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AoD Lighting sucks. Badly.

Chork

Scholar
Joined
Mar 12, 2006
Messages
123
Location
Alberta
(rambling alert)
eh...

IMO, good graphics can make a great game better, but bad graphics won't make a great game worse. As long as the interface is usable, I wouldn't care if the graphics sucked as much ass as the original Exile games.

Of course, that's not to say the graphics in AOD are bad, just primitive by todays standards (which are vastly overblown as it is).

I mean shit, I have HL2, FEAR, CoD... but I still play Doom 2 more than any of those.

All in all, I'm looking forward to AoD. Keep up the good work, and don't let the negativity get to you. Quite a few people are looking forward to this game.
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
Joined
Jan 7, 2003
Messages
28,024
Ladonna said:
Why did you change to 3D Vince?
The 2D version was universally disliked / written off by many gamers and developers. 3D does improve many visual aspects and removes sprite limitations - we couldn't have more then one weapon per class (one generic sword for all swords), 3-4 armor types, no shields, one generic attack animation, etc. Now we can show all individual weapons, shields, armors, including different metals; more than 100 unique animations, including special attacks, etc.

Please don't tell me it was to cater to the dumbass crowd....
50/50. I'm not planning to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, of course, but I need to sell more than a few hundred copies to "stay in business". I don't care if I make any money, but my team must be paid for almost 3 years of work.

Chork said:
All in all, I'm looking forward to AoD. Keep up the good work, and don't let the negativity get to you. Quite a few people are looking forward to this game.
Thanks for the support.
 

Goliath

Arcane
Zionist Agent
Joined
Jul 18, 2004
Messages
17,830
I think it is pointless trying to keep up with the demands of the graphic whores.
Almost every new major title released reaches a new high as far as 3D graphics are concerned.
Just look at how advanced the graphics of the most recent games are. The standard for 3D graphics rises with breathtaking speed, no point in trying to keep up with that. AoD will look like a game from the 3D stone age anyway, making the light effects a little better won't change that. People who care about graphics won't buy it. Not because the graphics are bad, but because they look like "Lil' Johnny's first week with 3D Studio" compared to the stuff the big studios do.
IMO all hardcore RPG fans would have no problem with 2D graphics either and how many people of the "I only play 3D games - with good light effects!" crowd will even just consider buying a turn-based PC RPG? x% (x = x - x)!
 

Nick

Iron Tower Studio
Developer
Joined
Apr 21, 2004
Messages
317
Location
Over the hills and far away
Hory said:
OK so why does the game look like a no-lights, textured mesh viewport from 3ds max?
The graphical limitations that you see are related to the engine.

Everything is so white and artifical, like playing Quake 2 in software mode.
What do you suggest?

As a person with some 3d modelling experience I can tell you that a few lights can make a world of difference.
All models are designed in 3dsmax, and when rendered there, they look great. Unfortunately, there is no way (that we know of) to achieve or simulate such light & shadow quality on TGE, which is why the models look very differently and inferior.
TSE (Torque Shader Engine) does provide a more advanced lighting model, but switching to yet another engine is out of the question for obvious reasons.

It's not about graphics whoring, it's about doing simple changes for huge improvements.
And the simple changes are...?

So please do everyone a favor and bring this up with the 3D artists.
We are using what Torque offers us, and I can't see how to improve lighting without rewriting Torque rendering code, which would take much longer than a day.

I don't know if you have day/night cycles or not (not that I like them), but you could replace "the world where daytime has no shadows" with an "almost at dusk" setting.
I'm afraid that we would receive a ton of "why everything is orange" complaints.

It would go well with the decadence setting (color-wise too - orange/brownish). I see there are hanging lanterns in the game world, why not use them? Torque can probably handle them.
There are several kinds of light sources in Torque, and we use them where needed.

Without meaning any offense to the 3D devs, I have to say that right now the game looks very unprofessional. Not low-budget. What I mean is that it doesn't include some of the basic elements that 3D games should have.
You keep hinting at simple and awesome solutions to all our problems that are clear to anyone but us. Can you be more specific?

... and some antialiasing for the font would be an improvement too).
That's not supported either. However, we may just pick another font that will look better, but no AA there. You can turn it on manually in your videocard settings though.

Hope my criticism was constructive.
Yes, kind of...
Anyway, the fact that you care is already a big plus.

Looking forward to AoD.
Thanks.
 

Ladonna

Arcane
Joined
Aug 27, 2006
Messages
10,578
I have spruiked this game on so many websites its not funny. I get two standard answers:

'I have no idea why you have to be into everything thats butt fucking ugly' Graphicswhore.

'Wow, I love the features. I will definately keep my eye on this! Its about time something like this was done..' RPG fan.

Just do what you can without making it the primary focus of your game. You cannot grab the Oblivion crowd.

Do what you do best.
 

