Ah, thanks for the clarification, rainwarrior and Nightshade.

Also:

 

Real time lighting and shadows? I assume you guys are using deffered rendering techniques?

 

[...]

 

It allows for alot of lights to be placed and effect a scene at a minimal cost. To not use it tends to be more expensive, infact to my knowledge it is.

 

Why would you make that assumption? The vast majority of games do not use deferred rendering. Whether or not it's better or even just faster depends on a whole lot of factors (graphics hardware, platform architecture, memory, content, content pipelines, artistic goals, et cetera). The few developers that are using it will tell you that it's faster because it's faster for them. This does not mean that it is better in general. It is better sometimes.

 

I wouldn't disagree with that. I was speaking very much off the cuff, a kind of generalised perspective, I made the assumption based on lack of information -> I'm not privvy to the "graphics hardware, platform architecture, memory, content, content pipelines, artistic goals, et cetera", requirements of the Onyx engine or Aliens. Deffered rendering doesn't trump other methods, it depends on the technical requirements of the project itself, without any information all I can do is make generalised assumptions, and try and answer any questions I can.

 

In truth all it does is make me think you guys have worked extremely hard on building a rendering system which does what you need it to do, and does it well, I don't know if it's fast or slow, but rendering geometry multiple times can be a bitch - different platforms respond differently though, I'm just trying to peak through the keyhole and see a better picture .

 

Here's another assumption, you're probably dealing with indoor area's.

Edited January 22, 200917 yr by Nightshape

Another assumption: The approach is more akin to Crysis, than Stalker.

Another assumption: Aliens RPG will save the world from terrorism.

Another assumption: Aliens RPG will save the world from terrorism.

 

Bin Laden is shaking in his desert cave right now, fearing the moment the RPG will be released.

 

Wow. This is not in good taste at all...

Edited January 23, 200917 yr by Blackeye13

Agreed. Destructible environments look nice, but don't add anything important to the game.

Bad Company disagrees.

Jagged Alliance 2 agrees to disagree too. Can't get at the sniper shooting from the window? Remove window, wall around window and sniper all in one go with a bit of C4.

 

You can do that? Seriously?

 

I think Silent Storm is probably the apotheosis of destructible environments in strategy games.

P.S. Does not understand what Mr Josh means by "We're using alot of shaders", no reason I can bring to mind at the moment why that is at odds with deffered shading. BUT he is a designer, so why would he know? It's a curious angle.

 

The reason to use or not use deferred rendering is dependent on what you want to do. It's an attempt to optimize the shading calculation by restructuring how you do it.

 

In "traditional" forward rendering, the shader does the entire calculation beginning to end. You can swap one shader for another and get a completely different lighting equation, i.e. a very different looking material.

 

In deferred rendering, you divide up the work of your shaders. Various pieces of a lighting equation get rendered into a set of full-screen buffers, and later get composited all together with lighting information. Because each piece of the lighting equation is now done in separate screen-wide phases, your lighting equation is hard-wired into your rendering pipeline, and you have a lot less flexibility with it. All of your materials now have to use the same set of components for their calculation. The other drawback is translucent layers. Anything that is blended on top has to be drawn separately from the deferred rendering process, because layering has to be done after lighting. This means that in addition to a deferred pipeline, you need to support forward rendering for your translucent stuff (smoke, fire, etc.). You can also use a forward render on top of the deferred renderer to get fancier materials, but the more screen space you cover with forward rendering, the more you're cutting off any advantage that your deferred renderer might have over a forward renderer (it's generally worse to do half-and-half than to do all forward).

 

The advantage to deferred rendering is that each stage of rendering is a much simpler calculation. Performance is a question of whether several simple calculations are faster than a single complex calculation, and this depends heavily on what king of stuff you're feeding to your renderer.

 

 

A gross oversimplification is:

 

Deferred rendering gets you more lights.

 

Forward rendering gets you more varied materials.

 

Are you guys using spherical harmonics coupled with a light mesh, is that generated offline or online?

Agreed. Destructible environments look nice, but don't add anything important to the game.

Bad Company disagrees.

Jagged Alliance 2 agrees to disagree too. Can't get at the sniper shooting from the window? Remove window, wall around window and sniper all in one go with a bit of C4.

 

You can do that? Seriously?

 

I think Silent Storm is probably the apotheosis of destructible environments in strategy games.

 

I think you just introduced me to cool new computer game. Kudos to you.

Agreed. Destructible environments look nice, but don't add anything important to the game.

Bad Company disagrees.

Jagged Alliance 2 agrees to disagree too. Can't get at the sniper shooting from the window? Remove window, wall around window and sniper all in one go with a bit of C4.

 

You can do that? Seriously?

 

I think Silent Storm is probably the apotheosis of destructible environments in strategy games.

 

I think you just introduced me to cool new computer game. Kudos to you.

Well, to be honest, few people go for a mix of fast runner, stealthy and explosives skills, so in a pinch, you can just carpet bomb the area with mortars and LAW's... Gives you a nice line of sight to anything that was hidden behind walls and fences previously (that is in JA2, I never did get around to try Silent Storm).

 

A handful of mustard gas grenades can do the trick too of course, no hiding from those

Agreed. Destructible environments look nice, but don't add anything important to the game.

Bad Company disagrees.

Jagged Alliance 2 agrees to disagree too. Can't get at the sniper shooting from the window? Remove window, wall around window and sniper all in one go with a bit of C4.

 

You can do that? Seriously?

 

I think Silent Storm is probably the apotheosis of destructible environments in strategy games.

 

I think you just introduced me to cool new computer game. Kudos to you.

Well, to be honest, few people go for a mix of fast runner, stealthy and explosives skills, so in a pinch, you can just carpet bomb the area with mortars and LAW's... Gives you a nice line of sight to anything that was hidden behind walls and fences previously (that is in JA2, I never did get around to try Silent Storm).

 

A handful of mustard gas grenades can do the trick too of course, no hiding from those

 

Oh man, there's clearly more to JA2 than I thought. I sort of got bored at one point because it seemed like it would just be like playing Fallout without the story and quests. So I stopped before the mines in the first major town, then my HD crashed and I lost the saves. Definitely on my list again, though.

About SS(not the gruppe, the game), I had a situation in the first game where the enemy held a strong position in the upstairs of an apartment building. I couldn't go up the stairs(and since you can't save during combat) in fear of facing the Fallout Tactics trick by six or seven Fallschrimj