Attached Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVqtAQPt9Zs&NR

Remember... all effects in this video are real time.

Attached Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFtATu5gt3k&NR

I can't wait...I'm tempted seriously to get another machine with Vista just so I can play Crysis. I played Far Cry several times. Second time around I grew quite bored with Oblivion. Also waiting impatiently for Half Life2 Episode 2.

The youth where I work marvel at the fact that there's this old geezer that's an avid gamer and can kick some serious cyber butt. I marvel myself....who would've known twenty years ago that we could even do this stuff?

Frag on!

M

I know the feeling... there is another long video of a demo of Crysis available on youtube as well.
You should I heard me when the guy playing started ti hack a tree into pieces :)

it is a little bit more advanaced than "pong" 

Monsoon
heck I loved Elite2: Frontier..Eye of the Beholder..
I feel old...lol ;)

yeah games are so powerful now, art software companies really need to start USING soem of the crazy power in vid cards...when you see vid cards with 768 megs of RAM....

Makes my mouth water......

My brothers and I have only seen each other 2 or 3 times in 30 years....but we get together all the time in Cyberspace and blow the hell out of each other with tanks and missles in Battlefield. Hunting each other with enhanced sniper rifles is a hoot and is just like playin' in the woods when we were kids. And what's cool is you can talk to each other with the mic if you're on the same sqaud. Beats long distance anyday lol.....

An older game we still play is Battlezone 2 Combat commander. It's so much fun building your base and then lambasting your neighbor and conquering his. It's what used to actually happen as kids in our imaginations as we made forts and bases out of pine branches and old plywood.

Besides that, the most wonderful thing about gaming, especially single player adventures, is the fact that instead of watching a movie or reading a book , you're actually in it's starring role and may not make it out alive....

I'll game till I croak........

Monsoon,
exactly ;)

BF2142 with my new vid card is amazing (7600GS) jeesh, the night time, ice bound cities of Northern Strike are eerie

Hey Silverblade...let me know when you're going in and I'll join ya....we'll die with honor!

Evenings after 7 are best....or Monday mornings.

M

But recently I went through my little archive of interesting plugins and reinstalled every single one on a clean install of the game to reduce the chances of bugs.

It took a while to get it rights, but then I get scenes like this one and I believe it was worth the effort.

Now I am waiting for the next extension (shivering Isle) to start fresh with new content from that and the mods.

Oooh...an extension. Maybe I'll do the same thing. Clean install you say? I've got tons of plugins and I was thinking about playing it cruel and evil instead of good guy. Which way are you playing it?

I tried to play a plain mage and I was successful for a while... but then I got sucked into the flood of interesting plugins and nearly trashed my save games (and my game at the same time) by trying and uninstalling plugins.

It becomes tricky to install and remove a lot of things without problems.

So now that I have settled on a list of must-have modifications to the game, I started over with a clean install and a battle mage this time.

Monsoon

alas I'm in the UK so my play time is difficult with most folk :/

also, die with honour? pfft! massacre the enemy leave a pile of their corpses as yer funeral pyre, muahha! ;)
I generally play "Support" as I like team playing, or "recon" when I've got sneaky plans, as I preffer playing defencive.
:)

Agiel
aye, the quality of image games are capable of, shows the ART industry MUST wake up and start using the power of the cards gamers have, screw those stupid $1,000 "art workstation" cards (like the Quadros), game cards leave 'em in the dust!

Attached Link: http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=17743&type=mov

Indeed.... with scene editors like these, this is not so Out of Topic as I thought initially :)

We are really getting closer to the point where gaming editors will drive technology of 3D graphics and not just consume it for cut-scenes.

Add import/export functions, a 'final render' pass with high definition and good anti-aliasing, and you would get a damn good scene editor.

Attached Link: http://www.thewitcher.com/witcher.asp

Attached Link: Gothic 3

It's like watching a dream; hard to believe that the demo guy edits things without rendertime; the ocean waves, the instant ecosys and terrain editor are fantastic; they only have to put in a "make-it-high-reso/global-radiosity" button; nevertheless, it's a miracle! :-) 

I already have gothic 3 (although I didn't play it yet for lack of time) but I did not know about the Witcher. Hopefully they did better with the Bioware engine than what Obsidian did for Neverwinter Night 2 ... what a letdown.

I'm in the middle of NWN2. It is going very slowly because it is not very interesting.

In G3 I was impressed with the variety and the herds of animals.  It made the woods and plains feel alive.  

Everyone that knows about the Witcher is very excited, since the main character is based on a popular Polish or Czech novel that has yet to be translated to English.  I wish I could read it before I play the game.

The future of gaming looks very hopeful, especially after seeing, the Cry Engine 2.

Quote - Can you imagine editing your scenes / movies like this? :)

Wow! Can you imagine being able to layout scenes/animations with a system like that? Forget images, everyone would be making movies. Holy cow.

You can also imagine what the 'props' market will look like then. For the most part, people will purchase all their props and then direct the shots. I wonder what resolution that guy is working with?

What really blew me away was when he started carving caves into the rock.

There is still a big gap before using this kind of editor for a high resolution polished render.

Namely, what is missing among other things is :

• import and export to popular formats
• simplify seamless conversion of imported models into low poly (but high visual quality) versions to use in the editor
• conversion of the viewed scene into a high resolution model for full ray tracing (they could export scenes for popular renderers - VRay, Pov Ray, etc)
• director tools for animation (although they probably have something like that for cut-scenes)
• preset libraries of materials and atmospheres

The things is - they are certainly using a lot of tweaks and constraints to handle large scenes like this in a very fluid manner. But even knowing that, this kind of approach would make a fantastic scene composer / previewer where you could get 90% of the job done before taking a high def snapshot at the end.

Yeah it would be a great middle step tool.  Use standard Vue interface to import/export, work up your textures, basic placement of items, creation of terrains etc.  Then once everything is in, then you activated this kind of "Live Vue" program and work with it like it shows in the video. 

Edit the mountains like that would be awesome, esp the cave making.   Real time lighting / shadows would be awesome for replacement of items and trees.  So in the "Live Vue" you can set all that stuff, set motion paths(ie actually drive the vehicle to set the path if desired), and do other changes.  You could even play it back and edit cameras in real time.  Then when you are done you go back into non live version of deep quality rendering.

Thinking it is about time technology is ready to make this a reality.  But you have to take advantage of the modern video cards to do it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6457951.stm

real time in game RAY TRACING!
ok the journalist obviously doen'st quite udnerstand it all, as ray tracign can be doen on any PC ;) but yes to do real time ray tracign would take a bank of PCS.

now, it can be done, in real time, in game.....

Real time ray tracing has been talked about at SIGGRAPH for a few years now, with mostly prototypes at this point. It is good to see people are making progress towards turning this into a practical technology. One day it will be as common as 3D graphics cards.... maybe it will be just one more function of a multi-core card of the future...