Littlefizz

Novice
Joined
Jan 25, 2006
Messages
26
If you are not going to use the shadows for gameplay-related things i dont know whats so wrong about not spending time perfecting them, specially if the engine is not really capable of good lighting.

However, some screenshots in the website look better than others when it comes to lighting. Is it because they are from different versions or am I seeing things (wouldnt be the first time)?
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
Joined
Jan 7, 2003
Messages
28,024
Littlefizz said:
If you are not going to use the shadows for gameplay-related things i dont know whats so wrong about not spending time perfecting them, specially if the engine is not really capable of good lighting.
My sentiments exactly.

However, some screenshots in the website look better than others when it comes to lighting.
Which ones?

http://www.irontowerstudio.com/images/6a.jpg - that's an outdoor area, the shadows work fine and add quite a lot.

http://www.irontowerstudio.com/images/5a.jpg - that's an indoor area, the shadows don't work and require a very time consuming workaround.

http://www.irontowerstudio.com/images/4a.jpg - see that area where the blacksmith is? That's technically indoor, so no shadows again.
 

Littlefizz

Novice
Joined
Jan 25, 2006
Messages
26
Vault Dweller said:
http://www.irontowerstudio.com/images/6a.jpg - that's an outdoor area, the shadows work fine and add quite a lot.
Yep, thats the one i thought was better than the others and more than enough for me.

Didnt know about the indoors vs outdoors problem and thought maybe it was a more recent version with some things tweaked, anyway I know very little about 3d programming and even less about Torque so...

I still think it looks good, much more next-gen than the 2d version ;) , and I don't think you have wasted your time switching to 3d, IMO, most people tolerate graphics as old as the first games they enjoyed, raising the bar a little is always good (for your sales) if you can afford it.
 

suibhne

Erudite
Joined
Aug 21, 2003
Messages
1,951
Location
Chicago
The great news is you'll have a lot of expertise built up from using this engine, and you can start your next project with a more advanced iteration that supports neato dynamic lights. :wink: I think the OP's point is that, in the right engine, dynamic lights aren't that hard to set up, and they probably have a more positive impact on graphics than just about anything else, but I wouldn't worry about it for AoD. I'm eager for the game either way, and I know my sale will make or break the project. :wink:
 

obediah

Erudite
Joined
Jan 31, 2005
Messages
5,051
suibhne said:
...I wouldn't worry about it for AoD. I'm eager for the game either way, and I know my sale will make or break the project. :wink:

Phew, now that you've takent the responisbility, the rest of us can pirate it guilt-free ;)
 

gromit

Arcane
Joined
Jan 31, 2005
Messages
2,771
Location
Gentrification Station
I haven't used torque, so I'll take your word that indoor lighting / shadow is a bitch. I take it that, for some reason, the renderer itself distinguishes between indoor and outdoor areas? Do e know why? Seems like it should be up to the game code to handle the designation and ramifications thereof... have you noticed any benefits of the engine taking care of it for you? *shrug*

Flashback said:
antialiasing for the font
That's not supported either.
If you're using fonts residing on a texture, as opposed to truetype or something, take advantage of your alpha channel!

Assuming it's opaque pixels against a transparent background, scale that font up to like 4x with a smoothen algorithm, maybe give it a touch of gaussian blur, then scale it back down and sharpen / unsharp-mask / clean up as necessary. We're going for just a teensy bit of semitransparency in the nooks and crannies of the solid black.

Mmm, nothing like in-file antialiasing! I use alpha'd edges a lot in my 2d-via-3d engine, to great effect. However, if you're using "real" font files, then, uhm, yeah... sorry, I've got nothing. :oops:
 

Nick

Iron Tower Studio
Developer
Joined
Apr 21, 2004
Messages
317
Location
Over the hills and far away
wallace said:
I take it that, for some reason, the renderer itself distinguishes between indoor and outdoor areas? Do e know why?
Yes. Outdoor area is a terrain block, which accepts shadows normally. Building is a 3D object (DTS); one DTS can't draw shadows on another in TGE, and character is DTS too.

However, if you're using "real" font files, then, uhm, yeah... sorry, I've got nothing. :oops:
That's the case. Torque takes the TTF and FON files and builds its custom *.gft (game font, I guess) format from those. What's inside of those, I don't know. And digging the [font] rendering code would be counter-productive at this stage.
 

GhanBuriGhan

Erudite
Joined
Aug 8, 2005
Messages
1,170
Unfortunate, but no big deal. I assume light sources work indoors and outdoors? If so, maybe the original post has some merit: lowering the ambient lighting indoors and putting more emphasis on light sources (torches, lamps, candles) would create a more dramatic interior. Are these things you can easily influence?
 

Dhruin

Liturgist
Joined
Aug 15, 2003
Messages
758
obediah said:
RPGDot didn't think it was pretty enough.

