Offset

[BlackThief]

speaking of next gen graphics - has anyone seen the Crysis trailer yet (sequel to FarCry) ? Especially the jungle looks imho much better than anything I've seen of the unreal3 engine!

 

http://www.worthdownloading.com/download.p...id=1724&id=7043

[oDDity]

Yes, it's pretty amazing physics, ever single leaf is bendable, and breaks off if shot, and you can track people by looking for broken grass and leaves etc.

[SneaksieDave]

The realtime ambient stuff (whether faked radiosity or not) looks.. well, unreal, to say the least. Holy cow.

[Forsaken]

Eh, the damn Offset reached even here...

 

Well, OK, they have good graphics, but only because they are preparing for 2007 if they are lucky (2009). The game is a Fantasy FPS too, and they even dare to say that it's the first one, but regarding the game, it looks like something very banal to me. Just take DnD standarts, nothing original, boring ugly trolls with giant maces. I'll be more impressed with a beautifully designed old Thief level than a big ugly troll that looks like it contains 100,000,000,000 polygons... And they seem to be really happy with that troll...

[OrbWeaver]

I agree that it is better to focus on the level surroundings than the detail in the monsters. Perhaps not in Thief where you spend a lot of time looking at the AI, but in fast-paced shooter games like Quake the detail on the enemies is lost when they are charging at you in a darkened room.

[Forsaken]

Yep, just take heXen, Thief (yours, too), maybe some RPG's, most Quests - hom much detailization they have? And then look at Oblivion! All white and same. Or red and same...

[BlackThief]

if you're interested - here're some new screens of Crysis:

http://www.gamestar.de/aktuell/screenshots...?galleryId=1401

 

graphicswise Germany's got the largest

[sparhawk]

Sorry, I don't visit a gamestar site until they stop their annoying popup philosophy. It's one thing to show these annoying things, but it is yet another to intentionaly abuse established visual aids and change their menaing, so that users are tricked into visiting sites, when they just want to close the window.

[BlackThief]

you don't have a popup blocker?

[sparhawk]

This special popups can not be blocked, because they are not seperate windows. At least that was the answer I got when I asked how to block them. I have blocked popup windows, but these overlay windows work differently. If you know a way how to disable them I would be eternaly gratefull Until the next annyoing "feature" is abused.

[BlackThief]

no I don't have anything against those overlay windows, but they're not as annoying as normal popups imho, since the only open one time per day you enter the website - I think they somehow store your ip.

[sparhawk]

Last time I browsed their site, the opened on every single page. That's why they were so annoying that I quit browsing it, and never came back. Maybe it is because I'm browsing from my company IP and it doesn't work for some reason for me.

[Gildoran]

graphicswise Germany's got the largest

At first, I misunderstood and was about to say "Take it to the Patriot Wars thread."

[Domarius]

I doubt they'd store your IP. More likely it would be in cookies. Spar, check if cookies are enabled.

 

Checking out the pics now... god. I mean, those screens look good, but then you see that landscape shot - that's a lot of work there, with all the landscape variety like in real life. That can't be the actual live map. If the game can scale like that dynamically, my brain will explode.

[sparhawk]

Cookies are enabled. You can barely browse anywhere without them.

[Dram]

I doubt they'd store your IP. More likely it would be in cookies. Spar, check if cookies are enabled.

 

Checking out the pics now... god. I mean, those screens look good, but then you see that landscape shot - that's a lot of work there, with all the landscape variety like in real life. That can't be the actual live map. If the game can scale like that dynamically, my brain will explode.

 

It looks a lot like terragen. I'm expecting it is ingame terrain, they would'nt be lame to put up a terragen sample or whatever.

 

*crosses fingers for Dom's brain to explode*

[obscurus]

Those are all in-game shots, no pre-rendered stuff AFAIK. I downloaded a video of the ingame footage, and it was pretty gobsmacking how much detail is in that game, in real time. It is damn near photorealistic in places. I am under the impression that you won't see all of that detail unless you have one mofo of a computer (Quad SLI monster PCs get the real eye candy), as the engine scales quite a bit to perform well on whatever hardware it finds itself running on (up to a point). The video showed footage of the game editor, where you could drag a light around, and it updated the shadow maps in real time, ie, real time radiosity, in a complex indoor scene (the editor is the game engine essentially, so it does the same real time lighting in-game). It was very impressive to see dynamic, real-time global illumination like that, and the quality of the rendering was on par with what you used to take a high end renderer days to complete.... The Cryengine 2 has to be one of the most impressive engines on the horizon. Looks good, even if you might need to sell a kidney to buy a machine to run it on...

[woah]

If you use Firefox, Spar, I'd recommend getting "AdBlock". It allows you to explicitly block certain websites, and you can even use wild cards in your blockings. For instance, if you hate intellitxt like I (you know, that feature where certain keywords are automatically set to hyperlinks), then just type in your block list " *intellitxt* " (without quotes, but with the astericks), and Walla! No more intellitxt!

 

I can send you my list of blocked elements if you want. My pages load SOOOOO much faster. No longer do I have to wait for "http://ads.etcetc" to load before I can pull up a web page. You can also block flash elements, pictures, pop-ups, and those in-page pop-ups too.

 

http://adblock.mozdev.org/

Edited April 21, 2006 by woah

[Domarius]

My GOD it really scales out to that view dynamically????

 

*ka-boom*

[Dram]

*Celebrates!* - DISCO INFERNOOOOOOO!!!!

[Domarius]

I told my brothers - real time radiosity, real time scaling out to that view. They think you are all lying.

Hehe.

[Gildoran]

I must admit that I find myself very curious how they acheive the realtime radiosity...

[Forsaken]

What exactly do you mean by "realtime radiocity"?

 

ZBrush can do a lot of crazy stuff realtime, why they can't, they made a special program for themselves, so it runs there.

[OrbWeaver]

Radiosity (also known as interdiffuse reflection) is the phenomenon where light bounces off multiple surfaces to illuminate areas that are not in direct line-of-sight with a light source. This is why it is not pitch black under a table, for instance, as the light takes an indirect path via surrounding objects and surfaces.

 

Simulated radiosity is extraordinarily performance-intensive to compute, therefore it is not yet used in games, although various tricks can be used such as ambient lighting in Doom 3, and presumably more complex techniques in Offset and other next-generation projects.

[sparhawk]

Additionally radiosity also accounts for "colour bleeding", which is not possible with other techniques. When you are having to surfaces with different colours, in real life it happens that these two surfaces can have an effect on each other because the colour of the one is reflected a little bit on the other one.