Is the art and effects in CoD dated?

[Flying Pencil]

In another forum I an in a nearly one sided debate for the quality of CoD.

Their criticism is:
* dated graphics
* Horrible shadow work
* no anisotropic filtering
* pegging the graphics to 2006 (aka 5 years old)
* some others

One said outright:
Low polygon models, low texture resolutions, poor alpha maps, no anti aliasing, little to no lighting


My OP was not well worded, but the flame attack I have been getting is solar, so is CoD lagging the market badly?


Note: they keep comparing to FPS like Crysis, Unreal, and BF3
Really good examples :rolleyes:

[jibo]

please don't bring this flamewar topic here
90% of what they said is false

[Rattlehead]

Not to me it isn't.

To me CoD looks beautiful...especially so at dawn or dusk. The aircraft models look fantastic and those cockpit shadows are something I never stop marvelling at.

Thing is, it's easier in my opinion to make a fps look better...much, much reduced draw distance for one thing. Look at Metro 2033 - a beautiful game, but 90% of it was underground, in tunnels. They could not get away with such pretty graphics in a game with vast, open scenery.

[Dano]

Little to no lighting? LMAO!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDaVHGfC2Ss

Yer, no lighting there at all...

[seiseki]

Well it's all true, compared to games like Crysis 2.

The difference is it's a flightsim, and it still looks really good at high graphics.
And the cockpit is quite high poly and looks very real with the reflections and shadows.

Technically, I guess all the shaders and such used in CloD existed in 2006, but no one would be able to run a flight sim using it at that time.

Not sure why anyone should be offended by this, the game still looks very good. Just wish it would run better..

Little to no lighting? LMAO!!!
Yer, no lighting there at all...

Seems quite basic too me..

[Dano]

Not to me it isn't.

To me CoD looks beautiful...especially so at dawn or dusk. The aircraft models look fantastic and those cockpit shadows are something I never stop marvelling at.

Thing is, it's easier in my opinion to make a fps look better...much, much reduced draw distance for one thing. Look at Metro 2033 - a beautiful game, but 90% of it was underground, in tunnels. They could not get away with such pretty graphics in a game with vast, open scenery.

It's also very very noticeable how bad the graphics are in Metro in the outdoor sections in comparison.

[Derinahon]

please don't bring this flamewar topic here
90% of what they said is false

Agreed. The graphics are what they are, there won't be any huge changes. As a flight sim, graphically and in most other respects CoD gets a thumbs up from me.

[Heliocon]

In another forum I an in a nearly one sided debate for the quality of CoD.

Their criticism is:
* dated graphics
* Horrible shadow work
* no anisotropic filtering
* pegging the graphics to 2006 (aka 5 years old)
* some others

One said outright:



My OP was not well worded, but the flame attack I have been getting is solar, so is CoD lagging the market badly?


Note: they keep comparing to FPS like Crysis, Unreal, and BF3
Really good examples :rolleyes:

Well yes and no, I want to be as fair as possible. First its unrealistic to compare COD with Crysis 2 and other similar games because they are just an entirely different beast. Its apples to oranges, - yes they are both fruit - yes they are both round - yes they are both edible, but they are different fruit.

That being said I would say yes the engine in its current state is dated in a range of its features, and when taking performance into account is in a bad state. Currently since we are in a transition period it is running on mixed late current gen tech, a year ago it was current but by the end of the year it wont even be current it will be last gen (dx9 is being completely phased out as is XP). Early-mid last year it would of been next gen tech but by the end of the year DX11 will be standard. Currently while the foundations for it are in the game to some degree with the DX10 settings, we are a ways away from getting current gen stuff, as there are still holdovers from Il2 (dx9 and below) - for example the clouds, water and fire effects which are very outdated.

Now the beuty of DX11 would be that we could get Crysis fidelity graphics while still have huge view distances an everything else, this is the first time really the tools have been provided for the level of scaling that a flight sim needs to show intricate detail with a huge view range but perform well at the same time. The game seems to be stuck in the same generation as like Arma 2, when really it should be closer to BF3 in how it uses graphical rescources (BF3 large scale MP).

