l33tworks, on 12 May 2013 - 09:37 PM, said:
Great, So its going to be foggy at a mere few hundred metres just like every other map except frozen city night.
Games should only have a small number of foggy weather maps, not all but one.
Can someone explain to me what is up with MWO devs wanting the majority of maps to be heavily foggy?
...
Sure, easy enough.
Real world weaponry can hit things from huge distances. The Abrams tank can put rounds on target at 2500 meters. Not like *plink* but a fully effective enemy-ceases-to-be hit. Actual artillery can shoot even farther, often 15+ km. Imagine slogging the entire width of Alpine only to get blown away by cannons that had that anticipated your movement and had the spot dialed in, with absolutely nothing you can do about it short of trying to do the same to them first. Sounds even worse than 8v8 all-poptart battles.
On top of this, the devs would have to make dozens of kilometers worth of terrain, setpieces, and so forth. They'd have to place orders of magnitude more trees and boulders, test orders of magnitude more collisions, and spend months longer doing each map than they already do. This isn't really practical without some sort of procedural system, which is even harder than handmaking stuff (believe it or not) if you want the content to be actually
fun.
For these reasons and others games almost universally "compress" things, using squished scaling, carefully designed terrain, and haze to give the illusion of much larger and more open areas than there actually are. For example, Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind was about 7 square miles. Oblivion was significantly more. Yet morrowind felt larger because the fog distance and cluttered terrain kept the player from being constantly reminded how close everything is together, while Oblivion's world was kind of a bowl where you could see the major landmarks (especially white gold tower) from basically anywhere.
Compare this to real life where you can look at a hill, say to yourself "I'm gonna walk over there and see what I can see," and then SURPRISE, ****, it's a clear day and that hill is two ******* miles away.
Xtrekker, on 15 May 2013 - 07:51 AM, said:
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No, they are not. In fact objects are replaced with 2d sprites as you go farther out. I suspect this is part of the seemingly unfixable zoom module woes, i.e. telling the engine to render objects that are beyond rendering range. PGI probably doesn't have anything to do with this and is waiting on CryTek to add support.
See
draw distance.
Uh, pretty sure only things like trees are replaced with billboards (sprites), unless you really think they rendered animated sprites for all mechs.
Even if they're using billboards for sprites (they're not) that would have nothing to do with zoom module being pixelated. That's actually because the zoom module is literally just showing you an enlarged section of the rendered frame. Rendering picture-in-picture involves literally rendering the game a second time at a smaller resolution. There's fewer pixels to render, but there's still the same number of shader passes, the same number of objects, the same number of textures, and so on. They may well be hitting some kind of internal limit. Yeah it's possible they could do something like use lower quality mipmap levels for the non-zoomed part of the screen and use gaussian blur to cover it, but it's also possible that wouldn't help and they've painted themselves into a corner.
Oh my god look at this wall of text. Look at what a terrible nerd I am.
Edited by Blue Footed Booby, 16 May 2013 - 05:38 PM.
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