84 replies to this topic

[sokitumi]

Krivvan, on 08 November 2012 - 06:31 AM, said:

I think you misunderstood the problem slightly. The pixellating isn't something they do to render it easier. The pixellating is because all they're doing is taking the graphics data that's already rendered, copying it and blowing it up. The actual environment is still only rendered once. To have a clear image you need to go all the way back to the source and render it twice, essentially take all the resources it took to do the graphics and double it every time you zoom.

The issue is having two pictures in the first place.

Your second solution is good though.

Comassion, on 08 November 2012 - 07:39 AM, said:

No.

Different software contains different features and is optimized for different things. The Source engine, for example, can totally handle multiple render perspectives - which is why Half Life 2 had TV screens simply rendering a different part of the map, or why Portal works so well in that engine.

The Cry engine likely focuses more on lighting / atmospheric / texture effects and all the stuff that makes this game look so damn good. I don't find it at all hard to believe that all the time spent optimizing the engine to handle these effects is done with the idea in mind that it will only ever have to render one instance of a view perspective. The notion that the engine would have to do twice as much work to render twice the perspectives is actually the more intuitive one. If an engine isn't specifically built with the idea that it can handle multiple perspectives already in mind, it's going to be very difficult (or nigh impossible) for the programmers to add in that capability after the fact. Making the choice to be able to render those additional scenes comes at a cost - you can't optimize all your lighting / atmospheric / texture stuff as much because you have to have enough power available to you to render the additional perspectives if you need to.

Too bad I'm looking at Crysis2 right now at this moment (which also uses crytek3)... on high settings... with a beat old GTX250... and it handles PIP just fine, with 0 hit on FPS, and post effects on the 2 layers to boot.... and an overall infinitely higher FPS than MWO gets.

random web screenshot of it below.. but in game exp is completely smooth.

Edited by sokitumi, 08 November 2012 - 11:54 AM.

[Hauser]

Zo San, on 08 November 2012 - 03:10 AM, said:

The simplest solution to the advanced zoom crytek engine issue would be to skip the whole PIP thing and just let people zoom in a third step using the normal zoom key.

Nonono, that gets you horrible tunnel vision. Its great if you're aiming down range, but the PIP is great when you want to move about. The peripheral vision gives you way more information about your surroundings.

[Jack Corvus]

sokitumi, on 08 November 2012 - 10:33 AM, said:

random web screenshot of it below

That screenshot you posted doesn't show two seperate renders or picture in picture. It shows a single zoom level and the areas outside of the zoom are simply blurry. You can see the road stripe on the left continue at the exact same scale and perspective. It's not PIP. It's one zoom level with blur and an overlay around everything that isn't in the middle.

[sokitumi]

Jack Corvus, on 08 November 2012 - 11:44 AM, said:

That screenshot you posted doesn't show two seperate renders or picture in picture. It shows a single zoom level and the areas outside of the zoom are simply blurry. You can see the road stripe on the left continue at the exact same scale and perspective. It's not PIP. It's one zoom level with blur and an overlay around everything that isn't in the middle.

You're correct. I was wrong. I'll eat my words now

[Comassion]

Jack Corvus, on 08 November 2012 - 11:44 AM, said:

That screenshot you posted doesn't show two seperate renders or picture in picture. It shows a single zoom level and the areas outside of the zoom are simply blurry. You can see the road stripe on the left continue at the exact same scale and perspective. It's not PIP. It's one zoom level with blur and an overlay around everything that isn't in the middle.

Beat me to it, well said. That screenshot is great for showing it's a single layer rendering the full scene at the same distance, thanks to the road line on the left and the sidewalk panels on the right. The overlay for effect is just well crafted for creating the illusion that your 'scope' is the main thing that's happening by hiding and blurring the surrounding area so you're not paying much attention to it. No worries - it's an easy thing to miss.

Edited by Comassion, 08 November 2012 - 11:59 AM.

[ReD3y3]

Just remove the PIP and give and extra level of zoom.

PIP is just a gimmik anyway.
Alot of fixes are so easy.

Seems like they want to make **** complicated AF.

Edited by ReD3y3, 08 November 2012 - 12:10 PM.

[AC]

Why not just get rid of the PIP and do a straight window zoom if Cryengine can't do dual renders. I would take a 10x zoom full window over a 4x pip any day.

[Doomie77]

Why not just revert zoom to how it was before?

[ReD3y3]

Doomie77, on 08 November 2012 - 12:13 PM, said:

Why not just revert zoom to how it was before?

Zoom is the same.

This is for the PIP mudule that you unlock for like 1mil cbills.

[Thermal]

An extra level of zoom would be cool. As would getting a 2x zoom window PIP of that?

What would be better is if we could have the ability to map keys for zoom in and out. And for those of us with fancy controllers, linear zoom mapped to a joystick axis.

[Xenroth]

sokitumi, on 08 November 2012 - 10:33 AM, said:

Too bad I'm looking at Crysis2 right now at this moment (which also uses crytek3)... on high settings... with a beat old GTX250... and it handles PIP just fine, with 0 hit on FPS, and post effects on the 2 layers to boot.... and an overall infinitely higher FPS than MWO gets.

random web screenshot of it below.. but in game exp is completely smooth.

Yes it is smooth because the whole screen has the same zoom factor as you have it now with your normal zoom ... this is not a partial window zoom

[cmopatrick]

i personally would prefer they just add another full screen zoom to 4x (or better yet, 5x)... of course, we can not actually lock onto anything outside of 800m anyway, but it would be nice to have for PITAs and snipers.

