1UP preview: The Conduit

[sc94597]

Sansui said:

sc94597 said:

@Sansui Are you seroius? There are last gen games that look better than most of those. There is really nothing from the games you mentioned that are even close to comparable. The closest things are the textures(which will most likely be the next thing on HVS' mind). I don't see any of those games using techniques like Normal Mapping, and Projected Textures.  How about I compare one of the most Recent Conduit screens that barely show what the game looks like to some of  the best looking games  you mentioned. Btw I've played most of the games you mentioned as well.

Splinter Cell is the closest, and it was a high end game in 2003. Which as I said the conduit looks right now like a low-mid end game pc game of 2004, and could look even better by the time of release. Also as a big pc gamer, I don't know why HD console owners think the graphics of most of their games look good? Oh and please look at the videos rather than the screens of the conduit. It will give you a better perspective on what the graphics look like. Also seeing as somebody who has played the game(DKII) said that it looks much better on screen than in the pics, or videos, I would think the game looks much better than the screens or even the videos show. 

Ok - you cherry picked a few screenshots, ignoring the trailers I provided of those games in motion - which certainly look better than the cherrypicked screens you selected.  I was comparing the videos of those games to the video of the conduit, that's why I linked videos instead of screenshots.

I already stated the wii obviously has some improved lighting and shader effects, but they do NOT dwarf the games I posted by any stretch of the imagination.  Normal mapping is not some holy grail - it adds another layer of detail but does not blow those old games out of the water.  In fact the character and enemy models in a lot of those games, as well as the environments, look a lot more impressive than the Conduit.  The *only* thing the conduit has on them are modern shaders, normal (or is it using parallax mapping) mapping and lighting effects.

And like I said, even if you consider it to be on par with 2003/2004, why would that be hype worthy?

 

I got the screens from ign, and looked for the best possible screens I could find for all three games. ALl the rest of the screens look equivalent or worse. Its not just normal mapping. There is normal mapping, better shaders, projected textures, better reflection mapping as you could see in the scope and water of the conduit, much better lighting, by the looks of it, more polygons, better particle effects and the textures(which as viper has mentioned as placeholder textures) look comparable to the other games. The game still has 9 months of development. Actually here is all of the things that HVS describes in the end of their tech demo of the Quantum 3 engine.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyPnRyz6-6s&feature=related

Lighting and Shadows

Global Illumination

Per-vertex light mapping

Projected shadow Casting

Self Shadowing

Soft Shadows

Light/ Dark Maps

Dinamic omni,directional, point, spot, and projected texture lights

Rendering

Fixed Function or Shader Driven processing

Render to Texture

True Type Font Support

Native Flash Content Rendering

Bump, Environment, Detail Mapping

Multi pass, Multi-Texture

Deffered Rendering

Alpha Blending, Masking and Chromakey

Decal System

Scene Management

Cell & Portal Engine

LOD

Seamless streaming Environments

Full Collision Detection and Ray Casting

Auto Generated, Hierarchical collision volumes

Real-time Reflection generator

Picking SUpport

Animation

Skeletal Keyframe Based animation

Morphing

Translation/ rotation extraction

Scriptable, multi-channel blending

Variable Bone Weight Skinning

Facial Animation

Special Effects

Screen Aligned Billboards

Advanced sprite based particle system

Volume Particles(atoms)

Animated Skydomes

Interactive Water

Linear, Height and Volumetric Fog

Scriptable Materials

Texture Animation

Alpha Masking

Native Flash content rendering

Projected Textures

Motion BLur, Heat Distortion

Bloom

Full Screen Post-processing

Also they mention that this is only a few of many things the engine is capable of. I doubt the end product would look like a 2002/2003 game. Right now other than the textures it doesn't look like one.