Given that I dislike nature and prefer to flatten it and make everything out of concrete, the narration is a bit offputting. But I suppose it might be interesting.
I stopped watching after I saw "Creation of a realistic nature simulation". Ok, I didn't! This looks awesome!
Really nice engine, the physics are pretty realistic, not to mention the dynamic water (which most engines fail to do flawlessly) and the mechanics of the game. It would be pretty dumb if someone would have to pay for this game though, unless if you can do things kind of civilization where you evolve your people and technology and stuff, and maybe there is an opposition. I'd get my hands on this though, looks really cool, just wouldn't pay for it.
Yeah the water tech is pretty cool, texturing is particularly impressive. Yes because people should just spend years of their lives making games without getting paid for them... Again you aren't allowed to have opinions.
Glad I wasn't the only one seeing that. Lets see. They should be payed, but it should be free. Where will the money come from to pay them for this? Oh, I know - let's just print some new money! I'm with Chris on this, you're not allowed to have opinions.
I saw that too and was immediately disappointed in that they spent so much time making it look incredible that the F'd that up?
LODs are hardly difficult to change, besides it's probably using placeholder models, note there aren't really many models in the scene.
Well, if they're shipping early 2011, I'd hope they're not still using placeholders...now is about the time they should be locking the code down.
I find that hard to believe, the game doesn't look very done, although it's entirely possible that it's just the tech demo they hacked together. Also you don't do all the art first and then go onto the code, you do both right up to the end, otherwise you end up with a few months paying your artists to do nothing.
So, I obviously am not in the game industry, but for non-game stuff, you have a few stages, and within a few months of shipping, you usually are locked down doing only critical bug fixes and art tweaks. Within 2 months of shipping, at least, you plainly cannot touch the version you're shipping, since you need to be printing the installation discs. You can work on some patches, sure...but not the shipping code. For something shipping in January, you usually have locked down the code completely in november, and went into bug fix only mode a little bit earlier (hence the term RTM.)
You don't need to change code to change models, you can replace models in source by just changing the model file. If the LODs are poppy, you just change the model file containing them, which basicaly amounts to 'get the modeller to remodel it and put the new file over the old one'. It's really never too late to change art assets because they are very easy to change. So you can build the game with placeholder models using final code, then replace the placeholder files with finalised files and the game magically has non-crappy models. Intermediate LODs to reduce popping is probably the absolute last thing a modeller should do, because you can extreme test the engine with just the minimum and maximum LODs, but you'll get lots of popping, the intermediate ones are purely cosmetic and to reduce that while still retaining some performance benefits. Like I said, I wouldn't worry about it.
