[Devblog] DirectX 11 Tessellation Tech Demo at Fanfest 2012

[Frug]

I love their wording. They're trying to gauge player response to improved graphics.

Do you like better graphics: [] yes, [] no

quickly let us consult the community to see whether or not they like pretty things! Fucking douche marketing business speak. You showed it to generate hype. Not to figure out if people will welcome better fucking graphics.

If they wanted to see what the community thought about the visual direction of the game, how about asking people if they would prefer better missile effects over tessellation.

[Alistair]

I like new NPC-Corp Ship Skins, and would buy them with Arum. Pretty sells.

I like damage-modeling.

I like old-hulls being refreshed (and symetry-ized generally). I can't think of a new design I like less than it's older original thus far.

As long as development is balanced, some shiny, some fixes, some needed redesigns (POS, Sov.) then I'm more than ok with a bit of pretty every expansion.

[Daneel Trevize]

I can't think of a new design I like less than it's older original thus far.

Velator. Really?

[SuperSpy]

I'm way more impressed with them having a method to automatically scale from absurdly high levels of detail to lower levels of detail based on GPU/client load than I am of them showing off MOAR SHINIES.

Imagine a client that looks amazing when it's just you and your 10-man roaming gang warping around and also automatically down-scales detail to prevent a 2000-man fight from becoming a .1 FPS shitstorm.

[hellgremlin]

I have a GTX 480 1.5gb, will it cut it?

[I Legionnaire]

I have a Dx11 card, and I approve of this message. More pretty things CCP!

[Joshua Foiritain]

I'm way more impressed with them having a method to automatically scale from absurdly high levels of detail to lower levels of detail based on GPU/client load than I am of them showing off MOAR SHINIES.

Imagine a client that looks amazing when it's just you and your 10-man roaming gang warping around and also automatically down-scales detail to prevent a 2000-man fight from becoming a .1 FPS shitstorm.

I'm pretty sure most of eve's graphic lag comes from the HUD, especially things like brackets, not so much the actual ships.

Of course i havent been on a grid with 2000 ships in years so what the fuck do i know :P

[Jarnis]

I have a GTX 480 1.5gb, will it cut it?

Easily. It is considerably faster than the card they used to demo it at Fanfest.

[Intigo]

I like new NPC-Corp Ship Skins, and would buy them with Arum. Pretty sells.

Fuck you.

[Sandzibar]

I'm way more impressed with them having a method to automatically scale from absurdly high levels of detail to lower levels of detail based on GPU/client load than I am of them showing off MOAR SHINIES.

Imagine a client that looks amazing when it's just you and your 10-man roaming gang warping around and also automatically down-scales detail to prevent a 2000-man fight from becoming a .1 FPS shitstorm.

I'm pretty sure most of eve's graphic lag comes from the HUD, especially things like brackets, not so much the actual ships.

My god this. and its not just EVE thats guilty. lots of MMO's run spankingly fast if you turn off the HUD. Maybe this inititive that CCP Unifex mentioned at fanfest, to recode/streamline/update lots of the old tangled mess of ancient backend code will help improve this.

[Cerbus]

The tessellation uses the normal map and some shader trickery

To be clear a displacement map is not a normal map; you can't do geometry modification for tessellation with the latter. However the two are similar in nature.

Hmm how odd. I thought the magic part of cuda tesselation was creating a displacement map / increasing the poly count out using polynomials, of which I thought normals were.

edit. you are correct i don't know what I'm talking about, the displacement map is created from the high res model not the normals.

[moomers]

for those with serious trouble comprehending what they saw, the 'corporation skins' are not vanity aurum purchases but revised tech2 skins for the v3'd models. the manufacturing corps they show are what tech2 is. unless tech2 has started selling for aurum while i wasn't looking, your attempt to stir turboneckbeard nerdrage for lolinternets drama is baseless.

[randomToon]

I like new NPC-Corp Ship Skins, and would buy them with Arum. Pretty sells.

Fuck you.

QFT

[Paradox]

I like new NPC-Corp Ship Skins, and would buy them with Arum. Pretty sells.

Fuck you.

QFT

yep

[Cerbus]

for those with serious trouble comprehending what they saw, the 'corporation skins' are not vanity aurum purchases but revised tech2 skins for the v3'd models. the manufacturing corps they show are what tech2 is. unless tech2 has started selling for aurum while i wasn't looking, your attempt to stir turboneckbeard nerdrage for lolinternets drama is baseless.

nerd rage.

There are t1 manufacturer variants in the stuff files also that don't exist in game as of yet, but it looks like the default will be 12 manufacturers/ factions per race some of which exist already in game (such as the t2 manufacturer variants you are referring to)

[MrBadidea]

So in ground level user terms what does this mean?

Extra detail without a modeller in CCP doing the work. The video card looks at the texture and thinks, "Hey, this looks like a tube, I'mma make a tube shape", and so it was.

They already fake this a bit with bump mapping, but this is modifying geometry on the fly. That stuff isn't easy.

It's not free detail for no extra work. They even mentioned this during the Video; "We had to have one of our artists come in and pretty this up a little to make it work right."

As somebody who has actually worked with and implemented tessellation and knows how it works, they'd p. much have to have their artists do another pass over all of the existing models to touch up the model geometry, fiddle UV maps and dick with normal and height maps to get it to work. As a minimum. That's time spent on making detail work that is basically irrelevent for the vast majority of your time spent playing EVE. They'd be better keeping it on the cards for new models rather than trying to convert over, but that's mainly for reasons other than visual detail.

[SuperSpy]

I'm pretty sure most of eve's graphic lag comes from the HUD, especially things like brackets, not so much the actual ships.

Of course i havent been on a grid with 2000 ships in years so what the fuck do i know :P

Yeah most of the lag comes from brackets and the overview, but in fuckoff huge fights graphics do start becoming an issue.

Although, at that point the client is processing so much data (the giant shit the client takes as it receives grid info on 1k+ ships is abysmal) that graphics lag is still pretty low on the list.

[Helicity]

I'm pretty sure most of eve's graphic lag comes from the HUD, especially things like brackets, not so much the actual ships.

Of course i havent been on a grid with 2000 ships in years so what the fuck do i know :P

Yeah most of the lag comes from brackets and the overview, but in fuckoff huge fights graphics do start becoming an issue.

Although, at that point the client is processing so much data (the giant shit the client takes as it receives grid info on 1k+ ships is abysmal) that graphics lag is still pretty low on the list.

Specifically it's the twenty-thousand overlapping semi transparent SEBO and ECCM effects that are to blame.
Leave turrets on, turn off effects, hide brackets and It'll work splendidly even on my shitty old pc and gfx card, with ship detail maxed.

[randomToon]

It occurred to me yesterday, that if CCP is planning on implementing DX11 renderer in Eve, then they might as well go for OpenGL 4.0 instead - which would be a much more logical choice given that Eve Online runs on both Windows and Mac OS.

OpenGL 4.0 provides support for GPU tessellation, its hardware requirements are basically identical to those of DX11(Nvidia GeForce 400 series or newer/Radeon HD 5000 series or newer), and, of course, it runs natively on Mac OS X(afaik current client uses Cedega's DirectX->OpenGL translation layer based on wine which is obviously more complex and error prone than a native solution).

I don't want to start a DX vs OpenGL flamewar here, but I honestly see no reason why DirectX 11 would be the better choice in this particular case.

[dpidcoe]

I like new NPC-Corp Ship Skins, and would buy them with Arum. Pretty sells.

Fuck you.

QFT

yep

Not empty quotin