Shannon V. OKeets
Posts: 22095
Joined: 5/19/2005 From: Honolulu, Hawaii Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: ASHBERY76 I mean no disrespect to the people involved but I expected the graphics to be much higher standard than what has been shown.It looks like games from the early 90's.With such a well known name like W.I.F, I expected Matrix to really be on the ball in this area. There are trade-offs. Some of the considerations are: 1 - What hardware does the player have? If you assume they are running a high end machine (3+ GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM, fast graphics card with a lot of memory) then you can display more detail. 2 - Map size. If your entire map consists only of Europe, then the memory required for the map is much smaller. Or if you are limiting play to the Pacific, where almost everything is ocean, then the requirements for graphics processing speed is substantially reduced. 3 - Zoom. If you restrict zoom to a small area at a time (magnifying glass effect), then the memory and processing speed demands of the program are much less. MWIF is designed: 1 - to be playable by players with less than state of the art hardware. The minimum requirement for the screen is 1024 by 768 resolution. 2 - to cover the entire world (360 hexes by 195 hexes) 3 - to provide 8 levels of zoom so the player can obtain: different views of the battlefield (high levels of zoom) and theater of operations (medium levels of zoom), or a continent perspective (lowest levels of zoom). ============== Though it would be nice to do a loving bitmap for each hex, there are 4 major difficulties in achieving that: memory requirements, screen refresh speed, reducing map distortion when zoomed out, and the labor to draw them. There are 70,200 hexes in MWIF and roughly 60% have land of one type or another. That is 40,000+ individual hex bitmaps if you draw each of them as unique. We have elected to go with doing the coastlines in detail, which gives us only 5000+ individual bitmaps to draw. The river/lake overlays add 7000+ more. The 5000+ coastal bitmaps require over 240 MB of memory. I am doing tricks with the code to reduce the 7000+ river/lake bitmaps to under 50 MB. The units make additonal demands for bitmap storage (3000+ counters). Basically, MWIF is a monster map and rendering it on a 17 inch screen so that players can play the game is non-trivial. As it is, we are pushing the limits of the hardware more than I would like. I worry about the players with lower end systems having to modify how they play the game because of the speed of screen refresh. If the market for wargames were as fierce as it is for first-person shooters, then perhaps we could aim for the high end of the market and force players to upgrade their systems if they want to play the game. Sadly(?) that is not the state of the world. And anyway, a person's lust for more and better (I am no exception) is unquenchable.
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Steve Perfection is an elusive goal.
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