Tessellation

Do you guys consider implementing tessellation? After all opengl has seperate tessellation shaders since version 4.0 (2010) and therefore the last few graphiccard generations support it. I think at least the terrain could take great advantage of this technology.

For those who don't know what tessellation does: Put simply, the graphicscard splits up one triangle into several, generating additional vertices which can be manipulated (for example by the normal map). This is much faster than just simply to give the graphicscard a high poly model to render, because the additional vertices of a high poly model don't have to be transferred to the graphicscard.
In my opinion its a great tool to enhance the graphic detail without ruining the game's performance because its very scaleable.
tl;rd: tessellation makes stuff pretty



Demo (its dx11, but it works the same way)

...wow...

excuse me while i go get a mop to clean up my drool

I'm all for the use of graphics techniques like tesselation, but don't forget that PA will need to be able to support hardware that can't handle it too, so it should be optional.

One thing to be aware of is that at the moment, many of the graphics cards that support tesselation don't have drivers that support it on Linux (or many of the OpenGL 4.x options). Now that Linux support by graphics card manufacturers is picking up, especially due to the impetus provided by Valve's foray into Linux, we just may see these features implemented just fine by the time PA is released next summer. (I also have high hopes for the open drivers of AMD's HD 8000 series, which are apparently being developed alongside the Windows drivers.) That said, the engine shouldn't be so dependent on high end graphics technologies that it won't run on a decent range of graphics cards, across any platform.

WANT! I havent realy looked the tech up in detail, but if i understand it correctly, PA could potentialy look amazing using this without much of a performance hit.

Isnt PA supposed to go for rather simple graphics?

Sigh, yea, so we have been told. (Well a simple "style" atleast).

I got the impression that the simple art style was to save development time and to allow the game to run on lower end machines (or to render a ridiculous amount of robots on high end machines)

So as far as dev time goes, I am pretty sure that tessellation is just a rendering mode you turn on, or just a quick function call after your vertex shaders load. Then your graphics card subdivides all the triangles and repaints the textures on it's own. I could be wrong, and honestly I am not sure how Direct X handles this.

And as far as frame rate goes, I did see one neat trick where tessellation would turn up or down based on the model's distance from the camera. So if you zoomed in on something it would tessellate more than something far away.

And yeah if Open GL 4 is going to be an issue on Linux, then we may not be able to do this at all.

Linux is no problem. Anyone with Linux, and the want to be able to play games, can achieve this easily enough. Macs are where the problem is at.

The units yes. I wonder how viable this would be for terrain. Then again, it might look strange if you have super HD terrain and stylized units.

Maybe this could be a thing for an expansion or DLC if PA sells well. Wouldn't be the first game to receive a HD polish later on.

only because something is stylized, why shouldnt it have neat surfaces, that are not only flat.

The only time I've knowingly seen tesselation in action (in the Unigine Heaven DX11 Benchmark) it did look lovely, but the performance hit was pretty extreme. I don't have the best graphics card (Asus EAH6850 running marginally OCed), but at the highest setting it was halving the frame rate or worse.

But then if it's optional and it doesn't require too much dev time then might as well have it as option. To this day I still don't have anti-aliasing turned on in FA.

I like units that remember me of lego-bricks. Reminds me of the time I threw around lego-bricks in the real world instead of virtual polygons in virtual worlds.
Apart from that if it is simple to put tessellation in, I dont see a reason why not. However I think the priority should be on different things, so it would be totally fine if it Tessellation is a post-release-patch.

Tessellation requires to much cpu+gpu power to implement it into PA if we like to give the low-end players a chance to play.

Tesselation is also more for organic shapes, not robots. Especially robots with the art style of PA.

It could be a feature, but I do not think it's a good thing to spend money on. I'd rather they spent it on extra moddability or something.

It's good for a bunch of different things.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k7oaz8mWug

I believe it also works like a Level of Detail algorithm - namely, you feed the card the lower poly model, and it decides if it's powerful enough (or close enough to the camera) to make it worth tesselating.

The major consideration is that you'd have to make your normal maps / bump maps etc to be one level more detailed - which is, to my limited knowledge, simply a matter of exporting the source high-res textures to the correct level.

Whether it would be useful or not would, of course, be dependent on what Neutrino is cooking up for us.

Well, that really depends on if the Linux drivers support it. Unless you can write your own graphics drivers for Linux, in which case many people would be interested in your source code . . .

That said, I may be incorrect after all. The proprietary drivers may support OpenGL 4.x, as they overwrite some of the Mesa libraries when installed. (Mesa is the OpenGL implementation for Linux.) Still, out of interest for performance, tessellation should still be optional.

Exactly this ^^

If tessellation gets implemented, it should of course be optional. All graphiccards that would support opengl 4.0 (and therefore tessellation):
Nvidia GeForce 400 series, Nvidia GeForce 500 series, ATI Radeon HD 5000 series, AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series, AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series

For example my Radeon 4850 would be to old ):

Afaik does tessellation stand very much on its own and doesn't need much changes "around" it, so it should be fairly easy to implement it with an update later too.

The stylized units could benefit from tessellation, since they will most likely have details in a normal map, which will not be in the model itself. Tessellation could create these details in the 3d model from the normal map. Watch the demo video!

You should have a look at Mobile Frame Zero if you want to get back to throwing around lego blocks