The new graphics engine

[Ssnake]

I can only say that you should wait until we have the work finalized to a point where we can make clear statements about the overall performance of a new engine. Before that point it's all idle speculation.

[[]_--__[]KITT]

I can only say that you should wait until we have the work finalized to a point where we can make clear statements about the overall performance of a new engine. Before that point it's all idle speculation.

Yeah fair point I was just saying I had been burned by OpenGL game like Combat Mission Shock force in which performance was quite abysmal. It was playable but it should have not been that resource intensive imo.

I suspected NVIDIA was going to kill OpenGL and intentionally giving bad OpenGL support for their video cards.

I will not speculate on SB Pro second engine performance and wasn't trying to just made my relief open that it wasn't going to be openGL.

Anyway is there even ETA for this second engine release. I know it's no where to even close to starting perhaps but I'm curious to get a feel how long we need to wait for this second engine. It doesn't have to be accurate nor professional estimate(personal opinion is fine and will not be taken as official announcement). A very rough estimate will do like which year.

Thank you. Imo SB Pro needed this engine upgrade if it wanted to remain appealing to the gamers.

[dejawolf]

_--__[]KITT;223873']Yeah fair point I was just saying I had been burned by OpenGL game like Combat Mission Shock force in which performance was quite abysmal. It was playable but it should have not been that resource intensive imo.

I suspected NVIDIA was going to kill OpenGL and intentionally giving bad OpenGL support for their video cards.

I will not speculate on SB Pro second engine performance and wasn't trying to just made my relief open that it wasn't going to be openGL.

Anyway is there even ETA for this second engine release. I know it's no where to even close to starting perhaps but I'm curious to get a feel how long we need to wait for this second engine. It doesn't have to be accurate nor professional estimate(personal opinion is fine and will not be taken as official announcement). A very rough estimate will do like which year.

Thank you. Imo SB Pro needed this engine upgrade if it wanted to remain appealing to the gamers.

all ID games are openGL, like Doom3, Rage and that quake wars thing. so with some decent work behind it, openGL games will run and look every bit as good as a directX game.

[[]_--__[]KITT]

all ID games are openGL, like Doom3, Rage and that quake wars thing. so with some decent work behind it, openGL games will run and look every bit as good as a directX game.

Ah I see I hope that's true. I had a horrible experience with Combat Mission Shock Force hence being cautious.

Doom 3 had an efficient engine then. Didn't know it was on OpenGL.

btw Merry Christmas to you Dejawolf and to everyone else.

[Ssnake]

_--__[]KITT;223873']Anyway is there even ETA for this second engine release.

Well, if it is ready by then, it'll be part of the next upgrade in June (2013), about six months from now.

[Skybird03]

_--__[]KITT;223909']Ah I see I hope that's true. I had a horrible experience with Combat Mission Shock Force hence being cautious.

May I ask what kind of experience? I just got into CMSF+addons two weeks ago and am curious, since I have no issues of any kind with it. It runs fine for me.

[Gibsonm]

And I must say the Mac version of CMSF 1.31 (that by definition was OpenGL) was fine for me too over two different generations of MacBook Pros (so that's 6 years or so) with NVIDIA cards.

[[]_--__[]KITT]

May I ask what kind of experience? I just got into CMSF+addons two weeks ago and am curious, since I have no issues of any kind with it. It runs fine for me.

Just 2 weeks ago? It was when CMSF was just came out until about a year or two after release so patches were installed too in the end.

I had my previous PC back then(or 2 previous PC) while it wasn't top of the line it was a decent mid range gaming PC which should have handled CMSF well considering it handled other supposedly more demanding games better but the fps would crawl to 20s!:redface: It was pretty horrible considering it's not much of a graphics to look at. Changing setting didn't help much either which is one indication of either a bad inefficient coding or bad driver support.

I do not know how the game developed over the years now and with newer more powerful hardware.

