ZymeAddict on 8/11/2007 at 09:47
Quote Posted by DaveW
My hand is firmly down. I thought the shadow system was awesome, and in some cases really drew me into the environments.
One thing about the large levels is that they actually looked horrible due to the lack of lightmapping combined with low texture memory. For example, (
http://uk.media.pc.ign.com/media/015/015304/img_1661714.html) this.
Figures :rolleyes:
I always thought the shadows looked extremely fakey anyway. If that was really one of the main reasons the game levels ended up being so small then I think they struck a pretty crappy bargain.
As long as the level size and gameplay hadn't been adversely effected I personally wouldn't have cared if the game had DX 1 level graphics.
catbarf on 8/11/2007 at 11:18
Quote Posted by Pyrian
Half-Life 2 is
still using "fakey" shadows.
And can thus run on my friend's 1.5GHz comp with 512MB of RAM. And it really isn't worth the performance hit to have prettier shadows.
DaveW on 8/11/2007 at 15:59
Quote Posted by demagogue
Well, to each their own. Just to be clear, though, I didn't mean the shadows by themselves, of course it's better with them than without them ... but
at the cost of the engine and its foibles it stuck them with is more what I meant, in relative terms if you had to choose. Although from your second paragraph I suppose you got that.
Not that the look would have been so much better -- although IMO I feel freer in a game with some wide open spaces; the low texture memory, etc, doesn't bother me as much -- but I think the gameplay would also have benefited from having maps more like those early screenshots, fewer loadzones, etc ... if that's really what was at stake. I'm admittedly speculating, though. A lot of irksome things about DXIW were design decisions that wouldn't change, anyway. If I actually played the two versions I might have a different opinion.
Well, the thing that confuses me is that a lot of the maps in T: DS are far larger than those in IW. The Cradle, for instance. While it's split in two you have that large, open-ish space outside as well as quite a bit of the interior. I don't understand why IW needed to have quite that many loadzones, like between the North/South medina.
Not being part of the dev team it's difficult to determine
what caused the small maps. Plenty of games on the Xbox have them, including games based on UE2 (Championship, for example) - so it might have been the shadow system. Personally, as fake as they look, I still like them. Some of the environments just wouldn't look as cool without them, I don't think.
BlackCapedManX on 11/11/2007 at 20:16
Quote Posted by Pyrian
Half-Life 2 is
still using "fakey" shadows.
Not true. EP2 is (finally) implimenting real time dynamic shadows. On the other hand it's not like you'd ever know, because HL2 has always managed to look awesome. Though here you have a totally different gameplay experience, where HL2 tries to get you going in a certain direction from a certain place, the DXIW/TDS games need to have everything look good from every possible angle.
As to why the devs never noticed low performance, I highly doubt they developed the game on anything even that resembled home computer systems. I recall reading an article some time ago about a group (I believe of university students) who managed to get a real time playable version of Quake 3 with
ray-tracing, but it took something like ten linked Pentium4s. The developers probably had incredibly powerful systems to build the game and only later realized that they wildly over shot realistic expectations. Couple this with seemingly unoptimized coding and it's probably like they had shit good and running, and then ran into a brick wall and had to make hasty solutions to get around it.
I'd be somewhat fascinated to see what DXIW would be if they'd waited another year or so before making it, and simply made use of engines that already functioned, instead of always trying to build their own. On the other hand, real quick, I have to imagine a good deal of the trouble actually comes in from the TDS side of things. I don't know a whole lot about graphics processing and the like, but I feel like it's two different things between creating dynamic lighting that the player
sees and dynamic lighting that the game itself is aware of. I recall hiding in a guards own shadow in TDS, which to me says that their engine is doing more than simply creating these shadows, and is presumably why something like CryENGINE, which can obviously create MASSIVE levels and still have dynamic lighting, wouldn't work for DXIW/TDS. I could be way off mark here, though.
Pyrian on 12/11/2007 at 07:04
Would you like me to post screenshots? HL Ep2 shadows are not consistent with lighting. It's not very noticeable for the most part, but there are a few places where it looks ridiculous. The silo loading screen is particularly egregious.
Developers, BTW, tend to have about the same computers everyone else does. There's a tendency to think "things will get optimized before we're done". Sometimes, that's even true.
DaveW on 12/11/2007 at 12:07
When they were demonstrating Crysis they certainly weren't using average hardware. Developers usually aim for future hardware given that it will take a while for the game to be released. With HL2 that wouldn't be the case because the technology has remained fairly consistent, with ocasional new features being added in - but none that stress the system too much such as realtime AO maps in Crysis would.
DX-455 on 13/11/2007 at 18:32
I personally think the performance in Thief : DS is MUCH less an issue than in DX:IW. As an FPS, it is much, much more dependent on framerate stability, and consequently, I would sacrifice the shadows in DX2 (for performance sake) but not in TDS.
Papy on 14/11/2007 at 01:01
Quote Posted by DX-455
I personally think the performance in Thief : DS is MUCH less an issue than in DX:IW. As an FPS, it is much, much more dependent on framerate stability, and consequently, I would sacrifice the shadows in DX2 (for performance sake) but not in TDS.
Invisible War was not necessarily a shooter. Someone could play it like a shooter, but other people could play it as a slower sneaker.
Personally, I would not sacrifice shadows, I would rather make the game use shadows as a gameplay element rather than a cosmetic element. I'd say the one thing that sold the game to me was seeing the shadow of a guard, who was searching for me while I was hidden behind a crate. My thought was it would be great to decide on the path to follow, or to choose a good spot to observe things around, based on the lighting. I thought about being able to turn on a light so I could spot shadows of a passing guard as a warning, or on the opposite, to turn off another one so the guard wouldn't see mine. Unfortunately the game didn't really use shadows as a gameplay element, but it doesn't mean shadows are a bad thing.
