Diablo III - It's official

That is absolutely not true. Even the Blur guys would instantly agree that there's an order of magnitude difference between their work and Blizzards. For a start there's absolutely no mocap in SC2, everything is manually animated. Then there's the detail, the polish, the artistic values, it's worlds apart.

The entire intro movie of putting together Tychus and his armor is something that neither Blur nor we could really to do today, 3 years after it's been published. It's so complex even Blizzard was barely able to do it, and it took a studio like ILM to match it in Iron Man 1.


You must understand the difference between the approach of Blizzard and that of Blur or us.

We need to deliver 2-4 minutes of stuff in 3-5 months, so we spent years on developing tools and workflows to be able to work as fast as we can. We re-use anything we can (Blur in particular must have a huge model and texture library after 15 years and at least 70-80 projects), we cheat whenever we can, we always take the easy road.

Blizzard on the other hand spends time to get every tiny little detail completely perfect (within their aesthetics of course) and can afford to, having practically no budgetary limits. And it's not just the completely insane complexity of that armor which has more details then all the characters from the SW cinematics put together... Just look at the way the toes or the belly of Tychus moves in that movie, the way the gas freezes on top of the armor when the cables are pulled out, or just how his cigar lights up in the darkness. It's something we would love to add but have no time to do and it does make a difference too. I'm sure Blizzard's movies cost at least 10 times as much money to make per minute as the Blur ones.



The intro took an entire year, although they weren't 100 people back then. They've replaced their entire animation and rendering pipeline from Max/Brazil to Maya/Renderman since then, hired a lot of movie VFX guys, and still it took them 3 years time to do the remaining 3 movies plus the Lich King movie and the Diablo 3 trailer.



More, but at a far inferior quality. Most of Square's stuff boils down to good mocap, interesting character and prop/environment design, but they don't do too complex things with them. FFXIII versus seems to be a bit different... but then again, we don't know how much money they sink into their CGI. It definitely costs more then Blur's stuff.



You are wrong, and it's based on more then a simple guess.

Well, that's why I said correct me if I'm wrong. I had no idea Blizzard's stuff was this complex.

This level of complexity makes one issue I have with the Star Craft II CGI all the more puzzling, though: the movies are compressed all the way to hell and back. The final cinematic in particular is just riddled with artifacts. Why go through such lengths and then refuse to use a couple more gigabytes of storage space which is basically free?
 
It doesn't look like there was any space left on that DVD. After all it has all the content for a regular 3D RTS game, and the entire frontend part too, which pretty much beats any other game's detail on characters and vehicles by about a factor of 5.

But I do agree that it's a damn shame to see all those movies compressed that much.
(I really hate it when gametrailers does it to our stuff, too)
 
Well, gametrailers of course has to deal with tons of traffic (still sucks, but it's somewhat understandable), but adding a second dvd (that cost next to nothing) for such an anticipated game? A game that costs 10 bucks more than your usual PC release no less? - Seriously, how cheap can you get?.
 
Sigfried,
I suspect the percentage of actual Starcraft players who become annoyed by the level of compression in the movies is pretty much undetectable, thus negating the need for a second disc just for the movies.

In any case, if you bought the Collector's Edition, you received an extra disc with the cinematics at (potentially - I haven't looked at mine yet) full DVD bitrate. This is not a biggie IMO...
 
The cinematics are in HD, so the DVD format means an IQ loss through the low resolution, too.
 
Sigfried,
I suspect the percentage of actual Starcraft players who become annoyed by the level of compression in the movies is pretty much undetectable, thus negating the need for a second disc just for the movies.

And most SCII players probably don't realize the exceptional quality of the renderings either (apparently I didn't, and I really appreciate this sort of stuff), yet still Blizzard put them. If I was an artist on Blizzard's CGI team I would be pretty damn pissed to see my hard work being compromised by something as easily avoidable as bandwidth limitation.
 
Pretty sure they are. I didn't notice any differences at least (bought the German version but wanted to play the game in English so I downloaded the English language client)
 
Are the cutscenes in the DD version the same quality as the disk version?

Yes, I'm amazed they didn't at least give an option to grab a less compressed version. But even with the compression artifacts, it's still a thing of beauty to behold. As Laa-Yosh has said, the amount of attention that Blizzard spends on even the smallest of details is testament to their love of CG. And one of the reasons I regard them very highly, even if I don't like the rainbow-brite/my little pony art direction they are going in. :p

Yes, I'm a CG whore. :)

Regards,
SB
 
Is there even a tiny hint of a release date yet? Or is, shockhorror, Duke Nukem actually gonna come out first.

Serios, my world got turned upside down by that one.
 
Direct X 11??!!?!? :(

I'd bet on SM2.0 support before DX10+. Who knows, even in 2011 there might still be 1 PC gamer still running an X800, and that 1 sale is very valuable to Blizz. They must ensure the maximum possible audience you know :yep2:
 
But only 2x MSAA because Blizzard are like that.



DX11 is the future B_E_L_I_E_V_E!

Of course, I've been using 8xMSAA in WOW since I got a 4870, and SM3.0 support since late 2008(at the latest), so I'm pretty sure Diablo3 will have that.

In semi-related news:
"Shortly before the release of Cataclysm a patch will be released in which PowerPC processor based Macs will no longer be supported. This update indicates the removal of PowerPC support from World of Warcraft. Attempting to run the game after the update will bring up a message stating the hardware is no longer supported, and the game will not run."

When that was stated, someone of course asked about other games:
"SC2 is Intel only and Diablo 3 will also be Intel only."

So Blizzard does know when to (eventually) cut the cord...
 
Of course, I've been using 8xMSAA in WOW since I got a 4870, and SM3.0 support since late 2008(at the latest), so I'm pretty sure Diablo3 will have that.

In semi-related news:
"Shortly before the release of Cataclysm a patch will be released in which PowerPC processor based Macs will no longer be supported. This update indicates the removal of PowerPC support from World of Warcraft. Attempting to run the game after the update will bring up a message stating the hardware is no longer supported, and the game will not run."

When that was stated, someone of course asked about other games:
"SC2 is Intel only and Diablo 3 will also be Intel only."

So Blizzard does know when to (eventually) cut the cord...

So maybe we'll see SM2.0 support cut next year? *HOPES!*
 
Unlikely, but there's the extremely small possibility of them coding directly to Dx11 with Dx10.1, Dx10 and Dx9 feature levels. Thus they only have to code for Dx11 and only Dx10.1/10/9 features will be enabled for cards of those levels.

But, extremely unlikely considering when D3 started developement. More likely is a possible dual Dx9/Dx11 (with Dx10 feature level).

Regards,
SB
 
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