Friday update and discussions 2011-03-18

[recoilfx]

Originally Posted by Heliocon

Its a lie, it is not able to take advantage of the latest tech OR EVEN CURRENT TECH. Why? Because DX11 has been available for coming up to two years now and its not ingame (and devs would of known about it/be able to get info before the general public). Now I am not saying that they wont add it in (which they said they are going to do), but if you run it dx9 thats very dated, dx10 is also getting long in the tooth.

Point is on release the game's engine will be antiquated upon release, it may look good, but its foolish to call (and a lie) to say it will be able to harness all the tools for years to come since it cant even use hardware and software from coming up to two years ago!

While I agree that Maddox may have made some wrong choices regarding graphics development (IE, cloud & water should have been concentrated more vs the diminishing returns on certain nitpicking details), but given that they are such a small team with finite resources and given niche market share of DX11(http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey), not shooting for DX11 is understandable and wise. Even Crysis 2 is DX10 upon release!

It's wrong to assume that the engine will be antiquated upon release because it doesn't support DX11 - it's only a rendering path. You don't need to replace the whole engine (FM, DM, atmosphere modeling & resources management, blah blah blah) just to get DX11.

Originally Posted by Heliocon

From that screenshot I can already tell its old stuff, a huge amount of options are missing.
HDR, DOF, MSAA, particle settings, distortion effects, PP, Shader model, volumetric lighting, DS - and the list goes on, note that the ss is a pic of the options in "advanced" settings...

DX11 is within the engine...Oleg comfirmed that . Just not enough "stable" f/x yet to exploit in a flight sim of this magnitude.
And just because you don't see every single parameter listed as "tweakable" doen't mean that it is not there...
Some visual features are more "hungry" than others and could simply be included within different settings levels....In other words, Oleg could have decided to keep it simple....

Salute !

[The Kraken]

Originally Posted by recoilfx

While I agree that Maddox may have made some wrong choices regarding graphics development (IE, cloud & water should have been concentrated more vs the diminishing returns on certain nitpicking details), but given that they are such a small team with finite resources and given niche market share of DX11(http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey), not shooting for DX11 is understandable and wise. Even Crysis 2 is DX10 upon release!

Actually it's only DX9 And it's not just Crysis 2 - just ask Dragon Age 2 players about the horrible DX11 implementation, or take a look at Shogun 2 which will also deliver DX11 only after release through a patch ("2-4 weeks" ), and it's pretty clear that no developer is willing to invest too much in what is still a niche technology. Even if they're developing PC exclusive titles.

Looks like Oleg is in good company with concentrating on outdated technology

[JAMF]

There's something like a glitch that doesn't look right in the clip. When the Beaufighter attacks, there are what look like glowing gasses dropping away. Not likely I'll be seeing it when I game, but just wondering what they are or were meant to be and if it needs fixing.

[Chivas]

Originally Posted by Heliocon

Its a lie, it is not able to take advantage of the latest tech OR EVEN CURRENT TECH. Why? Because DX11 has been available for coming up to two years now and its not ingame (and devs would of known about it/be able to get info before the general public). Now I am not saying that they wont add it in (which they said they are going to do), but if you run it dx9 thats very dated, dx10 is also getting long in the tooth.

Point is on release the game's engine will be antiquated upon release, it may look good, but its foolish to call (and a lie) to say it will be able to harness all the tools for years to come since it cant even use hardware and software from coming up to two years ago!

Your the one posting misinformation. the game engine isn't antiquated. DX 11 can be used by the COD engine but the API is unstable. Calling a brand new game engine antiquated is total BS.

[Feuerfalke]

Originally Posted by Tree_UK

+1 thats the way most rational people would see it.

ROFLOL - WIN!

I love your logic, Tree: Eat xxxx, thousands of flies can't be wrong!


LOL - sorry, but two people posting the same non-sense doesn't form a "common sense".

[Heliocon]

Originally Posted by Chivas

Your the one posting misinformation. the game engine isn't antiquated. DX 11 can be used by the COD engine but the API is unstable. Calling a brand new game engine antiquated is total BS.

Chivas, calm down kiddy - you already tried to argue in the other graphics thread (horribly because you didnt have an argument) and failed, dont do it again.

