Virtual spaces keep getting prettier.
Aug. 12th, 2003 03:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tugrikThey're definitely helped along by proper hardware. Kim was a saint and lent us his Nvidia Quadra4 card -- a too-pricey-for-us ubercard that he won at the last GDC. We had a machine it'd fit well in and he had it just sitting on a shelf... so why not? After installing this card, all I can say is wow
Planetside is a seriously tough-on-hardware game. On our souped up box we tend to run it on the 'medium' preset to maintain a playable 30-40fps rate. With this heavy-pounder of a graphics engine I was able to set the game into "everything on and at max" settings, at 1280x1024, and get between 40-90fps no matter what we were doing. Battles with 30 people crowded into a hall leading to the command-center that used to turn the game into a slide show now run at 30fps. This just breaks my brain. Scarier yet is the card appears to run cooler than the slower one!
To give it a proper test out I hooked up with Nash from my outfit (Smoke & Mirrors) and went for a little playaround on Cyssor. Cyssor is a favorite continent of mine. Lush green and cypress swamps give you these vivid colors during the day, breaking completely out of the 'FPS games should be dark and industrial' flat-palette mold. At night the fog rolls in, deeply hued and sound-muting. The vegetation is so thick that you can actually be a foot soldier and live even with a sky full of bombers and reaver pilots. If you walk away from the cities and out into the open land, away from the fights, you can just walk around and listen. It's a really great place.
Tonight had no real quiet-times to appreciate, though. The Terran republic had entrenched themselves in the base at Ixtab... and dammit, they weren't going to give it up. Their home-continent's warpgate was just down the road and they were pouring out of it like termintes from a kicked-over mound. The road was theirs, as was Ixtab and its surrounding areas. A storm was rolling in from the west, cutting overhead visibility. Still a few miles out we could hear the muffled concussions in the distance. Evidently someone felt the Terrans' mound needed a little more kicking.
Nash turned around to motion me onwards. In lighter scout armor he could beat my pace... but he wanted to be behind my thumper instead of in front of it when we crested the ridge. Slogging up through the wet grasses was slow going, but it gave us something to crouch down in and peek over the ridge beyond.
The enemy was still out of sight, a few ridges over. A check of the map showed that it'd be much more wise to take a detour through the bog to the south, where a watchtower held point. If we could take that it'd give our empire a spawn-point to help take Ixtab back. We slogged onwards, keeping our heads low as a Liberator chuffed past, 35mm chaingun thumping. The frontline was close. Tracer rounds randomly flicked by and splintered tree-bark. The occasional lightning flash didn't help. Those always make me flinch.
A Galaxy-class dropship makes an incredibly distinctive noise even if it's way overhead. The radar showed it was friendly and was headed towards the same tower that we were. While the tower-fight was out of sight a half-kliometer ahead, I could easily visualise what was happening. The pilot ferried his load of friendlies to the top of the base, hot-dropping them on the balconies. I've been in that kind of drop before, and it's a fun challenge. The hacker works the top security doors open while the heavies wait to charge in. Down the stairs they go in a phalanx, the Maxx armors mowing a clear path while their support engineers keep their backs clear. They cluster around the command console of the tower to protect their hacker as he rewires the systems into their network, turning all of the tower resources into their own.
By the time we'd cleared the bog the puple flag of our empire welcomingly hung from the tower's posts. The drop-ship had re-loaded, and was pulling from the tower en route to Ixtab as the evening set in. Although the ground-fog was still pretty thick the stormy skies were clearing, letting the moon show through.
The fight for the city itself was harsh. Darkness had fallen, making it hard to get an accurate view of the situation. Cloaked scouts went in, suffering heavy losses but bringing back good information: over 80 Terrans held the base and had time to fortify it. Holy cow. To make things worse, many of the vehicles normally used to assist a base-rush were useless in the thick swamps. Harassers bogged down, Sunderers couldn't fit between some of the tree clumps and the skyguards couldn't pound their flak through the canopy. Aircraft were still helpful but were limited by the high trees. The only open space was in the target base itself and that was bristling with AA turrets and pissed off Terrans with shoulder mounted rocket launchers. Not a friendly situation.
Commanders got on the horn and roudned up people from minor skirmishes around the continent to come help in the base-raid. Vanu came swarming in rapidly; we listen to our commanders pretty well, as empries go. The strategy was simple: a sheer-numbers tactic nicknamed a 'zerg'. As the short night hit its darkest point, over 120 Vanu stormed the base in unison. As they died reinforcements immediately replaced them, pouring in from the towers and mobile bases snuck in between the trees. They put up an amazingly strong resistance but it was like a child's sandcastle trying to resist the tide. In the end they were simply swept away.
