When in the development process does graphic polishing accur? Not knowing game development process; My guess is that it is sometime late alpha or even beta ? Sun effects on the horizon and lens flares; Antialiasing, aircraft and ship effects on water, and so on. But i guess it will all come togheter sometime before release?
They said in their live steam that they had just hired a DirextX god from Microsoft so I assume he's going to be working on graphical features like lighting and shadows.
Visuals polishing usually done when all assets (models, textures, animations) in their final state. It's differs for different studios/projects depend on many things. I think you could wait for more effects like that when Uber spend more time on post processing, currently it's not priority.
As mentioned in the last livestream (you may watch it on youtube) Uber hired a graphics guy who should start mid august. According to Uber he will update the graphicsand optimize code, so i assume, it should happen sooner than later...but however since hes new with uber and PA we may need to wait a while to see some results... as you assumed correct, those things will be implemented before release my guess is they start mid beta, when they stabilized the builds enought and are done with most optimization.. but that's a wild guess from my side
I think Uber might even done some post processing before beta, so we can play with it ourself. PS: OP probably will be interested to read this post: viewtopic.php?p=766599#p766599
The game is totally basic in graphics and effects. Nothing is in yet besides the bare bones from what i understand. You dont wanna polish add detail to units or buildings before your sure its the final design. They dont exactly have that much money to just waste. Its gonna be fun watch it all come together. Recent patch is definitely the one so far where im enjoying the game the most.
Where was said he was a Direct X guy? from what I knew he was just a A Graphics programmer? As to the OP think of it this way, Gameplay > Graphics. Mike
It's not so important, usually graphics programmers know both API. Everything in modern computer graphics it's shaders and actually there not so much HLSL/GLSL/Cg specifics.
PA use Coherent UI for HTML5/JS/CSS-based interface. Coherent UI based on Chromium codebase (it's open source base of Google Chrome) which use Direct3D on Windows for some functions like WebGL. Uber can't disable it because they haven't source code license for Coherent. But game itself doesn't use DirectX at all.
Being a graphics programmer has almost nothing to do with API's and is much more about understanding how to make algorithms work well together and map well to the GPU. Understanding the basics of the API isn't all that useful. In fact most graphics programmers would be comfortable not having an API at all and just working to the metal if needed.
At least you need to exclude UI from this list. For last ~6 years most of games use UI middleware which doesn't require lot of programming for integration. Scaleform GFx based on Flash is most popular, but there is few other libraries too. Even code monkey can use these libraries, so usually expensive graphics programmers don't do any work on UI.
I really hope that the new gfx programmer will be able to start optimizing. The game is pretty low in fps with the new patch especially.
Nope. Shaders are a bit of a gray area though. Graphics programming mostly consists of designing and building the code for the graphics engine. This is stuff is kind of hard to explain because it's fairly esoteric.
I find that it takes far longer to set up the backend stuff to handle a shader, than to write the shader itself. As far as i'm aware, graphics programmers make the functions that allow people to draw whatever they want to onscreen, UI programmers can then draw the UI to screen using these functions
