holy *bleep*

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

I see your holy *bleep* and raise you a mother *bleep*. This is the coolest thing I've seen in a while.

So what kind of hardware would I need to run this, and should I be ordering my vats of liquid nitrogen coolant now?

No, I think you'd be Ok with a single GeForce 7950 card ($550) and a medium CPU and 2 GB of RAM.

As opposed to all those 3D games that AREN'T rendered in realtime?

Yeah.. 'real-time' isn't the selling point. The 'cinematic' quality is.

http://www.videosift.com/story.php?id=7953

I can tell you the lighting shaders and all the afects are not cinimatic quality no where near it. its just a matter of how mutch you can blag it with less exspensive techneeks. allso what makes this look more cinimatic is not the shaders ore the models its the animation. everything in this video can be done easily by the unreal 2007 engin.

what makes this more specail if i recolect corectly is this engin was made by a resnably small goup of programmers and in adition to the standerd new drx 9,0 afects that will become standerd in most games after 2007 there are some nice programmed afects sutch as the blure efect thay showed. u have to bear in minde that manny studiose however will program sutch afects into there games to make them stand out from other games. all in all impressive but not that far outside what is normal for drx 9,10 games. i think this clip is at least 9months old so there should be some new stuff on the game

yah it was the game i was thinking of the origonal bould of the engin was by 3 people thats what makes this so special.

"Offset Software started as 3 people: Sam McGrath, Travis Stringer and Trevor Stringer. Initally working out of an apartment and completely self-funded, the engine and all art was created with a tiny budget -- just enough to purchase the software and hardware needed for development"

No current hardware or anything that we have seen in futrue lineups can do real cimematic quality in realtime. There are just too many factors that are preventing it at the moment.

Texturing and physics are the two major stumbling blocks at the moment.

There is always a limit to how effective bumpmap textures can be and throwing more memory at it will take decades to get to cinematic quality. Procedural textures based on vector maps is one way of getting around the problems but I'm sure more efficient methods will be developed in the future.

Physics is the other big problem. When I say physics that also includes lighting and the behaviour of liquids and gases. Ray-tracing is currently the most accurate way of emulating real light in a 3D environment, but is very processing intensive. There are solutions being developed but as there is no demand for real-time ray-tracing its not comming along very quickly. Liquids are represented reasonably well in fixed bodies but when it comes interacting with that fixed body or with dynamic effects such as rain or from a tap then you can really see the deficiencies of the current methods: water has no mass or fixed volume other that aplied in specific situations.

Finally the physics that everybody normally thinks of in games (solid objects interating) is also pretty poor. Rag-doll looks nice and is a good emulation but it causes problems like stretching which can lead to rather obvious glitches. Using sprites and predetermined models to represent damage patterns doesn't help matters. Currently a bullet will make only a single impact pattern when it hits an object (or only a few variations), so wether you fire perpendicular to the surface or at an etreme angle there is the same visble result. Object collision needs to work on a per-polygon basis with procedural texture effects to look tryly realistic.

If all this sonds like its gonna take a lot of processing power then you'd be right. Unless major steps are taken to improve efficieny on both the hardware and software sides then its not going to happen for a very long time. Add to that the many other factors like AI and player interaction that I haven't even mentioned and you can begin to see the size of the problem.

"There are solutions being developed but as there is no demand for real-time ray-tracing its not comming along very quickly."

There is a lot of demand for real-time ray-tracing and it's coming along very quickly. The August Scientific American has a good article on it. But yeah, real cinema quality... a ways off. Still, this engine is pretty sweet. Highly recommend the full videos from their website.

I might add that although this engine looks sweet, I'm not big for games that look "real". I just don't think it necessarily makes a good game. I still load up Ultimate Doom on occasion and play it through and have a blast. (I have a DOS-box just for older games). I still prefer Warcraft II to Warcraft III and wish they didn't go to the 3D engine. It was just a funner, better looking game in 2D to me. I think some games go 3D just to go 3D, and it's done at the expense of the fun-factor, at least for me. I quit playing the Command and Conquer games when they went to a 3D engine. Oh well, I'm old and somewhat nostalgic for the old stuff anyway.

Sheesh! Am I still talking? Sorry...

lol so funny how we started geting outraged at the cinimatic coment chances are annyone that knows its not will alredy know and know why and people that just think it looks prity ish will say oh yah cinimatic and not bother readin what people put. its a hard life been a geek

What I ment was in a game environment. Sure realtime ray-tracing is very nice for animation (my work) but thats a lot easier than in a game even if the detail levels of the textures and models are much higher. The problem is that the solutions being developed at the moment are only really practical for media environments rather than game environments. I don't want to be burdened with a RT card, a physics card etc when my computer is already cramped with a dual slot graphics card, a sound card, an NIC and a SATA RAID controller.

My workstation is already filled but thats another story ;-)

Well, westy and cobalt, the great thing about this game is that even though the developers hype up the graphics, thats not what the games all about, try looking around in the project offset forums. Frankly i'll sink however much it costs into a new PC to play this title. After years of waiting for a medeival/primeval FPS, and the closest thing to it being "savage" (which, was okay, for a week,) If "projectoffset" doesn't gain a huge following, it will definately gain a long term cult following, (look the work "cult" up fo this context before responding like an idiot; to; anyone)

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