Graphics engine improvement

[bn880 5]

I created this thread to discuss anything about the entire graphics engine as a whole. (Of course I'm not an expert in this)

We were told BIS is working on pixel and vertex shading, this is extremely important if OFP2 is to look better but I'm worried about one thing:

improper use of this may rended the entire game to look pale and faded. Unrealistic like Raven Shield. If you don't know what I am talking about, go play the R6 Raven Shield Demo or full game and look at the colors. It's missing all bright clear colors. Even the fireworks look like a joke. I have seen this in other new games, I don't remember the titles, shading is nice, but it has to be limited and checked with real life appearance.

Also, as discussed before, I would like to see harware vertex tessellation/subdivision as supported by ATI,TRUFORM...

ATI's TRUFORM

General Surface subdivision

Pixel and Vertex Shading (ATI)

Pixel and Vertex shading

[SpeedyDonkey 0]

I dont think pixel and vertex shading is something that automaticly makes games unrealistic. My question is, how will vertex and pixel shading work in a large scale game like ofp2?

i was gonna write something about Bf1942´s water but i realized that was H/TL witch resistance allready has?

[bn880 5]

That's what I mean, I would appreciate (and we all will I'm sure) if BIS steps back and judges from time to time whether the result is realistic or simply too much fade.

Everything in moderation may be the key here, I'm not sure.

[Koolkid101 0]

I hope I won't have to buy an expensive video card.

[bn880 5]

This is one of the common misconceptions, just like the ability to play OFP on 3 seperate monitors with a special video card, and the ability to use 7.1 point directional sound, it would all be optional.

For instance with 1.91, if you have a 5.1 surround system, great, you play with it, if you don't you can play with stereo. Or H&L, if your card supports it you play in that mode, if it doesn't you play in another standard video mode.

[ArchangelSKT 0]

Maybe not 100% graphic related , but I hope to be able to move better indoors , of course you spend more time out in the open , but man I`ve had probs inside

[Heatseeker 0]

Yeah, Take that Black Hawk Down game for example, it uses lotsa pixel shadding efects and all that but overall it has too many low res. textures and its colors look cartoonish.

one thing bis should look into is light efects during the day, while opf looks amazing at night, and awsome during sunrise/sundown it looks a bit watercolored during the day .

[edc 0]

DFBHD has really good water effects, it actually looks and seems like water. I'd like to see that and also maybe DFBHD's swimming.

[AXE 0]

I hope they find a new way of texturing islands so

that we won't be stuck with the same bland generic

simple texturing. I would also like to see more realistic

terrain geometery so we could have ditches and foxholes.

right now the terrain is formed from 10m x 10m squares.

We also need MUCH MUCH more attention to basic

physics in the game. It sucks to see a tank do a huge

jump and land like a fluffy pillow - I want noise and

rattles and shaking! And the airplane aspect of the game

could use some more accurate physics, especially when

turning.

One major thing that should be totally redone is the

'Geometery" of the game. You can easily walk through

thin walls, you can get stuck inside objects inside the

houses, and worst of all the game only checks the

geometery if the object is moving!

There are tons of bugs and unrealistic shit in this game,

but the gameplay makes up for it. Imagine what this game

would be like if all these things were corrected... Could

be the best PC game yet...

[edc 0]

Even w/ those bugs its the best game yet.

[bn880 5]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Heatseeker @ April 24 2003,16:11)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">Yeah, Take that Black Hawk Down game for example, it uses lotsa pixel shadding efects and all that but overall it has too many low res. textures and its colors look cartoonish.

one thing bis should look into is light efects during the day, while opf looks amazing at night, and awsome during sunrise/sundown it looks a bit watercolored during the day .<span id='postcolor'>

Yep, I think that's actually where pixel/vertex shading can be helpful. In moderation.

You also noticed how the cars in R3 RVS look cartoonish? too funny Having said that, R3 RVS does actually have some really nice sun and shadowing effects.

I think BIS will kick butt with it's decisions on graphics next time around.

[Dwarden 1124]

Hopefully something like this comes (trilinear displacement mapping on flat surface with vertex shaders)

http://users.belgacom.net/xvox/

http://users.belgacom.net/xvox/Xvox.zip

http://users.belgacom.net/xvox/Xvox_source.zip

of course more optimized ....

and techniques used by this guy here

http://esprit.campus.luth.se/~humus/

i'm sure more can be added than i can find and imagine

[bn880 5]

Only problem with tesselating terrain much is the size of OFP islands. Man, this is a fine balancing act they have to perform. Although it will be ok as long as there are configuration options to use very low detail. Like current engine.

HEY, this was bn880's 2880th post. Nostradamus would be impressed.

[Heatseeker 0]

I can imagine a island the size of nogova without cliping probs inside buildings and with deformable terrain and better fisics... but current hardware would not be able to run it, maybe in the next 10 years or so .

[-SZ-Vladimir 0]

good idea bn880 using of ATI's trueform and other DX8 (DX9 too ?) functionality

Vladimir

[hovmand 0]

I dont want to much of all that new and "cool" graphics it doesnt look realistic at all, i will be extremly dissapointed if it will turn out to look like BF1942 or Unreal2.

[Antichrist 0]

I'll be happy as long as BIS don't make the game for a specific videocard manufacturer like retards at Epic did!

