Graphical comparison to todays RTSes

[Gabbe]

Ok, so when looking at Glest, i see so much potential, and working with it is so fun. Also I have already noted that the graphical limitations are very big, though, gameplay is pretty unique and awesome. In this thread, I`ll compare Glest with other RTS games at higher graphical level than Glest.

While something to take note of is texture, yes, the textures currently used in Magitech is highly optimized, looking at a game released some years ago, youll see a heavy difference;

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[img]http://www.aramation.com/games/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/image.png[/img]

So what does make this difference? The first thing i think of is different maps of textures, having normal maps can make such a huge difference. Too illustrate, i`ve found a image on google:


As you can see, normal mapping ads so much detail so a rather simple game model, now, have this model with other maps aswell and it would resuslt in stunning graphical improvement for glest.
Now,  while FPSes have taken the lead in graphics, RTSes can still outgun them, since RTS games doesnt require a lot of detail to textures, it can get equal results with less detail. Now how does that help? It gives you less time to work, and get more eye-candy for less work.

Now lets see a "Archmage" without normal mapping;



Now you can say "Wow, thats a heavilly optimized model!" but why not add Normalmapping? See here for results;

Imagecoming.com

edit:  Lot of information about OpenGL Mapping;

http://www.3dkingdoms.com/tutorial.htm

[ElimiNator]

We were already talking about this, but it will be a big step and take lots of time so we are going to do the more important stuff first.

[wciow]

Normal maps are ancient history in terms of cutting edge 3D graphics, whilst still useful and routinely used they now more of a default than some magical graphical cure-all. I suspect what really makes the first picture look more impressive is two things.

1. Scale, your pictures show a wide vista shot for the first game and a very close in top down shot for Glest, whilst this avoids showing Glest's ugly black cut off and lack of fogging it isn't a good comparison.

2. Lighting, this is what I suspect makes a huge difference to the two pictures, the lighting model in the first picture is way in advance of Glest's simple rendering and almost total lack of dynamic lighting. For an example of what I mean go look at the other big free RTS games.
.
Warzone 2100: This game was made commercially over a decade ago and shows how far things have come, basically, no lighting at all from what I remember.

Glest: basic day/night cycle, some shadows and small number of dynamic lights on units.

Spring: Slightly better than Glest (from a player POV, I'm not a coder so I don't know about the engine).

0AD: Try out the new beta of this, Their models/textures are well done but comparably (or even less) detailed than Glest, what makes them look awesome is the scale, good use of textures/palette and most importantly lighting. Play with the sandbox a bit to see what i mean!

[Omega]

0AD: Try out the new beta of this, Their models/textures are well done but comparably (or even less) detailed than Glest, what makes them look awesome is the scale, good use of textures/palette and most importantly lighting. Play with the sandbox a bit to see what i mean!

Full agreement. I think the lighting, water, and shadows make a HUGE difference. In fact, much of the realism depends on the lighting, etc;

[Gabbe]

Hmm, I have to agree, lighting is maybe the deciding factor, 0.AD is damn awesome graphics from my view, then again, my personal prefereance from lighting would be not to change the particle lighting, it sounds weird but i love them now, they look so, noobish, yet totally full of pro and it gives such a wonderfull felling looking at it

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[img]http://www.spring1944.org/images/screens/32.jpg[/img] SPRING VS 0.A.D

(click to show/hide)

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[img]http://wildfiregames.com/0ad/album_image.php?pic_id=12436[/img]

Id say 0.a.d is more impresive. graphics wise

Shit the pic is huge sorry, put them in spoilers..

[John.d.h]

Indeed, without better lighting, normal maps wouldn't make much (if any) difference.

[Psychedelic_hands]

 A skybox would also make Glest look awesome....

[Ishmaru]

A skybox would also make Glest look awesome....

Agreed! The black background really does not work. Or at least a sphere with a sky texture on it would be a large improvement.

Indeed, without better lighting, normal maps wouldn't make much (if any) difference.

True plus units would be so small that the normal map bump effect would not be noticeable. What would be more noticeable would be bloom effects on metallic objects, windows, water and ice. Normal maps work better for more closer to camera action such as FPS. Many Commercial RTS (Comand and Conquer 3, Red alert 3, Age of Empires 3) use bloom effects.

BTW you may already know this but, a tip for creating better lighting in tileset XMLs is to NOT use white light (EX:<sun-light red="1" green="1" blue="1" /> )It looks to plain and boring, which is why the glest screen shot above looks bad . To make lighting a bit better: Make the lighting off white and add a slight fog (ex: density ="0.02" unless you really want dense fog) to accent the lighting. The color of the light should be would vary depending on the mood you want to bring, but typical Day time should be warmer so at a little bit more red while night would be more blue. Cold would have more blue, hot would have more orange/yellow. The fog color should be similar to the color of the daylight. I would play around with the textures of the scenery to accent the light more. (ex: deserts add a bit more yellow/orange) With a bit of effort you can create an environment that is much better lit than with the standard white glest lighting. A good example is the darkforest which has lighting that is a bit more green which creates a eerie swamp effect. Hope this helps!

[-Archmage-]

Quote from: Psychedelic_hands on October 28, 2010, 03:36:22
A skybox would also make Glest look awesome....
Agreed! The black background really does not work. Or at least a sphere with a sky texture on it would be a large improvement.

