How can they solve the massive texture problems?

[Luridis]

No tiles please. They don't stand the test of time.

 

Bah! Yes they do... look at how old these tiles are.

[Nightshape]

It's absolutely pointless to use a tile-based system for this kind of game. Tiles themselves aren't bad but you can't build something of the same kind of quality as what you see when the entire world is hand drawn like in the old IE games.

 

Between Apple fanboy DPI man, and strange Tileset endorsement man I'm thinking about stopping posting in here.

[Hassat Hunter]

Please don't.

 

While I personally wouldn't mind downloading 50 Gig, I can see it being an issue (although maybe not anymore in 2014/2015). However resorting to 'solutions' by making a fragmented system of pre-fab and infinitely re-used content, no thanks. I don't want a second DA2, I want the beatiful handcrafted areas of BG2 and PS:T.

[Frisk]

I don't even understand why people are bringing up tiles - that's not even an option being considered. Anyhow, we know the backgrounds will be big and the game will take up several disks, but so what? It's not an unsolvable problem. I suggest people find something else to worry about.

[Infinitron]

We wanted a PC-exclusive game, didn't we? That means finally getting a game that stretches our machines to their limits.

 

I say bring it on.

[matthewfarmery]

2014 is only 2 years, in the UK, super fast broadband is still not fully reached everyone, BT have been dragging their heals upgrading places from the old copper wire to super fast optic, even then getting on a ISP that allows anything above 50gig is still not that common, and tis is still the key issue, is bandwidth, even in 2 years this miight not really change much, and Im sure a lot of countries are in a similar situation as it just costs too much to dig up large chunks to upgrade to fibre optic, even the town Im in (UK) probably wont get fibre optic for a long time, we aren't close to a major city, (well we sort of are, but there is a pretty big distance from it) I am fine able to download up to 50gig but even then not everyone will have that much, I know its a mess, but its the truth, while Jay Wilson in his recent interview concerning D3 and the reasons to making that online only, but he is deluded, as he mentions everyone should have fast broadband by now, as he can walk into a hotel and have access to Wifi, sure if that Hotel is in a major city in the states, it will, but not everyone has that Luxury

 

I agree that we want a PC only game, Im still a bit concerned on how large the download will be, that is all

Edited October 25, 2012 by matthewfarmery

[JOG]

@Frisk: We are just discussing the "logistic" problems Josh mentioned in the last update, nothing to worry about.

 

He mentioned both, the programming-logstics to bring the vast area bitmaps to the screen and add animations and stuff, as well as the delivery-logistics to bring the game to our pcs. Several DVDs will be inconvenient and expensive for Obsidian, A blue ray will be inconvenient and expensive for those of us that still have a DVD drive, and huge digital downloads may cause their own problems.

Edited October 25, 2012 by JOG

[mstark]

Apple fanboy DPI man

Might make you happy to know that I wouldn't go near Apple software for the life of me, or pay exorbitant prices for mediocre hardware. That said, do you recognize the issue with scaling assets to be readable at native resolutions on both high/low DPI monitors? That entire thread is a mess because of the issue being fairly hard to grasp, and my (uneditable) opening post making a mess of explaining it. Apple just happened to pioneer delivering these kinds of products to a mainstream market, so, for most people, their design solutions & marketing terms are easiest to relate to in order to understand the underlying issue.

 

That said, I'd love to see this game be 4-5x the install size of the average game, just like BG was back in the day, if that's what it takes to deliver the quality. I remember BG taking up half my HDD, dad wasn't happy.

[Sensuki]

Me too. Bring on a 50GB game (or more), love dem HQ textures.

[rjshae]

That wouldn't hit the visual target. They'd be selling themselves short entirely.

 

I think that really depends on the variety of tiles they decided to use. Not enough and you end up seeing the duplication everywhere. Too much and you might as well draw the whole picture as one unit. There must be a happy median in there somewhere.

Then use non-periodic tiling!

[Nightshape]

*sigh* I understand what

Apple fanboy DPI man

Might make you happy to know that I wouldn't go near Apple software for the life of me, or pay exorbitant prices for mediocre hardware. That said, do you recognize the issue with scaling assets to be readable at native resolutions on both high/low DPI monitors? That entire thread is a mess because of the issue being fairly hard to grasp, and my (uneditable) opening post making a mess of explaining it. Apple just happened to pioneer delivering these kinds of products to a mainstream market, so, for most people, their design solutions & marketing terms are easiest to relate to in order to understand the underlying issue.

