Friday with(out) Means - March 25th, 2011: Loaded Up & Truckin'

[DocJones]

Also any "realistic" ETA on the engine going to live, like 2-3 months?

when its done (tm)

[Acidbaron]

Good to know about the textures, no real ETA after so long is kinda annoying.

[Pomidor]

We were given clues:

1) They are working on Omni Cities atm
2) There are Clan Cities in queue
3) Then SL

So, if Omni cities took 1 year...

figure it out.

[Kamarar]

I was thinking...

When you go and sharpen up the graphics of AO, things start to look veeery boring. I mean, effects look great and all, but you can still tell that the same tiles are repeating because the teeny little smudge of dirt on each one is identical in perfect clarity.

You should think about outsourcing some of them for fan stuff. That said, can we get some sort of effect so it fuzzes up stuff slightly? If it blended slightly without so many harsh lines, it would be more appealing and fitting the themes you're trying to represent. Or, I think so at least.

[Alternity]

We were given clues:

1) They are working on Omni Cities atm
2) There are Clan Cities in queue
3) Then SL

So, if Omni cities took 1 year...

figure it out.

Hate to burst your bobble but you got this somewhat wrong. They are redoing individual graphical assets. Meaning building type 3F60 is being used 80 different places ingame, they artists enhance that one asset, and wow guess what all the 80 spots got an enhanced building.

They are not sitting in a dark corner redoing the entire game, with their nifty little programs one building at the time.

Back at the fan gathering we were shown how this worked, with a number of outdoor RK sheds.

[Otansaanpas]

You people realize that by the time this "new" engine releases it will be outdated by atleast 5 years right?

Oh wait... it already is...

lets say if AO would have dx11, who would notice the difference to dx9?.. none.
(except those who doesn't have dx11 card)..

http://newtipsandtricks.com/dragon-a...ws-7-benchmark
dx11 isnt always better anyway :/

[Obtena]

You can go faster in DX10/11, as you can execute in parallel, instead of sequentially as DX9, which was my point. And if you want you can program more advanced shaders for various things, as well as lighting is capable of being more advanced when you have more power available.
And no AO doesn't look like a DX"4" game or whatever. It looks exactly like what it is.

Well, let me be more clear then since you seem hooked on semantics. OK, not DX4 but certainly 'dated' i.e. ... crappy. I honestly don't see the need to argue about DX9 vs. DX10/11. This isn't some academic exercise. It's a game that people want to look good and if it doesn't look good under DX9 from 'crap' transition, then it won't look good from DX10/11 from 'crap' transition either. OK with you?

[DaviasI]

Look no matter what happens you will get people who will try to view the engine on thier old dx8/9 cards and complain it doesn't look great and it was a waste of time. I spent some time playin AoC on various graphics cards (I used different computers for benchmarking) I can tell you from personal experience, updating the graphics card drastically changes the game.

If you go from high-end dx9 card to middle end dx10 card you'll a bit of difference, go from middle to low-end dx9 card to middle to high end dx10/11 card (as in able to turn everything up) and its an entirely different game. And yes I know AoC doesn't use DX11 but the cards are more powerful and you can crank things up without losing frame rates.

No amount of FC optimization will make up for a crappy computer (lets face it this is the post digital age anything over 5 years is old no matter how you spin it), you'll just be playing a good game with muddled visuals. Once the engine is moved over, if you don't upgrade at least the graphics card, you'll be missing out on a lot. But its your choice and no one (including FC) is forcing you to miss out on extreme awesomeness.

For the record I play on an Nvidia 260 GTX, I can turn everything up as long as I avoid raids and its a universe of difference from when I have to turn everything down to handle raids (actually just to turn off the constant flash-flash that blinds me).

[Pomidor]

Alternity I was being sarcastic.