Mostly, a couple of guest posters wanted to make some point to VD. Since this guy in this thread thinks the lighting is crap, obviously RPG Codex thinks it sucks too.
 

EvoG

Erudite
Joined
Mar 25, 2003
Messages
1,424
Location
Chicago
My two cents if no one minds:

If you're using instanced geometry for you objects, consider at the VERY least baking down some ambient occlusion.

Since you're using Max:

  • Go to the Lights rollout and add a Sky Light

    Consider adding a ground plane under the object to occlude the light from the bottom
  • In the Advanced Lighting rollout(under Rendering), turn on either Radiosity or Lighttracer. Use low values to do quick tests; low percentile on the rad solution or low Rays/Samples below 150 for lighttracer...you can get away with no bounces for increased speed since you're going for occlusion, not light bounce. Turn up the samples and such when you're ready for a final pass with Render to Texture.

If your object is UV'd properly to a page, you can for the most part get away with baking the ambient solution down onto the texture you're using now for objects, just make sure you back up your old ones! In this case, you can simply save over the old ones in your /<data> folder and Torque will reload all the new textures with the ambient lighting and immediately see the results in engine. All in all this shouldn't take more than a week to process all your objects (assuming you have quite a bit), perhaps even less.

Now, if you're NOT instancing objects and they're not dynamic, consider treating your scenes as one object and go for a more robust lighting solution using the above outline, but turn light bouncing, add extra lights (sun, lamp) and increase your samples on the final pass to get full on global illumination. Here you can get lighting interaction across and between objects and make the scenes feel richer with a tiny bit of extra effort.

Here are a couple of old examples which a few of you might remember:




Here I have every object in this scene sharing one huge UV page on a separate channel, and then laying down two large lightmaps over them I get a more intimate feel, and its not time intensive and rather fun IMHO. (FYI, ignore the the banding in in the lightmap nearest the window...I was using DXT1 which compresses the hell out of textures; thats not indicative of any problem with lightmaps themselves, just user error. :P

Anyway, if Torque supports multitexturing, you can have lightmap texture pages separate from your object textures instead of baking the lighting solution down, allowing you to use less texture space with your diffuse textures layered with the lightmap on top.



This was just some quick blathering but everyone should consider this; when a little bit of effort can pay off big in dividends, you dont ignore that. Its not selling out, its polishing a product and there's no reason not to. If it ends up being a LOT of work, then perhaps dont bother, but dont immediately assume you're catering to the masses because you want to make it prettier, thats silly. If you have available artist time, use it and remember this is your baby VD, and you want to present it in the best availabe light. Personally I dont care either way, as I still plan to play it, but you do have options and you can at the very least look into it. :)


Cheers



EDIT: ...and just to make it clear, I'm not talking about using dynamic lights in-engine, but rather baking out lighting FROM Max...big difference. Personally I'm not a fan of per vertex dynamic lighting, so unless you want to implement per-pixel, stick with tried and true lightmaps. :D
 

OlSheep

Novice
Joined
Aug 13, 2004
Messages
42
Location
Lost in Quebec
The urge to stop lurking was too strong...

For crying out loud, antialiasing for the font? Unless the text's jaggies are going to come out of the screen to puncture the player's eyes, there's no way to justify that waste of time.

Who, on this sad planet, ever refused to buy a game because the font didn't look smooth enough?!
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
Joined
Jan 7, 2003
Messages
28,024
EvoG said:
My two cents if no one minds:
Always welcome, EvoG.

Since you're using Max:

  • Go to the Lights rollout and add a Sky Light

    Consider adding a ground plane under the object to occlude the light from the bottom
  • In the Advanced Lighting rollout(under Rendering), turn on either Radiosity or Lighttracer.

  • That's what we used: Sky Light and Lighttracer. It *is* the engine.

    I'll discuss it with the artists, thanks.

    Its not selling out, its polishing a product and there's no reason not to.
    No arguing here.
 

EvoG

Erudite
Joined
Mar 25, 2003
Messages
1,424
Location
Chicago
Cool. I dont want to doubt your word, but I don't see an ambient light textures on your objects. If you like, you can send me a couple (max files plus diffuse textures) and I can show you exactly what I mean.


Cheers
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
Joined
Jan 7, 2003
Messages
28,024
EvoG said:
Cool. I dont want to doubt your word...
You can (and probably should) doubt my word. You know way more about this stuff than I do.

If you like, you can send me a couple (max files plus diffuse textures) and I can show you exactly what I mean.
Sure, will do. Thanks for the offer.
 

DarkUnderlord

Professional Throne Sitter
Staff Member
Joined
Jun 18, 2002
Messages
28,335
EvoG's on the case.
icon_salut.gif
 

Apar

Novice
Joined
Oct 5, 2006
Messages
44
God damn but the game looks ugly.

God damn but I'm excited to play it.
 

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