Project CARS? Not even Assetto Corsa? Meaning that DX9 game was used to demo a 12k rig? lol....

I am a graphics coder at Respawn. I understand where the claim of a "decade-old-engine" comes from, but I assure you we entirely rewrote the renderer backend and heavily modified the rest.

I'm not an authorized spokesman so I can't confirm anything that we haven't already talked about publicly, but pretty basic insight confirms what I've said: for example, all modern PCs and consoles use DX11-class GPUs and the "decade-old-engine" you mention only supported DX8 and DX9.

Anyway, I'm really glad you like the game! We've worked hard on it and hope it does well.

Yeah, some of them are very gpu and or CPU bound - Fairlights particle based rendering in particular are a strain on most systems - but to be fair most demos are designed to work with medium hardware - the trick is getting a lot out of it without resorting to 8 CPUs 3 GPUs and a tonne of memory

(this demo runs just fine on a 260GTX for example - this demo is GPU heavy)

most of the time the demos will run just fine without you needing up to date HW etc

DirectX10 is what we use (it, amongst other things has less dependancy issues than DX9)

you should definitely have a look at some of the newer stuff from last year and this year, so good demos

>> ^TheGenk:

They are still pushing. And I'm sorry that you missed the glorious demo years of the 2000s
I, sadly, lost a bit of an interest when my computer could no longer handle the processing needs of demos a year ago.
>> ^VidRoth:
Wow, Demo comps are still going on? I used to love these things back in the '90s when they were pushing the limits of pre-hardware-accelerated graphics.

>> ^jmd:
Spoco, uhmm... does flash count as a plugin? Cause yea flash could do it. Although maybe you wouldnt need flash.. web cams have supported HTML controls for panning/tilting for many years now.. althought its not nearly as graceful as you would like.

I definitely count flash as a plugin if they're talking doing this on phones. Yes you can get flash for phones but it can't be assumed to be installed. Also, you can't say that it doesn't need a plugin if you need flash, that is a plugin, just one with huge penetration (tee hee).


Why is there point of view changes? uhmm..why not? MOST rendering engines of this calibure support such features, its actually practically done in hardware. Would you normaly in this type of application? No not really, but its pretty clear the controls were not "final" in anyway.. infact there was no interface which probably means hes using a bunch of developer functions to move around. This also gave him easy access to adjusting light sources.

But you're missing the point that there's NO consistency between the various bits of video, some have full on HDR, bloom, focus effects, high detail, the works... these are the pre rendered stuff that took artists a seriously long time to create and then a seriously long time to render. Then there are some still shots for no good reason other than to try to show some more detailed environments that a system like this could never hope to do.

Check out OTOYs website itself... it shows the sort of quality they currently claim to have with their tech, which is pretty nice unto itself, but NOTHING like the pre rendered portions of this vid.

To say that current online worlds already look somewhat like this ignores the point that all of those worlds are rendered by EACH person's computer... the rendering is handled 1 to 1, 1 pc to 1 user. The servers just need to keep track of where everyone is and what they're doing, and they need HUGE numbers of servers to handle just that.

Now, put on top of all of that the need for the servers to ALSO render scenes 'server side', and it really doesn't sound very plausible.

Now, I just tried to run the OTOY demo 'city' (which I'm guessing most of this Liveplace thing is taken from), and in Firefox the page did nothing, and in IE it tried to do an ActiveX install, and then failed (running vista here).

And on top of that, the info pdf states

OTOY 2.0 is currently in beta testing and is scheduled for deployment
in Q2 2006.

So... yeah... kinda a long way out of date there.

Right at the end of the pdf it states:

virtual runtime tools - enables OTOY content to stream onto thin
clients using either AJAX, Flash or Java - no binary plug-in required.

So, Flash and Java are plugins, and there's no way you're getting scenes anywhere near the first part of this video via AJAX...

However the mustard is cut, it's going to require horsepower on the user's machine.

In that same pdf:

cinematic rendering using 3D hardware on systems with Shader Model 2
cards (i.e. DX9 cards introduced in 2002 or later), including Intel
integrated graphics chipsets which account for nearly half of 3D
hardware enabled systems. (All screen shots in the gallery are direct
captures of the engine rendering in real time with no post processing, using shader model

ie. the machine itself needs the processing power, not the server.

Dood, that really sucks, I'm sorry to hear it cause the game kicks ass. The editor is even more amazing!
I downloaded and installed the demo and it works great. here are my specs

2.4 pentium (old school)
1 gig of ram
radeon 9700 pro
win xp sp2

As I'm sure you've read people are getting better frame rates (and less troubles) out of Win Xp with DX9 (enhanced, check my vid) than Vista

I remember this demo scene was exactly the same as the year before only slightly tweaked for new DX9 and DX10 features.

I'm really not going to get myself into yet another argument with you Farhad - so here's the one point I'm making:

As I said Command & Conquer is the original and best RTS (it created the genre)...I believe it was also the first for full 3D detailed graphics, first for ships, first for underground vehicles & first for dogs! (to name just a few!)

I think the graphics for Supreme Commander seem a little bland, like they had to sacrifice detail (such as full DX9/10 Texture & Lighting etc) to achieve the scalability. I'll look into when both games are being released, maybe it's earlier in development...

I think you misunderstood what I meant Deathcow, let me clarify. Right now it's pointless buying these products because they are geared for DX9+Windows XP systems, and are ridiculously high priced obviously. Once DX10+Vista is released all those technologies geared for DX9+WindowsXP will fall in real price because manufacturers will switch into the newer hardware production. The first DX10 cards are coming out, prices in older DX9 are falling even though there is no game out right now that supports DX10.

Thus sit and wait. Never buy first generation products.