1. Is Empires taking advantage of full SM3.0 capabilities? 2. Is Bloom or HDR implemented soon? 3. Can the loading time be decreased? On my A64 @ 2650MHz with 1GB DC 265MHz RAM @ 2,5-3-3-6 1T it takes up to 3 minutes. Any other source game less than 30 seconds. 4. What is the minimum requirement to play the mod, also the recommend requirement? 5. I have seen on my ATi X850XT, that the water has sharp bounds. This was fixed back in CAT 6.1 i think. Any thoughts why they are back in your mod? My settings are as high as possible, also AFx8 and AAx4 enabled. On HL2 i can't see those bounds with same settings.
I'll answer 1 and 2: 1. No, because it isn't yet implemented in Source. I don't think they have access to that level in the Source engine. BTW, your X850XT only supports up to 2.0b :p 2. It uses some kind of Bloom addon, dunno which one. It does not use HDR yet.
You are wrong. PS3.0 and VS3.0 are implemented in Source, otherwise you won't be able to use FP32 HDR. My X850XT is only a stand in card and yes thats true, it only supports up to 2.0b, but this doesn't matter. Some kind of, isn't bloom. I don't see any difference, if i enable or disable it.
Well, there is - some kind of - bloom effect in Empires. I know this, because putting pp_bloom 0 mat_bloom 0 into the autoexec.cfg does make a difference to me - menas, Empires doesn't crash anymore when ATL+TABing back to Windows, the loading times are much shorter and I have more frames per second and less lags...
What the hell is Bloom? What are you whackos TALKING about? Crazy technical mumbo jumbo. Some of us despise all technology, thank you very much.
1: No and it can barely run as it is (see number 4) 2: Bloom is already in but I doubt full hdr will be in anytime soon. 3: They are seeing what they can do about loading (creating a sound cache so you don't have to load it or something) but they/I am unsure how much of an improvement it'll make 4: Same as HL2 I suppose? Although on a P4 3GHz with a 6600 GT and a gig of ram, I struggle to get above 20 fps at times 5: Example pic please?
My System only gets below 30 frames if 25 people and all buldings are visible, normally i have like 70-90, thats on 1280x1024. 7900GT with 512MB @550/1400MHz is on its way :D Your example ... At the moment it looks like this: but it should look like this: Those aren't empire shots, but you can see the difference. For a little explanation: Bloom lets pixels overbright, so bright textures look brighter and black ones become really black. HDR uses dynamic lighting for the pixels in real time, so if you move, you can see the sun wandering on water for example..
Why should it be? The source engine is based on it. I just want to know, what is possible to expect and what not.
Just because the engine can do it, doesn't mean it'll work. Empires seems to already be pushing the engine to it's limits without using it. Whether that's down to engine limitations or lack of optimization, I don't think empires could handle it too well.
With those textures by far not. We also don't see any big physics, nothing really explodes and gets torn by it. It always depends on your hardware, what limits you can push.
Dude, the developers maybe are geniuses, but they are SO not going to code their own PhysX code for you just to make sure you can have loads of explosions and floppy ragdolls all over your screen. Remember, Source has Havoc2-based physics, don't expect dynamic dismemberments and loads of debris just yet. Some mods managed to do it, but it's a lot of work. And it lags the server immensly (if you want the debris to hit other people and vehicles).
i dont think hes saying that empires should have massive physics, hes saying that even without that stuff, the game lags. I don't have a problem with the lag, there are huge maps to load and there's a lot going on in game. Don't become so overconfident in your computer. Go get a coffee while it's loading, relax load times really don't matter, and i always find that once im in a game, it runs smooth, which is all i ask for.
KnightTemplar is right. I could go play the hidden, a mod with more than decent gfx, but even on lowest settings I only get max 30 fps and it can easily drop below 5-6 fps (thus totally not playable). And they have been tweaking the mod for a long time. In empires it takes some time to load a game (during which I go to the refrigerator) but once playing, the game runs smooth on almost the highest settings (aa en af or never above 2x en 8x, and the res is just my desktop res). Empires only launched a few months ago, and now already everything runs smooth, maybe some lag when I'm playing on servers not in Europe. In time I do want more sounds, more effects and more models, but not anytime soon. Btw, without a sound artist, animators and whatever people that are still needed, the small dedicated crew must use their time for what's really important.
Wow! I see difference between those two pictures. The language. What made you think that HL2 (game) supports HDR? HDR = maps recompiled with HDR (+ usually LDR). That's it. Nothing to support. Just recompile and fix some bugs (wrong appearance of some textures). Looks like you have nice hardware and you bought also some magazine for games or saw some shit on net and started to tell everybody around that you're the man. If you don't see certain eye-candy you call game shit and so on. It'd be good for you to learn a bit more about things that you're talking about.
Down, boy! :p FlightcranK has a point, here. The water edges are drastically different there. The top one has settings lowered so far that it's switched over to using cheap water (which it also does when the water is far enough away). The lower one is using expensive water. The difference you see in Empires is due to mapping. The mappers have simply selected different water types than what you see there, and probably have the cheap water transition variable set differently. As for the shader model 3.0 thing... I honestly dont think the Source engine is 3.0 at this time. I wouldn't be surprised if they could get it working at some point, though (although it could seriously bork existing shader 2.0 games). Your reasoning that Source has to support 3.0 because it has HDR is sound, except for one tiny catch: it isn't true HDR. The folks at Valve developed a workaround to the whole "can't use antialiasing while using HDR" thing by simulating HDR (Ironically, I actually prefer Source's fake HDR to Oblivion's real HDR - although that might just be the settings Bethesda has the HDR set at). The Source engine does not use Shader Model 3.0 for its HDR, it uses 2.0. So... Yeah. Sorry to burst your bubble.
Source uses SM2, not SM3 and Empires uses whatever the engine uses(unless they like getting bored to death coding shaders).
