Whipporowill
Erudite
Data4 said:
Looks pretty interesting. The first screenshots had me thinking Fable and WoW though. Must beallt that damned pumpking patches that need clearing...
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Assload of new OB-screens + videos courtesy of the Germans
- Thread starter Fresh
- Start date
Looks pretty interesting. The first screenshots had me thinking Fable and WoW though. Must beallt that damned pumpking patches that need clearing...
Relien
Scholar
Nice screens.
http://morrowind.free.fr/Archive/Concept-art/Images/sload.jpg
This is wrong though, it should've been "screens of a sload":Data4 said:
http://morrowind.free.fr/Archive/Concept-art/Images/sload.jpg
Arkay Firestar
Novice
- Joined
- Mar 2, 2006
- Messages
- 23
Those screens look better. Wtf was justgames.de thinking running the game with those settings. They must be a front for pirhana bytes.
Haha, not surprised about crashing though...when was the last time Bethesda made a game that didn't have a crashing problem...and this one is a port too, so lolz
Haha, not surprised about crashing though...when was the last time Bethesda made a game that didn't have a crashing problem...and this one is a port too, so lolz
Section8
Cipher
All of the up close stuff looks very nice, if very "fairy tale-ish," but at least it's a fairly uniform style, even if there are major discrepancies in details. It's also good to see some scuffles with ~5-6 involved parties.
Anoik
Novice
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2005
- Messages
- 91
In one of the screenshots you can count (?) 9 goblins, some dead, some fighting, and 2 npcs (only one in the screenshot, but in other you can see the two npcs). Not bad. I was hoping to see only six npcs/mobs in screen, that was Bethesda said.
http://www.pcgames.de/screenshots/mediu ... 879203.JPG
http://www.pcgames.de/screenshots/mediu ... 879203.JPG
dongle
Scholar
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- Jan 23, 2006
- Messages
- 838
I had thought mipmaps work as you say, swapping half sized textures depending on the radius from the player. I messed with them some in Morrowind, you got four levels of progressively smaller texture, there was a nice gradual blend between them as you got closer. I suppose the quality of the blend is dependent on the filtering.EvoG said:
What’s weird about these screens is it looks like were going from a 512 full resolution texture to like mipmap six in one fell swoop. No blend, just blam! You see this in the official “2 day†countdown video too. It also does -not- look like its solely based on the distance from the player. It could be a cell-loading thing, as you mention, and I speculated above.
What did you think of the theory that only a certain -number- of the full resolution texture tiles get rendered? Not necessarily a radius around the player of full-res, but it starts loading the first hills in view with full-res then when it gets to a certain number of tiles it quits and goes to low-res. Is that ever done? Could that account for the nVidia statement about some terrain features being randomized?
Sure, this is graphic whore discussion. If it’s soo annoying tho that it’s constantly drawing attention I can see it affecting my gameplay. Anyway, thanks for the expert explanations.
sanibonani
Novice
- Joined
- Mar 19, 2006
- Messages
- 13
http://www.gamereactor.se/bilder/?textid=6615&id=40302
Well, these screens give pretty good overview of the games different environments. Some crappy looking textures and models are clearly to be found, but on the whole i like the look of it. Perhaps not as 'nextgen-never-seen-anything-like-it' as we may have led to beleive, but still effective enough for me.
Well, these screens give pretty good overview of the games different environments. Some crappy looking textures and models are clearly to be found, but on the whole i like the look of it. Perhaps not as 'nextgen-never-seen-anything-like-it' as we may have led to beleive, but still effective enough for me.
Sorry, Codex was down for me for the past two days, and I just caught this Dongle 
Really no. Almost all precaching systems just anticipate what objects are going to be into view and begin loading the textures(ideally...a lot of times its just a dumb to memory, which is the cause of hickups in gameplay). What you're sorta talking about (I know I said "sorta" last time...I think you know the right questions to ask which is good :D ) here is similar to running out of video mem, and then you start using system ram or virtual memory to store that data, and you begin to get significant slowdown. I suppose there could be a system that lets you fill up vid mem with X megabytes of texture data, and then supply the remaing geometry with a low quality version of the texture, but I've never heard of it.
