I can almost garantee that OP3 will look better than that. We're using a very modern, powerful, highly optimized and portable refresh engine that is capable of DooM3/Quake4 style graphics (possibly better if the right GPU programs are written).
Anyway, by the end of 2006 (sometime in December) the game should be mostly finished. The refresh is already done and that's what usually takes the most time to get working and then to optimize to get it working fast.
It's now a matter of content creation, input/sound programming and then coding the rules that the game operates by (e.g., how the camera moves, what the units do, what research trees are like, etc.).
One of the problems that I've been juggling around in my head is the power or lack thereof of a lot of the GPU's that many OPU users have... Because of that I plan on leaving a lot of detail out so that users with Graphics Cards older than GeForce MX400 (or equivalent) can still play the game. This will hinder a lot of the graphical intricasies that would be impleneted (e.g., unit mesh geometry having a polygon limit of 2500 rather than 800 and world geometry being 180,000 polygons rather than 45,000).
Of course, I could just simply forget about that and require a GPU equivalent of a GeForce FX 5800 (I only really know the nVidia cards because I hate ATI... no room for debate here, we can do that on IRC sometime).
So I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place on that particular subject. Maybe we'll post a poll of some sort before too much work has been done. It would require that users upgrade their graphics cards in order to play... <sigh> Oh well... such is the modern computer graphics world.
However, one thing that will be very usefull is the ability for our refresh engine to switch between standard program rendering and running GPU programs for extra power (depending on the hardware) so it could be a simple matter of creating high-resolution models and then enabling levels of detail so that users with less powerful cards could still play with some decency of visual effects.
I do blather on sometimes, don't I? :heh:
