Words Of Wisdom said:
I never played RS2. Was the level of detail on those ships adequate at all distances? Simplistic AI? I have this feeling that there's a level of exaggeration in that statement or that there's something missing from it. |
The Rogue Squadron series also used level-of-detail mechanisms that included imposter sprites off in the distance. On top of that, in a spaceship game, you don't have to skin meshes to animated skeletons, nor animate the skeleton to begin with. Everything is "hard" geometry -- very easy to model, very fast to render. As such, thei level of detail mechanisms don't need to be as aggressive as a game with "people" characters. Spaceship "characters" are cheap.
I always get a chuckle when people point out RS and its ilk, on the GameCube, as examples of its horsepower, for this reason. Spaceships are approximately one bazillion times closer, than animated characters, or detailed indoor environments, to being those tiny 1-or-2 tiny texture triangles they use to spit out performance numbers for graphics chipsets... i.e. very specialized, very easy, very fast. Then again, obviously they can still be used to make some phenominal games -- RS was awesome, although it doesn't prove anything about the GC or Wii's power, like people like to believe it does.
