3 questions to the graphics in the game

[tantrus332]

1. Why is there no anti-aliasing in the game? Personally, I always did not like bad antialiasing or lack of it. This kills the atmosphere of the game and immersion in the game world. I think that anti-aliasing at the level of 8 MSAA will be enough.

Spoiler

2. Where is the texture filtering? What happened to his face?

Spoiler

3. Where is the grass? Grass can fill empty spaces and slightly mask bad soil textures, etc. For example, a screenshot from Age of Empires 3.

Spoiler

P.S: With a strong increase, you can make a soft blur, for example, in Simcity 2013 and Cities: Skylines.

P.P.S: If someone does not like or lags behind, then it's just additional sliders in the settings that you can turn off.

[Stan`]

Hello @tantrus332 and welcome to the forums.

Thanks for the feedback on textures and post processing filters. To answer your question in a simple way : Why is there no texture filtering and antialiasing ? Because nobody coded it in the 17 years this game have been in developpment. There has been attempts by external contributors such as @niektb and myself to do so, but we didn't end up with something usable so it was not included in the game.

So if you want anti aliasing you can code it yourself or wait till someone finish https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/3640 so it will be easier to do it.

Keep in mind everything done here is on somebody's free time, and that we use a homemade graphical engine.

About grass, the main concern is a performance issue, because in order to have such a result, mappers would have to add more than 10 000 new actors on maps, which would prevent most of our players to play with a good framerate. And this kind of entities can not be switched on or off. Unless someone codes an option to do so, which would affect gameplay.

Hope I helped you understand why it's not done at the moment, and why we I can't give you a precise idea on when or whether it will be done.

 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Texture filtering and antialiasing are easily controlled with your graphics card's driver software until such things are coded for the game. 

[Sundiata]

So there is no way to add grass, to cover bad/lacking soil textures, without performance issues? I've also always thought that a significant amount of grass (and other ground cover/shrubs) would solve those poor ground textures…

By the way, look at those beautiful rolling hills in AOE III! Why are maps with a flat surface still made in 0AD? Even the flattest maps shouldn't be entirely flat, it kills immersiveness. I also think that stand alone cliffs tend to look horrible in game, especially those cliffs with an inaccessible top, that rise from a 100% flat surrounding, with horrendously stretched textures, and you can't even build a wall against it without serious headaches, essentially making them a useless annoyance on the map. 

There is a MUCH higher degree of realism already achievable in Atlas than many of the current maps hint at (with the exception of Rouen and that Alpine one)

Whatever happened to @Leroy30, who was busy creating the most beautiful map yet, a few years ago..?

Spoiler

 

I believe any other direction than this would be selling 0AD short of it's true potential… 

I know, performance issues….… But maybe it's high time for another kickstarter to pay some professional coders to fix lag and pathfinding once and for all, even if it means rewriting Pyrogenesis...  

 

[vladislavbelov]

On 02.07.2017 at 5:24 PM, stanislas69 said:

About grass, the main concern is a performance issue, because in order to have such a result, mappers would have to add more than 10 000 new actors on maps, which would prevent most of our players to play with a good framerate. And this kind of entities can not be switched on or off. Unless someone codes an option to do so, which would affect gameplay.

 

52 minutes ago, Sundiata said:

So there is no way to add grass, to cover bad/lacking soil textures, without performance issues? I've also always thought that a significant amount of grass (and other ground cover/shrubs) would solve those poor ground textures…

Grass should be added without actors, and we'll reach best performance if we add it to terrain. Add grass like painting by brushes (i.e. other 3D engines). It'll save time of artists and give some things to optimize rendering and beautiful features (like color of grass will depend on terrain textures).

 

52 minutes ago, Sundiata said:

I know, performance issues….… But maybe it's high time for another kickstarter to pay some professional coders to fix lag and pathfinding once and for all, even if it means rewriting Pyrogenesis...  

I couldn't say that we have such non-professionals and they couldn't do something better. Main (and probably only) problems are time and motivation. Also I'm sure that even payed coders couldn't fix some issues fast (it's not only a problem to write, also need to have an idea how to write).

Rewriting of Pyrogenesis isn't a good idea, because it has a good architecture enough. Issues are only in some components of it. And it could be fixed.

 

I want to optimize GUI (I have some drafts, we talked with @wraitii about it) and terrain rendering, as it's the one of my science works. @Yves has a OpenGL4 branch (which could really help with rendering performance, i.e. grass), it's not really active, but I believe we will add it at sometime.

Edited July 4, 2017 by vladislavbelov

[Sundiata]

Interesting… anyway, I wasn't saying that the team is so unprofessional they need to outsource coding, but rather, we need to pay some people (and they may very well be part of the team already, which would probably be better anyway), so that they can spend all of their time on this project, instead of just their spare time.

[Stan`]

Quote

Grass should be added without actors, and we'll reach best performance if we add it to terrain. Add grass like painting by brushes (i.e. other 3D engines). It'll save time of artists and give some things to optimize rendering and beautiful features (like color of grass will depend on terrain textures

I agree.

There is a ticket about brushes in atlas. 

 

@Sundiata Paid development was thought of first with Philipp (Ykkrosh) and then with @elexis. I guess the later can explain more in depth why it wasn't done

[Siramods]

On 7/2/2017 at 4:24 PM, stanislas69 said:

Thanks for the feedback on textures and post processing filters. To answer your question in a simple way : Why is there no texture filtering and antialiasing ? Because nobody coded it in the 17 years this game have been in developpment. There has been attempts by external contributors such as @niektb and myself to do so, but we didn't end up with something usable so it was not included in the game.

