have to agree that it was a very good looking place. But as many others i am curious how well it meshes with demands from other things such as physics engine and A.I and what the final bill will be system wise. After all since illumination is moving every so slowly from GFX to physics it might demand a bit to much from fast paced games.
Now it would prolly be a very good fit for them outdoors games like hunting and fishing simulators.
Most PC's can't handle it. That leaves a few rich ticks crying for it. What do you think will happen to a great graphic game with only a few rich people for buyers?
That's actually not true. You can loosely think of limitations as being something like, you can only have this many draw calls per frame, or the size of all textures that must be loaded at once can only add up this this big. But a highly detailed area that takes dozens of draw calls and millions of pixels of textures when up close can be replaced by a much simpler object that only takes a single draw call and thousands of pixels of textures when far away. The price of this is that you'll probably have an obvious pop when it switches from one model to the other, but it can be done--and even on not terribly powerful hardware.
Most PC's can't handle it. That leaves a few rich ticks crying for it. What do you think will happen to a great graphic game with only a few rich people for buyers?
Then why even have detail sliders at all? in fact, remove all graphic options and make everyone play the same low-res pixel mudball as you, right?
Texture resolutions are really easy to scale down if you're keeping the geometry exactly the same. If the resolution is too big for your hardware, then you take 2x2 grids of pixels and average them to get a single pixel, and do that all across the texture to get a new one that takes only 1/4 of the space. If that's still too big, do it again. It's called mipmapping, and video cards do it on the fly because the lower resolution textures look better when further away.
Originally posted by tom_gore You guys are also forgetting that the farther the viewing distance, the bigger the badwidth demands for sending data about other players/NPCs at the distance. Even if your PC could handle it, the Internet might not.
That's not a problem for things that are done purely client-side. Internet bandwidth isn't relevant to drawing mountains that don't move other than the initial download.
But yes, it is a problem if you want to draw players in full detail. That's why games commonly draw terrain at longer distances than players. You can mitigate the issue somewhat for players by using much simpler models when far away, and sending less detailed movement data less often. If you're in the same battle as a player, you need to see what he's doing right away, but if he's a 20 second run away from you, it doesn't necessarily matter if you see a half-second delay on what he's doing.
Check out this video from Miguel Cepero of Voxel Farm, this is the guy who is being contracted out to SOE for EQ Next and Landmark for voxel and procedural generation design iirc.
16 mins 20 seconds of just going down a single mountain in a fully customizable voxel landscape. This video is even 4 months old and I am sure he has made significant tweaks.
I also look forward to the day MMO worlds are truly massive worlds with "single server" setups , and while it may seem unfeasible at the moment it will eventually become a reality...we are already seeing a few MMOs pickup procedural generation for larger landscapes in shorter development times
This.
This is what EQ Next should look like, finally someone gets it and it's ridiculous what we are having to settle for when it could be so much more. Hope they don't go broke without reaching the level of realism that you posted.
Most PC's can't handle it. That leaves a few rich ticks crying for it. What do you think will happen to a great graphic game with only a few rich people for buyers?
That's actually not true. You can loosely think of limitations as being something like, you can only have this many draw calls per frame, or the size of all textures that must be loaded at once can only add up this this big. But a highly detailed area that takes dozens of draw calls and millions of pixels of textures when up close can be replaced by a much simpler object that only takes a single draw call and thousands of pixels of textures when far away. The price of this is that you'll probably have an obvious pop when it switches from one model to the other, but it can be done--and even on not terribly powerful hardware.
They need to stop making computers for secretaries so game devs can stop having to dance around their incompetence. We have the tech to get a rocket to the moon but no one wants to get off their lazy ass and make a decent PC for consumers? And one without fans blowing more dust in than out!
On distance, yes. There is some fixed range that the depth buffer is looking for, and anything outside of that range won't be drawn--or may be sliced into on a pixel-by-pixel basis. This is clearest with the minimum distance, though some game engines take steps to cover it up. Both the minimum and maximum distance can be set arbitrarily.
