After NWO has its fun, what is next

jedite2012 · May 2013

After the NWO fad is over, what would happen next....i know they will move onto a new project or continue to work on NWO with updates to keep it fresh

CO is done, i don't think there will be any major update in the future, it would be good if another company Buys CO and make it stay as far away as possible from cryptic and PWE

aiqa · May 2013

Don't we have more then enough doom threads on the first page of the forum already?

rokurocaris · May 2013

Those and two amusing picture threads by now.
There's nothing of interest in this one.

Step along, step along, nothing to see.

jorifice1 · May 2013

You can NEVER have too much DOOM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqcn_TPu4qQ

amarillonmc · May 2013

One part in me hopes Tencent buy it. (Tencent bought Riot, you know, LoL - and just recently developed Monster Hunter Online from 0 while making it better than the original Japanese MMO)

However, I also know that while Tencent don't screw up their games very often, if they DO they screw them up hard.

Oh well.

smoochan · May 2013

NWO is a license type thing the same way STO is right? As in, there's another (big) company who actually cares what people think about a product that has their name on it? That means it will be like STO. Not perfect, but with continuing attention, since they have a big brother company looking over their shoulder telling them to do a good job.

Cryptic actually owns Champions Online through and through, so the only ones to tell them they need to do a good job are themselves.

sockmunkey · May 2013

The forecast for tomorrow will be DOOM! Followed by a brief scattering of teeth gnashing and angst.

honestresearcher · May 2013

im surprised people havent broken this game already with custom server runtimes and started hosting Private servers, because quite clearly
we are better at fixing the game and the tailor...than you, Cryptic

this should be where you come in and show me im wrong...but you dont have anything to come back with

x0y1 · May 2013

Go back to Star Trek Online in 10days.

tacofangs:

"What do you mean you 'updated every texture everywhere'!?"
"Why does everything look crisper now!?"
"Taco! What did you do to my textures?!"

ALL YOUR TEXTURES ARE BELONG TO ME! MUWAHAHAHA!

These are some of the questions you may have been asking me/yourself/others around you if you've been playing on Tribble for the last week or two. And they are good questions. And better yet, I have answers!

Alright, so before I get into what I did exactly, let's go over the basics of what a MipMap is, since that is what most of these changes involved.
In essence, every texture in every game is actually a whole series of textures, called a 'Mip Chain.' This is basically a series of duplicate textures, each smaller than the last. In games, all textures have to have dimensions that are a power of 2. So while the original texture might be 1024x1024, it's mip chain will be every power of two from that down. (1024, 512, 256, 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2).

spaceLike this!

This is one of our new Romulan interior ship textures, and what it's Mip Chain (or MipMap) would look like.
Each of these different sized textures, is called a Mip. I'll be referring to Mips and MipMaps (the whole chain) more later.

What are MipMaps used for? I'm glad you asked! When you are standing somewhere in the world, the textures on the nearest objects will display at their full size. But, there's a box over there, 500 feet away. It's very small on screen, and if we just loaded the whole texture on to it, there is a ton of useless data that doesn't actually get displayed. :::cue horns::: Enter the MipMap! Instead of loading that whole texture, we load one of those much smaller mip maps onto the box. Now there is a lot less wasted data on that box, and we can use that to load more textures on more stuff nearby.

Each texture's mipmaps are automatically generated when we convert our photoshop files into something the game can understand. When we do this conversion, it's called 'Processing a Texture.' When Zer0 says we 'Updated every texture everywhere' what she means, is that we REPROCESSED every texture everywhere. It does not mean that we repainted everything by hand. We simply reprocessed them with some different configurations, to yield a different result.

This will be on the test.

So, with that out of the way, there are 4 main things that were done to textures.

spaceCRUNCH!
Crunch is a new compression algorithm that we use to make our textures take up much, much less disk space on your hard drive. The textures get uncompressed when they are sent to your video card, and thus, the compression has very little impact on the look of anything in game. However, this does mean that the patch size for a new user is reduced significantly, and any future texture patches will be much smaller as well.

spaceMip Splitting
Remember Mips? Mip Splitting is where we take the biggest mips in the chain, and break them off into their own textures. What this does is allows people with lower end systems to only load the smaller mips, and not bother loading some of the biggest textures in the game (which wouldn't be displayed anyway).

spaceMip Reversal
Mip Reversal is basically what it sounds like. We flip the order that they were stored in. Previously, when a texture tried to stream in, it would try to load the whole thing, and then it would drop down through the chain, to the appropriate Mip. That seemed silly, so we flip it, and now, when you run around, it starts with the smallest mip, and works it's way up through the chain to the right level.

spaceMip Sharpening
This is probably the most noticeable of our 4 reprocessing techniques. If you look back at our MipChain, those smaller Mips tend to get blurry, and lose data as they get shrunk. So, much like a photoshop sharpen filter, we sharpen up those mips a bit, to make them pop out more at a distance, and look better on lower end systems. This sharpening does not happen to the full texture, only the mips the lower mips. Now, there are some textures that look worse with this sharpening, and those textures can be unsharpened on a case by case basis (and many already have), but overall, we believe the sharpening has drastically improved the look of the game, both at a distance, and on low end systems.

That's pretty much it. We did have to reprocess the whole texture library to do this, but overall we're very happy with the results, and we hope you are too.

Edit: why did all of my apostrophes turn into question marks?! WHAT MAGIC IS THIS!?!
-The Artist formerly known as Tumerboy

http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=665941

and much more..... :redface:

flyingfinn · May 2013

Next project, *The Secret Project* is 4 faction "Secret Worldish" Indiana Jonesy Arabian Lawrenchisy with pulp heroes, Knights Templar, Brotherhood of the Rose, Da Vincians battling of world order, against ancient evils. Single Player Game.

atring · May 2013

"Lawrenchisy?" Wasn't that the name of the all-Orc jazz quartet they tried to put in WoW, back a couple of expansions ago?

And now, a puppy:

sistersilicon · May 2013

x0y1 wrote: »

Go back to Star Trek Online in 10days.

http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=665941

and much more..... :redface:

Awesome. Meanwhile, in CO, the Art Deco Cape still randomly comes up looking like Lego blocks at 200% character texture detail.

Can't wait to get this along with the Foundry! ANY DAY NOW RIGHT?

smoochan · May 2013

honestresearcher wrote: »

im surprised people havent broken this game already with custom server runtimes and started hosting Private servers, because quite clearly
we are better at fixing the game and the tailor...than you, Cryptic

this should be where you come in and show me im wrong...but you dont have anything to come back with

Maybe somebody already tried that... and gave up when it was way too much work.

kallethen · May 2013

smoochan wrote: »

NWO is a license type thing the same way STO is right? As in, there's another (big) company who actually cares what people think about a product that has their name on it? That means it will be like STO. Not perfect, but with continuing attention, since they have a big brother company looking over their shoulder telling them to do a good job.

Cryptic actually owns Champions Online through and through, so the only ones to tell them they need to do a good job are themselves.

That's pretty much what I was trying to say in another thread. NW and STO have big money from corporations investing, but are also beholden to please those same benefactors. CO on the other hand has no big money behind it, but likewise doesn't have that same sword of Damocles.

rokurocaris · May 2013

x0y1 wrote: »

Go back to Star Trek Online in 10days.

http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=665941

and much more..... :redface:

That also explains why Valerian Scarlet's arm attachment looks disconnected when your camera isn't right next to her.

After NWO has its fun, what is next

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