So yea, either way, that issue with distant terrain being that ugly is just their cell system and nothing else. Within mere steps, that same muddled looking terrain becomes textured and detailed as the new cell loads. I suppose on the PC you could fuck with the ini and adjust a buffer size to tell the system how far(radius) or how much data(MB's) to allow to be loaded per cell, but thats assuming it works like that in the first place. I'm on a 360 so I can't experiment.
Well hell, when people are receptive and interested, is my pleasure.
Cheers
dongle said:
Really no. Almost all precaching systems just anticipate what objects are going to be into view and begin loading the textures(ideally...a lot of times its just a dumb to memory, which is the cause of hickups in gameplay). What you're sorta talking about (I know I said "sorta" last time...I think you know the right questions to ask which is good :D ) here is similar to running out of video mem, and then you start using system ram or virtual memory to store that data, and you begin to get significant slowdown. I suppose there could be a system that lets you fill up vid mem with X megabytes of texture data, and then supply the remaing geometry with a low quality version of the texture, but I've never heard of it.
So yea, either way, that issue with distant terrain being that ugly is just their cell system and nothing else. Within mere steps, that same muddled looking terrain becomes textured and detailed as the new cell loads. I suppose on the PC you could fuck with the ini and adjust a buffer size to tell the system how far(radius) or how much data(MB's) to allow to be loaded per cell, but thats assuming it works like that in the first place. I'm on a 360 so I can't experiment.
dongle said:
Well hell, when people are receptive and interested, is my pleasure.
Cheers
Pr()ZaC said:
Nope. 512 megs is a lot memory for a dedicated device. I've see plenty of games that look like shit on the PC and I have 2 gigs of ram and 256 megs of vram on my 6800GT.
Remember to always factor in everything when considering quality. You've got the hardware, and the efficiency and performance of the game engine(they are NOT equal by any stretch, with dramatic differences in performance; engines are not created equal and far from it), and the talent and technical know-how of the artists and leads and finally you have budgeted resource priority. Sometimes you just have to stick a fork in it because there is just too much work to be done to work on one asset for too long; artist speed and ability comes into this and while I know a lot of very talented modelers/texture artists, rarely are they both really good and really fast, so something is sacrificed. There are no absolutes.
dongle
Scholar
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- Jan 23, 2006
- Messages
- 838
Not much time right at the moment, but yep, OK, I can see how it works now.
Cells are either loaded or not. Looks great close up, pretty darn good in the far distance. It's the blend between the two in the near distance that looks really bad. You can see in the officially released screenshots how they masked that area. When you're free to move around it's really awful.
Default .ini setting is to load five cells. Standing on the bridge between the Imperial City and the Prison the hills across the lake are unloaded. Setting it to load nine cells got a couple of cells in the lower foothills loaded, and cut FPS from 40 to 20. Still, the border is razor sharp with no blending, and cell based, not based on a radius around the player. The tiling of the ground texture is really, really, obvious. I also edited the grass distance in the .ini out to insane distance, but it still only shows up in the loaded cells, although trees go beyond that. Since SpeedTree does such a good job at LOD I would have thought some ground cover over the blobby hills would help, but no dice.
The LOD for buildings is weird. Standing on the same bridge I can see two entire towns waaay up in the mountains; Chorrol and Bruma. Only directly across the lake, right on the shoreline, is a huge ruined fort that is entirely hidden. You need to get most of the way across the water before it pops in. One can fly all the way up to the very top of the northern mountains, be right up against the invisible border, and still see the Imperial City. There must be certain "hero" objects that either have LOD models, or can be flagged to always load?
So, fantastic view distance, but only for like four or five things.
Cells are either loaded or not. Looks great close up, pretty darn good in the far distance. It's the blend between the two in the near distance that looks really bad. You can see in the officially released screenshots how they masked that area. When you're free to move around it's really awful.
Default .ini setting is to load five cells. Standing on the bridge between the Imperial City and the Prison the hills across the lake are unloaded. Setting it to load nine cells got a couple of cells in the lower foothills loaded, and cut FPS from 40 to 20. Still, the border is razor sharp with no blending, and cell based, not based on a radius around the player. The tiling of the ground texture is really, really, obvious. I also edited the grass distance in the .ini out to insane distance, but it still only shows up in the loaded cells, although trees go beyond that. Since SpeedTree does such a good job at LOD I would have thought some ground cover over the blobby hills would help, but no dice.
The LOD for buildings is weird. Standing on the same bridge I can see two entire towns waaay up in the mountains; Chorrol and Bruma. Only directly across the lake, right on the shoreline, is a huge ruined fort that is entirely hidden. You need to get most of the way across the water before it pops in. One can fly all the way up to the very top of the northern mountains, be right up against the invisible border, and still see the Imperial City. There must be certain "hero" objects that either have LOD models, or can be flagged to always load?
So, fantastic view distance, but only for like four or five things.
Do me a favor...can you jack the "cell load limit" to as high as you can get it before crashing it (or before having it be ineffectual)? Don't worry about framerate, I just want to see the composition.
You're absolutely right about hero objects...this was an issue for me right away.
When at the ImpCity, outside on the western bridge, you dont see anything in the hills. Make it to Aswel, literally just a hop north of the City near the road to Bruma, and look back, you damn well know you 'should have' been able to see a whole lot more. The small farm just at the entrance of the ImpCity Bridge isn't there for example, though the area is in plain view with distance nor occlusion being an issue. This is actually a major graphics issue that Bethesda dropped the ball on, if I excuse everything else. There isn't a reason on earth they couldn't have put those structures out there, what with a negligible cost in polycount to display them. One of the extremely satisfying things about GTA SA is that you literally see every structure no matter the distance. Sure they may be simple boxes with crude textures, but thats better than nothing.
The ONLY reason I can think of then is that they wanted you to come across these structures to 'discover' them rather than see everything from a distance. You're effectively standing in a bowl when you're in the City, so its clear that we could be seeing a LOT more than we do.
Anyway yea, see what you can jack ALL the way up (back up your ini
) and upload some pics man.
You're absolutely right about hero objects...this was an issue for me right away.
When at the ImpCity, outside on the western bridge, you dont see anything in the hills. Make it to Aswel, literally just a hop north of the City near the road to Bruma, and look back, you damn well know you 'should have' been able to see a whole lot more. The small farm just at the entrance of the ImpCity Bridge isn't there for example, though the area is in plain view with distance nor occlusion being an issue. This is actually a major graphics issue that Bethesda dropped the ball on, if I excuse everything else. There isn't a reason on earth they couldn't have put those structures out there, what with a negligible cost in polycount to display them. One of the extremely satisfying things about GTA SA is that you literally see every structure no matter the distance. Sure they may be simple boxes with crude textures, but thats better than nothing.
The ONLY reason I can think of then is that they wanted you to come across these structures to 'discover' them rather than see everything from a distance. You're effectively standing in a bowl when you're in the City, so its clear that we could be seeing a LOT more than we do.
Anyway yea, see what you can jack ALL the way up (back up your ini
) and upload some pics man.dongle
Scholar
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- 838
I will do that. I've got a 7800GS and 2GB system RAM. I suppose it'll go to swap eventually, and then I'll hit the 4GB WinXP limit. We'll see what happens. Unfortunately it'll be tomorrow evening before I get a chance to try this.EvoG said:Anyway yea, see what you can jack ALL the way up (back up your ini
There are tons of .ini settings, a whole section for LOD, plus separate tree and grass sections. I'm still messing with it all. It will happily accept higher than max values, but if you open the video option dialogue in-game some get overwritten.