Also the fact that the devs seem too scared/unwilling to continue to optimize the game for multicore systems is really slowing progress, there was a huge performance boost when they offloaded textures to another thread, but they do not want to do it for tree impacts/hit boxes which makes no sense. They are holding the games potential down to the lowest common denominator, which is a total contradiction of what they set out to acheive.

P.S edit - The graphics as they are now WOULD be good if they didnt have absurd building pop, ugly LOD/jarring transitions for trees and low resolution textures for terrain that doesnt scale (not to mention the mediocre water+clouds+fire). Now add to that the fact that the game runs slow as hell and kills even the best machines if you fight over land, it makes a very bad impression.

[Skoshi Tiger]

How old were the comment? After restating the campaign with the new patch, there is nothing dated about graphics. Compared to any other combat flight sim out there I doubt there is anything out there that does it better.

It's definately on par with the other two contenders.

Cheers!

[seiseki]

Eh.. not really. the graphics are actually pretty standard. I would even go as far as saying bad. Nothing that fancy at all.
Low polygon models, low texture resolutions, poor alpha maps, no anti aliasing, little to no lighting. Meh. I have seen better.

This looks better....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cuXg


This is the reply you're talking about.
And I agree with him, technically it's not that impressive.
But again, it's a flightsim, not an FPS.

To be fair the OP posted this:

New GOLD STANDARD for realistic video games.
This is not a CG movie.
These are actual real time captures from the new game with some simple effects added here and there.

http://youtu.be/1LMftuei6Fw?hd=1

The graphics in CloD are not that good, especially not in slow motion as the linked video..

[Heliocon]

How old were the comment? After restating the campaign with the new patch, there is nothing dated about graphics. Compared to any other combat flight sim out there I doubt there is anything out there that does it better.

It's definately on par with the other two contenders.

Cheers!

Yes but that in no way makes it modern.

Think about this: year 2011, there are flightsims out with near or photorealistic graphics and they would be mainstream market games.
FPS's are the niche. Then when everyone has been playing BF2/DOD/CS and then Modern warfare 2 comes out in year 2011/2012 everyone is like omg its so pretty, then people point out that flight sims have hyper realistic graphics and effects then the people who like MW2 say: Well all the other FPS games graphics suck in comparison! Therefore since MW2 looks better than other older FPS it must be next gen/cutting edge graphics!

Just because it looks better than other games in a small market in no way means that it takes advantage of modern tech or is even particularly good looking. Thats the point I was making in my other post, these comparisons are stupid because comparing COD to a flight sim from years ago is the same as comparing COD to Crysis 2, instead of genre we are talking about hardware and software capabilities and techniques though.

The ONLY way we can make a clear headed and accurate judgement of COD's graphics is to compare it to current gen or recent sims, (which is hard now that we are in a tech shift) or analyze the underlying graphical tech and methods used to create the games graphics, and then look at how well the game is performing. Currently this is pointing towards the game performing very badly for what it is displaying and what it is displaying is not spectacular. Outside of the forum bubble people are all saying this, look at the pc gamer article for example.

[jibo]

" to be fair " you shouldn't compare CoD with the last trillion dollars budget pop corn fps
" to be fair " you should wait because 50% of the effects are still in the pipeline

anyway football manager is better

[Heliocon]

" to be fair " you shouldn't compare CoD with the last trillion dollars budget pop corn fps
" to be fair " you should wait because 50% of the effects are still in the pipeline

anyway football manager is better

To be fair - I wasnt comparing the graphics I was comparing the tech/structure of how the game world was modeled and made, not the graphics themselves (although they indicate how it was done).

To be fair - I dont give a hoot if 50% of the effects are in the pipeline, we are talking about COD NOW, what is in it NOW and how it performes NOW. I was actually pretty forgiving since good progress has been made, but you cant judge and comment on content you have never seen, may not run (thats why its not in), you may never see and you do not even know exists appart from a comment from those who have an interest in you buying their product. Judge it on what it is, not what you wish it to be. The only competition is themselves and their statements on what it would be at release...

[seiseki]

Yes, we're looking at it objectively..

CloD will always lose to Crysis in terms of eyecandy..
Also the technology used is not next gen, and has been available for quite some time..

But everyone who's screaming "Its false! Its blasphemy!" should know better, CloD is a sim and does a lot more than most FPS games, and the team doesn't have the same budget and manpower either.