[PerfectTommy]

What COULD be done is rendering the WHOLE scene at 4x resolution, then chopping the middle bit out and blowing that up to fill the PIP box.

As opposed to the current rendering the scene at 1x resolution then blowing up the middle to fill the PIP box.

Dunno what that would do to the framerates.



-PT

[Doomie77]

ReD3y3, on 08 November 2012 - 12:15 PM, said:

Zoom is the same.

This is for the PIP mudule that you unlock for like 1mil cbills.

Actually zoom is not the same. They added pip zoom when they nerfed regular zoom. the third zoom level without the module is a joke.

[xRaeder]

JewBoy, on 08 November 2012 - 02:30 AM, said:

To be fair, most rifles have effective ranges further than most MWO weapons. My Kel-Tec RFB with a 18" barrel can do 600 meters easy. Palma competitors go out to 1000 yards with .308 and iron sights. Yet machine guns are limited to 200 meters. 20mm Vulcan has an effective range of 5000 meters, yet AC/2s (20mm) max out at 2000 meters. Dont get me started on missles, Sidewinders dont get a lock untill 1000 meters, yet LRMs are limited to 1000 meters. Also most American ground to ground missles weigh over 2000 pounds, whereas a LRM weighs 11 pounds. When you factor in the airframe, guideance and propulsion systems, the war head cant be bigger than a pound or two. We are essentially shooting glorified Estes model rockets at each other. Hell, even in the 1950s we have nuclear warheads on artillery, so why can't I get a nuke round for a AC/20? It seems that 1000 years in the future, weapons have taken a giant step back.

I'm sure this has been said before... but lore wise... the Inner Sphere basically nuked themselves back to the 20th century in terms of tech. They have some advanced stuff from the 3000s, but targeting computers are really rare. Think of a kind of steampunk future... kinda... with bits and pieces of different tech from completely different eras. It was only in 3050 that the Tech level started to advance.

But... anyway... normal combat ranges throughout the 20th century and even in the 21st is around 600-700 meters. Think of Mechs are big infantryman if you like.

[Sarevos]

xRaeder, on 09 November 2012 - 10:51 PM, said:

I'm sure this has been said before... but lore wise... the Inner Sphere basically nuked themselves back to the 20th century in terms of tech. They have some advanced stuff from the 3000s, but targeting computers are really rare. Think of a kind of steampunk future... kinda... with bits and pieces of different tech from completely different eras. It was only in 3050 that the Tech level started to advance.

But... anyway... normal combat ranges throughout the 20th century and even in the 21st is around 600-700 meters. Think of Mechs are big infantryman if you like.

no point in arguing over "space magic" and "mystical macguffins"... it helps make the experience "fun" lol

[Foksuh]

JewBoy, on 08 November 2012 - 02:30 AM, said:

To be fair, most rifles have effective ranges further than most MWO weapons. My Kel-Tec RFB with a 18" barrel can do 600 meters easy. Palma competitors go out to 1000 yards with .308 and iron sights. Yet machine guns are limited to 200 meters. 20mm Vulcan has an effective range of 5000 meters, yet AC/2s (20mm) max out at 2000 meters. Dont get me started on missles, Sidewinders dont get a lock untill 1000 meters, yet LRMs are limited to 1000 meters. Also most American ground to ground missles weigh over 2000 pounds, whereas a LRM weighs 11 pounds. When you factor in the airframe, guideance and propulsion systems, the war head cant be bigger than a pound or two. We are essentially shooting glorified Estes model rockets at each other. Hell, even in the 1950s we have nuclear warheads on artillery, so why can't I get a nuke round for a AC/20? It seems that 1000 years in the future, weapons have taken a giant step back.

Warhammer 40k, anyone? Fancy technology in the far future.

[Tarman]

Foksuh, on 09 November 2012 - 11:52 PM, said:

Warhammer 40k, anyone? Fancy technology in the far future.

At least mech monkeys don't need to pray over the lostech before they try to figure out how it works. But that whole "We used to be smarter but we smarted ourselves to death with it" angle is similar. I like dysfunctional future settings; it's not like there's some guarantee that whatever comes after this is automatically a linear improvement.

[Minos Murdoc]

Ok i'm probably going to get slammed for this but....

1. I kind of like the fact its grainy and horrible.
2. I seem to remember reading a comment from a dev to say its not a 4x optical but digital zoom (which we know has the same effect).

Ok forget real world technology and that real weapons and zooms have a better range (this is a game after all). In BT technology development came to pretty much a stand still about 300 years ago, and most of the mech tech is lost technology.
The other thing is if they make it crystal clear like the 1x,2x,3x zoom its going to be SOOOO much easier for ER Lasers/PPC, Gauss, AC's to snipe cockpit shots. Making it grainy like this gives you additional zoom but doesn't make it 100 easier. Personally i've not had a problem with it.

awaiting flaming responses telling me i'm wrong, its crap etc...

[PoLaR]

Youngbull1980, on 10 November 2012 - 01:06 AM, said:

1. I kind of like the fact its grainy and horrible.
2. I seem to remember reading a comment from a dev to say its not a 4x optical but digital zoom (which we know has the same effect).

You know what??

I totally agree with you. It's balanced In the game right now so that snipers aren't insanely OP. I'm sure It will be fixed at some point because most people are complaining about It (You know who you are! ). It's not even THAT bad, Its blurry, but when I'm standing In my Mech on a hill, firing off dueling AC/2's with my sweet Advanced Zoom moduel.. I'm having fun.