Knock that one out over lunch break? How long do they give you for lunch over at Epic?Quote:
Originally Posted by Xortag
;)
The difference is crazy! Looks great and thank you.
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Knock that one out over lunch break? How long do they give you for lunch over at Epic?Quote:
Originally Posted by Xortag
;)
The difference is crazy! Looks great and thank you.
👍 glad we are all good.Quote:
Originally Posted by aKe`cj
Did I see you ingame tonight?
I just watched a few UE4 level design tutorials and all I thought about was the NC world. For some reason I kept thinking about the graves and the viper king and how amazing that would look.
So if its the same workload then why not use a better engine? Unrealocron is a catchy name imo.
Because it is not the same.Quote:
Originally Posted by William Antrim
Recreating some assets != recreating *insert-all-the-things-meme*
Right I see. It would be more like starting a new game from scratch than "touching up" an older one?
Basically.Quote:
Originally Posted by William Antrim
With the current engine, we can replace assets as we go for gradual progress. If we went to an engine as radically different as UE4, everything would need to be redone in one go. That or the equivalent effort would need to go into getting current assets to work.
Just because we're using the engine that Neocron has always used, doesn't mean the game can't look better than it does now. Alduin and Zoltan have already improved Tekktonic's (well, Genesis3D's) capabilities, we just need to take advantage of them. Sadly, as with everything, that takes time.
While it's not the photorealism of UE4, the vastly higher resolution decals Xortag has been working on already make Neocron look a lot nicer.
I would say yes, but I have no idea how difficult it actually is. The reason I say yes is because I remember hearing/reading about how 'Reinkkarnation' [sp?] had ported NC2 to the Unity engine and you could play it in the browser.Quote:
Originally Posted by William Antrim
However I'm a more a Sys admin and not a programmer/developer so I've no idea how complex such a task would be. (and ofcourse the big part is just how many man hours it would take to achieve something like that)
I know Alduin said about the UE4 engine's requirements probably being rather high, but historically the Unreal Engines have actually scaled rather well.
The company you refer to is Nukklear and from what I have seen they have not ported NC2 but were trying to find an investor who would provide the funds required to do the actual port. Importing a single bsp map with textures is pretty far from porting an entire game.Quote:
Originally Posted by Netphreak
Reinkkarnation was the term used on the reakktor.com homepage, which I believe has little to do with Nukklear.
Nukklear was founded by the then CEO of Reakktor Media, after the company went belly up. Reakktor of 2014 (new lords of reakktor.com and thus behind the Reinkkarnation thingy) is a new game studio. To add to the confusion, this new studio is run by MJS, who also happens to be the founder and first CEO of the old Reakktor. He probably still has romantic feelings for it - thus the reincarnation by launching a studio under the familiar name :)
How many times did I just say Reakktor? O_o :)
Yes it is quite confusing! I've been around off and on for 12ish years or so and still I very much appreciate the synopsis you just gave.
Thats right but there are many, many players in the community who don't have the right hardware which is required to run the Unreal 4 Engine at the minimum settings.Quote:
Originally Posted by Netphreak
You may remember, we'd upgraded the old DirectX 9.0 Driver to DirectX 9.0c which lead to a drop of the old DirectX 7 driver too. More than 1/3 of the community weren't able to run Neocron on their hardware (for example laptops with integrated gaphic units) so we were forced to implement some workaround such as "softwareprocessing".
Apart from that I agree to my previous speakers. there is still room for some improvements in the Genesis3D / Tekktonic Engine.
Here you can see an example of the upcoming and said improvements:
Engine Improvements
Some of these changes will find the way in the next patch and needs some testing effort.
Good to see the video stopped before eye cancer flash :)
Thanks for the clarification.Quote:
Originally Posted by aKe`cj
I do remember one of the devs stating that it was cool playing NC in a browser at 60fps. I'm guessing they were refering to some kind of tech demo they had done.
Also following on from Zoltan's point, I understand that it's a very fine line you have to tread to keep the current user base catered for while progressing the game. Tbh, the directx 9 thing should not have been the issue it was for users. Directx 9.0c was released in August 2004. At some point, progress had to be made and certain legacy 'features' removed. This is what you did.