Remember, the comments the OP are talking about were mostly reactions to how the OP stated that Cliffs of Dover is a "New GOLD STANDARD for realistic video games."
Of course it's gonna get flammed, they were simply stating it looked quite bad because of how much you overhyped and overestimated it, claiming it would be a standard for (all) video games.

It doesn't look that good compared to other engines, but it looks very good for a flight simulator, considering the scale of everything.
The video shown also makes the game look worse than it is..
It's supposed to be viewed from inside the cockpit, at full speed, and not in slow motion where you can see how flat and undetailed the firing and explosion effects really are..

[Blackdog_kt]

To be honest, i think a lot of people focus on labels instead of the real scope of a game such as CoD.

Sure, it won't be as current-tech as an FPS and the reasons are numerous yet simple:

- completely different scope and scale in everything that pertains to the gameplay experience, from map sizes to amount of units populating it, etc, etc

- much longer and complicated development cycle, it had to be released at some point so yes, it's going to lag somewhat behind...otherwise we get feature creep with more and more stuff to do in development and it never gets released...this is my major source of laughter with some of the people who complain the loudest, not all, but a lot of them are the same people who were telling them to hurry up and release it :-P

- small budgets, small market share, small development teams

I think i don't even have to go on.

This is the state of things, nothing more, nothing less and to be honest with you, i'm not bothered because it puts the emphasis first and foremost on what should be the heart of a flight sim. They could ship it with IL2's graphic engine for all i care as long as it had those elements. Ok, i'm exaggerating here, but you get my drift, graphics are not the main attraction for such a game. They are not trivial either and neither is sound as they are both tools to create immersion, they just don't take first place because there's a lot of equally important stuff to include. In that sense, if they don't reach perfection they should be functional to enable everything else to work.

Once revenue starts coming in, it's better optimized to run well on a wide range of PCs and the extra content starts arriving (payware or not, official or 3rd party), things will pick up speed.

The bugs will gradually be squashed, the FMs will be corrected and even the graphics could improve over time, especially as DX11 GPU prices drop and more people can afford one. It does make sense to take into account the fact that not everyone can afford dual 6970s at this point in time.

This is not catering to the lowest common denominator, it's catering to a well-rounded medium and it's once again a function of the fact that we are a tiny part of the gamer demographic that has to fund some of the most complicated and expensive to make games that also have a long shelf-life. If you are making a sim and you want to secure enough sales to keep the project going you don't make it DX11 exclusive at this point in time, it's as simple as that.

I'm not disputing the benefits of DX11 in terms of offloading computation to the GPU, in fact it's something that will let us have even better performance down the line and not just on graphics, but on physics-related calculations which matter the most in a flight sim. What i'm disputing is that everyone who currently owns the sim would rush to buy a DX11 GPU it this game was DX11 exclusive. And to make it clearer, by exclusive i don't mean that it would have to be truly exclusive.

Simply having realism-enhancing features that need DX11 to work would divide the online community in DX11 enabled servers that, for example, would run dynamic calculations on how the wing bends under fire and how that affects the FM and non-DX11 ones that don't: a couple of tick-boxes in the server's realism settings and bye-bye online compatibility.

This is the same thing that happened with the original IL2 in the past. High detail clouds made it harder (and more realistic) to spot aircraft in them, but most servers were running with them switched off because not enough people could take the FPS hit at that time. The end result what that running with high detail clouds left you at a disadvantage to someone with a lower-spec PC that had them disabled: he could see targets in clouds just fine, you couldn't.

It's clear that due to the type of constraints mentioned above, it was a choice between state of the art rendering techniques and building an engine that will provide more simulator-specific elements. Sure, the CEM is broken at high altitude, but i'd rather have a broken CEM that will get patched to accuracy over time than have it ship as a remake of IL2 with crysis-quality graphics and none of the aircraft related stuff we got.

This is what the game aims to do first and foremost, simulate the way an aircraft flies. You won't see me complaining in a shooter forum because they don't have strategy elements, so i can't comprehend how people can focus so much on graphics alone and completely miss the fact that not just the aim of the game, but it's actual defining quality is something entirely different.

