Which aspect of graphics do you wish to see improved the most?

[boxleitnerb]

That is why the engine scales with slower and higher end hardware. I don't want them to hold back anything. If you can't play it at maximum, then that's the way it is. I'm eager for a game where even with the best hardware you cannot play at maximum, but will have to wait for the next gen or use SLI/CF. Those were glorious times when games actually pushed the hardware. Stagnation serves no one.

[magpie]

Slave Girls and Orgy cameo,s Great animations and graphic,s will be needed

[Megasalexandros]

I voted for terrain mostly , because i was thinking about empire and napoleon and how its battle maps turned out to be, unsatisfactory in my opinion with a extremely narrow amount of terrain , battlefields, and virtually no mountains or rarely appearing hills , comparing it with the variety and beautiness of lets say roma surrectum 2 battlefields etc/
I firmly believe that most of the work must be done on the terrain and the battlefields in order for the battles to get radically improved in visual terms, the soldier details in shogun 2 for eg were good enough and the battlefields also were a step forward.

let me explain in pictures what i mean.


this is a picture of Greek country side, now imagine a battle map that will portray that valley and then the roman legions fighting against Macedonian phalanxes.
Again a variety of pictures of Greek countryside





Look at that picture for eg, i cannot recall any battlefield in any total war title have such depth and horizon, maybe only Rome was close in achieving that

Thats a picture from corinths country side

[Durendalv2]

I'd like to see greater detail with units, especially with equipment. E.g., give Macedonian Cavalry commanders Eagle-Hilt swords (yes, they really used them).

[Duncan III]

I'd never notice that kind of detail.

[myaku]

I voted for terrain mostly , because i was thinking about empire and napoleon and how its battle maps turned out to be, unsatisfactory in my opinion with a extremely narrow amount of terrain , battlefields, and virtually no mountains or rarely appearing hills , comparing it with the variety and beautiness of lets say roma surrectum 2 battlefields etc/
I firmly believe that most of the work must be done on the terrain and the battlefields in order for the battles to get radically improved in visual terms, the soldier details in shogun 2 for eg were good enough and the battlefields also were a step forward.

let me explain in pictures what i mean.

Wow, beautiful pictures, Megasalexandros! I completely agree, the terrain and maps in ETW/NTW were unsatisfactory, some of the hills were simply horrendous - they looked like small earthen stepped pyramids. I also agree that unit models achieved a high level of graphical realism in Shogun 2, they simply look beautiful and, while of course I'd like to see them improved (who wouldn't want EVERYTHING to be improved, lol), I'd be perfectly happy if the devs decided to leave the polycounts for units where they are so that focus and greater polycounts can be allocated to the terrain.

One can't argue that the terrain graphics weren't vastly improved in Shogun 2, everything from the dusk sky and water in naval battles to the rocky outcroppings and small cliffs you'd see in castle sieges. Even the trees were considerably better.

The thing that strikes me about your pictures is that the Greek countryside doesn't seem to include too many hardware-stressing large trees, which should make it much easier to improve its graphical representation in R2.

I've spent quite some time on the bus to and from school thinking about this (while listening to podcasts of Roman and Greek history lectures ), but isn't rendering trees realistically a performance nightmare?

Imagine a large deciduous tree. The objects/assets of the tree are:
1) a trunk
2) dozens of branches
i) hundreds of sub-branches
ii) potentially thousands of twigs
iii) tens of thousands of leaves

Now imagine a gentle breeze (say the wind comes from the east) hitting the tree, and how to represent what would happen graphically in a time frame of one second.

In the first quarter of a second (0s < t < 0.25s), and this is variable on the wind speed itself, only a portion of the tree and its leaves would react and sway. How the leaves would react would also depend on other weather conditions.

You'd have to render each branch swaying, each sub-branch swaying, and each leaf either fluttering or rustling, or maybe even half-fluttering, half-rustling (for me, fluttering would be the flipping of the leaf, and rustling would be the jerky movement as the wind streams through the leaf (leaves sometimes have different colors on either side of the leaf)) - that's hundreds of thousands of events each second (and the breeze hasn't moved fully through the tree yet) to account for if you want a realistic representation. Not only would movement and motion over multiple time frames (swaying of branches on one time frame, movement of leaves on another) have to be accounted for, but the shading and light - depending, of course, on time of day, cloud density and and other weather conditions - would need to be taken into consideration. This can't be scripted, either - if each tree swayed in exactly the same way every time, a lot of realism would be lost!

