Alpha screenshots with FXAA and annotation feedback.

I had a great 2 hours
The game is so rough, so basic, so early, so alpha. Yet, somehow. It's awesome.
The only really major issues i had was only two things, which is quite remarkable this early.
Preformance when zooming / panning around.
Units disappearing into the ground.
And one minor, double-click to select all units of the same type is far too sensitive, even triggering on single-clicks sometimes.
Couldn't stop playing. Also, it looks quite damn nice with FXAA.



My mid-game base, can you tell i love to turtle?
I love how you can place structures anywhere. Of course the full version needs some restriction in proximity to existing structures
But i hope it's not too restrictive, there's no need to have massive empty spaces of "CAN'T BUILD HERE" around every structure.
Just make sure it doesn't cut into the mesh, that's all. Keep the freedom!
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Units pathing through the mountains, actually worked really really well, no waypoints, just end destination set.
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Combat, quite a slowdown, units seem to path great when out in the peaceful wilderness but as soon as combat starts they don't know what to do.
It might be better to have units in combat just "push through" the costfield, as it is important that they obey every command you give even if it's a move order directly into the enemy base.
It doesn't matter if it is an unoptimal route, they need to follow the order.
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Artillery battery, loved this. But they did not serve much of a purpose tbh. No enemy base structures ever came into range, and enemy armies were dealt with by the point defence.
Perhaps allow T2 artillery to "curve" around a bit further range? If direct vision only perhaps, if only with radar it'll be a bit too powerful.
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Safe or volatile? :twisted:
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<3
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Even just on lakes, it worked well to have battleships on the shore helping to defend.
They do glide onto land if using the "Stop" command, deceleration needs to increase.
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Why use one radar, when you can have several on top of eachother? :lol:

How did you enable FXAA? Looking good.

That has to be the best army color setup I've ever laid my eyes on.

Great screens too.

Nice team colors. Is that your vacation army?

I'm quite fond of how well FXAA or similar post process antialiasing techniques work with our art style. Once we implement post process effects it's something high on my list of things to get implemented. The problem with FXAA injection (like forcing it on in drivers) is it tends to mess with text badly.

I am jealous of your base layout skills ¬_¬

EDIT: And yes, how DID you enable FXAA??

I just added PA.exe in the nvidia control panel (or your ati driver settings).
Then selected FXAA to be on.
Should note that the ingame settings were on Medium (they go up to "Uber"), such as shadows, lighting and texturing.

For those not in the alpha, the faction colors are a preset selection of primary + secondary colors. This one as example is pink with dark green "stripes" here and there.
My favorite is still the white and red one, for that japanese anime feel :lol:

This start location is amazing








I love to turtle
And I love walls. But please make it possible to just drag out walls (and structures), like in Supcom.

Leviathan---->Your Base<-----Leviathan

Squish xD

Edge smoothing is, fancy as it looks, NOT anti-aliasing. Just look at the tightly grouped units to see a noisy mess.

I'm going to be a little pedantic here.

FXAA is anti-aliasing, in the most literal sense. A 50 pixel wide gaussian blur across the entire screen is also anti-aliasing.

Aliasing in graphics simply refers to hard pixel edges, usually along angles. FXAA, MLAA and other purely post process AA techniques are various forms of blur, some smart, some not. On one game I worked on in the past we just had a 1.5 pixel blur across the screen to remove aliasing. However it was broken and the game just looked like it was rendering at lower resolution and no one fixed it before release.

What FXAA is not is subpixel detail, which is what most people think of when using the term "anti-aliasing" as Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing and Multi Sampling Anti-Aliasing, which do have subpixel detail, were the main forms of AA for a long time. SSAA "easy" from the stand point of basically it is just rendering the screen at a higher resolution then reducing the image size to fit the intended resolution. It was a fairly simple brute force solution that worked well for a while. MSAA is a little smarter than SSAA and often produces better looking results, but it is also not fully actually accurate subpixel detail, it's just good enough most don't notice. The post process AA techniques are just another step in the "good enough" direction while freeing up significant rendering resources.

:shock: :shock:
I would have loved to see that, sadly the only player in the game had disconnected / crashed

In regards to bickering about "to FXAA or not to FXAA".
Personally I prefer a somewhat fuzzy mess to a knife-sharp jaggy mess. Especially on a moving image.
It's up to personal preference really.


LOL bgolus, I've seen that in a few rare games too, where their AA is so shabby that it just looks like it's running in 800x600. It's something that annoys me in games these days, how they spend so much money and effort on fancy-schmancy effects, but they completely neglect anti-aliasing, resulting in the entire game (and all the effort they put into it) looking like nothing more than a pixelated mess.

Shogun 2 Total War is a good example of that, they went to all the trouble of the intricate detail in the unit models, reflective shaders in the rain, but completely neglected any decent AA solution.

The result was that an older game like Napoleon actually looked "better" in some sense than this new multi-million dollar product. Well, in the sense that you could have armies of thousands of units moving in nice smooth anti-aliased fashion.
In the sense that the asthetic of the game was "flawless", no flickering jaggies, no immersion breaks. Just the purity of the scene.
Poor animation/texturing is still decent if the player can see it from a distance, make out an arm from a sword for example.
But great animation/texturing doesn't matter much if the player can't even make out the intricate movements due to flickering pixels all over the screen.

Strictly speaking yes, blur and AA is the same thing. But you are as you said , creating a lower resolution, lower detail version of the image.
FXAA is not "good enough". As it does not remove significant amounts of aliasing. Blur is AA, but FXAA is not AA, it's edge smoothing, it smooths only edges that it can detect.

Theoretically you can't fully antialias vector graphics like that because it has infinite resolution, but MSAA, unlike FXAA, is good enough. At least so long as geometry is concerned, shaders is another business.

Well yeah.. This engine uses deferred lighting, so..

Lower detail, not lower resolution. (Unless you're doing the blur wrong.) It's another case of me being pedantic, but I think an important distinction.

FXAA is "good enough" in terms of the average person won't notice the difference between FXAA and 12x OGSSAA when looking at an unzoomed, uncropped screenshot of your average game. In today's games of high shader complexity and transparency usage FXAA handles those cases of spatial aliasing better than MSAA. Not more accurately, just better at making them less obvious.

Also, FXAA, MLAA, SMAA (1x) are all selective directional blurring of high luminance differences with various methods of edge and angle detection.

Is the cartoony look going to be the final style they go with or is this still being refined as it progresses through Alpha?

The game's style will be similar to what it is now. We will continue to refine the look, but don't expect gritty realism.

Yes, I believe they are pretty much settled on this style right from the get go in the Kickstarter video.

Found any ships with legs yet?

Fair enough, and thanks for the quick answer as well. It always comes down to gameplay anyways!