Is the art and effects in CoD dated?
 

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:

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

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.

Little to no lighting? LMAO!!!

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

Yer, no lighting there at all...

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..

Seems quite basic too me..

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

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.

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.

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!

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:

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