MetalCraze said:
And yet GTA4 can't do that. As well as 99.9999999% of all games.
And yet you still fail to realise that GTA 4 and 99.9999999% of all games don't need it. Let me break it down for you...
Scope of ARMA: large scale conflict on an island. Up to a thousand units relevant.
Scope of GTA: sandbox type game in a city. Millions of inhabitants and hundreds of thousands of vehicles. At most, a few dozen units relevant in any mission, at different phases (i.e. low intensity conflict).
ARMA can keep track of a thousand units because: 1000 is doable, and it actually makes sense to keep track of units if you're supposed to be simulating a large scale battle. Nothing special about that though... loads of RTS games do that.
Having said that, there isn't even any reason for other types of games, such as GTA, to keep track of thousands of units (let alone millions). First of all, GTA is set in a world where there's supposed to be millions of units (vehicles & pedestrians). How are you going to keep track of all of them? Even your ARMA engine can't do that (a thousand is not "millions"). The way around that, which EVERY similar game uses, is randomisation.
Secondly, why on earth would GTA even need to keep track of that many units? I can't recall many games which ever had more than a hundred units involved in any single mission at any single time (i.e. not in different phases of a mission, but ALL at once). Not counting games like Total War, ARMA, RTSs, etc... whose sole purpose is to simulate those kind of large scale battles.
MetalCraze said:
ArmA2's AI is actually AI. GTA4 has bots playing "moving" animation along preset waypoints put on streets. It doesn't have every single AI using ray-tracing on the area to scan for enemies. Even when they are off-screen.
This is another blatantly false remark. The pedestrians don't have any kind of "preset waypoints." Upon spawning, they are given a random direction to walk towards, while following basic rules (e.g. stick to sidewalks, use pedestrian crossings, etc). Sometimes they also interact with other pedestrians (or even cars) on their way. In other words, they have the standard behaviour expected from NPCs.
What the fuck do you expect their "AI" to do? They're not your enemies, but if you do try to attack them, then they'll react by fleeing or defending themselves. There's nothing else their AI needs to do. In fact, if you use a cheat to set all NPCs hostile, then you'll very quickly see that they DO scan for you, and that they do fight off screen too (for those units which are being tracked, i.e. the ones relevant to a mission, for example).
MetalCraze said:
Well yep. It's 4 times more than what GTA4 can show and not a glitch. And what RV can show on the screen is p. much unlimited.
Wrong again. Two words: population density. GTA
can display plenty of vehicles on screen at one time, but it doesn't because it's set in a city environment. It's ok for ARMA to do a battle with a hundred vehicles because you're in the middle of nowhere and there's a land distance separation between the next fight (when and if there is one).
If GTA displayed a hundred vehicle on one street, then it'd have to do that for the street right next to it, and the one after that, and the one after that, and the one after that... city density quickly adds up. GTA could easily display a hundred vehicles at once, and you can even do it yourself by spawning them, but it usually doesn't because it would have to apply that everywhere around... which would be a clusterfuck.
MetalCraze said:
Be a bro, admit that GTA4's engine has a shitty optimisation while shows next to nothing special apart from Euphoria.
Classic skyway... attempting to change the issue and hoping no one will notice. Let me give you a reminder: this all started when I said MP3 will most likely have optimised graphics on PC, just like GTA 4 has. You, and the other dumbass who has now disappeared, derped "NO WAI! GTA 4 was totally unoptimised!"... completely ignoring the fact that I wasn't talking about whether the optimisation of the actual port to PC was good (hint: I said it wasn't). Here's another hint... I was only talking about the graphics quality, and that
was optimised for PC; that's a fact.
Then you went on about how GTA 4 looks like a 5 year old game (massive lols), trying to use a shitty screenshot as your argument. Then when I posted some good looking shots with everything maxed, you went into full derp mode and claimed you couldn't see any different. Even if we ignore the fact that your multiplayer screenshot is, in its very essence, technically inferior to the single player shots I posted (as graphics quality is lower in MP), you'd still have to be blind to not see the difference even if that WAS a single player shot.
MetalCraze said:
The question was never about ArmA2 engine being special, it was about "show me an engine that can have a bigger scope and not lag the shit out of PC" if you've missed that bit.
Why do you keep trying to change the issue? Here's the point you're missing when we're talking about "scope": DENSITY. Population. Density. ARMA is in an island, GTA is in a city. What part of that don't you get? The actual point was that, if you tried to build a GTA 4 on ARMA's engine, it would be a fucking joke. ARMA's engine is not built to handle millions of units in a city. It's built to handle hundreds, upwards to a thousand or so, units, in a mostly bland (island) environment. That's a completely different scope and ambition to what GTA is trying to do. GTA also has no ambition to keep track of thousands of units in its city, because for one that would be a drop in the ocean in the total population, and secondly, there is no need for it because GTA isn't about large scale battles...
Haba said:
Like every other CONSOLE game. Keeping track of thousands of entities and simulating them is no problem as long as you don't have to render them simultaneously.
Since when is GTA about "thousands" of entities? It's a city, so it's more like millions. Besides, why do you want to keep track of them? Most of the time you're zipping around the city, so the only ones that need to be kept track of are those that are relevant to the mission at hand (which is, at most, a few dozen).
Haba said:
GTA4 was ugly, poorly optimized game that (after updates) looked slightly better on PC while performing extremely poorly. Just like every other Rockstar game.
To repeat myself again, I never said it was well optimised (I even stated the contrary a couple of times). My very first point was that Rockstar optimised the graphics quality for PCs, and it will probably do the same for MP3. I didn't say GTA 4 ran perfectly like it should. I mean, I
was able to run it fine because I have powerful machines, but it's also true that it shouldn't have taxed them that much (for what it is). However, there's no arguing that GTA 4 looks much better on PC than on consoles. It might not look AMAZING or like anything special, but only a graphics whore wouldn't be satisfied. The graphics are perfectly serviceable, it's just the performance which isn't to standard (especially upon release).
