So... An NVIDA GeForve4 MX420 will do it? (Just checking...)
Most definatly.
Speaking of which, is it really necessary to have such a high end video card?
A GeForce FX5200 is far from a high-end video card. You can get them for $30 if you look in the right place.
What it comes down to is that I can either develop like I would have developed 5 years ago or I can develop like I would now. I'm going to shoot for now because I think I had mentioned on IRC once or twice that the engine I'm producing for OP3 is not targetted toward any specific type of game (e.g., RTS, FPS, etc.) and is completely capable of turning into any other game. It's graphic capabilities will not be fully exploited in OP3 because I will be using the game engine for two other commercial projects that I am now (as we speak) getting funding for. The graphic abilities for those two projects WILL require high-end video cards to play them otherwise I won't be competing with DooM3/Quake4 and such (as well as new xBox 360 titles that are just now coming out). So yeah, it's necessary.
Will everything be high-polygon? No. It's not intended to be high-polygon. But it will have more detail than older 3D RTS games because consumer hardware has changed over time. Basically, if you can run WCIII at a reasonable rate, you shouldn't need much more to run OP3 (although it will likely look a little better).
so terrain is built of dot cloud?
I've never heard of 'dot cloud' so I'm going to say no.
To get very technical, the scenes will be in a format called DotScene. Essentially, I create a mesh of whatever I want to create. I then run it through a program that organizes the 3D geometry into an OctTree scene format which is then run through an OctTree Scene Manager. This eliminates the need to render everything at once (as it currently does).
maybe you could make up a demo (screens) showing us an elevated boulder (a pillar with a large round rock on top). judging from what you said and the screen cap you showed, it looks like you should be capable of making terrain that "hangs over itself". going to the extreme and showing us a "balancing rock" would show this off pretty effectively.
That's what I had originally asked Stormy to create for me for the testing. He didn't have enough time to finish the mesh so I just took what he had at the time. Either way, the current mesh is for demonstration anyway and is not particularly realistic. It was meant to show the detail available to the artist.
As far as a balanced boulder as part of a pillar, yeah. It's definatly capable of that. The question is getting the mesh with that feature as part of it. Stormy is currently in the process of creating a new mesh now for testing so I'll make sure to include that.
Another note, I plan on releasing a demonstration of the terrain renderer very soon. I don't remember if I already said that or not but either way, it just makes sure everyone knows that. You WILL be able to see how it runs on your computer soon enough... just keep in mind that it's a demo renderer and is not in a finished nor optimized state. The stats I had mentioned earlier (200 or so FPS) is in Debug mode which is signifigantly slower than Release mode.
does yur game engine allow for scaling, non-linear inverse perspective scaling, distance fog or scene culling? (the modern equivalent of fog of war to those who dont know) like in Battlefield, it would cut down on system load to only display part of the terrain at any one time.
What would scaling be useful for?
I already explained the Scene Manager's abilities. If you don't know what OctTree is you can google it and find some pretty good results.
Fog is one of the easiest effects to achieve and there are two types: exponential and linear.
Fog isn't used to cut-down on system load at all. What it's often used for is to hide the fact that the view frustum in some games is very near to the camera. This means that any geometry outside the 'far cull distance' just doesn't get rendered. Fog is often used to mask that.
Fog will be used in OP3 but will only be visible in scenes where the user can see way off into the distance. Being that the atmosphere has a nice bit of a 'haze' to it the fog can easily be explained away...
The user will have a standard RTS view with the ability to zoom in/out and rotate the camera around (like in Age of Mythology or AOE3). It'll be relatively limited as it is, after all, an RTS game.
HOWEVER, that's not been completely set in stone yet. I've still got some planning to do right now before I make that a final decision.
Run 3d testing everyone!!!
That's not necessary. As I said, if you can Run WCIII at an optimal rate (even on low-quality settings) than you should have the hardware to run OP3. It's now just a matter of gettings the scene managers managing and building the executable in release.
