Forgelight

[XxAxMayxX]

For the past few months I've been working on my own little "engine" and desided to read up on forglight. I wanted to compare it 2 CRYENGINE, UNREAL, and other tripple A engines. A few off the major features I saw was real time radiosity and NVIDIA physx. Radiosity is basicly an algorythm for really advanced lighting, and Physx is just NC tanks lumbering about and being destroyed, all the little bits bouncing across the land.

These are a few features besides the cascading light beams, and particle effects that are effected dynamicly w/ light.

Reply below, I wanna know how well this will run on different PC's and how these features will compare to CRYSIS and BF3

[Roy Awesome]

I had to read this post like 6 times to understand it.

Anyway, what we know is that they are using a fully deferred renderer. Most of the textures are hard to view because they are all composed together with the shader in the end. I haven't looked at the shaders yet (they are compiled so it makes things slightly interesting when trying to view them), so I can't say much about how the scene is put together.

[Anderz]

I wanna know how well this will run on different PC's and how these features will compare to CRYSIS and BF3

This is like asking us what the cake tastes like before we've had a chance to eat it.

[maradine]

My parse attempt:

"I want to know how Forgelight will perform on identical hardware comapred to Crysis and BF3."

Brother, we have no idea yet.

[kertvon]

My take on it based on videos and screens thus far is that it will compare more to Crysis than BF3. The logic in that conclusion is that forgelight was made with scale in mind, which means optimization is critical. Frostbite engine is great and all, but it is an outright resource hog that will bring most computers with less than 2-3+ year old hardware to their knees. The devs said PS2 will be able to run on 5 year old hardware. There are multiple threads floating around the forums with plenty of speculation about necessary hardware requirements and as has been previously stated, nobody really knows for sure.

[Roy Awesome]

As for performance...It probably wont run on a videocard that is more than 5 years old. Unless the team has done some incredible hacks to get their renderer running on <SM3 hardware, it's just not going to function.

As for a product, anything that came out after the GeForce 8 series is unlikely to run the game.

After that point...wait and see. They have said a few times that they are working on optimizing code and making it run faster.

[Toppopia]

Originally Posted by Roy Awesome

As for performance...It probably wont run on a videocard that is more than 5 years old. Unless the team has done some incredible hacks to get their renderer running on <SM3 hardware, it's just not going to function.

As for a product, anything that came out after the GeForce 8 series is unlikely to run the game.

After that point...wait and see. They have said a few times that they are working on optimizing code and making it run faster.

Is a GeForce GT 230M before or after the GeForce 8?

[DarkChiron]

Originally Posted by Toppopia

Is a GeForce GT 230M before or after the GeForce 8?

After.

[Toppopia]

Originally Posted by DarkChiron

After.

So i might have a slim chance in playing

[RNFB]

Originally Posted by Toppopia

So i might have a slim chance in playing

A 4 generation old mobile GPU? I seriously doubt it

[Ratstomper]

Originally Posted by Toppopia

So i might have a slim chance in playing

It's ok, I'm still running a GeForce 6800 and a Pentium 4. Being broke sucks.

[stargazer093]

as a GeForce 9 user...I feel an extreme pressure on my wallet :S

[Toppopia]

Originally Posted by RNFB

A 4 generation old mobile GPU? I seriously doubt it

It could run crysis on medium to low i think, so it could run this on lowest settings and maybe lower resolution.

[ODonnell]

Wow...

[WNxThentar]

You'll probably see a lot of options to tweak your experience by the way SOE have done in the past. Look at EQ2 and the number of options you have with respect to graphics.

From what I understand the textures can be huge. Saying "Physx is just... all the little bits bouncing across the land" is a drastic over simplification. It deals with flight characteristics, vehicle movement, running, jumping, crashing, ramming...and on and on. I'll be interested in seeing how they load the world. From the videos you can see the render distance is pretty far but you can also see stuff loading but the code isn't optimised or anything so who cares.

The big thing about forge light isn't just the graphics. In my estimation the network code is more important innovation wise. This engine is the first engine really optimised for being able to handle thousands of people in one area. Look at games like EQ2, WOW and even EVE they all struggle with to many players in one area. EQ2 has a soft limit the number of players in a instance of a zone and spawn more instances as need. EVE implemented a time dilation or "bullet time" when battles get to big to help both servers and clients to cope. WOW starts showing issues with large raids in 1 area.

Contrast this with PS2 that will need to support up to 2,000 players in 1 area potentially. Just from a network point of view this is a Herculean task.

Next consider all the other things forge light is building into its engine even if PS2 doesn't use it.

• Near real time data warehousing
• SOEmote
• complex voice chat allowing not only squad/platoon/outfit/global/near bye chat
• Exstendable API for the both the data in the warehouse but also to actual game play mechanics
• Marketplace
• cheat prevention
• and much much more

The graphics, while literally "in our face" is just the tip of the iceberg.