Goblin Squad Member
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Really much would like to see a full view/draw distance graphic slider or more than 2 or 3 picks for the view distance. Also cool would be a option to control the depth of the fogwall for different tastes. I was just looking at the huge draw distance of the blog videos and thinking about my poor computer :)
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Goblin Squad Member
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The reason I am advocating this is that many new mmos look like graphic glitches when graphic settings a set to minimum. It is clear that those settings only exist to make the game run on minimum specs and no thought/effort has been made to try to make the game look decent with minimum settings. Studios use heavy shaders and renderers that are in-build in game-engines and you can either have that stuff on or off and the difference is huge.
Using view distance, textures, tri-amount, lights, shadows, clutter amount, anti-aliazing, full screen effects, and simple small shaders is what I am advocating to make the game look good. Using these to build a game that climbs from the root to the treetop is probably much more time/money consuming than using engine pre-build stuff. I keeping my thumbs up to see if PFO delivers in this aspect.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Given I am a game Dev graduate and shed some light on this.
The problem is the Dev Triangle of (Features, Time, Money) you can only pick two (and for GW cash is fixed).
Some of the graphical things you want can not be grey, it's black or white as it is a boolean switch.
Though view distance can be a slider most others can not.
Unity already has some processing power savers in it, like LOD (Level of Detail), and Occlusion.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The things that most bother me are objects just popping up out of nowhere when you get close enough to them and stuff that looks different when you look far compared to when you are closer to them and maybe a horizon that looks like it's pulled out of someones...
I'm just a hobbyist dabbling with graphic settings. I'm hoping GW hasn't build any major heavy one-click shader package, but giving the user some more freedom with setting the graphics...
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Goblin Squad Member
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Draw Distance is a pretty technical hurdle in an MMO, so it isn't likely to stay huge. The server bandwidth usage increases exponentially with each visible player in an area. Unless GW plans to limit this by making Players pop on the screen at a shorter distance draw distance is likely to decrease to prevent bandwidth issues. In a pvp game player draw distance is also a pretty big balance concern.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The things that most bother me are objects just popping up out of nowhere when you get close enough to them and stuff that looks different when you look far compared to when you are closer to them and maybe a horizon that looks like it's pulled out of someones...
I'm just a hobbyist dabbling with graphic settings. I'm hoping GW hasn't build any major heavy one-click shader package, but giving the user some more freedom with setting the graphics...
The popping is likely from the view frustum, in that when an entity enters the frustum is gets rendered, this is a view-distance thing.
If objects look different at different distances, it's there so you can run the game on lower spec machines. It's MIP mapping, and LOD though there could be another.
The problem with too many different graphic settings is that they do impact game play.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Mostly the popping out happens in games where there is no overall view distance setting, but one for objects only. In such games you see the bleak landscape all the way into the horizon. For example a barren hill where there are no trees, but when you get there it's a forest. Games that have overall view distance setting that fades everything gradually into a gray fog, even the landscape, don't have this problem.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The most jarring thing to me in all the games I've played - and even WoW has this problem, so I'm not sure it can be easily solved - is when I'm standing still but turning the camera gradually reveals more of some structure. Most often, it happens that when I'm looking directly at the object, I see less of it than I do when I turn the camera and see it off to the side.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I that does not make sense to me, if it is in the view frustum it should be visibly the same in any part of the frustum.
Okay, it may not make sense to you but I assure you I have seen it as well. If something is fact yet not understood it means either we have not explained well enough or you don't understand what we are trying to describe. It doesn't mean the fact isn't the case.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I know what your talking about, it's just HOW the heck in 3D rendering does that happen.
unless the rendering engine is designed to give more detail to the outer edges of the camera.
Or the graphics card gives more priority to the outer edges
(I recall setting my Voodoo 3 to render the outer edges better)
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Goblin Squad Member
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I that does not make sense to me, if it is in the view frustum it should be visibly the same in any part of the frustum.