[Franz_Schall -SWAF- 0]

I hope you guys aren't biased only on OFP - it's an excerpt of the developers diary about Söldner - Secret Wars.

There's something very interesting about creating these huge environments, and the difficulties it might bring for customers as well as developers which would target the same problems as BIS might encounter while programming OFP2.

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote </td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">3D HARDWARE ACCELERATION

As you know, Söldner requires DirectX8.1 and a hardware accelerator. The job of a PC game developer is made difficult by the myriad of different cards on the market. Even if brand new GeForce FX or Radeon 9700 cards are in the stores, there are still enough users with Geforce2 or even TNT2 cards out there. So which cards to support? Tough question.

Somewhere you have to draw a line. Currently this line is a GeForce2 for Söldner. We support all sorts of scaling down the game to run on those cards; whether or not we can lower this line to GeForce1 is unknown as we don't want to upset those people with high end cards, right?

The reason I touch this topic is something called static meshes. Due to the history of 3D acceleration, specifically the way hardware manufacturers tune their cards to play Quake-style games, is limiting games in big way. Modern cards are optimized to run static meshes really fast. Static meshes are the Object 3D data uploaded into the memory of the 3D card.

Once inside the card, this object can be displayed really fast: awesomely fast in fact. The drawback? Its static, i.e. it can't be changed.

So if you play a FPS game walls are concrete; they can't be changed or shot at. Remember Duke? That game was far more flexible and dynamic in its environment than for example Doom was. Check out the latest FPS games: even more static, but much more beautiful than the past. In fact recent games display less stuff but spend more time displaying it great.

Check out the Doom 3 movies. How many monsters do they display? Three? But oh boy, they look awesome. But forgotten were the days where you could kill 50 monsters in Doom with a single rocket from your launcher...

In other words the graphics card's power is spent on making things look better, but not making the 3D environment better, interactive, dynamic.

Söldner tries to change this with a lot of effort. In our game everything can be destroyed. This means that we need to update our objects in the 3D card constantly. As the AGP bus is pretty slow compared to the masses of data, we have to optimize everywhere we can. Would the 3D world optimize their hardware to run dynamic meshes we would be in a much better position and even support older cards than GeForce2.

Recently, the vertex shaders and buzzwords like cg compiler are heading our way: a programming language inside the 3D card where we can change meshes already uploaded. But its not here yet, less than 2% of the market has those shaders. So we need to wait.

What I want to say with all this? Well, this is the single reason why Söldner is a tactical shooter. Tactical shooters have the advantage of not needing 100 frames per-second. They can run with less, easily.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/r....ge=http <span id='postcolor'>

[-SZ-Vladimir 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Antichrist @ April 25 2003,14:53)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">I'll be happy as long as BIS don't make the game for a specific videocard manufacturer like retards at Epic did!<span id='postcolor'>

No for a specific manufacturer, but incule support of ATI's Trueform for personn who have ATI's videocard... there is no difference for personns who have other card

And why not any DX8 effect for water (Morrowind make that personn who haven't a DX8 videocard (GF3, GF4Ti, Radeon8500, Radeon9X00(Pro), GFFX) can play this game without this effect, that's all) ?

And OFP2 is released in 1 Year 1/2, you have time to change your videocard

Vladimir

[hovmand 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote ([sZ]Vladimir @ April 25 2003,17:29)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">And OFP2 is released in 1 Year 1/2, you have time to change your videocard <span id='postcolor'>

My videocard is just fine (gforce 4 ti 4200), I just dont think all those effects have a place in OFP.

[r71 0]

I dont want to see them kill the size of the game just to make it look pretty I think ofpr was fine. they have every thing they need in ofpr to make the game look better. just look at the inside view of the Oh-58. if they did all inside views of vehicles like that, it would look great. I want more power to the fight not the looks!

[bn880 5]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Hovmand @ April 25 2003,11:35)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE"></span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote ([sZ]Vladimir @ April 25 2003,17:29)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">And OFP2 is released in 1 Year 1/2, you have time to change your videocard <span id='postcolor'>

My videocard is just fine (gforce 4 ti 4200), I just dont think all those effects have a place in OFP.<span id='postcolor'>

Which? Hardware vertex tessellation has no place in OFP? What's wrong with nicer HW accelerated graphics options?

Hmm... it's really important for BIS to work on the graphics (and sound), it will be good for their sales and good even for veteran OFP players.

OFP already outperforms on size, freedom and realism yet many are not playing it because of graphics and sound shortcomings.

[Dwarden 1124]

nPatches are part of DirectX 8/9, same goes for shaders ...

most of cards (geforce3 and r8500 up) are capable of doing them ...

it's all just about WAY how they are used ... and i'm sure BIS do that correctly ...

[Epita 0]

I have a 4600 Ti, so ill be able to run anything for a while.

Since im making my own game at the moment, by the time it will be out, everyone will be using 64bit processors (u will, or u aint playing it) this means that 1x1m grids are a possibility, but with this comes more burden on the CPU for computing the physics that everone wants.

Epita

[hovmand 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (bn880 @ April 25 2003,20:40)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">Which?  Hardware vertex tessellation has no place in OFP?     What's wrong with nicer HW accelerated graphics options?<span id='postcolor'>

Could you show/tell what it does?

I just wanna keep the realistic way ofp:res looks, without adding to much junk that you dont see in th real world.