Considering that CA won't implement rowers on ships because of performance considerations, there's only so much we can hope for in terms of dendrological graphics realism. It would probably take a supercomputer to render even a SINGLE TREE with realistically (ok, maybe not a supercomputer, but at least an i7-3970k overclocked to 7.2GHz with a liquid nitrogen cooling system ). Now imagine the Black Forest!

But since Mediterranean landscapes, in general, are a bit sparser on the trees compared to Northern Europe, hopefully we'll get the beautiful terrain we're looking for . Shogun 2 was a such an improvement on NTW, I can't wait to see what tools/tricks CA are going to bring to the game next!

TL; DR - trees are hard, yo


Time to go look for books on leaf aerodynamics at my library

[Megasalexandros]

Wow, beautiful pictures, Megasalexandros! I completely agree, the terrain and maps in ETW/NTW were unsatisfactory, some of the hills were simply horrendous - they looked like small earthen stepped pyramids. I also agree that unit models achieved a high level of graphical realism in Shogun 2, they simply look beautiful and, while of course I'd like to see them improved (who wouldn't want EVERYTHING to be improved, lol), I'd be perfectly happy if the devs decided to leave the polycounts for units where they are so that focus and greater polycounts can be allocated to the terrain.

One can't argue that the terrain graphics weren't vastly improved in Shogun 2, everything from the dusk sky and water in naval battles to the rocky outcroppings and small cliffs you'd see in castle sieges. Even the trees were considerably better.

The thing that strikes me about your pictures is that the Greek countryside doesn't seem to include too many hardware-stressing large trees, which should make it much easier to improve its graphical representation in R2.

I've spent quite some time on the bus to and from school thinking about this (while listening to podcasts of Roman and Greek history lectures ), but isn't rendering trees realistically a performance nightmare?

Imagine a large deciduous tree. The objects/assets of the tree are:
1) a trunk
2) dozens of branches
i) hundreds of sub-branches
ii) potentially thousands of twigs
iii) tens of thousands of leaves

Now imagine a gentle breeze (say the wind comes from the east) hitting the tree, and how to represent what would happen graphically in a time frame of one second.

In the first quarter of a second (0s < t < 0.25s), and this is variable on the wind speed itself, only a portion of the tree and its leaves would react and sway. How the leaves would react would also depend on other weather conditions.

You'd have to render each branch swaying, each sub-branch swaying, and each leaf either fluttering or rustling, or maybe even half-fluttering, half-rustling (for me, fluttering would be the flipping of the leaf, and rustling would be the jerky movement as the wind streams through the leaf (leaves sometimes have different colors on either side of the leaf)) - that's hundreds of thousands of events each second (and the breeze hasn't moved fully through the tree yet) to account for if you want a realistic representation. Not only would movement and motion over multiple time frames (swaying of branches on one time frame, movement of leaves on another) have to be accounted for, but the shading and light - depending, of course, on time of day, cloud density and and other weather conditions - would need to be taken into consideration. This can't be scripted, either - if each tree swayed in exactly the same way every time, a lot of realism would be lost!

Considering that CA won't implement rowers on ships because of performance considerations, there's only so much we can hope for in terms of dendrological graphics realism. It would probably take a supercomputer to render even a SINGLE TREE with realistically (ok, maybe not a supercomputer, but at least an i7-3970k overclocked to 7.2GHz with a liquid nitrogen cooling system ). Now imagine the Black Forest!

But since Mediterranean landscapes, in general, are a bit sparser on the trees compared to Northern Europe, hopefully we'll get the beautiful terrain we're looking for . Shogun 2 was a such an improvement on NTW, I can't wait to see what tools/tricks CA are going to bring to the game next!

