Better models

[udm]

Don't see any similar thread on the frontpage, so I assume someone's gotta do this eventually. Here's to hoping we get better models to complement the fabulous scenery!

Seriously, most models, like fabric, decorations/scene props, humans, armor etc (essentially all models) have crap textures. They just don't blend in well with the realistic mapping on walls/ground/scenery

 

[linehand]

Well, I suspect that a big part of this has to do with being able to have 72 character models each with different armors and weapons, all on-screen and animated simultaneously and smoothly.. By default the char detail slider is at 50% so make sure you turn that up. For what the game engine is doing, it looks pretty damned good. There may be some room for improvement here but if it means we can't use the battle sizer to play with 100 - 200 person battles, I suspect many (me included), would rather not have ultra-high detail models. Of course if it is totally adjustable, how could we find fault 

 

[DamienZharkoff]

I will say this as I said to the Duke Nukem gameplay(ish) trailer.

It doesn't need to be next gen graphics if it has the depth and size to make up for it.

Examples of this (I am speaking unmodded FYI)

Daggerfall - Huge ****ing world (got into the record books) Living lands (economy,  VERY intricate quests, etc where you could do ANYTHING damn near in a quest from, aid the king, help betray him, or double cross both sides) hell, you could even choose what your character was ALLERGIC TO!

Morrowind - Large, amazing 3D island, many intresting armors, characters, etc. But not as much as daggerfall, but the 3D makes it hard to turn back

Oblivion - Breath Taking 3D, intresting combat system (but frustrating when your lunge at 100 skill in weapons gets replaced with a stab) very little land to explore. Lots of potential, wasted on making everything look pretty

 

[The Wandering Knight]

Actually, Oblivion had more land than Morrowind did, IIRC.

 

[udm]

Well, I suspect that a big part of this has to do with being able to have 72 character models each with different armors and weapons, all on-screen and animated simultaneously and smoothly.. By default the char detail slider is at 50% so make sure you turn that up. For what the game engine is doing, it looks pretty damned good. There may be some room for improvement here but if it means we can't use the battle sizer to play with 100 - 200 person battles, I suspect many (me included), would rather not have ultra-high detail models. Of course if it is totally adjustable, how could we find fault 

If it's possible, we can have it in such a way that if more characters are shown on screen, the LOD decreases significantly - models will use lower res textures. Likewise, if there are only a few items and models around, they will use the highest res textures possible

 

[DamienZharkoff]

Actually, Oblivion had more land than Morrowind did, IIRC.

Not really. In the end I can start the game, and travel with no quick travel, from one end of the map to another, in 30 minutes.
Morrowind took 2 hours at least, and Daggerfall took two weeks straight.

But morrowinds journey took long because there was alot more to draw your eye. In oblivion the most you would see is the rare, and boring cave or ruin (Each one was a obvious copy paste job)

Which, back to main topic, is Why I'd rather have a bunch of mid graphics guys, then a few high graphics guys

 

[Bismarck]

I'm always in for better models, but new content should be the primary target. There are lots of weapons and armours missing that I would like to see.

 

[linehand]

If it's possible, we can have it in such a way that if more characters are shown on screen, the LOD decreases significantly - models will use lower res textures. Likewise, if there are only a few items and models around, they will use the highest res textures possible

In theory this is a great concept and to a certain degree it works wonderfully and has been used in games to good effect (Serious Sam had pretty good hordes of monsters). However, excessive use of LODs may lead to new performance issues. Remember that you are now asking our CPUs to process this additional information to determine when to switch which models to which LODs, You are also swapping more textures each second.. (Serious Sam did not have many, many performance hitting features that M&B does have).

Certainly it is not inconceivable that M&Bs character models could be made to look better but we also must consider how much time it would take the dev team to redo all those textures and make so many nicer looking models.. There is a great many armors in the game. And if you ask me I think the game looks pretty good considering what it is doing. On my system I have all settings on max quality and it looks pretty good. People I have shown M&B to have been impressed with the graphics, not because they are photo-realistic, but because they realize that it is driving a lot of stuff all happening at once on the battlefield and it looks good doing it.

Personally I mourn the the dying art of low-poly modeling.. I turned on wireframe view in Oblivion and was disgusted at the ridiculously excessive use of triangles utterly wasted on large flat areas of the character models. Areas that were flat and required 5 triangles to display with the same exact quality of appearance were modeled with 50+ triangles. It was as though they just didn't give a crap whether anyones machines could actually drive their experiment in high-poly decadence. Were Oblivion crafted in an even half-assed optimized manner we could have seen detailed distances, realistic water, and not had to juggle 50 mods to get the game to look nice in motion (as opposed to seeing temples appear out of nowhere when you were 30 feet from them, experiencing loading pauses every few minutes of travel, seeing trees in the water reflections but bare hills in the reflections of anything more than 10 feet from the water).

So for me, M&B is an absolute joy to behold, in all it's semi-low-poly splendor.. I would hate to get high detail character models if it meant sacrificing the cohesive, well optimized, tight feeling performance that the game demonstrates so nicely on a solid gaming rig.

