Spring RTS Engine

I think the current reflections don't look so good, I think that with bump mapping and ray tracing they would look good, I think this should be in the game, the graphics would then be good.

raytracing? well, depends on the tracing map resolution I suppose, but still, damn expensive on the cpu/fpu resources. Bump mapping might be more doable? I don't know, but just remember this isn't a FPS game, despite the already stunning graphics. Also, the reflections will look much better once there are more detailed units made.

Ray tracing would really not be possible with the size of the worlds and the amount of units in Spring. But bump-mapping might be possible, but would still slow down the game alot. It would be good if these things were considered, but I seiriously doubt they would be implemented.

No video games have raytracing, and none will have it for some time to come, it's just too slow.

well, ray tracing is not a realistic/rational thing now, but OTA have lived so long and even the fastest computers to day having trouble to handle it, what im sayin is that for to be played in the future, this might be the one thing that will make it special and long-lasting game, obviously this is not a subject relevant for this point of the development, but near the version 1.5 or so this should be considered as the future thing, to make spring special, by then I believe it will be quite good by itself, and this would probably be the next step, after bump mapping of corse :)

A game does not run on graphics alone. Spring is already special cause of how it works and how it plays. Not to mention its free. It is easy to mod, easy to run, constantly in development yet still playable. I think these things alone make it a good game. Anyway, look at some of the really old school games. They had blocky, pixelated, 2d graphics, yet people still play them for the GAMEPLAY. Not the cutting edge, hyper-realistic, 1 fps graphics.

I have currently only a few complaints in Spring, and those are the weapons handlers, they don't aim right, esspecially not on aircraft, unless the weapons are ballistic or missiles, both wouldn't look right like that, and both wont work right if they are something else I.E. unguided LOS weapons.

Also the fact I can't run shadows in fullscreen mode is a nuisiance. (SP)

FireCrack wrote:No video games have raytracing, and none will have it for some time to come, it's just too slow.

Well, there are a few test engines out... It's going to be possible within the near future, video cards roughly twice as powerfull as our current one's are should be able to handle fairly advanced raytraced scenes pretty effortlessly.

BUt 1000's of units each shooting 10000's of bullets with 100000 particle effects from the explosions...

Plus, as you said, this will need a very advanced card. Not likely to be bought by the majority of the population. It will be hard to implement, and I think the SY's have better things to do, even though it is a good idea.

Maelstrom wrote:BUt 1000's of units each shooting 10000's of bullets with 100000 particle effects from the explosions...

Plus, as you said, this will need a very advanced card. Not likely to be bought by the majority of the population. It will be hard to implement, and I think the SY's have better things to do, even though it is a good idea.

If we're talking about spring then I'll be satisfied when dynamic lighting is possible. Raytracing will be possible to use in FPS soon, RTS with their much larger scale will probably take forever to catch up, considering a game like TAS running with 8 players will lag up a system that can handle doom3 pretty effortlessly...

What was that rendering system they used in Republic? IIRC The rendering time was only dependent on screen resolution and was independent of the detail in the scene, which would be ideal for an RTS.

Having said that I'm really not bothered about graphics myself, it's the gameplay that counts. Far too many games look whizzy but have gameplay problems.

Just my tuppence

Munch

Visually, Republic is stunning. The Totality engine Elixir have created gives an unparalleled sense of scale, with the flexibility of the engine effortlessly depicting the city you├óÔé¼Ôäóre in, as long as you├óÔé¼Ôäóve got a PC powerful enough.

http://www.videogameslife.com/reviews/review.asp?id=147

The power behind it all is the new 'Totality Engine', developed by Elixir themselves, and which can display an unlimited amount of polygons on the screen at any one time. Although Demis is quick to say that gameplay comes first when designing the game, it is clear that he is particularly proud of his graphics engine.

The most advanced graphics engine ever seen, "Totality" is capable of rendering scenes of unlimited complexity in real time every frame. In other words, there is no upper bound on the number of polygons and objects that can be used in a scene, thus allowing for buildings or characters to be made out of millions of polys if so required.

Zoom smoothly from a satellite-like image of Novistrana (2000km square) to focus on minute detail anywhere in the world (for example the threads on screws). In addition, the game will feature special effects that surpass the current state-of-the-art in development, including unlimited real time light sources, self-shadowing, and physically-based material models.

http://www.strategyplanet.com/republic/totality.shtml

Just a thought... anyone seen the new Unreal 3 engin's stuff. It's like looking at a photo. That sort of realisim. But then It also said in the more complex sceans they expect to be able to have maybe 20 or so "objects", and lets face it spring is not baout building an army of 5 its about building and army of 500. Dont compare RTS's to FPS's, Its a stupid contest.

aGorm

Let's just get shadows to work in fullscreen first before trying any other silly flash-bang-ooh-the-pretty-colors gadgets.