TL; DR - trees are hard, yo


Time to go look for books on leaf aerodynamics at my library

Thanks for agreeing with me, i really thought that the effect on a battles realism that a correct battlefield could have ,or a realistically made for that matter, is underestimated.
You are correct about your tree analysis, and you can be sure that there were wooded areas in greece in antiquety ,there are far less today than back then, cosidering that for eg Macedonia was a great provider of wood for the southern states of Greece, but guess what, no battles or very rarely ever were battles fought in wooded areas, most of the battles in antiquity were fought in the flat areas around thessaly in Greece, So many of them, counting a few, like the cynoscephalae ,or the Pydna(pydna was actually fought in a flat plain infront of mount olympus),or the Pharsalus etc.
Generally the areas that were chosen were flat and lightly wooded, that is not to say that there were no battles at all fought in wooded areas but there is always the choice of making the campaign map in such a way that there are not alot of wooded areas that a battle can be fought at least in the mediterranean cause in the north or gaul it is a whole different issue.
But i firmly believe that ca must take into account the REALISTIC depictions of each country's countryside from pictures and photos, and not the impression they have in their head about the areas they are going to depict.

[Greatonesh]

i want to see them fight and not get bored because they doing same move again and again !

[SargeBarnes]

Slave Girls and Orgy cameo,s Great animations and graphic,s will be needed

Hahaha, totally agree, make this happen CA!!!

[Xerrop]

terrain and weather ? I think people are just trolling witht hat poll. Definetely the battle animations.

i want to see them fight and not get bored because they doing same move again and again !

What is bad on more diverse terrain? You need some variety instead of mostly the same landscape again and again. Ideally each province should have it's distinctive landscape and environment. In any single battle you have to watch the terrain and react according to it, but how often does one zoom in to the single soldiers in a grand strategy game dealing with large formations?

[SamueleD]

Imagine a large deciduous tree. The objects/assets of the tree are:
1) a trunk
2) dozens of branches
i) hundreds of sub-branches
ii) potentially thousands of twigs
iii) tens of thousands of leaves

Just a question for anybody who knows about computer graphics: Wouldn't it be easier (performace wise) to have the tree generate itself following an algorithm, istead of drawing a model? Plants basically follow the same base structure in their development over and over, you just have to set rules for branching and putting leaves and the tree comes by itself.

[TR00PER7]

all of it equally

[Altimis]

All I care is animation coz those animation make the game so unique. The rest can be 'mod' to improve the eye candy later

[beckyolt]

The games already look great IMO when it comes to models, textures and such ( I'd be happy with ETW graphics even nowdays lol ) the graphics on the trailers already look stunning. so if I had to choose, animations. Make the battles look more fluid.Fighting animations are pretty embarrassing.


Graphics aren't really a factor for me anymore. We need more battle/gameplay mechanics. Because no matter how gorgeous the graphics are, getting your towers/ladders/rams in the enemy walls/gates, taking the walls, storming the gate with your troops, then slowly grinding your way to the town square will get old, specially after it's been repeated by nearly every game on this series.

[Greatonesh]

but guys really???? Terrain & Weather ???

[beckyolt]

...Yeah, so what ? Aren't they important aspects of the graphics?

[Kranos]

yeah but not the most important in a game called Total War. And why one would chose to keep all the rest of the graphics on medium and set the weather and terrain on ultra !!!

[Greatonesh]

...Yeah, so what ? Aren't they important aspects of the graphics?

emmm....yeah....but arent you guy's want them to fight with their sword??
arent you guy's want archer's to keep shooting at them till they running toward's them and just as they reaching archers pull their sword and fight?
arent you guy's want to see famous parthians catapract charge them and make them fly?
arent you guy's want to witness spartan hoplit's fight for 5 minute's and don't repeat single move?
yes i think those aspect are important but we cant steer at them and hope for something new

[agent 47]

ANTI ALIASING....that actually works.

[MarkusBarkus]

I'd have to partially agree with terrain and weather.

They've already had enough variation in weather in the past, but it would still be awesome to see a storm raging in the sky over an epic battle.

As far as terrain, the trees could definitely look a little better.

Even though this is all about graphics I would also really love to see awesome physics. Such as a group of men marching through a forest coming under attack from enemy artillery causing trees to fall down on them if they don't run out of the way. It would put a whole new twist on hiding in the dense forests expecting to pull off a successful ambush.