How advanced the graphics engine will be?

It's a nice write-up and all, and I agree with you that you need a certain level of realism to make a game atmosphere believable.

Case point: Assassin's Creed - it got to the point where they realized: What happens when there is a big sword fight and the player takes a hit? Should he need to go to a medic and stop the bleeding and/or let a ligament heal? The environment and setting is VERY realistic, but to expect certain things to be real would cripple the "FUN" out of the game.

Don't get me wrong I don't think a game will ever 100% appeal to anyone - it never does - and I'm just stating I think they'll do a good job...

Yes, the "going for awesome" thing is something that could be a fabrication, but why go for kickstarter and be passionate about a project when you could make way more money making a game that would get publisher investment?

We'll have to wait and find out, but so far these guys have me convinced my money is going to a good game. It could end up sucking, but who knows. I didn't put down $10K dollars so it's not a big loss if my $90 is forfeit... even that is way more than most people would ever pay for a game but I'm not going to hit my head against the wall for days if it doesn't pan out.

You wrote a great piece there, though... and paying attention to the marketing details with a source is above and beyond what most people arguing on this forum could do.

Well put my friend... well put!

I hope I'll be able to run it relatively smoothly on my laptop, which is by no means top of the line.

I'm a big fan of devs that make their games accessible across a wide range of machines while still making the game visually/artistically appealing without making it all about pure graphical horsepower.

Sins for example, still looks good, especially with some of the community mods, love the hand-drawn 2D style of Spaz as well.

That's why there's the option to turn graphical settings down...

I hate people that demand a game's top gfx run on their old hardware...

I don't think that's what I said. :roll:

I said relatively smooth, not maxed.

I love to see the game with "just" the same graphics as the intro video from Kickstarter .

more more more tech!

I agree you shouldn't use tech buzzwords for the sake of it, but to achieve the aesthetics you deem necessary you can't get around some of them. Some technologies interact with each other and sometimes they'll conflict. You'll then have to find a compromise, or in the worst case you have to decide to have one technology and not the other. You cannot solve all problems related to aesthetics while avoiding tech buzzwords.

Here is a specific example of a discussion that considers the interaction between the quoted bullet points: Deferred Rendering and Anti-Aliasing and a possible trade-off.

I hope not, because they said they will write the engine from scratch. If they will implement all this "advanced" stuff the release is going to happen in 2016

Will this game be more demanding than, say, Supreme Commander? I'd hope less, but I doubt it...?

Outside of the nice toon shaders that feature in the pre vis video, all I want from this game graphics wise are nice 3D explosions and lots of particles.

I was actually amazed at the lighting engine in the last live stream and also how the Lava biome is shaping up in the biome concept art, way above expectations.

So the graphics engine is shaping up to be pretty advanced.

Virtual texturing is the basis for the planetary rendering and is a fairly advanced technique. We are using a procedural variant of it which makes it even more experimental.

In addition we have a deferred lighting pipeline allowing for lots of complex lighting on the units.

The unit rendering itself is based on massive crowd instancing rendering techniques.

Overall it will push cards hard. I'm pushing hard to have it run as good as possible on lower end machines. In fact I harp on this constantly. Do remember that at the time both TA and SupCom pushed hardware pretty hard though....

Who could forget the great EMG lag fest of 1997!

There was even a mod that joined the sound of multiple EMG shots into one sound to reduce the number of total sounds being played in combat that involved EMGs, in order to help performance.

Oh, and the sales pitch on the back of the CD/Box: "With extra large maps for 32 MB [RAM] users!".

Well... I guess my PC won't be able to play this game then...

Dell Inspiron 560
Nvidia Geforce 310
Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q8300 2.50 GHz
4 GB RAM

It can play Supreme Commander at the highest settings (well, I'm pretty sure I have graphics and such at the highest settings, and it runs perfectly fine), but... I fear that won't be enough for this game?

Your CPU is a little old, but should be ok, just pop a new GPU and PSU in there and you'll be golden.

Very cool, we all love a game that really pushes our rigs. I thought it might provide a decent challenge, given the number of units, planets and the overall scale of the game. Given the massive upgrade and overhaul of the textures (from the pitch video), it might well go some way to filling up our VRAM too. Bring it on!

Crysis had it's "we melt graphix cards" slogan as a marketing slogan.

PA: "melt your computer with AWESOME"

I'm all for a game that really exploits all of the resources that a current (middle-class ~800$ self-built) PC can offer:
- Quad-core
- 8GB of RAM
- 2GB of VRAM
- SSD

Furthermore, I speculate that the audience of this game consists mostly of "veteran" gamers that usually have PCs with above-average specs. :ugeek:

Very nice to hear that! My Geforce Titan is waiting!

Yeah, yes! You're right!

Hosting a game is going to have vastly higher requirements than going online and playing on a server. It's just how a client/server game works.

The weakest computers shouldn't have too much problem playing online. The bulk of work is visual, so it's largely dependent on video settings. Hell, you could probably play the game with nothing but 2d icons!