It's a bit unrealistic I think of the community to expect a game that is still being developed in 2014 to expect it to be compatible with hardware that doesn't support an API released in 2004 (almost 10years now).
I know you guys are doing whatever you can to progress the game and hopefully in the future get new players into the game.
If the opportunity to update the game engine to a newer one was possible, then I'd like to hope it would atleast be considered (obviously the sheer time/man hours involved would come into any such consideration at that point as well).
Anyhow, as always keep up the good work guys and it's great to see your comments in these threads.
A new update for you:
http://www.neocron-game.com/media/de...shot010101.jpg
Thanks Xortag. The sign looks great!Quote:
Originally Posted by Xortag
I believe you guys are just working on logos and items like that for now to add a good pop to the game and other things later. But is there anyway to update the strippers to high definition?!! Maybe even for next patch :-) I bet that would get a lot of attention! Haha.
Again thanks for the update we all appreciate it!
All I can say is: We'll improve the textures step by step. There are TONS of textures which needs to be replaced, adjusted and scaled. Each world and each model needs a recompile too in case of Plaza 1 it tooks ~4 days with the original tools to compile the whole world with "high" details.
#LifeFacts
WTAF?Quote:
SHOP - Your Wisdom of Ceres Disc purchase payment is processing
Neocron goes Item Shop??
:-)
The "high" quality option did not really look any different imo.Quote:
Originally Posted by Zoltan
There is a lot of room where we can improve in terms of bsp compilation. At the moment we have not made any efforts to rewrite/optimize the current bsp compiler or even to use newer algorithms to do the bsp compilation. In case someone has experience with those algorithms, drop us a line!
This is not quite correct, so let me clarify this a bit more. Neocron does not use classic software processing which would be: writing an own renderer which works purely CPU based. DirectX offers vertices to be processed by the GPU if it supports it, which is of course prefarable. However, if the hardware does not support it you can ask DX to do the computations on the CPU. The workaround which Zoltan refers to is that you have to explicitly choose the way vertices are processed and so you need to cater for all possibilities in the computers setup which we initially did not do, we had to add that functionality.Quote:
Originally Posted by Zoltan
aKe cj raises a good point there. The question is whether the benefit for Neocron would be higher if we port it to a new engine or if we keep on improving on the one we currently have. Looking at the long term benefits the port would definitely win. However, on the short term point of view improving the old engine definitely wins.Quote:
Originally Posted by aKe`cj
The port to a new engine has several risky downsides:
- No more patches for a long time
- No major (information wise) updates for a long time
- Possibility of loosing the look and feel of Neocron
- Many more downsides along the same lines of the points already mentioned
The one main major upside would be that we would be far more productive with a c++ conformal code base and a toolset which is up to date.
This also brings me to the one major downside of sticking to the current code base: it is a huge pain in the arse maintaining it. It has grown huge over time with a lot of copy and paste code which was written way before modern coding patterns and C++11 emerged. Most often it had to be optimized for speed instead of readability which is highly noticable (the guys back then did quite an awesome job). Also the workflow (as well as the performance) of the current toolset is not optimal and really needs to be improved upon (in case you like to develop new tools, apply!).
After all we decided to stick with the current code base, because of one major benefit: evolution. Evolution meaning that Neocron will not be in a frozen state for more than a year but instead will be continuously developed and improved. It is still a very long way to go towards a c++11 conformal code base, but some parts of the code have already been improved quite alot and made more readable, the performance nowadays makes it possible and the size of our team makes this a must have.
Slauncha,
Alduin
... that post was "on-topic" in a quite literally sense. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Alduin
I am excited to hear you have means to edit and compile the bsp and possibly even the source to the toolchain. The tools involved must be a pain to work with compared to modern editors, but I think you have raised valid points for keeping the technical foundation in place and building on top of that. Good luck with the refactoring.
Good post showing how things look from the developer and maintenace side of things.Quote:
Originally Posted by Alduin
The only thing I worry about regarding sticking with the current engine, is that while you can make it look better and streamline some features, is that things like gunplay, player position tracking etc. all that 'stuff' will be always be limited by the very old game engine.
As much as I appreciate all the work and progress the support team manage with the engine nc has, certain things like op fights will never be able to be fully realised (and by that I mean large number of players, fluid movement, position update, hit reg) to the level yourselves the support team and the community would like.