It was morning before we had the base cleared, cleaned, restocked and ready for action. Combat engineers had laid down turrets and traps galore. Troops greeted the sun standing on the walls, watching the horizons while our vehicle stations dutifully churned out replacements for the equipment lost in battle. We now had a direct supply line to the warpgate and kept pouring energy into the base as fast as we were using it. Nash and I grabbed a Skyguard and took a quick patrol around the walls. The enemy was still strong up north of us, across the channel a few kilometers away. If they were smart they'd be sending some high-altitude recon craft or maybe even a bomber or two to test our defenses... and there's few things as satisfying as a huge mobile flak turret to bring them down.
The sky was quiet, though. Odd. Quiet enough that we rolled on down to the beach to look across the channel at our enemy. No planes in the sky, no craft on the water... and even looking through the 12x binocs, no footsoldiers dotting the distant shore. Did they abandon their stronghold in the middle of the night? Did we drive them off the continent? It almost looked peaceful over there.
Well, it was time for some rest anyways so I headed back to Ixtab to bunk my character for the night. We'd get the amphibious craft and cross that channel another day. Besides, I have work in the morning. :)
Screenshots never really do a full-motion game much justice. I can't stress enough how huge the environment of this game is -- and how well rendered it is. Imagine those frames moving realtime, 60fps or so. Imagine them full of literally hundreds of people in all manners of armor and vehicles, with shots flying overhead like the start of the Saving Private Ryan movie. Click on the pictures to get the full sized version (1280x1024) and look at the details. The trees and big rocks aren't 2D cut outs -- they're full 3D rendered and very 'real' to the game. You can take cover behind them, use them to conceal turret and mine placements or simply use them to hide/sneak past when trying to get into a hostile area unseen. They're not window dressing; they're important to gameplay. Rushing from boulder to boulder in groups of 4, moving your squad through hostile fire up to a defense wall so you can hack into the back door is a seriously cool experience. Tactics rule.
I have a hard time taking screenshots during base-battles because so much is going on. The game is in full 5.1 digital surround and you really do need it. Sitting in the basement command-center of a base you can simply listen to the battles rage on other floors and know what's coming. The fear-factor can be pretty intense (though once you're used to it, it's more a twitch-factor instead).
That last shot over the channel shows the power of this card Kim lent us. That city on the other side is about 3km away.. and yet it's drawing it out in surprising detail. The antennas on the buildings wink, the depth-of-field fades right, the fog rolls in and out (it's definatley NOT the cheapie 'it's too far make it foggy' cop-out fog most games have), and if some guy from, oh, Kentucky has his character logged in and standing on a balcony rail you can zoom in with your sniper rifle and see him walk around and interact with his co-horts. If you're closer (about 1.2km), have a sniper rifle and are an amazing shot you can see about making him crumple over and fall off that balcony, much to his buddies' panic.
The coolest thing? The biggest battles develop stories of their own, esp. when you're working with a good squad and outfit. They have planning, research, recon, full out attacks and aftermaths. Sometime I'll try to get a .mov capture of a good battle or actually just have it auto-capture screens every 10 seconds or so (yay for huge hard-drives) and pick out the right ones to tell the story.
This is part of why I don't a large selection of video games. The few I do play tend to be ones with enough gameplay and detail to seriously get into -- and I like playing them for all they're worth. :)
Planetside is a seriously tough-on-hardware game. On our souped up box we tend to run it on the 'medium' preset to maintain a playable 30-40fps rate. With this heavy-pounder of a graphics engine I was able to set the game into "everything on and at max" settings, at 1280x1024, and get between 40-90fps no matter what we were doing. Battles with 30 people crowded into a hall leading to the command-center that used to turn the game into a slide show now run at 30fps. This just breaks my brain. Scarier yet is the card appears to run cooler than the slower one!
To give it a proper test out I hooked up with Nash from my outfit (Smoke & Mirrors) and went for a little playaround on Cyssor. Cyssor is a favorite continent of mine. Lush green and cypress swamps give you these vivid colors during the day, breaking completely out of the 'FPS games should be dark and industrial' flat-palette mold. At night the fog rolls in, deeply hued and sound-muting. The vegetation is so thick that you can actually be a foot soldier and live even with a sky full of bombers and reaver pilots. If you walk away from the cities and out into the open land, away from the fights, you can just walk around and listen. It's a really great place.
