Quote:
Originally Posted by Eizon
Aside from some of the screenshots on MAX where the plane is parked on the grass by some pretty trees, which do look great...
The game looks to me (cockpits aside) worse than Wings of Prey. That is to say, unless you're literally parked on the ground, I'd say that WoP looks better and runs probably 15 times as smoothly.
If only 1C could get the resources in that whoever made WoP had. They clearly know much better what they're doing when it comes to making a rendering engine.
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Here's my take on it:
Rendering engines don't exist on their own. There's also a game that needs to be run somewhere in there too.
I think if CoD was running the same simulation/collision detection/damage modelling/etc etc etc that WoP does, the rendering engine could have certainly been made to do more and do it more smoothly. And then it would only be artistic choices that make the differences.
I think if the WoP people had a priority on making their game do the same content as CoD, they would have had to compromise their rendering as well. That's just the way it works.
So while it's perfectly alright to think that WoP looks better in whatever way, I think it's wrong to think that you could just shove their rendering techniques/engine into CoD and 'fix' it. It would probably encounter the very same problems CoD is having right now.
The WoP people made their choice: Graphics over gameplay. CoD went the other way.
That said, I still think CoD looks beautiful. Especially compared with other games of its type and by that I mean true simulations. FSX or BoB2:WoV or Rise of Flight or DCS sims or what have you. These are the titles that will show you what is possible graphically when making a SIM. Comparing the graphics of WoP to CoD is like comparing the graphics of Crysis 2 to Arma 2. If you want Arma2, you can't have graphics like Crysis 2. It just ain't happening. Not yet. Arma 2 still looks great, but it's restricted in how great it can look by all the other stuff it's doing that a game like Crysis 2 doesn't do.
HAWX looks pretty good too, but if HAWX had huge maps, a complex damage model and flight model, large view distances, and complex AI, it would be ahead of its time just like CoD is.
As for remarks about sim stuff being CPU and graphics stuff being GPU, that's all well and good IF they operated independantly. I don't think they do. These are moving objects in a simulation. Before a renderer can do that kind of work, it needs the information that's being processed by the simulation. Take for example the simple rendering of a bullet hole on a wing.
Before the renderer can display the appropriate image on your screen, the sim has to decide if the bullet hit your wing, where did it hit exactly, what damage was done by the bullet and needs to be displayed etc. CoD uses some pretty complex decisions for all that stuff. The renderer may be blisteringly fast, but it can only work with the information that the Cpu gives it. WoP I think is pretty simple in these kinds of matters, so it gets the data to the gpu faster and the gpu can render the scene faster as a result.
That's what I believe anyway. Since CoD looks better than any WWII Battle of Britain sim I know of, I'm not complaining at all. It can only get better from here.