I do really hope that FC will lunch this engine in next 2-3 months at TOP (at end of Q2), because siting in one place without people to play with ain't close to fun. Tbh, since over year I experiance /sit in one place game, then running. FC tend to go one direction way, to make things easier, and in some cases its not bad, but when content is skipped, things got messy - like upgrading outdor SK (long time ago) have turned out, that TM missions are not made, because its better to watch somone kite borgs. Also, Daily (which is good at now, since there is noone to team with besides at borgs/hecks) are 1 ding per easy run at low lvl, so who will walk somewhere, walk into dungeon (mission), put himself on risk to get 1 or 2 lvl for 1 hr? No wonder players log, do their 3x daily and log out.

[Mastablasta]

Well, let me be more clear then since you seem hooked on semantics. OK, not DX4 but certainly 'dated' i.e. ... crappy. I honestly don't see the need to argue about DX9 vs. DX10/11. This isn't some academic exercise. It's a game that people want to look good and if it doesn't look good under DX9 from 'crap' transition, then it won't look good from DX10/11 from 'crap' transition either. OK with you?

Depends entirely on what you call "look good", if high quality effects, like all lights cast shadows and all objects can have multiple shadows and high quality shaders with medium quality textures and various model updates is look good, then it would be able to look quite good in future.

Look no matter what happens you will get people who will try to view the engine on thier old dx8/9 cards and complain it doesn't look great and it was a waste of time. I spent some time playin AoC on various graphics cards (I used different computers for benchmarking) I can tell you from personal experience, updating the graphics card drastically changes the game.

If you go from high-end dx9 card to middle end dx10 card you'll a bit of difference, go from middle to low-end dx9 card to middle to high end dx10/11 card (as in able to turn everything up) and its an entirely different game. And yes I know AoC doesn't use DX11 but the cards are more powerful and you can crank things up without losing frame rates.

DX11 is actually a subset of DX10, the main difference between DX9 and 10/11 being that DX9 is in-order only and DX10 is parallel. View your card's load in something like MSI's Overdrive tool, which shows load based on shader processor usage, you'll see on a DX10/11 enabled card that running a DX9 game will not utilize the card 100%. For instance I did this test in AoC theo ther day, and DX9 would sit at 70-80% utilization, while in the same spot DX10 would sit at 90-100%. No idea what impact on framerate this had as even at 1920x1200 I was CPU limited :|

[Obtena]

Depends entirely on what you call "look good", if high quality effects, like all lights cast shadows and all objects can have multiple shadows and high quality shaders with medium quality textures and various model updates is look good, then it would be able to look quite good in future.

Yeah it's subjective but if Dx9 isn't 'looks good' enough for people, then I doubt 10 or 11 is either, especially in the context of AO. I.e., people need to set their expectations accordingly.

[SoapTarder]

back when sirrilion announced the new engine, everyone had a certain expectation of how it would look. when the ogre engine video was released, everyone said, "damn that looks good!" in fact, people were raving about it.

since then, we've seen alot of engine stuff, including screenshots, cheetah stuff and a video of the backyards. I haven't seen a decrease in quality since then, in fact there's been some improvements since the ogre video, and change to dreamworld over the years.

i agree with what someone else has said already; that if your hardware sucks, then so will your experience. even AO right now looks vastly different between onboard video, and a good gfx card with quality set to max. I can't even imagine what the difference will be when the new engine is released. my guess is, those with crap pc specs will still see an improvement, and those with good specs will see 10x improvement at the very minimum. we shall see..

[Autohead]

Even now AO doesn't look that bad with max settings and forced AA & AF through your GPU settings. The possibility of better graphics isn't even why I care about the new engine. I just want better performance (utilizing the GPU over the CPU) and hopefully an influx of new and returning players.

[Windguaerd]

Was already noted as an error in the MP doc thread.

Tech did you check your PM's?

[Chrys]

I rly liked how the Omni-Ent pix accurately showed the current population of AO and everything!

[vallikat]

Autohead - I just noticed your sig. That made me and then

[Ekarona]

I expect greati things from todays post ;D

[Krattonomic]

todays? this is thursday :O

[Ekarona]

todays? this is thursday :O

It's friday 1.4 here ;D

[Autohead]

Autohead - I just noticed your sig. That made me and then

I just couldn't help it, that was such an epic response.