CMSF is a pretty old game if it is run with today's hardware it will not be a fair comparison. It stood out because I believe it was the only OpenGL game i played that year while all others had very decent performance.

[Razor]

Maybe it wasn't the graphics you had problems with? The Combat Mission games are running a huge amount of calculations in the background, and modells things that less realistic titles don't. Things like armor penetration, LOS for every individual unit, accurate ballistics and so on. This makes it much more resource intensive than what just looking at the graphics would suggest.

[[]_--__[]KITT]

Maybe it wasn't the graphics you had problems with? The Combat Mission games are running a huge amount of calculations in the background, and modells things that less realistic titles don't. Things like armor penetration, LOS for every individual unit, accurate ballistics and so on. This makes it much more resource intensive than what just looking at the graphics would suggest.

That's a possibility though then my entire PC including the processor wasn't old at all. Perhaps it was the CPU issue. Perhaps.

[Skybird03]

_--__[]KITT;223916'] the fps would crawl to 20s!:redface: It was pretty horrible considering it's not much of a graphics to look at. Changing setting didn't help much either which is one indication of either a bad inefficient coding or bad driver support.

fps in the 20s? What is so horrific about that then? Frames in the 20s I consider to be fully playable without limitations, except maybe in some hype-fast action games or combat flightsims where angles of viewing directions maybe change extremely fast. In civil flightsims, strategy games and SBP, fps=25 or so I have no problem with.

But I read that it had technical issues in the very beginning, but by now seems to be patched out. After 3 additional addons, one would have been surprised if known serious deficits would have remained.

I bought a package priced at reducud costs, for the main title plus Marines, British Forces, and NATO forces (Germans, Dutch, Canadians).

[Tjay]

I believe that 30fps is the rate below which most people can detect the individual frames - which makes the game rather jerky. I certainly find it so. But others claim to be able to detect 'frame flicker' at anything below 60fps!

[dejawolf]

I believe that 30fps is the rate below which most people can detect the individual frames - which makes the game rather jerky. I certainly find it so. But others claim to be able to detect 'frame flicker' at anything below 60fps!

it's an age thing.

[[]_--__[]KITT]

fps in the 20s? What is so horrific about that then? Frames in the 20s I consider to be fully playable without limitations, except maybe in some hype-fast action games or combat flightsims where angles of viewing directions maybe change extremely fast. In civil flightsims, strategy games and SBP, fps=25 or so I have no problem with.

But I read that it had technical issues in the very beginning, but by now seems to be patched out. After 3 additional addons, one would have been surprised if known serious deficits would have remained.

I bought a package priced at reducud costs, for the main title plus Marines, British Forces, and NATO forces (Germans, Dutch, Canadians).

Heheheh the issue is more psychological if you are used to seeing your games playing at over 30 fps. Sometimes CMSF would dip below 20 fps too.

I don't like thinking that my rig is struggling when I'm playing my game. It's a good game though I enjoyed it very much especially with the mods(the mods site has since closed down too bad and I lost my CMSF mods collection and what they had in place in battlefront site wasn't even close)

I'm not obsessed with fps but I still think games should have fps over 30 or 30 at the minimum.

And I just remembered I bought a new PC(my previous one) but the performance didn't change much.

[Gibsonm]

Well all I can say is I've run it quite happily from early Alpha to the latst 1.32 version over a period of about seven years on two diiferent Mac laptops (each replaced every 3 years or so) and OpenGL was the only option available to me:

And I must say the Mac version of CMSF 1.31 (that by definition was OpenGL) was fine for me too over two different generations of MacBook Pros (so that's 6 years or so) with NVIDIA cards.

[Skybird03]

_--__[]KITT;223945']Heheheh the issue is more psychological if you are used to seeing your games playing at over 30 fps. Sometimes CMSF would dip below 20 fps too.

