Fascinating....

Let's talk about the issues in converting the SOW engine to handle Waterloo. Ideas, suggestions, feature requests, comments.
MarkT
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Re: Fascinating....

Post by MarkT »

ALSO, What is this about another WATERLOO? or is this just old rehashed? !!!!!!!?????

As stated, it is all a matter of taste. Every map I do I try to improve. I try to make it better than its predecessor, But I can only go so far without the ability to create my own buildings, I am in a rut.

I was told quality is in the eye of the beholder... I disagree. The fight for quality is something that I strive for constantly. I constantly fought for realism in the game as well as historical accuracy. As it ended up SOW has to be modded to be more realistic. To me, that is a failure. Too many decisions were made in a vacuum. Spontaneous short sighted crap.

But it still is the best out there. I tried NTW, don't like it. We fell short of competing by our own decisions.
Mark S. Tewes
r59
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Re: Fascinating....

Post by r59 »

Hi Davinci.
This may worth opening a new thread about the "legacies", in terms of coding/design/gameplay experiences, of the SOW series, perhaps...
Anyway, I suspect simply "plugging in" 3D models wouldn't suffice to get a relevant impact on those numbers.
The abstractions DarkRob mentioned, would kill the immersion for most of people anyway...
Aesthetically speaking, I'd prefer, as instance, seeing much more entertaining fort garrisoning/sieging (walls/gates), urban fighting, bridge crossing mechanics; mitigating inconsistent battle lines, unit manouvers, spacings and buffering zones under fighting conditions; improving firing/explosions/smoke graphics and sound effects; replacing guns from the artillery sprites with 3D models (you'll often see them "flying" when not aligned to ground); physically simulated roundshots; avoiding brutal hiccups on MP and frame rate drops in SP; and so on.
Just to name the first things coming to mind on that side...
That being said, the games remain rough diamonds for me. But still gems. ;)
Last edited by r59 on Mon Jul 08, 2019 11:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Davinci
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Re: Fascinating....

Post by Davinci »

@"r59" - So, how is everything going in Life?

OK, Let "Me" try this another way, there are roughly 500 to 1000 members off and on that follows this game and the previous games.

At roughly "Fifty Dollars" per game that still only amounts to approximately "25,000 to 50,000" dollars.

In the Gaming World, that is not a lot of money, you are basically only appealing to the "Same" group of people.

A Newer Engine would almost have to be "64 bit" which would mean a lot more memory, and better looking Unit Graphics.

Sometimes for the better good, one must sacrifice Quantity for Quality.

Only speaking about the Si8ngle Player part since I never played the ( MP ) game, but I don't remember that many people ever playing as the whole Army, most played the Brigades, and the Division Levels.

But, "Reb" did have an interesting idea about moving the units as "Sprites" and changing them into "3D Models", but I have no idea how one would archive that!

So, I guess that "We" will all have to agree to disagree, it is My opinion that "Graphics" are the main selling point towards the future of gaming!

davinci
The only true logic is that, there is no true logic!
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RebBugler
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Re: Fascinating....

Post by RebBugler »

Hi Davinci.
This may worth opening a new thread about the "legacies", in terms of coding/design/gameplay experiences, of the SOW series, perhaps...
Anyway, I suspect simply "plugging in" 3D models wouldn't suffice to get a relevant impact on those numbers.
The abstractions DarkRob mentioned, would kill the immersion for most of people anyway...
Aesthetically speaking, I'd prefer, as instance, seeing much more entertaining fort garrisoning/sieging (walls/gates), urban fighting, bridge crossing mechanics; mitigating inconsistent battle lines, unit manouvers, spacings and buffering zones under fighting conditions; improving firing/explosions/smoke graphics and sound effects; replacing guns from the artillery sprites with 3D models (you'll often see them "flying" when not aligned to ground); physically simulated roundshots; avoiding brutal hiccups on MP and frame rate drops in SP; and so on.
Just to name the first things coming to mind on that side...
That being said, the games remain rough diamonds for me. But still gems. ;)
Yes, absolutely, and I've got more!
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r59
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Re: Fascinating....

