@PatrickBalthazar So I'm going out on a limb here and going to ask a pretty abstract question, but since 40k is so full of absolutely gorgeous art and I'm always looking for ways to tie the art back into the game, I was wondering if there would be a way to render things a bit differently when they're out of your sight range? I know that EC is planning on not rendering players that can't interact with you, so this seems doubly important to ask now when it's still early on in development. Is it possible to have a rendering effect that smears and smudges things to the point of being almost unrecognizable when they are also far enough out of sight it doesn't impact playing? Here's a couple of visual examples of what I'm talking about: So in front we have our character and the ground he stands on in absolute clarity, behind him are his brother allies who are obviously being acted on by lighting effects and other battlefield conditions. They are not out of focus, but the environment is obviously decreasing the clarity. Behind him stands the ruins of some giant building. It's far enough away that he can't shoot it, and nobody on it can shoot him. In essence, it's just there for ambiance until he get's closer to it. In this instance, I know that the general practice is to have objects that would take up CPU be shifted out of focus or even left unrendered so that the game can run more smoothly. Obviously I'm all for it, but I'm asking if there would be a way to make it more artistic rather than having a mountain in the distance be some sort of drab brown blob and then suddenly shift into immediate focus even though it's 1,000 m away, and it's just there to serve as a point of realism to the scene you're creating. I mean, using the example above, the building looks skeletal, almost transparent and ghostly - like massive bones jetting up from the earth. I think it's a perfect example of how to render things at a distance using art as a screen that sets the tone of grim dark. If it's still foggy, here's another, much more extreme example: So immediately we see the guy, fully rendered. Directly behind him, the building is fairly well rendered. Behind that, less so, it appears smokey. Behind that even less so, continuing to smudge and distort until the viewer can only tell it's some sort of building. Last example: The entire scene is a battle, but in the distance there are buildings being blown to smithereens. Up closer, everything is clearly personal, but as your eyes get farther and farther away, there's less and less detail, which is obviously the same as any other game. What's different however, is that things are also getting lighter as you move away from the battle. Everything is a shade of orange, red, and brown. Buildings appear smokey and irritated, like the image is suffering. What's more is that these buildings are clearly massive, in a limbo between being rendered and not rendered, which is exactly how you get the optical illusion of gigantic-ness this game needs and is still lacking. Those buildings are so large that there could possibly be dozens more battles as large and intense as the one you see before you, but would never know unless you crossed the field of battle to get close enough with your weapon to shoot. Who cares if you can't even see the top, let alone get there? I have seen so many images of how we are lead to believe the massiveness of 40k on images as small as a postage stamp, I feel as though this is a major element I have yet to see in the streams: though I will admit, the stream on Dec 19th showed a great deal of promise, but I am still curious, can this be done? Will it have any positive impact on the game's performance?
Well - to be fair, I think this is actually more a Game Art and Game Design decision than a technical one - but in general all of this is possible, for massive buildings that clearly should be shown from far away applying certain post rendering effects to "smear" them or "make them artist-y" in any way is for sure something that can be done. But best to ask our art director Ghislain or @DAG for an answer!
Painterly fading to make the game look more like a work of art than a clean crisp high definition panoramic film would be nice, something to give it a stylistic edge while giving it more realism as when a human looks at an object they don't see everything surrounding it in 100% clarity, all is focused on one point and the rest fades till focused on.
*Still waiting on a developer team to replace player/vehicle models that are super far away with 2d sprites. People won't notice if they're 3d or not.
oh we have done this for static objects back a while (at different project) - the thing is that the gain for this is pretty low, if certain things are only a few pixels on the screen then a LOD with very little textures and polygons don't effect rendering much. While having the engine do some extra stuff on the 2d side of things and having lighting and other things correctly applied starts creating some extra headaches. Modern graphics cards don't need much of this technology anymore - the gain is little, if any!
So are you saying this negligible impact on performance is for his suggestion, mine, or both? I think another way of describing it is an artful Fog of War effect that distorts far away objects so they don't have to be rendered - in theory improving performance by having less things for the computer to think about.
what I am saying is that replacing 3d models with 2d sprites is not helping much with nowadays video cards. It's rare that the polygon count is the problem for slow rendering. Besides getting shadows and lighting show correctly on a 2d plane is always a pain, just think about a clompex structure etc. What you wanted is having a post-rendering "once the image of a 3d world is rendered into a 2d screen buffer" to apply some effects - that is called post processing and like blur and similar things it can be applied very easy and the depth buffer used to determine how much of that distortions should be used. So what I am saying, technically I don't see why it shouldn't work - it's a clear art direction question!
But this process, although an art direction question, has little effect on performance, both good or bad? Like this wont really impact the performance of the game, so we can't really use it to help in a battle of 2,000+ players?
