How advanced the graphics engine will be?

Will the engine have cutting edge graphics? Such as:
*Advanced lighting (Global illumination)
*Advanced post-processing effects
*Massive particle effects
*Tessellation

Hard core players always cares about tech. Please tell us more about your advanced technology.

The top 3, I could see work, in simple forms. I hope there are different shaders to use when modding, hopefully some lighting effects.

I don't know exactly if the team goes for post-processing effects in the sense of sreen-shaders. Maybe it could make it easier to generate atmospheres, different per planet and maybe some SLIGHT edge detection effect for better readability.

Tessellation is probably not going to happen in the sense Cry engine 3 does it. It will cost a lot of time(money) to add this to all units and doesn't fit in the cartoony style imo. Tessellation of the terrain/planets could be possible, but in that case mainly for performance reasons.

I'm pretty confident one could always provice a beta to the ENB guys that do all that awesome graphics modding for the tes and gta stuff, no ?

I think tesselation could help with scalability on highend systems/settings. No Idea how hard it is to procedurally generate the required detail in the maps to make it worth the effor tho.

Some higher end SSAO and GI I can see doing just fine. Could maybe even be a way to work with low quality shadows without anyone realizing, getting some performance back that way.

I'm not really sure how to answer this. I expect the entire engine to be "advanced" but a lot more effort is going into gameplay important stuff than wizbang stuff. It's going to take everything we have engineering wise to rise to the vision we have.

Good to hear, I'd rather have a ok looking game with amazing gameplay than an amazing looking game with ok gameplay.

Not really true. I don't care about that stuff. Most important thing is to have no lag, good framerate, and good interplanetary UI. The rest is of course the challenging part since nobodys realy done this before... But I don't care aobut fancy gfx at all, I like playing games, if I want visual candy I pick up an action movie. Or a porno.

Me too! Anyway all games released in the past few years have seemed to have good graphics to me.

The graphics have to serve the gameplay. occasionally graphics get so good they add a new subtlety to the gameplay (like shadows peeking round corners in FPS games, or the sheer clutter that makes camoflage possible in arma 2) but generally, go with what serves the mechanics best.

wizbang stuff, I love that one lol.

Honestly if the aesthetics look bad great graphics won't do anything.

I really liked the style and quality used in that video...units kinda kept simple but then you can find lots of detail again...

Finally some one who knows the terminology!!!

Mike

I think the game is going to be a bit more advanced graphically than Spore but nothing groundbreaking. That's perfect for me. SupCom wasn't graphically fancy game. It had very nice graphics but it wasn't as fancy as older Earth 2160 but who cares. SupCom (and FA) are excellent games (excellent gameplay) and have awesome multiplayer. That's way more important than graphics. If there are developers like Über ent. that have quite limited funding, then I would prefer the money to go into SupCom/FA or TA like gameplay than into graphics. Of course I like excellent graphics, but I preffer gameplay anyway.

I just want to have some cool water like in SupCom/FA with similar shader effects.

Keep in mind a lot of the work in the graphics engine is how to render a LOT of units. Tradeoffs have to be made against other things.

Hey Guys,

Long time reader, first time poster

While advanced lighting effects would be nice I don't think Global Illumination is very well suited to PA and in fact most strategy games in general. Simulating indirect light sources is best suited for more realistic less stylised games. Like it's been said. "We're not aiming for realism, we're aiming for awesome!". From the offset of the first concept video PA has been pitched as a very stylised RTS. Having said that thought that's not to say the engine won't support modern tech. Having the ability for a large number of light sources though, that would be nice!

Tessellation might be a nice touch for those with Direct X 11 but the only place I would really see that as adding to the game in a big way is the terrain. Adding the detail of tessellation though might subtract from the overall artistic goal. I'd be more impressed if volumetric smoke from flaming wrecks was influenced from shock waves from explosions

Anyhoo that's my 2 cents chaps.

Please feel free to disagree or build upon what i've said.

Onto 2 million!!!!

You're... you're so polite.

I like you.

One of the reasons I tend to like UK-English better than American-English

but yeah Global Illum will be quite taxing upon the hardware if Realtime, if Baked not so much, but with dynamic terrain or at least objects you can place that would ought to change the lighting/shadowing, there is not really a point.

I also really liked the cartoony polygonal(like) Explosions/Fire/Smoke in the trailer. I don't know exactly if those will be more or less efficient than volumetric smoke, but cooler than normal flat particle smoke (which clips the terrain )

Now that you remind me of the explosion graphics in the video... I thought that when the bots died in the firefight, they made way too big explosions.
Why is this bad, then? For gameplay. I want that when something explodes it harms both friend and foe nearby, but I don't want tightly packed armies chainsploding as a common occurence. Therefor it needs to be toned down.

It's just a previs man! You can't nitpick stuff from the video