Just walking down the bridge from the stables you can see the gatehouses pop between high-detail and low. Happens about halfway or so. Kind of jarring, but I could happily live with that over whole villages simply disappearing.
Awesome! NPCs in Oblivion even have personality disorders, and this guy thinks apparently believes he's King Kong.
Apparently there are also NPCs with multiple personality disorder or downright schizophreny, as some people have reported that voice of the NPCs suddenly change while talking.
Relien
Scholar
It's from TES lore. I think the only game featuring this race is Redguard.Vidder said:
dongle
Scholar
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- Messages
- 838
OK, here goes:
Standing on the bridge between the Imperial Prison and the City
Stock uGridsToLoad=5
Stock fGrassEndDistance=8000
Link to Large Version
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uGridsToLoad=25
fGrassEndDistance=50000
Link to Large Version
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Just outside Imperial City by the stables
Stock uGridsToLoad=5
Stock fGrassEndDistance=8000
Link to Large Version
-
uGridsToLoad=23
fGrassEndDistance=50000
Link to Large Version
-
You can see in the shot from the prison the two "hero object" cities - one at the upper right, one at the middle left - are shown even at the stock settings. Whereas the ruined fort right across the river isn't shown at 5 grids, but is at 25. You can see that one of the hills on the horizon has trees appear, but the others don't, so I think I'm not loading -everything- in view. Also notice how bad the texture tiling looks in the medium distance, I think mipmaps aren't even used for the ground textures? Also the terrain mesh that gets loaded is much higher res than the far distance one. Notice the hills to the left of the cursor in the Prison shot. I turned on wireframe view and it looks like 10 times the polys for the loaded cells.
One bug with high grids loaded is shown in the Stables shot. The water mesh is partly gone, and also the reflections are messed up. Folks are also reporting a weird "jumping" bug when a grid setting of higher than stock are used. While climbing hills on horseback you get this weird jittery up and done movement. So it sounds like tweaking this .ini setting is unusable for actual gameplay.
Beyond 25 grids at the prison and 23 grids at the stables it loads the save until the bar is almost done then CTD. Hard. Reboot needed. Takes about 10 minutes to load a savegame, vs 20 seconds at the stock 5. FPS is 30 at 5 grids, 2 or 3 at 25 grids. Word is that the actual grids loaded are the square of the .ini setting, so at uGridsToLoad=25 I actually have 625 real grids loaded.
Other than the above notes all in-games settings are maxed out for these shots except; 1600x1200, bloom lighting, and 2x AA. (My normal playing mode is less than maxed and gets me 40+FPS in those two locations)
System:
Xeon Dual 2.8 CPUs
Tyan Intel i7505 533FSB
2GB 266 DDR RAM
GeForce 7800GS @ 460 & 1.35
Detected during install as "Ultimate Quality"
Hardrive is a removable one I use solely for games. WinXP SP2, modified using nLite to strip anything not needed for offline gameplay. Only a couple of utilities installed, and none that autoload at startup. Any Win service not essential for the basic GUI is stopped from loading. As optimized as I can get this bitch. I Rebooted before each of the high grid shots.
Standing on the bridge between the Imperial Prison and the City
Stock uGridsToLoad=5
Stock fGrassEndDistance=8000
Link to Large Version
-
uGridsToLoad=25
fGrassEndDistance=50000
Link to Large Version
-
Just outside Imperial City by the stables
Stock uGridsToLoad=5
Stock fGrassEndDistance=8000
Link to Large Version
-
uGridsToLoad=23
fGrassEndDistance=50000
Link to Large Version
-
You can see in the shot from the prison the two "hero object" cities - one at the upper right, one at the middle left - are shown even at the stock settings. Whereas the ruined fort right across the river isn't shown at 5 grids, but is at 25. You can see that one of the hills on the horizon has trees appear, but the others don't, so I think I'm not loading -everything- in view. Also notice how bad the texture tiling looks in the medium distance, I think mipmaps aren't even used for the ground textures? Also the terrain mesh that gets loaded is much higher res than the far distance one. Notice the hills to the left of the cursor in the Prison shot. I turned on wireframe view and it looks like 10 times the polys for the loaded cells.