The downside of this is that the larger the ratio of the max and min distances, the less precisely the depth buffer will be able to tell which objects are in front of which others. If you try to draw two faraway objects with one slightly in front of the other, but they round to the same distance in the depth buffer, then which appears in the completed frame will depend on which happens to be drawn first. That can easily vary from one frame to the next, so you get flickering as it bounces between the two things erratically, and it looks terrible.
I think that it's possible to change the way that the depth buffer is done to get better precision at further distances. The formula that made sense in 1992 doesn't necessarily make sense today, as now, it's okay to have a little bigger performance hit because hardware has gotten so much faster. Unfortunately, depth buffer computations are hard-wired into video cards, and while you can override it in pixel/fragment shaders, this carries a big performance hit and breaks a bunch of driver optimizations. Changing hardware to allow more flexibility in computing the depth buffer would mean that all current cards couldn't handle the new way.
On distance, yes. There is some fixed range that the depth buffer is looking for, and anything outside of that range won't be drawn--or may be sliced into on a pixel-by-pixel basis. This is clearest with the minimum distance, though some game engines take steps to cover it up. Both the minimum and maximum distance can be set arbitrarily.
The downside of this is that the larger the ratio of the max and min distances, the less precisely the depth buffer will be able to tell which objects are in front of which others. If you try to draw two faraway objects with one slightly in front of the other, but they round to the same distance in the depth buffer, then which appears in the completed frame will depend on which happens to be drawn first. That can easily vary from one frame to the next, so you get flickering as it bounces between the two things erratically, and it looks terrible.
I think that it's possible to change the way that the depth buffer is done to get better precision at further distances. The formula that made sense in 1992 doesn't necessarily make sense today, as now, it's okay to have a little bigger performance hit because hardware has gotten so much faster. Unfortunately, depth buffer computations are hard-wired into video cards, and while you can override it in pixel/fragment shaders, this carries a big performance hit and breaks a bunch of driver optimizations. Changing hardware to allow more flexibility in computing the depth buffer would mean that all current cards couldn't handle the new way.
Quiz are you a programmer... or...? Because I've seen you posting and some of the things you say I suspect only someone with a degree from MIT would say lol. Of course my complete noobiness doesnt help. So yeah, I get it this. But I mean, couldnt someone just make a Engine that did EVERYTHING? Voxels, huge draw distances, insane graphics, etc. But at the same time push them to their complete limits? The gaming equivalent to a panacea, so to speak.
Originally posted by cura Yeah, i was so pumped for Dark&Light back in a day. That game was supposed to have massive world. Unfortunately people call 20x20 km maps huge and if they have to spend five minutes travelling instead of fighting they say the world is empty.
I always found this odd: it's what I really loved SWG for: that NOT every meter was crammed with mobs! But there was actually "empty" space to travel. This way how in today's MMos every mob is neatly placed for your convenience every 5 meters is just absurd. Again, take Skyrim, I liked that much more. You have clusters of mobs here and there and a few roaming mobs, but not this perfect theme parkish distribution of mobs like over a chessbord or what.
i agree with this so much. nothing kills immersion more than mobs everywhere. sometimes it can be cool to just walk through a dark forest without having to run into 20 generic mobs along the way
It won't happen because developers are greedy,they are not in this for thousands,they want millions.They would have to turn up the allowable bandwidth so we could have beauty and game play and they simply will not do it.
EVERYTHING technical wise is possible,it shows just how slack they are in giving us quality games,that is why in reality you cannot give any of these games a Triple A rating,they are still using 10+ year old tech.
This industry did make big strides when FFXI then EQ2 came out,it was solid textures and game play and decent graphics but that was 10 years ago.Now developers are not only eluding the quality of 10 years ago,they are stooping so low as to try and go backwards even further.