So if you want anti aliasing you can code it yourself or wait till someone finish https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/3640 so it will be easier to do it.

Just posted a possible solution to this here: 

hope it helps.

[Loki1950]

So far only useful under Windows no support for the other two platforms we support Linux and OSX so only a limited solution.

Enjoy the Choice

[aeonios]

>Why no AA

I was working towards that months ago then the project came to a screeching halt because something something EUSSR totalitarian thought police laws.

>Texture filtering

That's not something I've given much thought to but it shouldn't be all that difficult to implement. I think it's just a minor draw option so it should be possible to enable it centrally.

>Grass

There is grass, but applying it to maps is a pain. There are some problems with grass, some artistic in nature and some due to performance. Eventually we'll have an openGL 3.3 option with drawinstanced which should take care of the majority of gfx performance issues. The art thing is actually more of a pain because if you place grass on the side of a hill part of it will be floating off the ground which just looks awful. Getting even grass coverage is another challenge, but fixing that requires first fixing the floating grass issue, because it makes shadows (and low angle cinematic shots) look bad and grass looks really bad without shadows.

[Guest]

Grass (or any other actor for that matter) should not even be simulation entities IMO. They should be handled in the same way as decals.

[Stan`]

9 hours ago, aeonios said:

There is grass, but applying it to maps is a pain. There are some problems with grass, some artistic in nature and some due to performance. Eventually we'll have an openGL 3.3 option with drawinstanced which should take care of the majority of gfx performance issues. The art thing is actually more of a pain because if you place grass on the side of a hill part of it will be floating off the ground which just looks awful. Getting even grass coverage is another challenge, but fixing that requires first fixing the floating grass issue, because it makes shadows (and low angle cinematic shots) look bad and grass looks really bad without shadows.

If we have instancing and the performance becomes acceptable, what could be done, as a simple yet very boring task is to split every grass patch into little grass tufts, and use the drop propping mechanism currently in the game to automatically adapt to the ground. If the tufts are small enough, terrain won't be an issue anymore. Currently that mechanism is not efficient because it implies a lot of draw calls.

9 hours ago, aeonios said:

I was working towards that months ago then the project came to a screeching halt because something something EUSSR totalitarian thought police laws.

I guess your time is now limited, but if you still have some feel free to submit more patches. We hope to be giving a talk in Brussels about computer graphics this year. Having your code might make it more convincing.

Also, That period of doubt is coming to an end. Mac now has working builds, Slackware seems to have patched itself up, Fedora will be fine, and we are getting RC ready, which means might finally be able to get to that review queue.

[aeonios]

7 hours ago, stanislas69 said:

If we have instancing and the performance becomes acceptable, what could be done, as a simple yet very boring task is to split every grass patch into little grass tufts, and use the drop propping mechanism currently in the game to automatically adapt to the ground. If the tufts are small enough, terrain won't be an issue anymore. Currently that mechanism is not efficient because it implies a lot of draw calls.

I didn't know that was a thing. If we could split grass into individual leaf pairs it would look a lot better in a lot of ways, since the current strip grass creates ugly strip shadows. This could be pretty epic.

7 hours ago, stanislas69 said:

I guess your time is now limited, but if you still have some feel free to submit more patches. We hope to be giving a talk in Brussels about computer graphics this year. Having your code might make it more convincing.

Also, That period of doubt is coming to an end. Mac now has working builds, Slackware seems to have patched itself up, Fedora will be fine, and we are getting RC ready, which means might finally be able to get to that review queue.

I'll see what I can do. The current patch doesn't need that much work. An issue I'm running into repeatedly now though is that the graphics options panel simply doesn't provide enough space to display all the options. I'm going to have to merge the water reflections and refractions options into one just to be able to fit the GLSL option back in, and then there still won't be room for the AA or texture filtering options. What's this presentation/conference about anyway?

[Stan`]

5 hours ago, aeonios said:

What's this presentation/conference about anyway?

Will be up to @vladislavbelov

About the option menu maybe it's time to use sliders in there

[vladislavbelov]

7 hours ago, aeonios said:

An issue I'm running into repeatedly now though is that the graphics options panel simply doesn't provide enough space to display all the options.

I can suggest to add a new tab (like "Advanced Graphics"), if we can't increase the size of options window.

7 hours ago, aeonios said:

What's this presentation/conference about anyway?

2 hours ago, stanislas69 said:

Will be up to @vladislavbelov

If it was accepted, it'll be mostly about low level problems, like Intel crashes, backward compatibility. Because the Graphics Room is more low level oriented.

[FeXoR]

On 12/11/2018 at 11:08 AM, vladislavbelov said:

[...] the graphics options panel simply doesn't provide enough space to display all the options.

 

On 12/11/2018 at 11:08 AM, vladislavbelov said:

I can suggest to add a new tab

There's also the concept of scrollbars

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

6 hours ago, FeXoR said:

 

There's also the concept of scrollbars

Wasn't there a problem with scrollbars not working with widgets and options or somesuch. Probably not remembering right. It's the reason that we don't just have a scrolling game setup options panel instead of the weird sliding menus. 

Edited December 14, 2018 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[FeXoR]

Yes, I also have in mind they where not implemented at first but thought they where added at some point (at least they where mentioned as planned). Maybe just my wishful thinking

[Imarok]

Maybe we should just try it xD