If it comes down to a choice between what makes a simulator a simulator and state of the art graphics, it's only natural graphics will take a back seat otherwise it won't be a simulator anymore.

Again, i'm not saying everything is perfect or that people don't have a right to disagree, of course they do. I just have a feeling a lot of people are expecting CoD to have the type of priorities that are the hallmark of completely different genres, that's all.

Sure, it's not perfect and not everything works like it should, far from it. Its saving grace is that it has the appropriate feature set and priorities for a game of the simulator genre, it just needs these features to be corrected so that they work as advertised.

[smink1701]

No

[Tiger27]

If you are a fan of flight sims its unfortunate but you have to put up with delays and gradual progress, the reason is because of the popularity or lack of in flightsims compared to FPS games, CoD, ROF and DCS all run very small teams, maybe less than 20 full time, last article I read about Crysis 2 they had a staff of 160+, the upside of the tradeoff, is that while you may still be playing ROF, CoD and DCS in 5 years, you will probably be playing and have paid for Crysis 4 and BF-5 by then, most of these graphically beautiful FPS games become boring within 3 - 6 months and you move on to the next.

[Feathered_IV]

The resources required currently are next gen. The ratio of eye candy to hardware is somewhat disproportionate however.

Depth of gameplay however is the real issue. When it can't even compete with a QMB from a decade ago, it really makes you wonder.

[Heliocon]

To be honest, i think a lot of people focus on labels instead of the real scope of a game such as CoD.

Sure, it won't be as current-tech as an FPS and the reasons are numerous yet simple:

- completely different scope and scale in everything that pertains to the gameplay experience, from map sizes to amount of units populating it, etc, etc

- much longer and complicated development cycle, it had to be released at some point so yes, it's going to lag somewhat behind...otherwise we get feature creep with more and more stuff to do in development and it never gets released...this is my major source of laughter with some of the people who complain the loudest, not all, but a lot of them are the same people who were telling them to hurry up and release it :-P

- small budgets, small market share, small development teams

I think i don't even have to go on.

This is the state of things, nothing more, nothing less and to be honest with you, i'm not bothered because it puts the emphasis first and foremost on what should be the heart of a flight sim. They could ship it with IL2's graphic engine for all i care as long as it had those elements. Ok, i'm exaggerating here, but you get my drift, graphics are not the main attraction for such a game. They are not trivial either and neither is sound as they are both tools to create immersion, they just don't take first place because there's a lot of equally important stuff to include. In that sense, if they don't reach perfection they should be functional to enable everything else to work.

Once revenue starts coming in, it's better optimized to run well on a wide range of PCs and the extra content starts arriving (payware or not, official or 3rd party), things will pick up speed.

The bugs will gradually be squashed, the FMs will be corrected and even the graphics could improve over time, especially as DX11 GPU prices drop and more people can afford one. It does make sense to take into account the fact that not everyone can afford dual 6970s at this point in time.

This is not catering to the lowest common denominator, it's catering to a well-rounded medium and it's once again a function of the fact that we are a tiny part of the gamer demographic that has to fund some of the most complicated and expensive to make games that also have a long shelf-life. If you are making a sim and you want to secure enough sales to keep the project going you don't make it DX11 exclusive at this point in time, it's as simple as that.

I'm not disputing the benefits of DX11 in terms of offloading computation to the GPU, in fact it's something that will let us have even better performance down the line and not just on graphics, but on physics-related calculations which matter the most in a flight sim. What i'm disputing is that everyone who currently owns the sim would rush to buy a DX11 GPU it this game was DX11 exclusive. And to make it clearer, by exclusive i don't mean that it would have to be truly exclusive.

Simply having realism-enhancing features that need DX11 to work would divide the online community in DX11 enabled servers that, for example, would run dynamic calculations on how the wing bends under fire and how that affects the FM and non-DX11 ones that don't: a couple of tick-boxes in the server's realism settings and bye-bye online compatibility.

This is the same thing that happened with the original IL2 in the past. High detail clouds made it harder (and more realistic) to spot aircraft in them, but most servers were running with them switched off because not enough people could take the FPS hit at that time. The end result what that running with high detail clouds left you at a disadvantage to someone with a lower-spec PC that had them disabled: he could see targets in clouds just fine, you couldn't.