Even the most advanced game FFXIV is still missing water zones,i have no idea why.There is only one way to start getting true Triple A quality,stop supporting games and demand it.
There is one problem however in massive view distance.It is easy to pull off with a nice ,mountainside and sunset but once you get a lot of players,animations,houses,mobs,animations,effects,sounds,mounts ect ect,it gets really crowded fast.You cannot cater to the absolute maximum machines,you need to aim for the middle and scale both ways from there.
Really all it takes is a good effort by the developer to monitor and test maps/zones,perhaps that is the reason,they don't want to do any effort,the yrather make the game so low poly it will play no matter any circumstance.Then they go even lazier yet,let's just make a bunch of instances and any noob mapper could make a zone for the game.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Check out this engine, it doesn't have an extremely detailed area like the one you're talking about but it looks like you make a whole world or galaxy.
On distance, yes. There is some fixed range that the depth buffer is looking for, and anything outside of that range won't be drawn--or may be sliced into on a pixel-by-pixel basis. This is clearest with the minimum distance, though some game engines take steps to cover it up. Both the minimum and maximum distance can be set arbitrarily.
The downside of this is that the larger the ratio of the max and min distances, the less precisely the depth buffer will be able to tell which objects are in front of which others. If you try to draw two faraway objects with one slightly in front of the other, but they round to the same distance in the depth buffer, then which appears in the completed frame will depend on which happens to be drawn first. That can easily vary from one frame to the next, so you get flickering as it bounces between the two things erratically, and it looks terrible.
I think that it's possible to change the way that the depth buffer is done to get better precision at further distances. The formula that made sense in 1992 doesn't necessarily make sense today, as now, it's okay to have a little bigger performance hit because hardware has gotten so much faster. Unfortunately, depth buffer computations are hard-wired into video cards, and while you can override it in pixel/fragment shaders, this carries a big performance hit and breaks a bunch of driver optimizations. Changing hardware to allow more flexibility in computing the depth buffer would mean that all current cards couldn't handle the new way.
Quiz are you a programmer... or...? Because I've seen you posting and some of the things you say I suspect only someone with a degree from MIT would say lol. Of course my complete noobiness doesnt help. So yeah, I get it this. But I mean, couldnt someone just make a Engine that did EVERYTHING? Voxels, huge draw distances, insane graphics, etc. But at the same time push them to their complete limits? The gaming equivalent to a panacea, so to speak.
I've been programming my own game and want to do some pretty radical stuff, so I had to make my own engine for it. That means that I'm aware of the precise details of how my game engine works, and also that I've had to consider a lot of the available trade-offs. And make no mistake: there are many trade-offs all over the place. There's a ton of fakery that goes into 3D graphics, of the "we can skip this and it will still look good" variety. Because without that sort of optimization, you'd get terrible frame rates. So no, you can't just say, let's make a single game engine that magically does everything well without any compromises.
Check out this video from Miguel Cepero of Voxel Farm, this is the guy who is being contracted out to SOE for EQ Next and Landmark for voxel and procedural generation design iirc.
16 mins 20 seconds of just going down a single mountain in a fully customizable voxel landscape. This video is even 4 months old and I am sure he has made significant tweaks.
I also look forward to the day MMO worlds are truly massive worlds with "single server" setups , and while it may seem unfeasible at the moment it will eventually become a reality...we are already seeing a few MMOs pickup procedural generation for larger landscapes in shorter development times
This.
This is what EQ Next should look like, finally someone gets it and it's ridiculous what we are having to settle for when it could be so much more. Hope they don't go broke without reaching the level of realism that you posted.
While I agree and think it would be awesome to have stuff like this in an MMORPG or rather what I want a Virtual World Simulation. I bet there are a lot of game devs and players who just couldn't handle not having a mob every 10 feet or walking for more than 10 minutes without something happening.
