[Frost]

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20001103/duvall_01.htm##

(hmm, is there any other way to post possible interesting links without starting a new thread each time?)

[Gambit]

Neat read Thanks for the URL!

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Gamingvault.com

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Cheers Frost, interesting and useful read for me.

btw, I'm new to this board, just wanna say, your work is superb & very inspirational, as is pretty much everyone elses here!

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[shahar2k]

oh how true that article is, I read 99% of Gamasutra articles, I almost swear by them, post mortems are awesome too, although I have some trouble getting throught the technical programming articles

how about what you think of that article? I've always held a beliefe that good use of even a few polygons can create an interesting charecter on screen, and that for games, they need to wory less about 50,000 poly charecters and more about 100 charecters and objects and things on screen with an avrage 500 polys each, this way you can create the detail present in all those great 2D games (Crusader comes to mind) where every object is there, and relevant to the suspension of disbelief, compared to creating a really great looking main guy, who moves around in a plastic undereal world.
anyways, just my 2cents

[Frost]

Sharar2k:

Hi there.=) Well, I thought it was obviously a good article for those interested in learning about real-time 3d graphics for games or anything D3D or OpenGL (yeah, Glide is dead folks. =). It has some very useful notes on how gouraud lighting interacts with colored textures and such, which is very good information to someone of beginner to intermediate level in game art. Alot of other pointers there are very valuable also, the man speaks from experience, that is good (although I dislike his cryptic way of getting around to a point at times).

As for preferring 1 50K character to multiple 500 poly characters, well, I guess that depends on your needs, based on the game engine, how open the level is, etc. Newer hardware will be able to push great number of polygons out, which is excellent, and will give the possibility of having multiple higher res characters... not to mention MRM (multi-resolution mesh from Intel) and such dynamic LOD of meshes are becoming more and more standard. The game Outcast had over 50, perhaps a hundred characters at once on the screen in city scenes was fantastic (running decently even though it was all rendered fully in software), and adds a lot to the mood, so I tend to agree with your point. One thing which I am very displeased with in the hardware and technology today is the lighting models... there are no soft shadow casting (no, I think stencil buffer shadows rather suck, and rendering to a texture per light source is a waste of time), no self-shadowing or inter-mesh shadowing, no light projection, volumetric fog and lighting, etc... all manufacturers are pushing polygons ( big hurray {=/ ) and are taking lighting for granted. Personally, I would better see a scene with realtime soft- and self-shadows with proper specular and material properties on lower polygon scenes than higher polygon scenes with crappy gouraud and stencil shadows. ...but that's just me. Lighting speaks volumes...

Plastic undereal worlds? Well, blame the technology first and then blame the artists. Some game artists out there simply don't know how to make art for games. The technology is also a huge problem as you have nowhere near the flexibility of defining surface and material parameters... you only have 2D drawings representing texture. A lot of bump map methods are out which adds interest, but those methods do mot make bumps on the surface but simply offsets the texel lookup dependant on the view (polys are still flat). DX8 will support pixel shaders, which are somewhat interesting, but they are by no means a be all end all solution, in fact, it kind of sucks in my oppinion as I expected it to be more flexible and powerful -- I've toyed around the DX8 SDK and, well, it will give cooler effects, but don't expect miracles.

uhm, anyway. enough ranting.

[Muzman]

heh
I remember the reviews of Outcast. In nearly every instance they made a big song and dance about the game res being 640x480 tops (or about that), quite often adding remarks like "If you just bought your big tnt2 for running boss visuals you might be pissed off by this."
Quite funny really.
I'll be your linesman for better lighting though, Frost. One of my pet peeves for sure. It seems like it's hard to get engines to do it though and with graphics sales spin focussing on polycounts and such (a sure sign that marketeers expect people to be impressed by such terms and understand what they mean in a small way) it could be a while before other aspects are added to the mix.