It's clear that due to the type of constraints mentioned above, it was a choice between state of the art rendering techniques and building an engine that will provide more simulator-specific elements. Sure, the CEM is broken at high altitude, but i'd rather have a broken CEM that will get patched to accuracy over time than have it ship as a remake of IL2 with crysis-quality graphics and none of the aircraft related stuff we got.

This is what the game aims to do first and foremost, simulate the way an aircraft flies. You won't see me complaining in a shooter forum because they don't have strategy elements, so i can't comprehend how people can focus so much on graphics alone and completely miss the fact that not just the aim of the game, but it's actual defining quality is something entirely different.

If it comes down to a choice between what makes a simulator a simulator and state of the art graphics, it's only natural graphics will take a back seat otherwise it won't be a simulator anymore.

Again, i'm not saying everything is perfect or that people don't have a right to disagree, of course they do. I just have a feeling a lot of people are expecting CoD to have the type of priorities that are the hallmark of completely different genres, that's all.

Sure, it's not perfect and not everything works like it should, far from it. Its saving grace is that it has the appropriate feature set and priorities for a game of the simulator genre, it just needs these features to be corrected so that they work as advertised.

Well no not really right here. But to keep it simple:
1. DX11 advantages are far more than what you stated here. Also I was refering to DX9 support/engine which is absurd since about 95%+ of people own a DX10 card. Why make a game for an outdated dx version that wont be around in a years time (in releases, and the only reason its in now is because of consoles).
2. DX11 direct compute is an advantage but not really for what you are saying it is. Really the physics for nearly everything in this game can and should be handled by the CPU. What direct compute is good for is particle physics which is clouds, water, smoke etc.
3. DX11 is easier to program for than DX9, this is because with DX10.1 they basically laid down a guideline for hardware and software component capabilities which insures more or less uniformity and therefore its easier to program for a unified base.
4. DX11 features like tesselation really greatly reduce the workload on artists for models as they can have one or two models instead of multiple models for LOD. Then the engine will auto increase the LOD giving the model more or less infinit LOD versions depending on distance. Same thing for terrain and houses.
5. DX11 works far better with multi core cpus than dx10 or dx9
6. The issue was that they said 1. It would be DX11 on launch until a few months before release and 2 that it would be an engine that would last a decade... Like said they are competing with their own comments, not other games.

Please dont tell us what you think the benefits of dx11 are when you really dont. Also as it is offloarding anything right now to the GPU would be a disaster.

[Heliocon]

The resources required currently are next gen. The ratio of eye candy to hardware is somewhat disproportionate however.

Depth of gameplay however is the real issue. When it can't even compete with a QMB from a decade ago, it really makes you wonder.

Agreed - the gameplay/meat needs to be present (and it isnt). However those who completely dismiss graphics are foolish because you need a believable world to fly in or it removes the immersion.

[seiseki]

I honestly don't care that much about the graphics.
Shadows and high poly/high res cockpit makes it look quite stunning already.

If I'm going to nitpick however, I'd complain about the low res normal mapping which makes panel lines look too smooth and thick..

And the lack of proper HDR and bloom. (no not the overused cheap looking bloom in most shooters).

But I'm sure with all the future upcoming features implemented this sim will keep on surprising us when it comes to graphic fidelity in a flight sim.sim.

[Flying Pencil]

Looks like I really stepped in it with my post in other forum. :(

Now I read in some ways this sim lacks quality compared to others, but that could change, things going our way.

[Dano]

What forum was it?

[Blackdog_kt]

Well no not really right here. But to keep it simple:
1. DX11 advantages are far more than what you stated here. Also I was refering to DX9 support/engine which is absurd since about 95%+ of people own a DX10 card. Why make a game for an outdated dx version that wont be around in a years time (in releases, and the only reason its in now is because of consoles).
2. DX11 direct compute is an advantage but not really for what you are saying it is. Really the physics for nearly everything in this game can and should be handled by the CPU. What direct compute is good for is particle physics which is clouds, water, smoke etc.
3. DX11 is easier to program for than DX9, this is because with DX10.1 they basically laid down a guideline for hardware and software component capabilities which insures more or less uniformity and therefore its easier to program for a unified base.
4. DX11 features like tesselation really greatly reduce the workload on artists for models as they can have one or two models instead of multiple models for LOD. Then the engine will auto increase the LOD giving the model more or less infinit LOD versions depending on distance. Same thing for terrain and houses.
5. DX11 works far better with multi core cpus than dx10 or dx9
6. The issue was that they said 1. It would be DX11 on launch until a few months before release and 2 that it would be an engine that would last a decade... Like said they are competing with their own comments, not other games.

