Fresh stuff from sukhoi.ru (Discussion)

[Chivas]

Originally Posted by ACE-OF-ACES

Bingo!

Yet that does not stop the whinners from refering to that as some sort of 'full year effort'

On that note, every software company I have delt with is allways 'working' on thier next thing.. If not just to keep current with the changes in tech

So to try and paint that inital efforts by 1C as some 12 month effort that they wasted money on is just plane ignorant and/or silly

I agree, unfortunately its easy to skew any information to suit a postive or negative agenda. Of course from my positive point of view I find the negative view takers much more skewed with their interpretation of information.

I personally love the one were people have suggested that the unfinished game engine thats being designed to continually evolve and incorportate future tech will be "outdated" by the time its finished.

[philip.ed]

I agree with the above.

My only injection would be this:

The video of SoW on the 1946 DVD showed, what appeared to be, a working game, corroborated by the showing of this version at the exhibition which Mysticpuma attended.

Now is it the work on the engine which caused the host of problems in providing minimal tangible development between 2007-2011? Because it is certainly the lack of development between the first two builds which I think causes a lot of the so called 'negativity'.

See there is a gulf between the two engines, but this may not be as clear as we would like to imagine. It's only really noticeable visually in the self-shading, and landscape geometry.

But let's further this odd scenario with the map-editor, shown in 2008:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KozuhKXGDoY

Which build is this? The geometry would suggest the engine CloD has now, however the cliffs and terrain textures aren't so different from the first build.
And I think the colours and textures look a lot better than what we have now (save for the repetition which could be tweaked).

So if this is the current build, why has the landscape taken so long to come together, and yet not provided a 3 year gulf in visual experience?



The answer is there are a lot of ways to look at it, from a positive perspective which takes the problems with the team and lack of initial resources into account, and then the other view which highlights the apparent lack of major development over the years.

I personally think it's 6 of one, half a dozen of the other. Oleg was a perfectionist, and I think they ran out of time in producing their dream game so had to come out with something quickly: CloD.

[Chivas]

I think this statement by Oleg along time ago says alot about how features are implemented and removed or scaled down until a later date.

"Oleg: When we are designing the engine we put in anything we want or can and we're not very much afraid that there is not currently a PC that will run it well. However, when we are close to release we "cut" some features to get the right working gameplay - to get it playable with good FPS. Those features that were "cut", we will release or open later, when the new hardware will be coming. In the same way we did for the IL-2 series and it's why our old engine is still looking modern."

This is the bottom line, you build the engine to be capable of much more than computers are capable of displaying, and then turn down whatever features necessary to make the sim playable. You turn them back on again as the features are optimized or computers are more powerful. This strategy works well over the long haul, as thats the business model of a number of Sequels using the same game engine.

Unfortunately many people have ignored these statements over the years, and expected everything the developers are working on will be in the first release. This and the fact the sim had to be released unfinished has caused all the negative feedback.

Now some would blame everything on the development team not being capable of building such a complex game, there may be a small element of truth to that, but most is just a function of the scale of the project and people expectations. Its costing the investors thousands of dollars a day to keep this development going so they must see a rainbow of hope otherwise this development would have been shut down ages ago.

[philip.ed]

Very good point indeed.

However, to contradict this slightly, surely the current level of tweaking highlights that a lot of the software is not running adequately even at the more simpler levels? And the graphics re-write itself cut a lot of nice features (those beautiful cockpits and some of the nice lighting) but similarly added some improved ones such as coastlines and atmospherics.

It all gets very complicated.

But I think that quote needs to remembered. That first spitfire cockpit video showed a lot of lovely features which didn't make the game: atmospherics over the water, lovely cloud lighting (even if the clouds were poor) and those lovely cockpits which did make the game, but were 'tweaked' poorly IMHO.

I'd love someone to make that video with the current game and see the difference.

[Chivas]

Originally Posted by philip.ed

Very good point indeed.

However, to contradict this slightly, surely the current level of tweaking highlights that a lot of the software is not running adequately even at the more simpler levels? And the graphics re-write itself cut a lot of nice features (those beautiful cockpits and some of the nice lighting) but similarly added some improved ones such as coastlines and atmospherics.

It all gets very complicated.

But I think that quote needs to remembered. That first spitfire cockpit video showed a lot of lovely features which didn't make the game: atmospherics over the water, lovely cloud lighting (even if the clouds were poor) and those lovely cockpits which did make the game, but were 'tweaked' poorly IMHO.

I'd love someone to make that video with the current game and see the difference.

Your right the graphic rewrite probably cut a number of eye appealing codes, to cut down on CTD's etc. My system has never crashed but most peoples systems probably weren't as optimized as my was to run the sim. The new graphic code has just been written and hardly optimized, so in the future I'm sure we will see more appealing graphics etc as the sim is optimized and computer power allows. Personally I don't like the idea of scaling down the code to suit lesser computers, as this should be an available option, but there is probably far more too to the problem than I can imagine.

[philip.ed]

What I hope for is the SDK to allow a fair amount of cosmetic modifications: notably changes to, say, the cockpits, the shaders, the landscape colours, even speedtree, in the hope that the devs can then offer these as switch able features a la RoF. Or, with the case of speed-tree, even replace what's there.

I think the team should invest in this burford holly, and replace a lot of the trees with hedgerows:

http://www.speedtree.com/trees/?tree...ort=CategoryID

[Chivas]

Originally Posted by philip.ed

What I hope for is the SDK to allow a fair amount of cosmetic modifications: notably changes to, say, the cockpits, the shaders, the landscape colours, even speedtree, in the hope that the devs can then offer these as switch able features a la RoF. Or, with the case of speed-tree, even replace what's there.

I think the team should invest in this burford holly, and replace a lot of the trees with hedgerows:

http://www.speedtree.com/trees/?tree...ort=CategoryID

The terrain mapping tool, and SDK, should have that capablility, if they don't, they should be made to have it. The trees in COD are one of the biggest immersion killers for me. In COD many of the trees bordering roads and fields should be changed to hedgerows. As it is now flying at low level trying to navigate is very difficult. I use forest shapes, roads, and railroads to navigate. All the extra trees mask the shape of the forests and roads that make it almost impossible to navigate visually, as there are few other landmarks. Nice to see that Speedtree has a something that looks very much like a hedgerow. I'm sure the development or modders will at some point be able to replace some of the existing trees with a version of those hedgerows.

[tintifaxl]

Originally Posted by Chivas

My system has never crashed but most peoples systems probably weren't as optimized as my was to run the sim.

What kind of ctd's has the dev team fixed then? Ah yes - workarounds for poorly optimized systems