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st2988

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Everything posted by st2988

  1. Obsidian Entertainment: 1) PoE's frame rates are playable on an Intel HD 4000 Core i5 Processor, but only with anti-aliasing turned off. The game still looks pretty damn good with anti-aliasing turned off. Given that you are marketing this game to Mac users, most of whom own laptops without dedicated GPUs, you should probably include the option to turn off anti-aliasing to improve performance. This will lead to a much warmer reception from a lot of Macbook owners or PCs with integrated GPUs (i.e. most laptops and desktops / the semi-casual gamer market). 2) PoE needs to have a gamma and brightness slider in the graphics settings. If someone is playing on a screen that is calibrated poorly for your game, the game is too dark to play comfortably, which will lead to poor customer reviews. This oversight forces the gamer to have sufficient knowledge of their GPU driver tools to adjust the brightness and gamma manually. Both of these options are fairly standard features and should be included as soon after release as possible if they are not already included in the Day 1 patch or the pre-release build. If they have been included, please disregard this message.
  2. In retrospect, I think a better option is to only prerender the tree trunk, and have the entirety of the foliage rotate in the wind like only a few branches currently do. The way to do this might be to apply a more subtle rotational effect to the branch images than what's currently being used, and then on top of each branch throw a foliage layer that looks like it's rippling in the wind by applying a sort of a rippling pond distortion effect over the foliage image. That way there would be no playing of 2d animations on the map, and you wouldn't have the odd mash up of rustling leaves with still leaves that's currently in the game. I'd especially like to hear your thoughts on this idea. With that said, here are some more comments about the 2D animation idea: I don't know why more than 10 seconds would he necessary, as it stands it's a static tree with some slowly rotating images of branches. I think this looks less realistic than a tree rustling for 10 seconds and then playing the video in reverse for a total of 20 seconds of relatively fluid wind motion. I see your point about overlapping shadows and trees. Do you think it would be possible to record 10-20 seconds of all dynamic assets on a map as one super high resolution video, then split that video into smaller segments that only play when they are within camera to keep system requirements relatively low? The dynamic video would be a layer above the static map. Maybe that dynamic layer could have it's own simplified static depth map so that characters are shown either above or below parts of the dynamic layer depending on their y-coordinate. Right exactly, padding and dropping frames. However, I think deltaTime can only give you a reading of how fast the previous frame took to load rather than how long the current frame is taking to load, and that number could fluctuate much more than an average, which might lead to less fluid animation. I don't know, I guess it is something which would have to be tested out both ways to find what looks better.
  3. As far as this goes: If you animate individual trees, you would only need one animation per tree type. So if there are 60 trees reused throughout the game, wouldn't 't you only need 60 of these pre-rendered animations, in perhaps 5 to 10 second loops? That doesn't seem that space intensive to me, you'd have 600-1200 frames rendered per tree if it's rendered at 120 FPS. The real question, to me, is whether it is possible to dynamically sync frame skipping through that animation to the FPS at which the game is running. Why not use something like Unity's "deltaTime" to find the average framerate, then skip the animation forward by deltaTime frames. Do you think that would be possible and look fluid enough?
  4. Could you prerender it at 120 FPS and then automatically skip say, 3/4 of the frames if the person's PC is only capable of running the game at 30 FPS, or skip 4/5 if it's running at 24 FPS, etc?
  5. First of all, I think Pillars is already spectacular looking, and I'm sorry if this topic has been discussed already, but I didn't find it in a cursory search. I noticed in Update #49 that windblown dynamic foliage assests are static images layered with rotating foliage underneath. The result is that a large portion of the tree is entirely static while some leaves bend in the wind behind the fixed tree or bush. In my opinion, this creates an artificial and unnatural appearance that distracts from the rest of the great work being done. My question is, why not just prerender the entire tree rippling in the wind, and then place that tree animation above the prerendered background in the engine? It seems that this would take less steps than combining an animation layer and a static layer to create a single tree, and it would look much more realistic. Let me know what you think.
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