Don't get me wrong though.. Better models and textures are always welcome, but first and foremost is playability and the feel of the combat.. If you made the game have a flimsier and less consistent level of performance I think it would seriously effect the solid feeling of the action which, while far from realistic, captures a strong feeling of realism in part due to the way it performs.

 

[Erwin]

Actually, Oblivion had more land than Morrowind did, IIRC.

From the point of view of sheer landmass, yes. But it's not how big the world is, what counts is what's in it. Morrowind was completely hand-made down to the last blade of grass, which pretty much guaranteed right there that virtually any place on the map would be a breathtaking vista, or a quiet grove, a picturesque bend in the road, and so on. You had several distinct terrain types with their own kinds of trees and wildlife, from volcanic ash wastelands to marshes to lush forests to rolling grass plains. I could never ever get bored running through that, there was always something to occupy the eye and the mind.
Whereas in Oblivion you have the same endless bloody forest with bushes and pieces of rock randomly scattered on the ground. Bleugh.

 

[The Wandering Knight]

Well, I don't think it was THAT bad, Erwin.  Don't get me wrong, Oblivion got 3/10 for me, but still.  I do agree though that it was all forest -- could have had a few nice clearings and the like.  It had a small swamp with a ruin on an island in the middle, and a coastal region that was a bit different, but it could have used a couple more variations beyond just ruins.  On the whole it's biggest mistake was being France/England again, just like every other fantasy game >.> .

 

[spectre:]

I do not get it, does the OP complain about the textures or models, or both?

 

[kurjajuur]

Actually, Oblivion had more land than Morrowind did, IIRC.

Not really. In the end I can start the game, and travel with no quick travel, from one end of the map to another, in 30 minutes.
Morrowind took 2 hours at least, and Daggerfall took two weeks straight.

But morrowinds journey took long because there was alot more to draw your eye. In oblivion the most you would see is the rare, and boring cave or ruin (Each one was a obvious copy paste job)

Which, back to main topic, is Why I'd rather have a bunch of mid graphics guys, then a few high graphics guys

Off topic:  If you want tons of land, you should try Roma Victor lol. It has 900 square kilometres of it. 

 

[italiano]

Back on topic guys .

It must be considered that many of the armours have been in the game for a long time and simply haven't been updated. This is why there's such a vast difference in quality between armours such as the Khergit armour, the Mail & Plate armours, Surcoat over Mail etc and the earlier armours. Furthermore, the newer, better detailed armours aren't as demanding on performance as it would seem, as they make much greater use of the LOD system. There are also signs that new armours will be inserted into the game, as new armour items have been inserted into the items text file.

 

[DamnedChoir]

I'm not complaining, but I certainly hope that many of the models and textures in this game will receive updates eventually. My character in full Khergit armor is a glory to behold, with smooth lines and gleaming metal, his shield emblazoned, his sword shimmering.

And then there's that armor that looks like a misshapen lump of brown goo with barely any texture.

 

[udm]

Personally I mourn the the dying art of low-poly modeling.. I turned on wireframe view in Oblivion and was disgusted at the ridiculously excessive use of triangles utterly wasted on large flat areas of the character models. Areas that were flat and required 5 triangles to display with the same exact quality of appearance were modeled with 50+ triangles. It was as though they just didn't give a crap whether anyones machines could actually drive their experiment in high-poly decadence. Were Oblivion crafted in an even half-assed optimized manner we could have seen detailed distances, realistic water, and not had to juggle 50 mods to get the game to look nice in motion (as opposed to seeing temples appear out of nowhere when you were 30 feet from them, experiencing loading pauses every few minutes of travel, seeing trees in the water reflections but bare hills in the reflections of anything more than 10 feet from the water).

Doom 3 actually had very lo-poly models, but they actually looked awesome because of normal mapping. Even if there's no intention to create high poly models in M&B, I'd at least like to see better textures and mapping. Remember, the terrain and wall textures currently in M&B are all flat too, yet they look great because of normal and bump mapping

 

[DamienZharkoff]

Actually, Oblivion had more land than Morrowind did, IIRC.

Not really. In the end I can start the game, and travel with no quick travel, from one end of the map to another, in 30 minutes.
Morrowind took 2 hours at least, and Daggerfall took two weeks straight.

But morrowinds journey took long because there was alot more to draw your eye. In oblivion the most you would see is the rare, and boring cave or ruin (Each one was a obvious copy paste job)

Which, back to main topic, is Why I'd rather have a bunch of mid graphics guys, then a few high graphics guys

Off topic:  If you want tons of land, you should try Roma Victor lol. It has 900 square kilometres of it. 

If we're gonna compare single player game worlds to mmorpg ones (Which are easy to construct since quests, stories, etc don't need to be flexible, and combat engine doesnt need to be as tweaked) Then Second Life is bigger then all games combined XD
No game thus far (even mass effect) has been able to outsize daggerfall.

But on topic this debate goes with my idea that all cities should be seperated more, day and night should be a bit faster, and the map should be larger (Maybe even get us some other land masses that work via menu options. Just copy and paste the current landmass into 2-3 more exterior cels and be done after a bit of modding)

 

[italiano]

Which, back to main topic, is Why I'd rather have a bunch of mid graphics guys, then a few high graphics guys

You can get both with a good LOD system.