http://www.theelderscrolls.com/art/obliv_screenshots_01.htm

Wow. how is this even possible? THis is the first time I've been... really impressed with screenshots in a long time.

[thanks for the other link.. that database is better :p ]

yeah it's great isn't it.

http://www.theelderscrolls.com/home/home.htm

only thing i dont like is the helmets and weapons. some of them look downright awful. everything else looks great though, other than the over use of bloom/hdr/whatever in some areas.

Their LOD transitions are a bit obvious to the trained eye, but I think it's nice that they're putting the effort in.

Simply amazing. Too bad it probobly uses DirectX... (I know I'm gonna get flamed for this, but what the hell)



I think the LOD is relatively good. Maybe I've been sleeping under a rock, but not many games I've played recently have transparent LOD.

THATS CUZ YOU'RE ON LINUXLOLZ!

There's an obvious and definite distance where detail objects (like trees) are rendered as billboards and an obvious distance where landmarks (like mountains) are rendered into a horizon texture, or possibly several layers of them.

It's really subtle and effective for most of the screenshots we've seen, but it falls apart when you can see a high-detail area from across a clearing.

Something that I'd do, personally, to approve the appearance is to introduce a somewhat bumpy-looking normalmap to the billboards. That way it gives the trees and appearance of volume without having huge polygon counts. A particularly delicious option that can even cut back on the expenses of rendering the billboards with the normalmap would be to use impostors - so, basically, they can render a few different high-detail trees from different angles and render them into 3D textures. It's basically a tradeoff of some quality (which doesn't matter at far distances) and some variation (which doesn't matter in crowded scenes) for a freely rotating 3D object that has the same performance cost of an ordinary 2D sprite.

Lolz Bill Gates use the DirectX spyware to steal your palyer stats!

If that works on a 486, I'm impressed. (No, I don't have that crappy comp) But before that happens, nothing can impress me.

Anyhow, nice screenshots.

There are 8 levels of detail that I can see. There might be more, or there might be less (given that what I'm going by is the number of graphical defects. It's usually a pretty good indicator, but it might also just be a bug.)

0. When objects are close, naturally, they're rendered in all of their polygonal glory.

1. The trunks look like they're still drawn, but they might be normalmapped billboards. Foliage looks drastically toned down and flat.

2. The trees look completely flat from here on out. Obviously billboards.

3. Billboards are even lower resolution and don't look shaded or lit apart from depth fog. I think I see a depth-sorting error between LODs 2 and 3.

4. Lowest resolution for detail objects, but it still looks like all of the trees are being drawn as billboards. The engine probably does batch detail objects together in more forgiving situations (like flat terrain).

5-7. This looks flat, in spite of their bumpmapping efforts. I theorize about layers 6 and 7 based on the sharp horizontal lines at fairly uniform depths. This is exciting because it says their engine automatically generates this content, rather than it being prepared by an artist (as we've seen in previous, similar efforts - like Ultima X). In this instance I'd be really interested in seeing this engine in motion, since any approach I've considered would either be prohibitively expensive for storage or for performance.

I shall not buy the game, despite how sexy it is, until someone makes moogles for it.

I shall not buy the game either for the elder scrolls games get very boring very quickly (i mean in about 2 hours)

wow. wow.... I want...

I won't buy this game until i see an Argonian riding a froghemoth.

That guy on a horse shot really fails to impress me. I mean.. horses? Yay. Try summat more original and thematic, like the pack Guar mount mod someone made for es3, now /that/ would be great.

You know, I don't think I like HDR.

HDR != BLOOM
YOU = LOSE

That's not HDR, that's bloom. Two very different, very different LOOKING things. Bloom only looks like HDR because of the lens flare effect. HDR is much better looking, to me.

Bloom is okay for some games (Prince of Persia, REALLY set the mood), but others...not so much.

The Bloom effect is a reasonable approximation of HDRR assuming the lighting environment is known and constant. HDRR, by definition, is only possible on 3D cards that support floating point texture formats.

It's supposed to emulate image exposure. All monitors have a constant, set maximum brightness. Certain things in the real world are so bright that it's painful to look at and it appears to emit a "halo" of sorts (at least until the eye adjusts to the brightness).

When Bloom is used improperly it makes everything appear slightly photoemissive. This never happens with HDRR - HDRR looks almost exactly like the real world, especially if a DOF solution is included as well.