From the default view in Glest you cannot see the sky, or where it would be. If you're going to add a skybox for when people rotate their view up, you might as well add normal mapping...

[titi]

I think you all did not realize the main reason why 0AD looks so much better than glest!
Its the terrain texture! This is something we should reallly work on. The current 64x64 bit textures are such a big limit, you cannot do any more with this. Things like my new tileset Fernland are really the limit of this.

We need a new terrain splatting system! I already have ideas for it, its just .... time ....

update:
Normal maps might be cool but:
1. someone has to make them!
2. you will not see a big difference in the normal game view, because the models are so small.

This is (maybe) different for terrain textures which are big .....

Regarding textures in general we already made a huge step forward, because we now support compressed textures like jpg/png and we will see the use of texture compression in the gfx cards too with the next MG version! So technically there are new possibilities, whats missing now is the data :-) .

Another thing is better looking water. But for this we need a skybox too! Otherwise the reflections would look strange :-) .
But all people who ask for new graphical improvements should keep in mind that Intel graphics cards or things like this will not be able to handle much more than we have! And I think many people here use low end gfx cards!

[Gabbe]

I think that mid end does not cost a lot 
There are plugins for Gimp that automatically makes you a normal map.
I think you certainly see difference in "The settlers 6" even though, there y'all's camera is further away.
For terrain textures; i think normal maps would have such a great impact on the visuals; but to make it fit game models; i think thåt you must have normal maps for these too, atleast buildings would benefit.
In some games, i turn "Textures" setting down to medium and the normal maps disapear; This is also in water gun fight, i dont know if it will turn out of sync, but i dont think so when it has no impact on gameplay.

 Good points Titi

[titi]

The seddler6 shot also shows that they must have a special mapping system ( if they have one )
Also it might look cool, I think its much better to have a simple way to create maps like we have in glest now! By this we have tons of maps and with this a lot of fun to play

[Gabbe]

hmm what maps; im confused 

Do you mean that we would have to 3d model our maps or do you mean that it would be hard to make normal maps? so confused

[Zoythrus]

something that Spring does is allow you to move the camera to a point where you can look up at the sky. why cant we do this with Glest? i mean, in Spring, you can zoom in VERY far, same with zooming out (if you cant see the units any more, small icons appear to represent them)

[titi]

always the same reply for this:

1. It will cause serious performance trouble
2. it will change the whole gameplay. Its not Spring, its glest and i like it 

[Zoythrus]

always the same reply for this:

1. It will cause serious performance trouble
2. it will change the whole gameplay. Its not Spring, its glest and i like it 

well, it may not be Spring, but they do have some good ideas.  i.e. the multiplayer lobby and the ability to set multiple weapon offsets.

[silnarm]

Hailstone has added some experimental shader code to GAE, and made normal maps for the castle, defence tower and mage tower.  I wasn't expecting to see a massive difference, but I think the castle definitely looks better, and this might be worthwhile for buildings (I certainly wouldn't bother for the smaller mobile units though).

No word yet on how he made the normal maps... Presumably he found some cool tool to do it from the diffuse texture ? ?

If making the normal maps isn't too difficult, I think this would definately be worthwhile (for big buildings).

[Psychedelic_hands]

Hmmm, it is noticeable.

But wouldn't it improve ground textures even more?

[John.d.h]

But wouldn't it improve ground textures even more?

My intuition says "tremendously".

[Omega]

For ground textures, I propose a two step approach that I've successfully tried before. There's two textures, one is the terrain's colors, which, in the below example, is one large image stretched in a very large area. The next is the "detail map", a tiled texture that adds "details", in this case, pebbles. This example shows what I mean. This is the terrain rendering example from Irrlitch, and the top image is with the detail map, while the bottom is without it.

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[img]http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/8303/samplebz.jpg[/img]

[URL=http://img574.imageshack.us/i/detailmap3.jpg/][IMG]http://img574.imageshack.us/img574/4303/detailmap3.th.jpg[/img][/URL]The Detail Map used (512x512)

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[URL=http://img220.imageshack.us/i/terraintexture.jpg/][IMG]http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/290/terraintexture.th.jpg[/img][/URL]The base texture used (1024x1024)

[Gabbe]

If making the normal maps isn't too difficult, I think this would definately be worthwhile (for big buildings).

'

Yes there is a downloadable plugin for GIMP that automatically makes normal maps from your diffuse texture, of course, you could model a high polygonal model and then bake a normal map, but that would be too hard i think, so GIMPs plugin is the way to go.

http://registry.gimp.org/node/69

EDIT: I would suggest having a high number on the parameters, it increases depthfield, but then again, not too much or it`ll look fake.

[Psychedelic_hands]

Why stop at normal maps? Why not Glow Maps or Specular Maps ?

[wciow]

I vote for specular maps as well, but lets not run before we can walk.

[Psychedelic_hands]

If making the normal maps isn't too difficult, I think this would definately be worthwhile (for big buildings).

I'm not too sure how easy Gabbe's Gimp tool is. But I've found one for photoshop which is incredibly easy to use. You could make one in less than a minute.

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/photoshop_dds_plugins.html#downloads

Now I just have to figure out how to put it on my model :S

[Gabbe]

Simple steps:

Map tab
Normal map
Adjust parameters
Done

GIMP is free and most use it around here, thats why i suggested it

EDIT: and ANIMATED specular maps would be awesome, reflections and stuff but yeah no run before we can stand up properly.