Iron Horse, on 30 November 2011 - 12:02 AM, said:
This video is unimpressive. Hopefully it is just CryEngine 1. A fire in MWO needs to add significantly to urban combat (heat, smoke, debris).
In the announce trailer there's some pretty heavy-duty smoke blocking the Atlas as he makes his entrance. This is more what I would expect. Exploding trees, crumbling structures, flaming pedestrians? I hope PGI gets Havoc support. there's some interesting gameplay that could result from independent objects having physics.
Yeah, that particular video isn't as impressive as it could be. It looks to me to be a simple demo, showing off spreading fire. These features have been ported to Crysis with some degree of success, and look better there, I think.
The part that worries me is that there isn't a whole lot of smoke coming off of this grass fire. You think there'd be more - a lot more. They might have foregone this due to processing power concerns, which are a very real issue with a F2P game.
One potential solution is to make many different levels of smoke quality - old-style bitmap smoke(a la Modern Warfare), and modern volumetric particle type smoke, more akin to World of Tanks(i think). And, of course, should there be a WoT vision system employed, the occlusion of objects could be handled server-side, so the presence or absence of smoke via hacking or settings wouldn't make a difference.