I don't like thinking that my rig is struggling when I'm playing my game. It's a good game though I enjoyed it very much especially with the mods(the mods site has since closed down too bad and I lost my CMSF mods collection and what they had in place in battlefront site wasn't even close)

I'm not obsessed with fps but I still think games should have fps over 30 or 30 at the minimum.

And I just remembered I bought a new PC(my previous one) but the performance didn't change much.

Older titles may not be optimized to make use of more modern hardware options. For example' date=' the bottleneck in memory limits for FS9, or CPU cycles in FSX remain, no matter how much mekory you added to FS9, and no matter how fast your GFX board is that you use for FSX.

I recall a time when I flew aircombat manouvers in Falcon 4.0 + RP3-4. With frames [i']15-17.

FS2002 I had to use at frames 22, fixed.

Not to mention "flightsims" on the old Amiga. Worst I ever saw there was something named "Hawk", I think.

2-3 frames. :biggrin:

Or Tank Platoon by Microprose on Amiga, the first M1TP. Shells sometimes travelled so slow - with 2 frames or so - that it took seconds to reach you, you could see them and react to them by disappearing behind the pyramid that was supposed to be a "hill".

Well. Another time. Other expectation levels.

[Apocalypse 31]

I found a screen from the new engine! M1A2 is looking good!

Just kidding! That's BF3, but I know our beloved SB Pro will look that good one day...and even if it doesn't, it will always play better.

[Eisenschwein]

looks good

feels good

sounds good

hit every Target with the first shoot

can be played by everyone up a Age of 6 Years !

N I C E

[Hedgehog]

I found a screen from the new engine! M1A2 is looking good!

Just kidding! That's BF3, but I know our beloved SB Pro will look that good one day...and even if it doesn't, it will always play better.

3 things wrong with that....

1) Air intake is on the wrong side.

2) Roadwheels are waaay too big.

3) WTF is that thing...oh its an RWS....yeah they are normally fitted with a TUSK No. 3

[dejawolf]

3 things wrong with that....

1) Air intake is on the wrong side.

2) Roadwheels are waaay too big.

3) WTF is that thing...oh its an RWS....yeah they are normally fitted with a TUSK No. 3

another error is that it has USMC smoke grenades. AFAIK, USMC doesn't field the M1A2, only M1A1 AIM. and commanders cupola vision blocks are wrong for M1A2, front glacis plate is wrong shape, sideskirts are too thin..

but environment and graphics engine is worlds above SB.

[DarkLabor]

Errr...

The headlights are mirored... :neutral:

[Ssnake]

...but environment and graphics engine is worlds above SB.

...so is their budget, and the number of artists that they can employ. Clearly artwork results scale well with the amount of money that you are allowed to blow on it. Give me 20 million dollars, a staff of 200 artists, and two years time and I'll give you a handful of feature-rich maps in the 30x30km² region.

Unfortunately we can afford only two part-time and three full-time artists, one of which is exclusively tied to 3D character animation, one other is almost exclusively working on vehicle models. I think this explains the visual disparity well.

It also shows that you can do quite a lot - surprisingly much even - even on a shoestring budget if one makes careful decisions where development dollars will yield the highest overall pay-off. Of course BF3 is playing in a different league. It'd be a disaster of epic proportions if they would not, given the proportions of budget and team size.

[Ssnake]

The headlights are mirrored...

The question should be, why are they switched on in the first place. :heu:

[DarkLabor]

The question should be, why are they switched on in the first place. :heu:

Hahaha, You got me on that one! :mrgreen:

Wait! Why would a tank be alone on a paradisiac landscape using a pedestrian path?

Naaah! I forgot BF3, everything is said! :diable:

[Hedgehog]

Errr...

The headlights are mirored... :neutral:

They're like that on the real M1...i think.

Eases the supply chain.

Only need to supply one type of light headlight cluster.

And rear lights and indicators all come from the same parts bins,

For Brad, Humvee, etc.

You could probably put a modern US Army rear light cluster on a WW2 Jeep without much fuss.