The best way I can explain it is also the most jarring example. Imagine a mountain northwest of me as I'm facing north. From a great distance, it's not rendered at all and I can see the moon and stars behind it. As I get close enough, it begins to be rendered, but only the southeast face of the mountain nearest me. Then, as I turn my camera, for some reason (probably having to do with rounding errors from the tricks used to avoid doing factors) more of the mountains south and east faces are rendered, but if I then turn my camera back to true north, those faces disappear again.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I that does not make sense to me, if it is in the view frustum it should be visibly the same in any part of the frustum.
That is only true if the far edge of the view frustum is defined as an arc of radius Y. If it is a box with far edge center at distance Y, then swinging the middle slightly aside will include items that were formerly beyond it's volume.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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I that does not make sense to me, if it is in the view frustum it should be visibly the same in any part of the frustum.
That's because the clip plane is perpendicular to the viewer, rather than a sphere centered on him.
Making the clip plane sphereical would add a lot more math to figure out if a point was inside or outside of it, and would still lead to a different error case; where the center of a wall in front of you was rendered, but the edges were not.
EDIT: Figuring out which side of a surface a point is on, given the equation of the surface and coordinates of the point (in the same coordinate system) is as easy as evaluating the equation of the plane once.
If the surface is simply y=100 (in coordinates relative to the camera), then it's a simple comparison to tell if a point is inside it or not.
If the surface is x^3+y^3+z^3=1,000,000 (the sphere tangent to the plane at y=100), then figuring out if a point should be rendered needs six multiplication, two addition, and a comparison.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If the surface is x^3+y^3+z^3=1,000,000 (the sphere tangent to the plane at y=100), then figuring out if a point should be rendered needs six multiplication, two addition, and a comparison.
Those should be squared (not cubed) for a sphere, so the number of multiplications is reduced. The plane is tangent to the sphere, not the other way around. tangent spaces
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Goblin Squad Member
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So, does anyone know is it hard to build a fogwall that gradually fades the 3d objects out of view? Does such an effect have to be coded separately to interact with every other graphical effect that is in use?
In OpenGL (1.0->2.5) it's easy, but what it does is add fog to the render.
The farther something is from the camera, the more the fog hides it.|
Goblin Squad Member
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So, does anyone know is it hard to build a fogwall that gradually fades the 3d objects out of view? Does such an effect have to be coded separately to interact with every other graphical effect that is in use?In OpenGL (1.0->2.5) it's easy, but what it does is add fog to the render.
The farther something is from the camera, the more the fog hides it.
I wonder why it's not used more often by mmo developers. At least in a way that, if it could be programmed to start from some distance from the camera and in places where there's actual fog nearer.
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Goblin Squad Member
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OpenGL version 1 to 2.8 were fixed function pipeline, and did load the CPU some, but when OpenGL 3.0 hit the scene things changed, you had a programmable pipline, but they did not port over the fixed pipline functions that were in the earlier version as shader functions. So you have to write your own fog shader.
Fog in any graphics engine does slow things down.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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If the surface is x^3+y^3+z^3=1,000,000 (the sphere tangent to the plane at y=100), then figuring out if a point should be rendered needs six multiplication, two addition, and a comparison.Those should be squared (not cubed) for a sphere, so the number of multiplications is reduced. The plane is tangent to the sphere, not the other way around. tangent spaces
The math error is correct- it should only be squared.
The plane and the sphere are tangent to each other in the colloquial sense, which is the sense I used. The second correction is a communication failure.
The point of having fog is to -hide- the graphical artifacts caused by occlusion, by making everything fade in from white.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The point of having fog is to -hide- the graphical artifacts caused by occlusion, by making everything fade in from white.
Maybe it's the same thing, but I would use the fog for making graphical artifacts appear from it instead of thin(invisible) air, which doesn't exist as a graphical artifact(to my knowledge). To me this would enhance the actual feeling of an existing virtual world beyond the limit of the character vision.
When things pop out of nowhere, not so much...