Post by r59 »

Davinci, I'm sorry for that, but it's simply impossible to find myself in disagreement with someone being a personal modding hero since the MMG forum times. :evil:

I only meant to say that I'm under the impression that if NSD would have "just replaced" ( :huh: ) 2D sprites with 3D models in SOWWL, every single abstracted low-level mechanics like the one mentioned by DarkRob (units penetrating walls), would have been equally considered very significant (negative) factors by any typical gamers' opinion.
And that, again just for the sake of argument because we're talking about things probably beyond NSD possibilities (a 3D animation system like TW, that's an huge beast!), they could eventually had better luck with those people oversensitive to graphics, by revamping directly the abstractions while retaining the actual sprites system (possibly with improved performances, plus effects).

But these kind of speculations fell clearly apart if we're gonna talk about NSD future projects.
I think our opinions in that respect are much closer.

Everything's more or less fine here, thanks.
Ciao. ;)
Last edited by r59 on Wed Jul 10, 2019 2:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
Davinci
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Re: Fascinating....

Post by Davinci »

I think our opinions in that respect are much closer.
@"r59" Agree, and Thanks!

But, without a Great Community there would never be a "Modder", and this is One of the Best Communities currently on the Internet!

So, Thanks for being apart of that Community!

davinci
The only true logic is that, there is no true logic!
52ndOx
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Re: Fascinating....

Post by 52ndOx »

As I new owner of SOW (proving that the game can still attract fresh users), I hope that I may offer my view of the sprite topic.

For me it is not about how they look, the appeal of the game is more the scale and feel of the battles, and the sprites are fine in that respect. But the problem is performance.

It takes massive effort to pre-produce 2D objects (with basic animations and only 16 different facings), and then CPUs are tasked with switching areas of memory to produce the in-game images, without the benefit of multi core or hyper threading support. Resulting in stone age performance. The bottleneck is RAM and bus speeds.

3D models not only look better, which is relatively unimportant but still relevant, but all the business of rendering units (with any direction facing and much better animations), texturing, and lighting, can be handed off to the GPU and its shaders, (allowing lighting and shadows in real time and not baked into textures) and thus freeing the CPU to run the AI logic and interface.

(And those 3D models have to be built anyway to produce the sprites).

So not only more attractive, but also much faster and smoother on modern PCs.
Last edited by 52ndOx on Tue Jul 16, 2019 7:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
r59
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Re: Fascinating....

Post by r59 »

Hi 52ndOx!
Thanks for the interesting contribution to the discussion, first of all. :)
For what it's worth, these were the very exact reasons why I also believed 3D models should be employed in future games from NSD.
Probably only moving everything to GPU, simulation of figures too (like a GPU particle system), could make the sprite option minimally competitive. But tradingoff everything, it wouldn't be a practical enough solution, imho.

Anyway, "just replacing" 3D models in the PR engine, would have not improved the situation.
By no means, really.
Performances would have degraded even more.
The sprite renderer itself has absolutely no clue about what optimal drawing means (and we could talk for hours about it, so don't get me started here, please.. for the sake of everybody health :blush: ).
Can't even think for a moment how the animation system would have handled crowded scenes...
But also visually, it probably would have not resulted significantly more attractive with all the known abstractions still in place (walls penetrations, etc.).
In both cases, a massive amount of work would have been needed to improve the situation.
Maybe beyond the dev team intentions and possibilities.

But also sticking with all the unavoidable flaws at foundations of the approach (memory requirements, transparency sorting and so on), a lot more could have been done to improve the billboards rendering performances, though.
If only we could put together a team of 2-3 people (the sprites reprocessing step "scaries" me especially :dry:), we might code an unofficial revamp to the system and get more than decent results.
Making the whole game a little more "breathable".
I throw the pebble, if anybody is interested around here. ;)
Last edited by r59 on Tue Jul 16, 2019 9:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
52ndOx
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Re: Fascinating....

Post by 52ndOx »

Well I am new around here, and I know nothing about how the SOW engine works in detail.
But when I run the software I see my CPU maxed out on one core, the others idling, buses at capacity, and the GPU asleep with most of its 6GB VRAM empty.

About the only major improvement I could imagine with the game, was if my hardware, which is only mid range by modern standards, could actually be usefully employed.

I realise its not happening of course.
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