DX11 is not in the release version, full stop. Unless you can run it in DX11 its not DX11, that does not mean it wont feature DX11 in the future but for now it does not. If I make a new game with DX8 is it brand new because I just released it? No its not, use your brain.

My statement was solely a response to the post saying that the game would be so advanced upon release that it would be impossibly to max out and that its built for pcs years from now. That is completely incorrect for the release version as of now.

[philip.ed]

You lot are like 12 year old kids. Can't you accept that certain people have certain opinions? Unless you have nothing better to do with you lives, stop wasting your time arguing, please, it's getting really boring now.

[Heliocon]

Originally Posted by recoilfx

While I agree that Maddox may have made some wrong choices regarding graphics development (IE, cloud & water should have been concentrated more vs the diminishing returns on certain nitpicking details), but given that they are such a small team with finite resources and given niche market share of DX11(http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey), not shooting for DX11 is understandable and wise. Even Crysis 2 is DX10 upon release!

It's wrong to assume that the engine will be antiquated upon release because it doesn't support DX11 - it's only a rendering path. You don't need to replace the whole engine (FM, DM, atmosphere modeling & resources management, blah blah blah) just to get DX11.

Well yes and no. The reason the clouds and water are behind is because the tech that would allow them to really push clouds and water graphics are dx10/dx11. Dx11 for direct compute (physics), and differed lighting along with other lighting and particle effects that are in dx10 (but much improved in dx11), which could greatly reduce the burden on rendering these elements.

DX11 is not a niche market, there was a huge thread/argument about this last year and I made a prediction back then about market share and cards, which was that by 2011 win7 64bit would be the primary OS and that dx11 card market share would skyrocket at the end of 2010 and for the first half of 2011. Months after and even now, steam 100% backs this up and at the current rate in 6 months dx11 may even be the majority (by % increase last month out of the 15 cards that had the strongest % growth in market share, 14 of them were DX11 and represent probably around roughly 8%+ growth for dx11 card market share last month alone).

DX11 isnt only a rendering path, it has alot more to it which makes it far better then dx10, alot of that is it is made to work in sync with multicore cpus/multi threaded apps. It has a new shader model which gives alot of new features (shader model 5, dx9 = shader model 2).

Also crysis is consolised to hell and back, thats why it has no dx11 on release, in its video settings there are 3 options, gamer - advanced - hardcore and there are litrally no descriptions of even what each setting has in it... The tutorial uses console gamepad button instructions etc etc. Also the engine looks worse then the original crysis did.

[Heliocon]

Originally Posted by The Kraken

Actually it's only DX9 And it's not just Crysis 2 - just ask Dragon Age 2 players about the horrible DX11 implementation, or take a look at Shogun 2 which will also deliver DX11 only after release through a patch ("2-4 weeks" ), and it's pretty clear that no developer is willing to invest too much in what is still a niche technology. Even if they're developing PC exclusive titles.

Looks like Oleg is in good company with concentrating on outdated technology

Yikes, where to start? Well DA2 dx11 is stuffed because its a console title and it was tacked onto the end, kinda like metro. Crysis 2 is the same, except that the original crysis looks better and that is years old.

As for Shogun, as I was very active in their forums pre release helping the tech admins, the dx11 was a really big push on their part to add, they commited a huge amount of their rescources to the dx11, so you statement about committing is very off. Now the reason they pulled it was because of optimization and performance issues because they added DX11 onto the ETW/NTW Warscape engine which was originally at release dx9 focused (and single threaded). In any case they have added dx11 which was a huge job and they had to re-write parts of the engine, thats why they screwed up horribly and there is no AA in the game for dx9 or dx10 because it intefers with the lighting / shadow effects. In 2 weeks when they patch in DX11 it will have MSAAx8 and DX10.1 will have MSAAx4.

So the statement is alittle offbase, and win7/dx11 is the new xp/dx9. There is a huge jump underway. Much of it was held back because consoles are only dx9.0 and since they have made a huge chunk of market share many games are multiplatform resulting in poor use of dx11. The only real exception is TW but like said they are using a modified version of Warscape which was released 2 years ago but was in production from like 2005/2006.