Hi everyone,
I just wanted to talk about the resource requirements of Geist3D and what that means about the audience we can target. Ultimately, this also determines what kind of games we can make at this time. As most of you may have already found out, Geist3D requires advanced hardware to run properly. Obviously, there are still ways of improving performance using more efficient shaders and smarter level of detail, but in the end the resource requirements will still be high.
Geist3D requires a large number of terrain patches to tessellate the planet. There is no way I can think of to perform any pre-processing that would eliminate some of the invisible terrain as it would be possible with a fixed size landscape. In order to avoid z-fighting every frame has to be constructed out of three rendering passes with different frustums for near, medium and far distances. At this time, the complex shaders for atmospheric scattering and terrain texturing use up a lot of GPU resources. Of course, the engine does detailed frustum culling so that most objects are only actually rendered within their corresponding frustum. Once the scene has been painted into a frame buffer, there are a number of screen space passes for deferred lighting, high dynamic range rendering, bloom and occlusion culling as well as yet to come effects such as rain, depth of field, volumetric fog, light shafts etc. Once I add shadows, there even more rendering passes will be necessary. After all that, the transparent objects such as engine trails and clouds are painted over the image in yet another three rendering passes using the different frustums. I just found out today that I also have to use the stencil buffer in order to avoid that transparent objects paint over the foreground. I have also not yet implemented anti-aliasing for frame buffers which will eat up a lot memory and really tax the memory bus on the GPU. On the CPU side, terrain splitting, clouds and fauna further require expensive search algorithms in order to determine the visible regions around the observer. I could go on here for a little longer, but I think everyone gets the idea.
I would now like to throw out there that Geist3D requires at least an NVIDA GTX or an ATI HD series graphics card with at least 512 MB of RAM. The CPU must have at least two cores with 1GB of RAM dedicated to the engine. Now, these are not off the chart requirements. The graphics cards can be had for about $250 and you will have a hard time even buying a CPU with less than the stated requirements.
Having said all of that, the hardware requirements will limit the audience we can target to avid gamers. So, the MMO is even further of out of the picture at this point, because it would have to be tailored to the mass market, which will not have the required resources. It will still take a few years before that type of hardware is standard in most PCs. Yet, there are lots of dedicated gamers with the proper hardware out there, but I think they are more interested in the Crysis type of combat games. So, I think we should focus on making a team based combat game, with the racing game as the first immediate target. Exciting flight/driving behaviour is going to be an important step towards good combat game.
On the last note, I don’t want to spend too much time making the engine run on todays hardware. In my mind it is important to target tomorrows hardware, especially because it will take us about that long to get there
P.S. Stay tuned for the clouds. From the looks of it, they will add a life to the planets!
