Новости WWII!!!

[SimFreak]

http://discussions.playnet.com/viewtopic.php?t=54312

Unity II Update

Many of you may have noticed that in the latest version that we added waving flags to the game. Several people were a bit confused about what this new feature was all about. Today I'd like to take the opportunity to bring you up to speed on what this little technical advancement means for the future of WWIIOL.

Last year we began several development changes to our core graphics engine that culminated with the decision to move to OpenGL for future versions of the game. This decision is at the core of what we refer to as the Unity II engine upgrade. This upgrade path is intended to bring a refit of our proprietary graphics engine up to date with the most bleeding edge graphics in the industry. The first major visible change associated with that development path will be unveiled with our release of v1.13 for the PC and Mac versions of WWIIOL.

Building on the technology of waving flags, we will be bringing a full refit of all the foliage objects in the game to a new standard. We will be replacing all of our trees, bushes and plant objects with highly detailed, fully 3-D rendered foliage that have leaves and branches that sway and look very realistic. This will be the first major implementation of Unity II changes that will continue over the coming months.

That's a pretty big task to be sure and the full implementation will likely evolve over several iterations but what you canexpect to see, even initially will be quite amazing. Brush lines will now have berms to add cover for infantry as well as increased concealment. Tree lines will have voluminous, beautifully rendered 3-D leaves and branches that sway in the wind. We are even working to make all of the vast forests of the game world fully enterable, opening huge areas of the map to tactical gameplay. We plan to complete our implementation by adding new grass and clutter objects, improving both the immerssivness of our game world and the amount of cover for our ground warfare. Our goal is to provide a visually stunning world that is also superior for gameplay.

Unity II does not however stop there. Now in the development pipeline are several new graphics technologies that we will be adding to the world. Bump mapping and improved multi-layer multi-texture are being added. These will give players improved ground textures from the air as well as on the ground. These effects are also used to make moving water and hit effects and combined with environmental effects will give us incredibly realistic playing environments. As Unity II progresses you'll see this effect work continue with sun glare and ground cover effects. Hand in hand with continued improvements to the render pipeline of the game engine, Unity II will offer a better looking and better playing world.

Naturally the biggest question for many of you will be about performance and what affect these improved graphics will have on your performance. While we are committed to improving the look and feel of the game we are also working to make sure that performance for the average machine in WWIIOL improves. We will be making options available through the Unity II integration that allow players on low end systems to sacrifice some graphics enhancements for improved frame rates. In the end though, we will be raising our recommended specification for machines to what we feel is most representative for our community while still keeping a minimum specification at or near its current level.

I'll have more detail on what these actual numbers are next week as we continue testing but you can expect the minimum spec to be somewhere around a 1 gig machine (as it is now) with the recommended spec being in the 2 gig range with a modern graphics card running 128mb of memory. While even this specification won't affect the majority of our players we need to make everyone aware of the changes that are coming. To that end, we've been profiling every video card that we can and reviewing the specifications for as many as we can. I hope to have a more detailed list for you next week and possibly even the ability to recommend some that we find to be good choices in the marketplace. Until then I hope you enjoy the screenshots of the work in progress for v1.13 beta.


Dana V. Baldwin
a.k.a. "Gophur"
Producer
World War II Online
www.wwiionline.com