Outerra forum
Anteworld - Outerra Game => Tech demo, support, updates => Topic started by: KelvinNZ on January 11, 2013, 09:27:04 pm
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Just thought I would note down some issues here that I have noticed. Albeit they are not catastrophic problems but mainly visual ones.
1) When above the water it seems to be very pixelated/blocky
2) When looking to the horizon there is significant amount of shimmering (which looks like antialiasing is either not working or not available)
3) When under the water and looking up there appears to be no transparency, it is purely black. I would expect some blurriness at least
Below are a few optional things that would make Outerra feel a little more natural. Of course, i'm unsure how much work would be needed to apply these so take them as a grain of salt if too much effort would be required as i'm sure they will make their way into the engine ast some point.
One other thing is that it would be good to have graphical settings, for example, Low, Medium, High, Extreme, for those who don't understand the available settings. You could preset these to relevant values.
option: Add an underwater sound effect as opposed to the wave breaking when under water
option: Add a sound of a light see breeze when around water or use the sound used when on the himalayas and incorporate it into the beach sound or even forest.
Cheers,
Kelvin
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1) When above the water it seems to be very pixelated/blocky
Yes that thing ... new AMD drivers (http://www.anandtech.com/show/6393/amds-holiday-plans-cat1211-new-bundle) that were supposed to bring a perf boost actually slowed down OT on 7000 series, and one of the things that was considerably slower than with earlier driver versions was the automatic mipmap creation on textures. I've turned it off for water when testing and it stayed so. Seems I need to track (http://xtrac.outerra.com/index.fcgi/report/1) my own issues as well, otherwise I forget about it easily :)
2) When looking to the horizon there is significant amount of shimmering (which looks like antialiasing is either not working or not available)
Is it AMD or Nvidia, what antialiasing mode? On AMD MSAA does not work because of another driver bug, but there may be some other issues too.
3) When under the water and looking up there appears to be no transparency, it is purely black. I would expect some blurriness at least
Underwater rendering is not right, there are some other issues with it too, but I don't want to touch it now until some other parts of the rendering pipeline are finalized.
The sounds need some fixing as well, the sound is "packetized" when you are moving faster. With biomes it will have to be also configurable, changing with time of day, weather ...
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Thanks for the answers. I am using Nvidia GTX 680 as I have never truly believed in AMD's answer to graphic solution as Nvidia has lead the market for a long time proven by the quality differences between themselves and AMD, anyway just my own opinion.
Any feedback with my other idea:
"One other thing is that it would be good to have graphical settings, for example, Low, Medium, High, Extreme, for those who don't understand the available settings. You could preset these to relevant values"
So, in summary it sounds like these are all a work in progress and understandably.
Cheers,
Kelvin
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Yes we will need simpler settings for users too, but we thought that currently it's changing too rapidly and maintaining what stands behind the individual graphical settings would quickly get out of sync and need fixing. Even now there's a bunch of ifs that adjust various changed configuration settings when upgrading from older versions.
Although, maybe it won't be such a problem. Terrain quality, grass settings, antialiasing modes could be easily assigned into such categories ...