Is the art and effects in CoD dated?

[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..

[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

- 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]

Originally Posted by 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

- 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]

Originally Posted by 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.

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.