Even if in 1992 PlaneShift was one of the first graphical MUDs, because there was a real lack of visuals in all MUDs at that time, in reality we never aimed for extreme graphical quality, because we knew would have been impossible for us to keep the pace of commercial game development companies. Commercial products have a pretty different operational model, which is working tightly with hardware makers, getting new drivers and specifications before the hardware reaches the gamers, and plan their engines on that. So when the new hardware comes out their product is ready for it. Lately they have gone even beyond that threshold by making games which actually run slow on latest hardware and become fully playable (with all details at maximum) only in 1 year or more, so the game gains more longevity, well, at least this is their view ... to me it's quite frustrating to see your just-bought-shining-titanium-made-ice-cooled-hand-sprayed-long-awaited-blood-of-your-blood computer running slow with a new game.
Anyway for many reasons we have always tried to keep very high standards in terms of graphical concepts, style and design, but to avoid stretching the hardware requirements too much. It's also important to mention that even apart from the connection with hardware makers, we surely lack resources compared to commercial companies, and so our engines will never match their performance (I know now the engine team will be displeased...
) . Even with the best programmers PlaneShift remain a free project made in people's spare time, so the final performance is a bit lower (I said "a bit" so engine team can be less displeased
)
I have to say that the overall experience of the casual gamer has always been good and our graphical quality has been mentioned to be nice and appealing. Not being up to date with commercial standards never represented a real issue and our strategy is to upgrade the game continuously. To move forward with the progress of technology, we keep regularly enhancing our 3d models, our engine and our textures. If you check the newer PS models, they have larger textures and more polygons, compared to the old ones. Also the levels have followed the same path, increasing texture resolution and size. Look at the winch level today, it's pretty big and for sure we couldn't afford it few years ago.
[I know you were waiting for a sentence starting with a "But..." ]
But today we are facing a big issue ... recent games are drastically different from us for at least one aspect:
shaders. With this term we refer generically to the advanced graphical effects that you see in modern games, where you have realistic lights, you see shining metal shields, you see rivets on benches which seems to come out for real, while those are just textures. PlaneShift has none of those today, and it's starting to look too old. Yes, it looks a bit old (I said "a bit" ! ...) if you compare it even to commercial games made few years ago, like Oblivion. Oblivion for example was (and is) making heavy usage of those techniques to render grass, torches, and in general everything that gets displayed on screen. In the following screenshot you may notice the shining effect on the shield and the light reflections on the armor, plus the saturated light effect on the sword.
[THIS IS NOT A PLANESHIFT SCREENSHOT !!!! READ ABOVE]
We can still say we are better in many other things (or we will be), but the point remains.
In the past years, I never cared too much about those kinds of effects (even if I was always amazed by those) saying that PS didn't need such features to be enjoyable, and to a certain extent I still think that. We should aim for playability, roleplay, artwork, storyline, deepness of background, making the world look alive and real, etc... But in the last two years the difference with commercial games has increased a lot due to shaders and I think ...
(drum roll)
we have to face the new era now, or accept that new players will not be immediately interested in PS, and we will lose lot of potential gamers.
This is not an idea that just arrived today--we have been working on this concept for at least 1 year or more. Many tests were made by our engine team on shaders, and our Crystal Space engine has been using those in many test levels. But it's not so easy to move from a test or demo to a feature added in a real game, due to performance, platform compatibility and mainly the work needed to implement those all over the game.
Actually already in 2005 (!) we made few tests of "bump mapping". You can see how the question mark and the X seems raised or engraved on the two cubes. The geometry is actually flat, it's just the shader doing the work with the light reflecting on the cube.
After working on just some tests with simple geometry, we started to do real tests on our characters and we took the Kran model and his plate mail. In the following video you can see the model which is in standing position, still, while the light is moving to the left then to to right, then up, and then down. If the light was still and the char was moving you would have a similar effect.
[Click the image below to see the movie.]
This was still outside the game, but anyway it was a major step forward in proving that we were able to use such lighting effects with our models.
We also made a number of tests with our levels--for example this one in the podium level (which is the level you see in char creation). In this one you can see two effects:
- light reflecting on the golden plaque on the wall, giving to it a shiny look
- the drawings on the plaque being raised from the wall thanks to "bump mapping", a technique that cheats your eye with proper shading to have certain areas look raised. The geometry there is flat.
[Again, click the image to see the movie]
We recently have done more testing like this on our larger levels to see how this stuff was affecting performance (don't ask for now! But it will improve
). In the next screenshots you see a glowing effect applied to the stones in Gugrontid, and some bump (stones raised effect) applied to a table in gugrontid tavern.
[I know you are waiting for a paragraph with a "So...." and some conclusions]
So now you are wondering if we are implementing those for real or not. Well, being a dev blog (so pre-release information), I can say that we are doing our best to put those in place as soon as possible, but starting step by step, like we always do.
You might ask: "Why not enable the feature everywhere if your engine supports it??"
Eh, it's not that easy unfortunately. To create such effects you have to create one additional texture for the "bump" and one for the "reflection" for each texture we have in game. It takes time and resources, also those have to be tested, and the current implementation has to be improved to reach acceptable performances.
You can now say: "Damn, means it will take years??"
Well, we will try to have it implemented for small parts of the game first, maybe one small level, or one set of weapons, or maybe just the plate armors (my preferred choice atm).
Ok, so now you know the background the why and the plans. You also know that we are willing to look straight into the eyes of this new era and say: "You are a pretty challenging new era, but we still are Planeshift team... Draw your sword!"
The rest is up to the creative minds of PlaneShift developers and inspiration of our art department.
