Great next generation graphics!!!!!

I am not seeing those scenes anywhere in the screenshots area,the game looks amazing, but nothing like the shots posted above..

I signed up for the beta test, looks like it will be an awesome MMORPG.

 

They are. Considering they are using shadowmaps, I don't see why they wouldn't. In any case, I can clearly see them casting shadows.

 

I think you're confused, those screenshots aren't from Dragon Empires. Ingenu was just saying he linked to them previously in the thread that was originally about DE.

 

Yeepe deepee yeah.
Indeed, they are not Dragon Empires shots.

 

I have to agree with colourless, it's not a global illumination model. Further more, I'm not sure how accurate the lighting is either, in the picture with the trolls or whatever, they guy behind the flame doesn't seem to be getting much of the light loving, eh?

 

I see, we are still trying to find out what game those shots are for.

 

The devs are www.vtales.com

There's no set title yet, AFAIK.
They are short on money, and looking for a publisher, AFAIK.

 

The FSAA ON shot looks like a gaussian blur filter was applied.

That level of detail I seriously doubt a GF4 or Radeon 9700 Pro would run acceptably.. it all looks pre-rendered to me. I'm major skeptical on this one.

 

prerendering came to mind for me as well.

 

Why is it so hard to believe they're realtime rendered? 3DMark2001 had a dragon similar to those, in a similar town setting, and that was realtime. There has been a cathedral demo with geometry and lighting similar to their cathedral that is over 2 years old now, and ran on DX7 hardware. Just because there's a large ammount of geometry doesn't mean it has to be pre-rendered. I don't know offhand what the practical triangle rate of GF4's are (4600 can theoretically get 136 MVertices/sec), but I wouldn't be suprised if they could handle 1M polygon scenes at playable framerates for an RPG, and you can pack in a lot of detail with a million polygons to play with (especially if you have a very efficient PVS so you can have that many actually visible at any given time). Yann already admitted they're geometry limited, so things like enabling FSAA doesn't affect performance on newer cards. He also said the majority of the world is static, which makes me think they do have a very good PVS system in place, so they can keep the visible polygon counts high. I'm also guessing they optimize it for the z-buffer tricks on newer cards, using front-to-back sorting and such.

 

Excuse my stupidity, but how did you conclude that they are short on money ? Just because they doesn't have a title yet ?

 

Those screenies kinda reek of "Shenmue" syndrome to me... With any graphics engine, you can always come up with 1 or 2 screenshots that show off the best-looking possible case for the graphics engine, and render them at super-high resolution with high AA/AF. That doesn't mean the game will look anything like that.

Honestly, the lighting looks like crap. The flames don't seem to light the monsters properly, and the shadowmaps are excessively soft... while that may be great for outdoor / brightly lit scenes, it will look a lot worse for dynamic lighting, as seen in the "ogres/torches" scene. The only remarkable thing about the graphics engine is the disgusting amount of texture detail involved... they're probably using multiple layers of detail textures.

I'd be willing to believe the framerate never dips below 40 FPS, assuming they are talking about lower resolutions and no AF... in which case, the shots would look totally different; since the ultra high detail textures wouldn't be as visible.

I think it's highly unlikely that next-gen consoles will have graphics like this. The 640*480 resolution and limited memory systems of a console make it difficult to make things look good simply by using more textures. The advantage of consoles over PC is in shaders, and I don't see much usage of that in these screenshots; instead, it banks totally on the traditional PC advantage of high resolutions and texture detail. Instead of going for ultra-high texture detail, next-gen console games are more likely to be about superior lighting effects; we'll be talking about sub-surface scattering, correct soft shadows, correct ambient lighting, caustics and light bleeding. (not sure when if any of these will really be possible... but you never know)

 

Why do you try to relate two things which are not ?
I just said what I knew, in case anyone would be interested, that's all.

 

Now, I know why I didn't started a thread about it.
Some of you simply don't show enough respect for the work of others.

 

I try because you were supposed to tell us where did you get that information, in case you didn't want that any of us to be curious, and ask about the source of it You just confessed this...

 

BoddoZerg:

> and render them at super-high resolution with high AA/AF

Yes, but it still looks impressive in the non-AA shot.

> Honestly, the lighting looks like crap.

You are nuts.

> The flames don't seem to light the monsters properly

First of all, this is work in progress. Secondly, they do light the monsters. Could it be done better... probably. But this is still supposed to be realtime engine running on current hardware. Pretty damn impressive. There's also a very bright light source placed outside the visible area.

> and the shadowmaps are excessively soft

If anything they are too sharp compared to real life. Still impressive though and much better than stencil volumes. The size of the maps do have me wondering though. That and the insane amount of polys.