Edit: I watched the whole video and it fades to black at 13:30 /wink
"You CAN'T buy ships for RL money." - MaxBacon
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Funny I have the exact opposite. Lately I installed Skyrim and modded the hell out of it. When I pumped everything to the maximum visual appearance it was extremely realistic and beautiful, yet only one thing was off and I couldn't pin point it at first. Then after a while playing I figured out that the only thing that was ruining the realism were the mountains that were visible in the background. While everything looks amazing up close, when you zoom out to see the big picture everything looks extremely artificial, because no one actually bothers to design them to look realistic from distance. So I installed a mod that creates atmosphere that limits visibility.
It turned out to be much more realistic. Sometimes I wonder if people actualy go outside and look at nature with their own eyes, because some requests of realism, are really the opposite.
The true lack of realism lies in so many other places, that would negate the view distance problem anyway. For example forests that are supposed to be dense enough for trees to cover your entire vision of background... I live in moderate climate, and I can barely see ships in the port because of the thick air... Mountain is covered in fog completely most of the time... It feels like people are basing their ideas on some fake photoshopped national geographic photos in perfect weather conditions, rather than on the real deal.
I actually agree with this.
One of my issues with player made mods for the elder scrolls series is that eveyrone wants HIGH DEF AS MUCH DETAIL AS POSSIBLE textures to everything.
And none of that has ever really looked good in any of these games.
Not everything is popping out to you as detailed as possible.
I suppose you are right and not everything should be "popping out" at you at once.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
To me it's not about foggy or the looks really it's all about everything being zoned. I want to be able to go anywhere I like to if I see something far in the horizon I want to be able to go there.
LOTRO is pretty good at that.
"mmorpg.com forum admins are all TROLLS and losers in real life" My opinion
Originally posted by Jemcrystal Most PC's can't handle it. That leaves a few rich ticks crying for it. What do you think will happen to a great graphic game with only a few rich people for buyers?
That's actually not true. You can loosely think of limitations as being something like, you can only have this many draw calls per frame, or the size of all textures that must be loaded at once can only add up this this big. But a highly detailed area that takes dozens of draw calls and millions of pixels of textures when up close can be replaced by a much simpler object that only takes a single draw call and thousands of pixels of textures when far away. The price of this is that you'll probably have an obvious pop when it switches from one model to the other, but it can be done--and even on not terribly powerful hardware.
I'd actually like to see one these videos with 5-10 (100?) character and/or animal models on a distant hill or mountain and have the camera run towards them to see what exactly you see. Have the characters move occasionally to see the "redraw."
What these videos show me is a static world (though the sun traversing was cool to watch), but they are all VERY empty worlds with no life in them. Add models. LOTS of models. I will be much more impressed then, though I did enjoy the videos shown thus far
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
Originally posted by Jemcrystal Most PC's can't handle it. That leaves a few rich ticks crying for it. What do you think will happen to a great graphic game with only a few rich people for buyers?
That's actually not true. You can loosely think of limitations as being something like, you can only have this many draw calls per frame, or the size of all textures that must be loaded at once can only add up this this big. But a highly detailed area that takes dozens of draw calls and millions of pixels of textures when up close can be replaced by a much simpler object that only takes a single draw call and thousands of pixels of textures when far away. The price of this is that you'll probably have an obvious pop when it switches from one model to the other, but it can be done--and even on not terribly powerful hardware.
I'd actually like to see one these videos with 5-10 (100?) character and/or animal models on a distant hill or mountain and have the camera run towards them to see what exactly you see. Have the characters move occasionally to see the "redraw."
What these videos show me is a static world (though the sun traversing was cool to watch), but they are all VERY empty worlds with no life in them. Add models. LOTS of models. I will be much more impressed then, though I did enjoy the videos shown thus far
If you only have five characters in the entire scene, then you can draw and animate them at full detail and it's pretty easy to do. What makes characters hard is that if you'd typically have 5 to draw with short draw distances, and you want to draw things 10 times as far away, then you suddenly have 500 characters to draw. And you can't draw and animate 500 characters at once unless they're very simple (e.g., 2D sprites).