Please dont tell us what you think the benefits of dx11 are when you really dont. Also as it is offloarding anything right now to the GPU would be a disaster.

Well, i wasn't responding directly to you mate, neither did i say that i know exactly what DX11 does.

I'm just saying how it looks from where i'm standing, based on what i consider important for a flight sim. Graphics are important but not the top priority for me,that's all. It's a personal opinion that anyone can agree or disagree with at their own discretion. Cheers ;)

[leggit]

another pointless load of chaff from pencil...your such a moaner bud...you never stop.

[Heliocon]

Well, i wasn't responding directly to you mate, neither did i say that i know exactly what DX11 does.

I'm just saying how it looks from where i'm standing, based on what i consider important for a flight sim. Graphics are important but not the top priority for me,that's all. It's a personal opinion that anyone can agree or disagree with at their own discretion. Cheers ;)

Sorry for acting like an ass blackdog. Shouldnt of jumped on you like that, and your personal choice is also tbh my personal choice aswell. The reason I push it so hard is because if its not implemented I am worried that the game will completely stagnate in the near future.

Blame the angst on my english teacher... (finals suck!)

[Bricks]

Little to no lighting? LMAO!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDaVHGfC2Ss

Yer, no lighting there at all...

Nobody says it's bad.

It's just very little difference to IL2 (if there is any, especially in this video).


So, yes, you may ask the question why the old engine was abandoned, a whole new engine was developed, why "nothing was taken from old IL2 except the experience" and it still looks like IL2-1946?

WIP? Placeholder? All of it?

[Dano]

Nobody says it's bad.

It's just very little difference to IL2 (if there is any, especially in this video).


So, yes, you may ask the question why the old engine was abandoned, a whole new engine was developed, why "nothing was taken from old IL2 except the experience" and it still looks like IL2-1946?

WIP? Placeholder? All of it?

What more would you expect? They tried to simulate light as well as they could in IL2 and they did the same with CoD, why would there be a massive difference? Did you want them to add all sorts of over the top special effects like most fps games do?

I'm really not sure what they could add to make it much more realistic other than a better night sky?

[Bricks]

What more would you expect? They tried to simulate light as well as they could in IL2 and they did the same with CoD, why would there be a massive difference? Did you want them to add all sorts of over the top special effects like most fps games do?

I'm really not sure what they could add to make it much more realistic other than a better night sky?

Not at all!

In fact, I'd rather have the exact feature, that makes a FPS different from a flightsim: The believable rendering of an atmosphere!

As you can especially see with this video, this is simply not present. Rather than a constant change of the temperature of light, it's very bright until noon, then changes within a few hours to orange/red until the sun sets.

Also the little dusk on the horizon is clearly static, does not increase or decrease with daytime. This would be a simple graphics feature that would add a lot to a flightsim.

[philip.ed]

Dano, whilst I largely agree, the top cloud layers in CloD look little different from Il-2, and I have always found them to look quite dated by todays standards.
Many features of the game are extremely similar to Il-2, and although Il-2 is excellent, I think we were expecting many areas to be completely new. For example: objecting loading. Really, there is no excuse why buildings load up sporadically. WoP models this way, and TBH once in flight, no one is looking closely enough to monitor the complete transition. In CloD as it stands, it is extremely noticeable.
Then there's the sounds...are these the revolutionary sounds based n a 3-D sound engine that we were 'promised'?

My main gripe, though, is where is the BoB? All of this development time, but no campaign to match BoB2?
I think that starting the engine from scratch clearly took a heck of a lot of work. Because the CloD shown in those early build shots and videos doesn't look far off from the current game.

[Dano]

To be fair the video lost a lot of detail in compression so judging the lighting based on it will be flawed, and I have to agree about the cloud layer, though it's only noticeable really with accellerated time.