Tonight had no real quiet-times to appreciate, though. The Terran republic had entrenched themselves in the base at Ixtab... and dammit, they weren't going to give it up. Their home-continent's warpgate was just down the road and they were pouring out of it like termintes from a kicked-over mound. The road was theirs, as was Ixtab and its surrounding areas. A storm was rolling in from the west, cutting overhead visibility. Still a few miles out we could hear the muffled concussions in the distance. Evidently someone felt the Terrans' mound needed a little more kicking.
Nash turned around to motion me onwards. In lighter scout armor he could beat my pace... but he wanted to be behind my thumper instead of in front of it when we crested the ridge. Slogging up through the wet grasses was slow going, but it gave us something to crouch down in and peek over the ridge beyond.
The enemy was still out of sight, a few ridges over. A check of the map showed that it'd be much more wise to take a detour through the bog to the south, where a watchtower held point. If we could take that it'd give our empire a spawn-point to help take Ixtab back. We slogged onwards, keeping our heads low as a Liberator chuffed past, 35mm chaingun thumping. The frontline was close. Tracer rounds randomly flicked by and splintered tree-bark. The occasional lightning flash didn't help. Those always make me flinch.
A Galaxy-class dropship makes an incredibly distinctive noise even if it's way overhead. The radar showed it was friendly and was headed towards the same tower that we were. While the tower-fight was out of sight a half-kliometer ahead, I could easily visualise what was happening. The pilot ferried his load of friendlies to the top of the base, hot-dropping them on the balconies. I've been in that kind of drop before, and it's a fun challenge. The hacker works the top security doors open while the heavies wait to charge in. Down the stairs they go in a phalanx, the Maxx armors mowing a clear path while their support engineers keep their backs clear. They cluster around the command console of the tower to protect their hacker as he rewires the systems into their network, turning all of the tower resources into their own.
By the time we'd cleared the bog the puple flag of our empire welcomingly hung from the tower's posts. The drop-ship had re-loaded, and was pulling from the tower en route to Ixtab as the evening set in. Although the ground-fog was still pretty thick the stormy skies were clearing, letting the moon show through.
The fight for the city itself was harsh. Darkness had fallen, making it hard to get an accurate view of the situation. Cloaked scouts went in, suffering heavy losses but bringing back good information: over 80 Terrans held the base and had time to fortify it. Holy cow. To make things worse, many of the vehicles normally used to assist a base-rush were useless in the thick swamps. Harassers bogged down, Sunderers couldn't fit between some of the tree clumps and the skyguards couldn't pound their flak through the canopy. Aircraft were still helpful but were limited by the high trees. The only open space was in the target base itself and that was bristling with AA turrets and pissed off Terrans with shoulder mounted rocket launchers. Not a friendly situation.
Commanders got on the horn and roudned up people from minor skirmishes around the continent to come help in the base-raid. Vanu came swarming in rapidly; we listen to our commanders pretty well, as empries go. The strategy was simple: a sheer-numbers tactic nicknamed a 'zerg'. As the short night hit its darkest point, over 120 Vanu stormed the base in unison. As they died reinforcements immediately replaced them, pouring in from the towers and mobile bases snuck in between the trees. They put up an amazingly strong resistance but it was like a child's sandcastle trying to resist the tide. In the end they were simply swept away.
It was morning before we had the base cleared, cleaned, restocked and ready for action. Combat engineers had laid down turrets and traps galore. Troops greeted the sun standing on the walls, watching the horizons while our vehicle stations dutifully churned out replacements for the equipment lost in battle. We now had a direct supply line to the warpgate and kept pouring energy into the base as fast as we were using it. Nash and I grabbed a Skyguard and took a quick patrol around the walls. The enemy was still strong up north of us, across the channel a few kilometers away. If they were smart they'd be sending some high-altitude recon craft or maybe even a bomber or two to test our defenses... and there's few things as satisfying as a huge mobile flak turret to bring them down.
The sky was quiet, though. Odd. Quiet enough that we rolled on down to the beach to look across the channel at our enemy. No planes in the sky, no craft on the water... and even looking through the 12x binocs, no footsoldiers dotting the distant shore. Did they abandon their stronghold in the middle of the night? Did we drive them off the continent? It almost looked peaceful over there.
