the jet exhausts.

Thats for the materials! Now for other effects:

Wind effects for the trees. Let's say we have a Huey landing at an LZ, I would like to see the trees move depending on the direction of the chopper ;0!

Finally, the animations. Could it use a bone system like found in 3Ds Studio Max. If not, it would be great if we could use the skeletoon technique that we found in Character Studio.

That's it!

Later

[Wilco 944]

Heres what would be nice, your own death maker.

You have a seperate program, you get maybe 10-15 saved deaths, you then get to pick how great the explosion, or the caliber of the rifle, then you shoot maybe a non textured, blocky dummy, how he dies on a flat surface is different everytime, right?  Well then you would save that, then include it in the game as your own custom made deaths.  Then if you ever got bored, you could make new ones, and then there would be a whole new section of addons for ofp:  Death Sequences   .  I know I would get bored after watching the same death occur over and over again.

[The Frenchman 0]

Chances to see ofp2 graphics like stalker graphics 1 out of 10000000  

Remember that this game (OFP2) is going to be released in 2005 or later. I would not be suprised if it wasnt better than STALKER.

[Snypa UK 0]

A small graphics thing that would never the less look cool

you see on all that gulf war footage shot with night scopes? the way the bullets make big round balls of light could you do that with the NV goggles it would look very cool on the night battles

[acidcrash 0]

lense flare you mean? yes when tracers (or any light for that matter) enters your field of view would be nice to see, but essentially eye candy... probebly best that if we had that then theres the option to turn it off also as it could strain some of the les powerfull computers

[Baron Hurlothrumbo IIX 0]

you dont see lens flares and things like that IRL, thats the effect of looking through a camera.  Too many games stick loads of lens flare in because they think it looks pretty- it just looks stupid.

[svendejong 0]

agree on the lensflairs Baron Hurlothrumbo IIX

[crassus 0]

Quote[/b] ]I would not be suprised if it wasnt better than STALKER

Now wouldn't that be something! OMG!.....no more "bear claws" for hands......among other things!

[AirwolfPL 0]

Common guys... You're talking about vertex/pixel shaders, about mesh tesselation, ragdolls... while current engine doesn't support even simple graphical effects! There are much more important things missing in this game!

I'm talking here about things like:

high color textures (OFP's engine AFAIK supports only 256 colour textures (+ alpha) - even if texture is loaded from 24bit TGA or JPG image - engine converts it to 256 colours before texturing)

enviromental mapping (even simple enviromental mapping but it's just A MUST!)

volumetric fog (it would be nice to have fogged valley and clear sky above them)

projected shadows (softer more natural shadows)

animated textures (someone already mentioned it, it would be nice to have possibility to apply animated textures)

better specular lighting working in both - HW T&L and normal modes

material properities (like specularity, enviromental map etc) should be kept in the p3d file itself (not partially configured in the p3d file and partially in the cpp file).

better visibility distances without serious frame rate drop

(face it - in the current engine even if weather is clear visibility distance is very small which makes all the planes (in many cases choppers too) almost unusable)

bump mapping would be nice as well but it's not a must for me

[bn880 5]

Quote[/b] ]better visibility distances without serious frame rate drop

(face it - in the current engine even if weather is clear visibility distance is very small which makes all the planes (in many cases choppers too) almost unusable)

Well that's partly why I mentioned the Hardware based vertex tesselation and so on, to let the graphics processor do more of the work and leave the CPU free as a seagul. I think supporting any hardware optimizations is more important than the effects you mention above, as it adds the overall effects that can be supported on the large map with a good viewdistance.

However there probably isn't so much available in hardware...

EDIT: Once you have a free CPU you can pump the effects you mention to good levels. (that would be so sweet, to have all the special graphical effects packaged with a gigantic map and a good viewdistance, the fog idea is great too)

[AirwolfPL 0]

Well that's partly why I mentioned the Hardware based vertex tesselation and so on, to let the graphics processor do more of the work and leave the CPU free as a seagul.     I think supporting any hardware optimizations is more important than the effects you mention above, as it adds the overall effects that can be supported on the large map with a good viewdistance.

However there probably isn't so much available in hardware...

EDIT: Once you have a free CPU you can pump the effects you mention to good levels.  (that would be so sweet, to have all the special graphical effects packaged with a gigantic map and a good viewdistance, the fog idea is great too)

I can't agree with you. While hardware tesselation is generally good idea it's not very popular feature of graphic chipsets (AFAIK only ATI Radeons supports it - and probably not all of the Radeons). I suppose it would be quite hard to implement it in the game as well. I think software generated terrain detail levels would do the thing - just like in other games - of course I can't tell if it would be easier to implement such feature (perhaps not).

All of the effects I mentioned are pretty easy to implement. These features are supported by DirectX since version 3 or 5. Influence of these effects on the overall graphic quality would be greater than you think I suppose. (Other fact is that those features are supported by hardware for a long time now and CPU has almost nothing to do with them so I don't really understand your "EDIT" argument ;-)

PS.: I only hope that they're able to extend this list of graphic engine's features without creating new code for this engine from scratch.

[bn880 5]

If it's done in the Graphics processor than what are we arguing about? Any effects that can be handled by the GPU should be added, while load on CPU removed. We are stuck at the stupidity/cheapness of using a single processor in the PC, so we have to divert as much of the load to other peripherals as possible. I find it disturbing that processor developers keep having trouble with miniaturization and frequencies when all you have to do is expand into parallel processing or even better analog systems.

[Schoeler 0]

I just read on article on the upcoming Pentium 5 chip. Projected clock speeds are 5-7GHz without heat problems! That should help the OFP2 engine along nicely and make the graphics engine spectacular.

[cornhelium 0]

I still have to fire up Max Payne now and again to get my fix of bullet-hit effects. I love the way the different surfaces have their own animations so that bullets chew up wood splinters, throw up sparks, plaster or snow etc. I'd love to see that in OFP2, even expanded for shells, grenades etc.

Thanks for listening

[havocsquad 0]

I would be satisfied in OFP 2 if I can regularly see a distance of 10 kilometers or slightly more visual range when in tanks, ifv's, recon units, and aircraft (fixed and rotary).  Without having to buy a supercomputer just to have a vastly visible environment from considerable distances.

[TheManWithManyIdeas 0]

The graphics engine will be a major problem to solve for BI. OFP is a very open and wide game in terms of ambience. There are only 2 clear-cut solutions that i can see.

1) Crank down the graphics complexity of the game.

or

2) Install the latest graphics card.

Unfortunately it seems that most companies like the second option as it passes the problem on an entirely different market.

[SnypaUK 0]

I think i may have said this already but a small change would be like on those CNN videos shots taken with NV lens with that big ball of light where the bullet is that looks very cool could we do that? just imagine wathching an APC blasting of these rounds from a 50.cal and watching them ricocheting off buildings and floor etc

[SnypaUK 0]

In rough unfarmed fields btw there are often mounds and little tufty bushes and long grass. as well as looking good these would also provide lots of cver could we have tufts of long grass and lumps in rough fields or moorland?