Elemental makes use of a brand new 3D engine developed specifically for PC strategy games. Its multithreaded design along with dynamic LOD (level of detail) allows for it to look great on a wide range of hardware.
To see and understand why Elemental can look good on low end hardware and yet benefit further from higher end hardware see for yourself how the dynamic LOD works:
Look very very closely here. This isn’t one 3D object. This is dozens of 3D objects. The engine determines how powerful your hardware is and based on that can choose to display objects based on that.
As more objects come into view, certain “less important” objects start to fade away:
Did something change?
Look closely. Did something change?
How about now?
As a result of the object-based system that Kumquat provides, the graphics look identical at a casual glance and yet, the polygon count is dramatically less in the third image.
And users with very low end hardware can simply play using the sprite based output (cloth map mode):
Because Kumquat is a PC-only graphics engine, it can make a different set of trade offs than the traditional cross-platform engine. Namely, it can assume players have a considerable amount of memory (1 gigabyte is the minimum total system memory to play a Kumquat based game – very little on a PC but twice what a current generation console has). Thus, a given game object can be made up of many sub-objects (which use more memory) but can be dynamically turned on or off based on 3D hardware instead of having to load up lower-quality 3D models.
What can I say, graphics is important to me. Sorry but I would never play Elemental using the cloth map no matter how awesome everything else is.
I think it is still possible to make the game look better with small changes. I mean, in every screenshot I have seen there are huge, empty and flat areas of land. Just put something there! A hill, a tree, a stone... something! I guess I want it more realistic, while you have chosen not to be realistic so that low end computers can play... But the way this looks I could play on my old Pentium II at the highest settings! The highest detail level should be higher imo.
Thanks boogie for a detailed explanation.
Damn dude. It's early beta still!
ALWAYS...
Ya eye candy is always on the bottom of the list for most important you want in a game. 1. Its early beta still, 2. Stardock will keep adding on more stuff for sure (remember the expansions for GalCiv2 they updated the graphics and it made the game run smoother so no worries.) Remember they built the game up first without graphics so if the gameplay is good, then they added on the pretty stuff. Also just before the game ships I bet they will come back and clean up some of the art and graphic assets a bit.
Gameplay is what keeps bring ya back day after day and hopefully for years! I love Deus Ex and it looks horrible!
The graphics style is something we very much like. Obviously not everyone will agree but those screenshots are pretty representative of what the final game will look like.
I like the graphics, what I don't like is the size of the screenshots... Come on Frogboy, don't be mean...
Give us larger screenshots...
Brad first thing I saw on youtube like 5mins ago... Link
For the unaware, Brad, Frogboy and Draginol are the same person
But can't you just up the LOD a bit on the highest settings? I can live with the "style", but I'm having a hard time with the undetailed big patches of grass I see in screenshots like this. Why can't it be more like in this combat screenshot, which looks quite good.
And can the engine not handle small hills? Just tiny details like that will make the game more attractive to look at.
Gameplay can be fantastic, but if all I'm fighting for is a land that looks like a football pitch, why care?
AWESOME!!!
Is it tommorow yet?
Hey I know brad has multiple accounts... (Draginol really is just a Stardock janitor...)
Ohhhhh...niiiiiiiice!
Very Awesome Indeed!!! Can't wait.
That's kinda odd. I went to school with a guy named "Mike Duffy". If you still have lines of communication with him, please ask him if he ever attended school in Lake or Vollusia County in Florida.
As for the engine discussion. There have been quite a few games in the last few years that have used this affect of blending things out, but, as Boogie explains, they don't do it nearly the same way or as well as the engine in Elemental. Having the "grass" or "trees" fade out or in when playing GTA4 isn't quite the same thing. In principle they are meant to do the same thing, but the Kumquat engine is vastly superior at it.
It would be nice to have more variety in the elevation, some small hills at least. That's an awful lot of perfectly flat ground, and the sharp contrast with the occasional mountain isn't a good thing - who ever saw a mountain with no foothills around it, just flat plains and suddenly boom! there's a massive hunk of rock sticking out of the ground? Some of the forests are a bit too perfectly square as well, look at the one next to the mountain in the previously linked screenshot, it's not exactly an orchard but it doesn't look like natural forest either. Not that graphics are anywhere as near as important to me as gameplay, but the landscapes are a little too regular to really feel alive.
The engine handles small hills already. It can also handle lush grassy plains. I'm not sure why you're thinking the game map is flat. One screenshot is not representative of the whole game, especially when zoomed out.
His issue is that on some areas of the map there's large chunks of what looks to be a whole lot of nothing. That will probably go away some by release, but little doodads even like rocks or flowers make the map look less empty, even if they don't do anything.
or just grass, not as a texture but as an animated doodad would make the world seems much more alive
Maybe on tiles of great battles there could form mass graves and such to keep flavoring the map after the game starts.
Shouldn't a wasteland be empty?
Froggy, you and the team should be really proud of what you've done. This is incredible and it oozes atmosphere and personal style.
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