 

That said, I'd love to see this game be 4-5x the install size of the average game, just like BG was back in the day, if that's what it takes to deliver the quality. I remember BG taking up half my HDD, dad wasn't happy.

 

I understand what you're saying, and I don't want to get into it... But quite simply - it's more to do with how browsers render images than how a game renders and image.

 

In regards to DPI support, I can't perceive that as being a difficult thing to implement - it's more to do with our final matrix on the quad when we render it... But anyways, point being is that DX11 based GPU's have a 16k x 16k limit on texture sizes, and that's also huge. What you suggest is infact not even feasible for the technology... Unless of coarse there is some pre-processing stage where the image is sliced up, and the viewable area's data is all we see.

 

Theoretically DPI support shouldn't be hard, but mostly its a pointless waste of resources. The pixel you see is always the same data, but a texel is how large the representation of that pixel in on screen. Texel to pixel ratio should be 1:1 in something like PE.

 

That as simple as I can describe it right now.

Edited October 25, 2012 by Nightshape

[AwesomeOcelot]

Fallout 1 & 2, Diablo 1 & 2, Arcanum, countless other games look great with tile sets. Obsidian Entertainment don't have the artists to create 3D models of every background in the game, render them, and then hand paint over them. They can still do all that for tiles, that will look of the same quality, it just means there will be repetition. You're living in a fantasy world if you think that they can create a whole world in under 2 years by hand, how long did it take them to create part of one map? I think the solution is to have varying sizes of tiles that can be equivalent to a Infinity Engine background, a hall, a room, a part of a room. They've already created so many headaches for themselves with dynamic lighting by being 2.5D.

[Hormalakh]

I was going to suggest tiles as well, but I really think that it will be tough to sell the BG/BG2/IWD imagery if they did tiles. Those visuals were quite amazing. There could, of course be certain locations that used hand-drawn tiles instead of full drawn maps. Locations where geometric shapes made sense. Cities, mazes, certain locations of dungeons. But I wouldn't want them to go totally tile-set based. I want to see organic maps too!

[Infinitron]

You're living in a fantasy world if you think that they can create a whole world in under 2 years by hand

 

Well, that's too bad, because it won't be an Infinity Engine spiritual successor otherwise, so they'll just have to try anyway.

 

The game won't be tile-based. Although it might have repeated assets (trees, etc)

Edited October 25, 2012 by Infinitron

[Pipyui]

Does anyone really think something like this could be done using tiles?

 

[Luridis]

It's absolutely pointless to use a tile-based system for this kind of game. Tiles themselves aren't bad but you can't build something of the same kind of quality as what you see when the entire world is hand drawn like in the old IE games.

 

Between Apple fanboy DPI man, and strange Tileset endorsement man I'm thinking about stopping posting in here.

 

It is just an idea, and I pretty much expect Obsidian is going to find their own way of handling it. That said, if you want to run away and hide, then do so. No one wrote, "this is the way it has to be and you must leave because you didn't like my idea!"

 

This is a forum for discussion of Project Eternity, and if you don't like discussion then go somewhere else. I will remind you the description of the forum reads, "Discuss your ideas about the Unity engine and what might work best to creative an immersive gameplay experience! Spoilers are allowed in this forum, but please be courteous to others and warn other readers ahead of time."

 

BTW: Yes, I am strange and I freely admit that. However, you pointing that out, with a profile photo like the one you have is a bit like the pot calling the kettle black, don't you think?

[Luridis]

Does anyone really think something like this could be done using tiles?

 

That is made of tiles, they're called pixels.

[AwesomeOcelot]

Not to mention that we're all expecting there to be environmental effects and day/night maps.

 

You're living in a fantasy world if you think that they can create a whole world in under 2 years by hand

 

Well, that's too bad, because it won't be an Infinity Engine spiritual successor otherwise, so they'll just have to try anyway.

 

The game won't be tile-based. Although it might have repeated assets (trees, etc)

 

You're wrong, it doesn't have to have complete prerendered backgrounds to be an Infinity Engine spiritual successor, other people could say the same about not using D&D, and yet they're not going to build the mechanics around D&D then hope that they can get the rights some how. If the scale of the world is as they say, it's completely impractical to design in 3D, render, then hand paint every square inch of the world, it would take them 5 years and a much larger team, it's just not going to happen.

