No it's not Christmas yet but here we are again with some updates related to the development of our upcoming Space-MMO game Infinity: The Quest for Earth.
Horizontal displacements:
As mentionned in the previous update on the Infinity forums, InfinityAdmin has experimented horizontal displacements to create cliffs, overhangs and hard edges. It also creates interesting rock formations, similar to what you'd find on volcanoes. The result is looking quite nice, but as expected there are some issues that still have to be overcome.
Procedural details and motion blur:
The good thing with using procedural generation is that you are more future-proof than other engines/games. Just by changing a detail level in the config dialogs, you will be able to increase the quality and details to extreme levels. No computer that exists today has enough memory, or video cards and cpus good enough to make it run on the highest detail levels, simply because there's no hard limit to how far those details can go.
Case in point: at the moment the terrain patches are 33x33 vertices; that's the default for medium to high-end gaming computers, for example AMD FX/Intel Core2Duos on a NV7800, NV8800 or ATIX1800.
If your computer is good enough, you can try terrain patches of 65x65. The picture below(left) is taken on a Quad-core machine ( Q6600 with a 8800 GTX ), as expected it slowed down quite a lot, but it was still real-time: 40-50 fps. You can compare it with 33x33 terrain patches to see the difference
Last but not least, InfinityAdmin spent some time to add a render pipe for motion blur.
For more information check out the Development Journal on the Infinity forums.
/me drools on self
:O~~
SinKing: dunno what you are expecting, this is a *motion* blur, not a constant one.
The blur is depending on the direction pixels are moving in screen space. In this screenshot, the camera was turning around, so the pixels in the background are indeed in motion, hence the blur. You'd have the same effect in any other game that uses motion blur.
You guys are the only proof people need to see that independent games an be much better than commercial ones.
the blur is kinda strange. It should be more blurred in the foreground and less blurry in the faraway parts of the landscape, but this is an overall blur, which looks like you got oil on a camera objective.
Nice pictures though, terrain looking better than ever!
@ FBrebion - well than it ain't done right in any game, no matter what kind it is.
Blur always occurs with the object/s you can't focus on, while the background is hardly affected. This blur however affects every kind of particle in the same way, blurring the background the same like the foreground.
This gives the impression of a flat 2D-surrounding. Almost any depht is lost.
Okay- since it will only be snippets during movement, I guess it don't matter, but this is computer blur then not real-life blur.
Improvements indeed.
I think you guys are confusing motion blur and depth-of-field. Depth of field is where your eye can only focus on a limited plane on the z-axis. It is a constant thing and has been experimented with, although not very well, in several games. Crysis employs DOF quite well when iron-sighting a weapon, and if you've seen the new Killzone 2 footage, you notice your weapon is slightly out-of-focus because the character's virtual eye is focuses on where their crosshair is.
Motion blur is simply when you move quickly and your eye doesn't have time to process each point of light reflection all at once, and things seem to get "blurry." In reality things don't look blurry, they looks "streaky" (move your head around quickly and you'll see what i mean) but in a game motion blur is about the best simulation of this that has been thus far devised. If you download the Medal Of Honor: Airborne demo you can see a pretty good example of motion blur.
Anyway, stuff's looking good as always, keep it up!
You've got terrain down, now just imagine foliage.
Speedtree.com
Something like that, I'd say just duplicate their technique, and BAM! Instant endless foliage! That would look absolutely spectacular!
Yeah Cap - I have been confusing depht-of-field and motion blur! Actually this is done alright - I just didn't get the meaning at first.
My question is, in which situation this blurring will occur, because it is a very rare, phyical phenomena (which happens when the surrounding moves faster than your eyes).
DOF on the other hand is an artistic notion, which was already used in old games, like "Outcast". DOF is what I was referring to, the motion blur is something different. It will probably make sense in some situations, but I could do without it.
I've got to say there are few games I'm more excited about. Very impressive work, can't wait to see more.
This is.... just.... Amazing....
*picks up jaw*