Originally posted by cura Yeah, i was so pumped for Dark&Light back in a day. That game was supposed to have massive world. Unfortunately people call 20x20 km maps huge and if they have to spend five minutes travelling instead of fighting they say the world is empty.
Yes! Didn't we all have a good laugh at how that turned out . But it looked so nice.
What about the Voxel engines I see more and more of, are there any benefits related to those as far as viewing distance goes? I have a basic understanding of a typical 3D engine, voxels not so much. Actually I'm clueless as to how it works and differs from a more standard polygon engine.
A few years ago I remember this company called "Euclideon" came out with a video of their "Unlimited Detail" engine that was going to change everything. As I recall Notch from Minecraft claimed it was voxel tech, the Euclideon guys said otherwise.
Looked into them again and it seems they have steered away from games and more into the Geospatial Industry. Very cool stuff but problematic when it comes to collision detection I imagine.
What about the Voxel engines I see more and more of, are there any benefits related to those as far as viewing distance goes? I have a basic understanding of a typical 3D engine, voxels not so much. Actually I'm clueless as to how it works and differs from a more standard polygon engine.
A few years ago I remember this company called "Euclideon" came out with a video of their "Unlimited Detail" engine that was going to change everything. As I recall Notch from Minecraft claimed it was voxel tech, the Euclideon guys said otherwise.
Looked into them again and it seems they have steered away from games and more into the Geospatial Industry. Very cool stuff but problematic when it comes to collision detection I imagine.
The basic problem with the Euclideon folks is that they can't animate anything. Until you demonstrate that you can animate several independent characters simultaneously at acceptable frame rates on hardware that isn't especially powerful, you don't have anything viable for games.
One of their videos emphasized that they're not using the GPU yet. The reason is that, for what they're doing, they can't. When you need a quad core Core i7 processor to get 40 frames per second even with massively repeating terrain and zero animations, you don't have something viable for gaming. Anyone can do unlimited detail if offered unlimited processing power, storage, memory, budget, and so forth.
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Modern video cards are very much built to do rasterization, and that includes all of the 3D graphics APIs. If you're going to use voxels, you have to either hack it to make the video card think it's rasterization, use some API not meant for graphics (e.g., OpenCL), or not use the video card at all. I think that voxels mostly do the first option, but I'm not sure how they do it. If it's going through the normal graphics pipeline, then it probably doesn't offer advantages on extra long viewing distances.
Comments
have to agree that it was a very good looking place. But as many others i am curious how well it meshes with demands from other things such as physics engine and A.I and what the final bill will be system wise. After all since illumination is moving every so slowly from GFX to physics it might demand a bit to much from fast paced games.
Now it would prolly be a very good fit for them outdoors games like hunting and fishing simulators.
This have been a good conversation
That's actually not true. You can loosely think of limitations as being something like, you can only have this many draw calls per frame, or the size of all textures that must be loaded at once can only add up this this big. But a highly detailed area that takes dozens of draw calls and millions of pixels of textures when up close can be replaced by a much simpler object that only takes a single draw call and thousands of pixels of textures when far away. The price of this is that you'll probably have an obvious pop when it switches from one model to the other, but it can be done--and even on not terribly powerful hardware.
Texture resolutions are really easy to scale down if you're keeping the geometry exactly the same. If the resolution is too big for your hardware, then you take 2x2 grids of pixels and average them to get a single pixel, and do that all across the texture to get a new one that takes only 1/4 of the space. If that's still too big, do it again. It's called mipmapping, and video cards do it on the fly because the lower resolution textures look better when further away.
That's not a problem for things that are done purely client-side. Internet bandwidth isn't relevant to drawing mountains that don't move other than the initial download.