What you touch on here is mainly the netcode - not really my domain, but it is not unusual to find 3rd party netcode integrated in all sorts of engines. If NC was to be ported to UE4 it would not provide a smooth, open world no syncs PvP environment either (although level streaming is a cool feature for such a thing). Many multiplayer games of scale integrate 3rd party middleware for the netcode (e.g. Reakktor used RakNet, I believe). There is no reason why the same middleware used for UE4 should not be used for Genesis3D.Quote:
Originally Posted by Netphreak
Is that feasible? I don't know.
I guess it depends on how well separated the tech stack is for NC. Going by Alduin's post above, my bet would be that it is not like you can just remove a lego brick and replace it with another... too much hot glue involved in keeping it all together :)
There are actually differences (short info: there are no decals included in the low quality version).Quote:
Originally Posted by Alduin
http://www.neocron-game.com/Media/compile_modes.png
With "original tools" I mean the unoptimized versions ofc, at least we have a .NET wrapper for the old compile-codebase which allows us to run multiple instances of the compiler so we are able to setup a "compiler farm". This should save some time :)
In case of PLAZA-SEC 1 we can not compile it at "FULL QUALITY" at this time without crashing the process - KK did some changes in their version of the compiler and we just have the binaries not the source unfortunately. Solving this is just an another point of our endless list of things we have to do :)
I agree but I just don't want to bore someone in here with the details so I shorted it into "Softwareprocessing" (with quotes!) :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Alduin
huge difference in the shadow resolution, too.
Thats the point. Raytracing "vis portals" and calculating the lightmaps based on the raytracing data results are the main reason why the compilation of those maps tooks so many time.Quote:
Originally Posted by aKe`cj
What do we learn from this: never let Alduin touch asset related tools he is just too dumb to use them ;) Let's use the Runner's machines to bitcoin! Uhm I mean to compile maps ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Zoltan
You know how much I love to bore people with boring techy details ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Zoltan
You can bore me with the technical details. Plus I got to make sure I find the holes and issues with the new code. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Zoltan
Things evolve...
Attachment 12318
R-Click -> Open image in new tab will get you to a higher resolution.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xortag
The new textures are pretty. It would be totally transforming if you were to up the textures for walls/floors/ground/etc.. instead of logos. The logos and stuff are sexy, don't get me wrong - but the "big hits" are in textures that are used to cover huge surfaces.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Divide
If you look at the floor tiles in this short clip, it seems like that is being worked on as well.
http://forum.neocron-game.com/showth...=1#post2225498
The big problem I see with supporting high def textures is that these resolutions are very unforgiving when it comes to the quality of the assets. If something looked wrong earlier, it would go unnoticed as it would still blend in nicely with the rest of the pixel mud. Now, with high def assets, anything that is not absolutely "spot on" will be noticeable and also repetition will be problematic. That is why procedural textures and shaders play such a big role in modern engines. When every sign of type X shows the exact same rust pattern it looks silly. When floor or wall tiles show visible patterns in cracks, the same applies.
How are you tackling that problem? Increase the texture/model variants?
The oldschool way: handmade.Quote:
Originally Posted by aKe`cj
If you look properly, you notice some differences in those two signs. There are even 2 more variants. Yes, varity is one point to tackle those issue and also give NC a little bit more ambience.
Getting High-Res isn't that hard, but for NC, you need to work somewhat different. We have those baked lightmaps, along with a Day/Night cycle. And you may know all those Up-to-date Shaders and blingbling, applying automagic things to the environment are missing. Decals (in their technical meaning) are placed outside of any baked light. Thus, they become unlit. Every place you may wan't to place some sign has a different light scenario, but the sign does not receive any light.
If you catched the right ambient values in your texture, the Night cycle kicks in, darkens everything and your decal looks ugly again...
That's what it makes much harder and what i am mostly deal with.
There is no need to assume I looked improperly. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Xortag
It is from looking properly at those (and other new textures) that I see clarity/resolution and repetition/visual déjà-vu becoming an issue. Throwing in a few more variations will work for lesser utilized assets, while for more widespread assets, I would assume that holding back on the detail frenzy and making the textures a little more monotonous would help.
In any case - good to see you are busy on that frontier. I am curious of the impact it will have when everything is put together for a facelift.