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Forums > Home› The Academy

Newby question.

jumpingjsjumpingjs Member Posts: 0 Arc User
edited February 2014 in The Academy
I don't know much about Game Deving, nor coding, so I have a nooby question.

Why can't our characters be like handsome phaser guy? He is clearly highly detailed, but why can't our toons [in game] have the same level of detail. With my new laptop, I have everything on maximum and am running very smoothly, yet this isn't the first game where the art / pictures are very nice, but the "stuff" in the game is not as good. This is no criticism of the graphics, but rather a rather general question. Why can't games have the same level of detail of the art work?
Hopefully I'll come back from my break; this break is fun; I play intellectual games.

I hope STO get's better ...
Post edited by jumpingjs on

Comments

  • jonsillsjonsills Member Posts: 10,502 Arc User
    edited February 2014
    Because in order to render artwork of that level of detail interactively and in real time, we'd need everyone here to purchase a much more powerful computer than most any of us own. Still art can be lovingly rendered in fine detail; it only ever has to be in the one pose, after all. Our toons, on the other tentacle, have to be able to move at least somewhat realistically, and have to respond to both our actions and the environment in real time.
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  • UnknownUnknown
    edited February 2014
    This content has been removed.
  • catstarstocatstarsto Member Posts: 2,149 Arc User
    edited February 2014
    lol kirk, its not that bad. But I see what you mean, like a packaged food item, they would make it look better then it really is for window dressing, but the game play is still just as cool as the art none the less.
  • mjarbarmjarbar Member Posts: 2,084 Arc User
    edited February 2014
    capnkirk4 wrote: »
    Think of "Handsome Phaser Guy", and "T'Itsy the Flying Vulcan" as the military recruiters of STO. They're there to be your buddies, to show you how cool it is to be a part of STO. You only get the real truth after you take the Oath of Allegiance to the ToS, and come inside. Now you're scraping bird TRIBBLE of the end of a runway, somewhere in Guam. Welcome aboard.

    Why does this sound like bitter experience??? :)
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    THANK YOU FOUNDRY - YOUR CONTENT GAVE ME MANY HAPPY HOURS
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  • thecosmic1thecosmic1 Member Posts: 9,365 Arc User
    edited February 2014
    jumpingjs wrote: »
    I don't know much about Game Deving, nor coding, so I have a nooby question.

    Why can't our characters be like handsome phaser guy? He is clearly highly detailed, but why can't our toons [in game] have the same level of detail. With my new laptop, I have everything on maximum and am running very smoothly, yet this isn't the first game where the art / pictures are very nice, but the "stuff" in the game is not as good. This is no criticism of the graphics, but rather a rather general question. Why can't games have the same level of detail of the art work?
    In Console Games the developers are assured that every player will have at least X amount of graphics power to view their games - as everyone is using the same Console.

    In computer gaming the developers need to build toward the minimum denominator - the minimum system requirements. This is because the developers have no way of knowing whether someone is using a brand new $10,000.00 gaming PC or an 8 year-old $400.00 PC.

    The more computers the game can be played on the wider your customer base - and by default the wide your income source.
    STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
  • hevachhevach Member Posts: 2,777 Arc User
    edited February 2014
    Character detail levels are one of the main things driving the runaway inflating budgets of AAA games, and there's actually a pretty short list of developers willing to risk that kind of existence were it not forced on them by publishers, where each game must fund the monumental budget of the next and a single failure will often kill a studio without a publisher bailout (which will only come if you carry a flagship title, and even then you might just see that title handed off to somebody else while your studio is shuttered).

    When you get into MMOs, that short list almost vanishes, and the names left on it are a depressing litany of failure, games like Hellgate London and APB that collapsed under their own budgets and were fire-sold for a fraction of their value to developers who didn't need to worry about their nine-digit development debts, or Old Republic which has at this point basically assumed its development costs are a loss and settled for turning a profit over incremental updates and operating expenses - which is actually enough to qualify as a success in the MMO market.
  • gregindagreginda Member Posts: 1 Arc User
    edited February 2014
    Sorry if it is bad form to post a completely different question in someone else's thread but the forums wont let me post my own thread.

    My question is, when I play STO I am always teamed up with my wife. When we do ground missions the bridge officer configuration is ALWAYS I have 2 bridge officers she has 1. Nothing I can seem to do lets her bring 2 and me only bring 1. She would like to have two of here crew beam down with us on missions. Is there anything I can do to correct this?
  • thecosmic1thecosmic1 Member Posts: 9,365 Arc User
    edited February 2014
    greginda wrote: »
    Sorry if it is bad form to post a completely different question in someone else's thread but the forums wont let me post my own thread.