Well, there are a few test engines out... It's going to be possible within the near future, video cards roughly twice as powerfull as our current one's are should be able to handle fairly advanced raytraced scenes pretty effortlessly.

It's not just a question of processing power, raytracing is a completely other way to render in comparison with normal polygon rasterization.
You might see a few hacked GPU-using raytracers in the future, but video cards are basically not made for raytracing, they are made for rendering triangles.
For raytracing to be of any more value than current rendering methods, programmable shader hardware would have to support stack based code (recursive functions) and a much more general approach to memory instead of specific vertex/texture access. Since that's not going to happen for video cards anytime soon, saying they would be able to handle fairly advanced raytraced scenes is a bit farfetched.

Zaphod wrote:

Well, there are a few test engines out... It's going to be possible within the near future, video cards roughly twice as powerfull as our current one's are should be able to handle fairly advanced raytraced scenes pretty effortlessly.

It's not just a question of processing power, raytracing is a completely other way to render in comparison with normal polygon rasterization.
You might see a few hacked GPU-using raytracers in the future, but video cards are basically not made for raytracing, they are made for rendering triangles.
For raytracing to be of any more value than current rendering methods, programmable shader hardware would have to support stack based code (recursive functions) and a much more general approach to memory instead of specific vertex/texture access. Since that's not going to happen for video cards anytime soon, saying they would be able to handle fairly advanced raytraced scenes is a bit farfetched.

My 9800 pro can handle basic realtime raytraced scenes with decent frames from one of the test engines in development right now... Raytraced engines still have to use polygons, it's the shading that is being totally restructured.

Just another sugestion here. For the lasers, try making them act as light sources... It may improve the effect slightly.

The power behind it all is the new 'Totality Engine', developed by Elixir themselves, and which can display an unlimited amount of polygons on the screen at any one time. Although Demis is quick to say that gameplay comes first when designing the game, it is clear that he is particularly proud of his graphics engine.

The most advanced graphics engine ever seen, "Totality" is capable of rendering scenes of unlimited complexity in real time every frame. In other words, there is no upper bound on the number of polygons and objects that can be used in a scene, thus allowing for buildings or characters to be made out of millions of polys if so required.

Zoom smoothly from a satellite-like image of Novistrana (2000km square) to focus on minute detail anywhere in the world (for example the threads on screws). In addition, the game will feature special effects that surpass the current state-of-the-art in development, including unlimited real time light sources, self-shadowing, and physically-based material models.

That sounds familiar?! ?*quickly visits supremecommanderuniverse*

And yah, beam weapons should be brighter at the centre of the beam, and setting weapons that arent models to emit light would do wonders.

My 9800 pro can handle basic realtime raytraced scenes with decent frames from one of the test engines in development right now... Raytraced engines still have to use polygons, it's the shading that is being totally restructured.

Then apparently you don't really know what raytracing is. Anyone involved in 3D gamedev can tell you practical raytracing can't be done in hardware at the moment.
Which test engine do you mean?

My 9800 pro can handle basic realtime raytraced scenes with decent frames from one of the test engines in development right now... Raytraced engines still have to use polygons, it's the shading that is being totally restructured.

I've seen the sexy demos for 9800 - none of the good ones are raytraced. Raytracing is a brute-force approach when more elegant solutions are available. The 9800 demos show tons of sexy things I can't wait to see in games, but none of them are raytraced. If you could say which demo it was, I could tell you how it was done and why it's not raytracing.

For example: nice glares and glints from lightsources, realistic-looking halos, stark light&dark = high-dynamic-range lighting. Very cool approach, makes game light work like an eye, where the range of brightness is different from the range of observable brightness - things may be too dark to see, and if too bright then you get glare and glitzing, with whites bleeding into nighboring pixels. Looks much more realistic. Is not raytracing.

Stencil shadows: TA already does that without raytracing.

Depth-of-focus: blurs objects nearer or further than the visual target, looks more realistic - more like a camera. Very wasteful operation in that the verious depths of the scene are rendered seperately and blurred seperately. Again, not raytracing.

Motion blur: a very important technique in fast-action games. Motion blur creates awesome realism, because while the eye sees at only 60fps, it blurs in between instead of shuttering like a computer rendering. By rendering at higher FPS and blurring the intermittent steps in you can achieve much nicer graphics.

Any of those sound like your "ray tracing"?

http://www.realstorm.com/

Basic realtime raytracing benchmark... Most of todays reasonable video cards will hold 10-15 FPS on low settings, obviously high setting fry FPS even on SLI 6800 systems.

I'm not saying that I don't support more elegant solutions for some of the problems that raytracing solves via brute force, but the fact remains that real time raytracing solutions are being explored, and have been shown to be able to run decently enough that RTRT software might acctually make a mainstream approach in the next few years.