One bug with high grids loaded is shown in the Stables shot. The water mesh is partly gone, and also the reflections are messed up. Folks are also reporting a weird "jumping" bug when a grid setting of higher than stock are used. While climbing hills on horseback you get this weird jittery up and done movement. So it sounds like tweaking this .ini setting is unusable for actual gameplay.
Beyond 25 grids at the prison and 23 grids at the stables it loads the save until the bar is almost done then CTD. Hard. Reboot needed. Takes about 10 minutes to load a savegame, vs 20 seconds at the stock 5. FPS is 30 at 5 grids, 2 or 3 at 25 grids. Word is that the actual grids loaded are the square of the .ini setting, so at uGridsToLoad=25 I actually have 625 real grids loaded.
Other than the above notes all in-games settings are maxed out for these shots except; 1600x1200, bloom lighting, and 2x AA. (My normal playing mode is less than maxed and gets me 40+FPS in those two locations)
System:
Xeon Dual 2.8 CPUs
Tyan Intel i7505 533FSB
2GB 266 DDR RAM
GeForce 7800GS @ 460 & 1.35
Detected during install as "Ultimate Quality"
Hardrive is a removable one I use solely for games. WinXP SP2, modified using nLite to strip anything not needed for offline gameplay. Only a couple of utilities installed, and none that autoload at startup. Any Win service not essential for the basic GUI is stopped from loading. As optimized as I can get this bitch. I Rebooted before each of the high grid shots.
Elwro
Arcane
Thanks very much for the detailed info. I'm now convinced I shouldn't buy the game before I upgrade.
edit: Holy fuck, if that's "Ultimate Quality", then it's just pathetic.
edit: Holy fuck, if that's "Ultimate Quality", then it's just pathetic.
dongle
Scholar
- Joined
- Jan 23, 2006
- Messages
- 838
Just doin’ my bit to keep Codexers Oblivion free. :D
Yeah, it was kind of the opposite of what I was expecting. Arrived at a setting that runs pretty smoothly and is barely a touch worse looking than fully maxed. Maxed though looks really, really, bad in the medium distance. I expected it to look much better, and run much worse.
Yeah, it was kind of the opposite of what I was expecting. Arrived at a setting that runs pretty smoothly and is barely a touch worse looking than fully maxed. Maxed though looks really, really, bad in the medium distance. I expected it to look much better, and run much worse.
Hehe, ironically, the distant terrain looks better the way it was intended. The issue btw with normal maps being used on the distant terrain is that its far too low a resolution, and, it only looks good from certain glancing angles. There are parts of the world in certain lighting, where the the distant ground and moutains look spectacular, its just that care wasn't taken to ensure the mid-range terrain looked better.
Thanks bud...nice pics (though you should go up to Bruma and look back and screengrab that. :D
EDIT: Oh, and for what its worth, the area around Skingrad is absolutely gorgeous, so you should take a little trek west there when you get a chance.
Thanks bud...nice pics (though you should go up to Bruma and look back and screengrab that. :D
EDIT: Oh, and for what its worth, the area around Skingrad is absolutely gorgeous, so you should take a little trek west there when you get a chance.
dongle
Scholar
- Joined
- Jan 23, 2006
- Messages
- 838
Not sure I can get anything to load from up there. In the Prison shot you can see Bruma in the upper right, but I don’t think at the 25 grid setting it changed at all. From up there I’ll be loading the hillside I’m on, but I won’t be able to see much of it because I’ll be looking down-slope. I doubt I’ll be able to load much of the area around the Imperial City, much less anything beyond that. I’ll give it a shot tho.
kingcomrade
Kingcomrade
No that was Fallout. Ha, I'd totally forgotten about it.
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