    My question is, when I play STO I am always teamed up with my wife. When we do ground missions the bridge officer configuration is ALWAYS I have 2 bridge officers she has 1. Nothing I can seem to do lets her bring 2 and me only bring 1. She would like to have two of here crew beam down with us on missions. Is there anything I can do to correct this?
    Let her invite you to the team instead of you inviting her. The person who does the inviting becomes the primary/leader. If she invites you then she should get the Boff choice advantage, IIRC.
    STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
  • edgecrysgeredgecrysger Member Posts: 2,740 Arc User
    edited February 2014
    Because it is impossible. Because we are talking about an MMORPG and extrem graphic quality + stability are not compatible in this case. Besides, we are talking about cryptic, if they cant fix a simple bug, how can you expect they to re-vamp the game ashtetics?

    I personally think the graphics are really good in the major part. For a game from the year 2010, of course. And we all want better graphics, more detailed and more realistic, but thats not possible, not with cryptic anyways. They will need to re-do all the graphics in the game and they will need to re think the way they work and handle things. The way cryptic thinks right now, there is no way we could see better graphics. Not unless the game is completely re-maked.

    What i dont understand, is, the crappy textures of some places. That is what i dont get it. And it makes me the creeps. Even in the year 2005 we had better textures than some of em i found in some places.

    And when you approach to a planet, its incredible how a lot of textures are incredible low detailed , pixelated and you cant even see the surface. Those are the cases i dont understand. Because those kind of textures were present in the year 2000, but not now.. for god sake. I cant believe cryptic cant put there better textures, for example.

    But some of you are wrong. You dont need the best pc or a really good one to run STO. The game could have really far better graphics than now, and it will not require the ultimate pc to run it. The only problem wil l be cryptic, that will not optimize the game to run on lower end pcs.
  • norobladnoroblad Member Posts: 2,624 Arc User
    edited February 2014
    jumpingjs wrote: »
    I don't know much about Game Deving, nor coding, so I have a nooby question.

    Why can't our characters be like handsome phaser guy? He is clearly highly detailed, but why can't our toons [in game] have the same level of detail. With my new laptop, I have everything on maximum and am running very smoothly, yet this isn't the first game where the art / pictures are very nice, but the "stuff" in the game is not as good. This is no criticism of the graphics, but rather a rather general question. Why can't games have the same level of detail of the art work?

    If you really want to know in detail (if not, you can skip this one)

    -- almost all graphics consist of triangles. Even to form a ball, the computer usually generates a bunch of triangles that are so small the shape is correct. Think calculus, and how you can approximate area under a curve with smaller and smaller rectangles until they are so small as to be lines -- its the same idea. A sphere could be made only of pixels, but it would take a lot of them; by using small triangles the number is cut significantly yet looks as good.

    The more triangles used, the more processing that must be done. This includes the location, texture (color or image placed on each face), the normals for lighting and reflections, and projections (for shadows and lighting) and more.

    To make a photo-realistic game, in other words, you need a major amount of computing power to track, trace, and draw, a massive amount of memory for all the vertices and textures, and all that is just for a static scene. On top of all that you have to animate it, which takes massive amounts of computing again, as the triangle meshes must be distorted and redrawn.

    Remember that a movie runs at about 30 frames per second. Modern computers prefer faster, as much as double that, to avoid tearing and skipping etc --- the curse of higher resolutions (old movies were in very low resolution) is that the viewer can see mistakes better -- the shoe in star wars really stands out in high def, while in 640x480 its just a distant star destroyer.

    So you are asking for billions of vertices to be drawn at 60+ frames per second with algorithms for animation, lighting, shading, texturing, and more. You are asking for tons of memory too. Its not that it can't be done, but would you like to spend $20k+ on a PC?

    Even on a modern machine, using autocad or doing a ray trace, there is a delay. That used to take hours per image, but top machines today can do it in a few seconds. But thats a few seconds per frame, which is nothing like 60 frames per second....!

    And we keep going to higher and higher resolutions. Every time that happens, the problem is increased in difficulty as more pixels have to be mapped and processed. Basically multiply by 4 (red, green, blue, lighting) so 640x480x4 is 1.2 million pixels for an obsolete ancient tv resolution. 1600x1200x4 or whatever the higher modern resolution exact numbers are is nearly 8 million pixels to process. And that is at 60 times a second, again...
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