Well, it was time for some rest anyways so I headed back to Ixtab to bunk my character for the night. We'd get the amphibious craft and cross that channel another day. Besides, I have work in the morning. :)
Screenshots never really do a full-motion game much justice. I can't stress enough how huge the environment of this game is -- and how well rendered it is. Imagine those frames moving realtime, 60fps or so. Imagine them full of literally hundreds of people in all manners of armor and vehicles, with shots flying overhead like the start of the Saving Private Ryan movie. Click on the pictures to get the full sized version (1280x1024) and look at the details. The trees and big rocks aren't 2D cut outs -- they're full 3D rendered and very 'real' to the game. You can take cover behind them, use them to conceal turret and mine placements or simply use them to hide/sneak past when trying to get into a hostile area unseen. They're not window dressing; they're important to gameplay. Rushing from boulder to boulder in groups of 4, moving your squad through hostile fire up to a defense wall so you can hack into the back door is a seriously cool experience. Tactics rule.
I have a hard time taking screenshots during base-battles because so much is going on. The game is in full 5.1 digital surround and you really do need it. Sitting in the basement command-center of a base you can simply listen to the battles rage on other floors and know what's coming. The fear-factor can be pretty intense (though once you're used to it, it's more a twitch-factor instead).
That last shot over the channel shows the power of this card Kim lent us. That city on the other side is about 3km away.. and yet it's drawing it out in surprising detail. The antennas on the buildings wink, the depth-of-field fades right, the fog rolls in and out (it's definatley NOT the cheapie 'it's too far make it foggy' cop-out fog most games have), and if some guy from, oh, Kentucky has his character logged in and standing on a balcony rail you can zoom in with your sniper rifle and see him walk around and interact with his co-horts. If you're closer (about 1.2km), have a sniper rifle and are an amazing shot you can see about making him crumple over and fall off that balcony, much to his buddies' panic.
The coolest thing? The biggest battles develop stories of their own, esp. when you're working with a good squad and outfit. They have planning, research, recon, full out attacks and aftermaths. Sometime I'll try to get a .mov capture of a good battle or actually just have it auto-capture screens every 10 seconds or so (yay for huge hard-drives) and pick out the right ones to tell the story.
This is part of why I don't a large selection of video games. The few I do play tend to be ones with enough gameplay and detail to seriously get into -- and I like playing them for all they're worth. :)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-08-12 10:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-12 10:09 am (UTC)I don't really have a computer worth doing this sort of thing with. The laptop is.. well.. a laptop. The desktop has its own issues: we just had to add another slice of RAM as it tended to shut down before too long.
To give you an idea
Date: 2003-08-12 10:15 am (UTC)Even then it only ran well on medium and only at 1024x768. It wasn't until this new card-of-DOOM that I could crank it up to full mode.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-12 10:20 am (UTC)Normally in an FPS the server determines if a client's shot hits a target. This way there's no chance of an 'auto-aim' cheat and there's no 'easy kills' while someone is standing still (lagged out). However this gives you the type of lag you're used to seeing in Quake, etc, where things aren't exactly where you think they are once network latency builds up -- so it's hard ot hit people. Taken to Planetside's scale, this would be a nightmare.
With client-side hits, the server trusts the client to figure it out. If you have someone in your crosshairs, fire, and hit... you hit. This means you don't have to wait for the server to verify you've hit someone. The resulting play at your terminal is very smooth and almost lag-free until you get into hallway-clogging slapfights with so many people it's stupid.
The downside is that if Player A lags, the server will keep them doing whatever they were doing (running forwards, flying forwards, etc) in everybody else's client. If Player B then shoots them dead, even though they're lagged out, they're dead. When Player A unlags, they will start taking hits though they may never see who hit them, as the server informs them of all the strikes they've soaked up.
Lag is therefore less common but downright weird when it happens. You may notice people running in less-random patterns a moment or two when you lag... and you may take 'phantom hits' when you unlag. I think the tradeoff is worth it as it's not hard to adapt your play to get around most of those problems.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-12 10:21 am (UTC)-:)
-Traveller.
Re: To give you an idea
Date: 2003-08-12 11:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-12 01:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-12 02:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-12 08:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-12 10:04 pm (UTC)Is Planetside one of those multi-player online games you pay a monthly fee for?
Nice story, great box
Date: 2003-08-12 11:26 pm (UTC)Re: Nice story, great box
Date: 2003-08-12 11:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-12 11:44 pm (UTC)The nice part is when you finally tire of the game you simply stop paying. No long-term 'contracts' or what have you.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-13 12:03 am (UTC)This is the kinda stuff I miss, the kinda stuff I always wanted to hear.
Of course, there's still so many hurdles...
*wistfulsigh*
no subject
Date: 2003-08-13 09:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-13 09:59 am (UTC)boozin06@hotmail.com