Is the art and effects in CoD dated?

[Dano]

Originally Posted by 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.

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

[Heliocon]

Originally Posted by 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:



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

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as there are still holdovers from Il2 (dx9 and below) - for example the clouds, water and fire effects which are very outdated.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!

[Heliocon]

Originally Posted by 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!

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]

Originally Posted by 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

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..

[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....

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..