Reico Posted March 18, 2012 Share Posted March 18, 2012 That is why you fail. MMOs have to be able to display at the very least 20 times as many character models as a FPS. Yup This is what can happen. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Game-Hermit Posted March 18, 2012 Share Posted March 18, 2012 So, I'm just finishing up Mass Effect 3. No comment on the story, no need for spoilers, and not the place to like or dislike the story. But, one thing that would be amazing, and one thing that I'm frankly quite confused about, is how you can go balls to the wall on ME3 graphics (I don't care if they're the best you've ever seen, they're still quite spectacular), and then go "retro" in SWTOR. When was the last time you did a raid in ME3? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shama Posted March 18, 2012 Share Posted March 18, 2012 To anyone saying that the graphics in an MMO cannot be the same as an FPS, I'm afraid I cannot see why. Rendering is client side. Not server side. Which means that scalability is relevant only in terms of the power of your rig. Odds are, it simply feeds the client a string of gear information, and leaves it up to the client to render it properly. If you are in an area with 100 people, and your rig cannot load 100 high quality armor textures, turn down the settings. If your rig CAN load 100 high quality textures, then it can. If you're in an area where there are 100 people using abilities with wonderful effects that make your gfx card sweat, and it can't handle it, turn down the special effects. If it can, then great. The genre, and the ad-hoc nature of an MMO are 100% irrelevant. Whether you're loading 100 low res textures or 100 high res textures, you've completely side-stepped any relevance behind an MMO. The textures are loaded by your computer. But to say that because it's ad-hoc and the MMO has a large degree of uncertainty, is simply saying "we were too lazy to optimize our engine". It can probably be done with a little effort. I'm sorry but you're wrong, otherwise you'd have seen it done. The reason you can't name a single MMO that has graphics comparable to the highest-end single player game you could imagine is not because every developer is lazy: it is because there are real and next-to-impossible problems involved. You do actually touch on some of those, but then seem to think because it is all client-side rendering there shouldn't be a problem. What you may not be aware of is how textures are actually loaded into a graphics card and the texture/memory budget associated with that. Single player games are very carefully crafted and optimised so that draw calls are minimised (otherwise you get a bottleneck) and one way to achieve this is to reuse textures and blast them all in one call to the graphics card. With a single player game this can be controlled in a deterministic way - the programmer will know *exactly* which textures will be involved at any one point. As such they can pack them in a way that means textures being used at the same phase of the game are sent to the card as one call. With an MMO you never know which textures are going to be called on at the same time, because every player could be wearing any of hundreds of different items. If each of these were high-res, and sent to the graphics card in individual draw calls you'd notice slow-downs just from graphics 'lag'. Oh hang on, that's what we get already Even beautiful single player games have to work within these limits which is why, even if there are a lot of enemies on screen, you'll notice there is a huge amount of texture sharing between them. Show me a screen shot from a game with a hundred enemies, made up of individual customised parts (helmet, body, boots, gloves, bracers), and every one of them using different textures and I'll change my opinion (and also realise that there is a genius programmer out there who has solved the holy grail of graphics programming). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaboro Posted March 18, 2012 Share Posted March 18, 2012 Define graphics. Are you referring to the art style, the shader, geometry, or what? Because they specifically opted for a slightly cartoony art style with simple geometries and exagerated features and colors. This. Their choice of a graphic style is one of the few things i really like in this game, and they explained their choice time and again. Maybe they should make a full motion video mmo for the people who cant get enough realism Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drunkenfarmer Posted March 18, 2012 Share Posted March 18, 2012 I'm sorry but you're wrong, otherwise you'd have seen it done. The reason you can't name a single MMO that has graphics comparable to the highest-end single player game you could imagine is not because every developer is lazy: it is because there are real and next-to-impossible problems involved. The closest we've gotten was AoC, and that wasn't really stable until it was outpaced by hardware. It took MONTHS for the client to stabilize. Beautiful game, though Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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