But yes, it is a problem if you want to draw players in full detail. That's why games commonly draw terrain at longer distances than players. You can mitigate the issue somewhat for players by using much simpler models when far away, and sending less detailed movement data less often. If you're in the same battle as a player, you need to see what he's doing right away, but if he's a 20 second run away from you, it doesn't necessarily matter if you see a half-second delay on what he's doing.
This.
This is what EQ Next should look like, finally someone gets it and it's ridiculous what we are having to settle for when it could be so much more. Hope they don't go broke without reaching the level of realism that you posted.
2 GTX TITAN SLI should handle with it ))) and 32 RAM xD and best CPU on the market xD
They need to stop making computers for secretaries so game devs can stop having to dance around their incompetence. We have the tech to get a rocket to the moon but no one wants to get off their lazy ass and make a decent PC for consumers? And one without fans blowing more dust in than out!
Do game engines have a cap? So to speak...
On distance, yes. There is some fixed range that the depth buffer is looking for, and anything outside of that range won't be drawn--or may be sliced into on a pixel-by-pixel basis. This is clearest with the minimum distance, though some game engines take steps to cover it up. Both the minimum and maximum distance can be set arbitrarily.
The downside of this is that the larger the ratio of the max and min distances, the less precisely the depth buffer will be able to tell which objects are in front of which others. If you try to draw two faraway objects with one slightly in front of the other, but they round to the same distance in the depth buffer, then which appears in the completed frame will depend on which happens to be drawn first. That can easily vary from one frame to the next, so you get flickering as it bounces between the two things erratically, and it looks terrible.
I think that it's possible to change the way that the depth buffer is done to get better precision at further distances. The formula that made sense in 1992 doesn't necessarily make sense today, as now, it's okay to have a little bigger performance hit because hardware has gotten so much faster. Unfortunately, depth buffer computations are hard-wired into video cards, and while you can override it in pixel/fragment shaders, this carries a big performance hit and breaks a bunch of driver optimizations. Changing hardware to allow more flexibility in computing the depth buffer would mean that all current cards couldn't handle the new way.
Quiz are you a programmer... or...? Because I've seen you posting and some of the things you say I suspect only someone with a degree from MIT would say lol. Of course my complete noobiness doesnt help. So yeah, I get it this. But I mean, couldnt someone just make a Engine that did EVERYTHING? Voxels, huge draw distances, insane graphics, etc. But at the same time push them to their complete limits? The gaming equivalent to a panacea, so to speak.
i agree with this so much. nothing kills immersion more than mobs everywhere. sometimes it can be cool to just walk through a dark forest without having to run into 20 generic mobs along the way
It won't happen because developers are greedy,they are not in this for thousands,they want millions.They would have to turn up the allowable bandwidth so we could have beauty and game play and they simply will not do it.
EVERYTHING technical wise is possible,it shows just how slack they are in giving us quality games,that is why in reality you cannot give any of these games a Triple A rating,they are still using 10+ year old tech.
This industry did make big strides when FFXI then EQ2 came out,it was solid textures and game play and decent graphics but that was 10 years ago.Now developers are not only eluding the quality of 10 years ago,they are stooping so low as to try and go backwards even further.
Even the most advanced game FFXIV is still missing water zones,i have no idea why.There is only one way to start getting true Triple A quality,stop supporting games and demand it.
There is one problem however in massive view distance.It is easy to pull off with a nice ,mountainside and sunset but once you get a lot of players,animations,houses,mobs,animations,effects,sounds,mounts ect ect,it gets really crowded fast.You cannot cater to the absolute maximum machines,you need to aim for the middle and scale both ways from there.
