When is the graphics overhaul coming?

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Russell wrote:

Oh wow. Ok well they are a bit of an exception.. I dont understand... how though. 6 mill is enough to pay like 70-80 employees for 1 year.

Although im guessing they arnt including their engine development cost in that. The thing that eats 85% of our programmers time here :P.

Even so they must be very efficient.Impressive.

I know for the FF series games though they spend around 35+ mill.

Makes you think, what if you guys had the cash blizz has. What a fucking game you woulda produced..

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ownyaah wrote:

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Russell wrote:

Oh wow. Ok well they are a bit of an exception.. I dont understand... how though. 6 mill is enough to pay like 70-80 employees for 1 year.

Although im guessing they arnt including their engine development cost in that. The thing that eats 85% of our programmers time here :P.

Even so they must be very efficient.Impressive.

I know for the FF series games though they spend around 35+ mill.

Makes you think, what if you guys had the cash blizz has. What a fucking game you woulda produced..

Haha with more money comes more people to manage. Its not as easy as just chucking money at it sadly. With the more people you have the more wasted assets you get and more inconsistency's going on. However I wouldn't saw no to more employees : P I still need a graphics programmer who can work with me. With one of those guys we could start to add the cooler graphics settings.Johnathan sadly has to do a bit of everything so he has very limited time to do graphics stuff.

My only gripes with the graphics are as follows:

-Lightning spell effects are too blue. White lightning is more appealing.
-Ice spells could do with a more 3 dimensional look, with solid chunks of ice and such
-Water looks good when it is still. The wave movements on the shore arent convincing though, and the tiling can be apparent sometimes.

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BRavich wrote:

My only gripes with the graphics are as follows:

-Lightning spell effects are too blue. White lightning is more appealing.
-Ice spells could do with a more 3 dimensional look, with solid chunks of ice and such
-Water looks good when it is still. The wave movements on the shore arent convincing though, and the tiling can be apparent sometimes.

Hahaaaaah! I have an answer for those 2 top questions (as they are to do with me)

Lightning spells are blue so you can see them on all terrain. Their actually blue and white. Their actually more deep bluey purple instead of light baby blue like most high fantasy games go with (looks way cheese imo). I tried white lightning and it looks real cool in dark areas but you could not see it at all in brighter areas. It blended in like crazy into the environment. I tried fattening up the lightning but then that just caused it to look bad in the dark areas. Anyway its normaly good to have 2 colours to effects instead of just one for this reason. Also makes it look more interesting when you don't have hdr bloom (we dont have this).
White lightning worked in Diablo because all its environments had very dark ground colours.


Ice spells do need ice chunks yes. However I currently have no good way of emitting meshs. So I cant emit 3d ice chunks in effects. Currently the only way is to actually build the ice chunks into the rig then get an animator to animate them manually. This takes a "chunk" of time and would just end up getting replaced in the future. However I do agree with you :)


Water needs reflections to look better.Currently its just a normal map and a spec map which looks a bit dated. Also the water shore animation was done pragmatically so I cant tweak it myself. Im sure we can make it look less stiff in the future though.

Sounds awesome. Still wish there were a way to have lightning look more white, but we'll see how things turn out.

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Russell wrote:

White lightning worked in Diablo because all its environments had very dark ground colours.

Well, not that I don't like the current color of lightnings in PoE, but in D2 we had very bright ground in act 2 (sand) and act 5 (snow) and white lightnings still worked just fine.

I can try again I guess. They still didn't have quite as bright ground as poe. The ledge and the rocky climb and some other secrete places have stupidly bright ground. Its not really that you cant see it. You can see it kind of. It just looks like a bloomy hard to distinguish glow ball.

In regards to the demon/dark souls comment, the texture work in DkS is out of the current reach of the devs.



As much as i love the art direction of PoE, i do have to admit that it does look very dated (it looks similar inquality to ff12 when i throw it into an emulator to increase the internal resolution)



One thing that PoE really could use is some SSAO, but the games current optimization state makes me feel like it would burn out GPUs.

I always see someone complaining about the graphics. Mosly in global chat. The graphics were the first thing that made me download the game. I always loved that dark, wet and realistic look, unlike the bright and cartoony look of another game I shall not name. Considering the size and budget of this team, I would rate the graphics as one of the best I've ever seen. And I'm not exaggerating or letting my inner fanboy talk.

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thauller wrote:

Considering the size and budget of this team, I would rate the graphics as one of the best I've ever seen. And I'm not exaggerating or letting my inner fanboy talk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLd8kEQJIzw