 

 

Does anyone really think something like this could be done using tiles?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, you wouldn't necessarily want to do the statues and the waterfalls with tiles, but making the bridges and general scenery tiles would allow for their reuse in other areas, that is not only the best way but it's the only way. It also allows them to reuse all the assets not shown in that background, the pathing map, the lighting map, etc...

Edited October 25, 2012 by AwesomeOcelot

[Frisk]

Ugh, this discussion is getting silly.

 

THERE ARE NOT GOING TO BE TILES. IT IS AS SIMPLE AS THAT!

 

Now, this does not mean that there are not going to be reusable resources. For example, Obsidian might decide to implement the static parts of the scenery as a bitmap (or possibly as a multi-plane bitmap to handle occlusions, players walking behind walls and such), but use "placeables" for anything that moves, like water or trees (leaves).

 

But we are not going to have tiles like NWN had.

Edited October 25, 2012 by Frisk

[Pipyui]

Yes, you wouldn't necessarily want to do the statues and the waterfalls with tiles, but making the bridges and general scenery tiles would allow for their reuse in other areas, that is not only the best way but it's the only way. It also allows them to reuse all the assets not shown in that background, the pathing map, the lighting map, etc...

 

Forgive my ignorance in such matters, but I'm not too sure that reusing objects is the same as using tiles. It sounds like you're descibing prerendered sceneries with a few objects rendered onto them, which would do very little to reduce their aggregate size.

 

What I had imagined was texture tiling such as was used in NWN. This would reduce memory impact from game maps, but would also be much less pretty without a GPU powerhouse of a computer to run on.

 

Edit: Sorry Frisk, you're right, this topic is really losing traction.

Edited October 25, 2012 by Pipyui

[AwesomeOcelot]

Yes, you wouldn't necessarily want to do the statues and the waterfalls with tiles, but making the bridges and general scenery tiles would allow for their reuse in other areas, that is not only the best way but it's the only way. It also allows them to reuse all the assets not shown in that background, the pathing map, the lighting map, etc...

 

Forgive my ignorance in such matters, but I'm not too sure that reusing objects is the same as using tiles. It sounds like you're descibing prerendered sceneries with a few objects rendered onto them, which would do very little to reduce their aggregate size.

 

What I had imagined was texture tiling such as was used in NWN. This would reduce memory impact from game maps, but would also be much less pretty without a GPU powerhouse of a computer to run on.

 

Edit: Sorry Frisk, you're right, this topic is really losing traction.

 

No, I was referring to tiles, but more in line with Fallout's style. Rendering 2D objects on top of scenes without tiles would reduce the file size requirements quite a bit, but it wouldn't reduce the work load involved in creating, pathing, and lighting scenes like tiles would.

[Infinitron]

It's not THAT hard to render these maps, Ocelot. Let me remind you, the Icewind Dale games had the best maps and they were low budget as heck, with short development cycles.

Edited October 25, 2012 by Infinitron

[Chrząszczyrzewoszyczanin]

By 2014 25GB games will be standard. All of 8th gen consoles will have blu-ray drives or blu-ray drives in all but name and because of this AAA titles will grow several times in size and even if PE will take 10 times more than BG2(2.3GB) it won't be out of place. Even today 20GB+ game isn't anything shocking, just look at DA:O: 2009 game that takes 20GB on HDD.

[AwesomeOcelot]

It's not THAT hard to render these maps, Ocelot. Let me remind you, the Icewind Dale games had the best maps and they were low budget as heck, with short development cycles.

 

This isn't Icewind Dale, considering it's 3.5 years younger and three times the file size, I think Fallout stands up to it well, but a fairer comparison, a tile based expansion that came out the same month, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction looked amazing when I bought it near launch. We don't know how long it took to make just one screen in the style they've decided, and that's without objects, pathing, lighting etc... but I'm going to go with days. How many screens, 1440p, make up the world? Likely thousands. It's not as if you can't have full maps fully pre-rendered in a tile based system, you can have the rare and unique large tile for special places, but I just don't think they have the time or team that can use the same techniques as Icewind Dale to create an entire world in the way they have done that screen shot.

[Hassat Hunter]

IceWind Dale 2 is more modern than Fallout, Fallout 2 or Diablo II.

So point doesn't stand.

 

I kinda expect some re-use of smaller areas (think housing in Baldur's Gate 1), however areas should have their unique feel, as do cities, as do dungeons. You just don't get that with tiles.

So, no thanks. Not sure why anyone would want that when we can have fully handcrafted areas instead. And then you rather want tiling?