Really all it takes is a good effort by the developer to monitor and test maps/zones,perhaps that is the reason,they don't want to do any effort,the yrather make the game so low poly it will play no matter any circumstance.Then they go even lazier yet,let's just make a bunch of instances and any noob mapper could make a zone for the game.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
Check out this engine, it doesn't have an extremely detailed area like the one you're talking about but it looks like you make a whole world or galaxy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6a69dMLb_k
I've been programming my own game and want to do some pretty radical stuff, so I had to make my own engine for it. That means that I'm aware of the precise details of how my game engine works, and also that I've had to consider a lot of the available trade-offs. And make no mistake: there are many trade-offs all over the place. There's a ton of fakery that goes into 3D graphics, of the "we can skip this and it will still look good" variety. Because without that sort of optimization, you'd get terrible frame rates. So no, you can't just say, let's make a single game engine that magically does everything well without any compromises.
+1
While I agree and think it would be awesome to have stuff like this in an MMORPG or rather what I want a Virtual World Simulation. I bet there are a lot of game devs and players who just couldn't handle not having a mob every 10 feet or walking for more than 10 minutes without something happening.
Edit: I watched the whole video and it fades to black at 13:30 /wink
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/I actually agree with this.
One of my issues with player made mods for the elder scrolls series is that eveyrone wants HIGH DEF AS MUCH DETAIL AS POSSIBLE textures to everything.
And none of that has ever really looked good in any of these games.
Not everything is popping out to you as detailed as possible.
I suppose you are right and not everything should be "popping out" at you at once.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
To me it's not about foggy or the looks really it's all about everything being zoned. I want to be able to go anywhere I like to if I see something far in the horizon I want to be able to go there.
LOTRO is pretty good at that.
"mmorpg.com forum admins are all TROLLS and losers in real life"
My opinion
What these videos show me is a static world (though the sun traversing was cool to watch), but they are all VERY empty worlds with no life in them. Add models. LOTS of models. I will be much more impressed then, though I did enjoy the videos shown thus far
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
If you only have five characters in the entire scene, then you can draw and animate them at full detail and it's pretty easy to do. What makes characters hard is that if you'd typically have 5 to draw with short draw distances, and you want to draw things 10 times as far away, then you suddenly have 500 characters to draw. And you can't draw and animate 500 characters at once unless they're very simple (e.g., 2D sprites).
Originally posted by cura
Yeah, i was so pumped for Dark&Light back in a day. That game was supposed to have massive world. Unfortunately people call 20x20 km maps huge and if they have to spend five minutes travelling instead of fighting they say the world is empty.
Yes! Didn't we all have a good laugh at how that turned out . But it looked so nice.
What about the Voxel engines I see more and more of, are there any benefits related to those as far as viewing distance goes? I have a basic understanding of a typical 3D engine, voxels not so much. Actually I'm clueless as to how it works and differs from a more standard polygon engine.
A few years ago I remember this company called "Euclideon" came out with a video of their "Unlimited Detail" engine that was going to change everything. As I recall Notch from Minecraft claimed it was voxel tech, the Euclideon guys said otherwise.
Looked into them again and it seems they have steered away from games and more into the Geospatial Industry. Very cool stuff but problematic when it comes to collision detection I imagine.
EUCLIDEON GEOVERSE INTERVIEWS 2013
thoughts?
http://www.straightdope.com/
The basic problem with the Euclideon folks is that they can't animate anything. Until you demonstrate that you can animate several independent characters simultaneously at acceptable frame rates on hardware that isn't especially powerful, you don't have anything viable for games.
One of their videos emphasized that they're not using the GPU yet. The reason is that, for what they're doing, they can't. When you need a quad core Core i7 processor to get 40 frames per second even with massively repeating terrain and zero animations, you don't have something viable for gaming. Anyone can do unlimited detail if offered unlimited processing power, storage, memory, budget, and so forth.
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Modern video cards are very much built to do rasterization, and that includes all of the 3D graphics APIs. If you're going to use voxels, you have to either hack it to make the video card think it's rasterization, use some API not meant for graphics (e.g., OpenCL), or not use the video card at all. I think that voxels mostly do the first option, but I'm not sure how they do it. If it's going through the normal graphics pipeline, then it probably doesn't offer advantages on extra long viewing distances.