Ilya answers regarding CoD scaleability

[Heliocon]

Originally Posted by The Kraken

Well it's a bit more than that and includes some promising concepts (unlike DX10 which was pretty much a dead end), but currently it's still a niche technology that has to mature - not much sense in wasting development resources on that if there are better things to do that everyone profits from.

Tesselation in particular is more of a buzzword than a useful technology at the moment. Too much effort required on the modellers' part for anything but trivial cases (where displacement or even bump maps work nearly equally well), and too slow to provide any performance improvements over established technologies.

As with previously advertised so-called "break-through" technologies (e.g. texture filtering, hardware T&L, antialiasing) it may eventually turn out to be fundamental on the 2nd or 3rd generation of cards that support it. However given that most games these days are ported from consoles, where this obviously isn't available, it's unlikely that we'll see widespread use for this in the game industry beyond some smaller cosmetic improvements to surfaces.

Wrong.
1. Tesselation requires relativly little modeling work for the level of detail it gives, thats why its great.
2. Tesselation is dynamic which means it wont render geometry you cant see because of distance, in dx10 you would have to render it, or switch out models are distance. Either option is more work and worse performance.

Napoleon total war was capped to about 12k max soldiers on the battlefield before the engine started to "break down" on even the best pc's. They had to use sprites to reduce the gpu load at a distance.

Shogun 2 total war will have a cap of over 57k soldiers on the field, running DX11, soldiers will be tesselated and not use sprites. Its system requirments are also very similar/the same as NTW, just the gpu is 1 gen up. ie dx11=better performance.

[Azimech]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

I wouldn't want to fly a 109 and have it create overdone bumps and whatnot on the metal fuselage skin that were different each time...

I believe the name Warthog was for a different plane so I agree.

[bf-110]

Not sure if this is off topic,but how flexible is SoW engine?
I mean,if it´s a game that can get outdated in a few years,if it will still be a modern game in 2014,if the game can be upgraded to have better graphics/sounds/etc.

[Robert]

Originally Posted by bf-110

Not sure if this is off topic,but how flexible is SoW engine?
I mean,if it´s a game that can get outdated in a few years,if it will still be a modern game in 2014,if the game can be upgraded to have better graphics/sounds/etc.

Short answer, YES. That's the whole idea behind what Ilya said on the facebook page. CoD will have scalable graphics AND features that are already encoded into the game's engine so when the time is right they can be flipped on like a switch.

In the original IL2/FB there weren't detailed clouds, and perfect landscape. After about four years and PC specs came up to a certain level these features were either turned on or implemented by Oleg's team. A totally modular design feature.

[Cowboy10uk]

Originally Posted by Tree_UK

I cant believe they built a 2013 game built on DX9-10 and not DX11. That just doesn't add up.

Well Not all of us can afford to ramp up their Pc's every few months. I have a DX11 card, But I couldnt care less what Dx they us, So long as it runs well, Is a great Sim of the battle of Britain, and is moddable and upgradable, then isnt that all that counts. Im sure we can upgrade in the future, For now, Lets just get into those blue skys and enjoy ourselves. The graphics shown look great even if its not 11. Hell even the RAF dosnt have sims with perfect graphics. They have enough to do the job. Thats all we need. For a scalible graphics engine so it covers majority of our machines, it makes perfect sense.

[recoilfx]

Originally Posted by Tree_UK

I cant believe they built a 2013 game built on DX9-10 and not DX11. That just doesn't add up.

Why not? DX paths are just different renderers. The developers are right to concentrate on DX9-10, where 90% of the market is at.

It's not like the whole game is based on DX versions. You don't need to dump the whole engine for a few new DX11 APIs.

I am sure that the developers have looked into DX11. Maybe that path is even half done, but they realized that the additional time and money needed isn't worth it for this release.

When the time the market is ready for DX11, they only need to rework their renderer and release the upgrade as an expansion pack. I'd gladly support Oleg with more money.

[zauii]

Originally Posted by Tree_UK

I cant believe they built a 2013 game built on DX9-10 and not DX11. That just doesn't add up.

You make dx11 sound a lot more important for the consumer than it actually is, have you actually understood what dx11 does or are you just looking at the numbers..