apparently cryengine 3 supports maps of up to 264x264 km, and it on consoles and supports all this stuff.

Because frequently it does. Hell it goes beyond correlation to cause and effect. Games have a finite limit in how much data they will contain, 6-16GB seems to be the current limit for most games. The more graphic intensive the game is the more of that space is devoted to graphics and the less to other content. Designers are always trying to balance appearance with content for the maximum effect. How well a person thinks they balanced these issues is a matter of opinion.

That would be a omni or omni directional light.

In 3d you also have directional lights that have a cone shaped spread for the light, basically imagine a spotlight light in RL. That's a directional light. They are really handy for lighting a scene. And being stuck only with omni again would svck

Directional Lights, even though Gamebryo supported them at the time Oblivion was released, Ob simply could not use them, and if you did create one they simply reverted to omni

While we are here on lights, and fix all the controllers so they can be animated, again oblivion a couple light controllers simply did not function.

This game has 'directional' lighting.... Look at the screen shots. Every single tree, leaf, rock, and building casts its own unique realtime shadow. This game has very nice lighting. I don't know what your complaining about.

Lighting plays a huge role in visuals
http://forums.elementalgame.com/405167

can i just point out, that if deus ex,morrowind, avp(gold/2) half life,halo 1 and twisted metal had photo realistic graphics and real quality animation then you wouldn't be able to put those games down. graphics was just about the only things lacking in those games (well- morrowind had bad combat mechanics and most of those games had pretty poor ai)


yes. directional lighting is INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT. half life had this and that game is 10 years old. (half life also had ladders, but that was because valve hires competent coders :flamethrower: )

but since this thread is pretty derailed, may i add that i looked at that picture of the guy hunting a deer and thought...

grass looks bad
low Polly models
[censored]e textures
animations force hair to bend horribly
no cloth physics

and gameplay wise i hate the idea of having to duck to "sneak"

snip- bad internet made me double post

Common fallacy, graphical effects are moving away from things like textures and meshes - precomputed structures stored in primary storage for quick retrieval, and onto things like shaders, which are computed on the fly on the GPU. Shader definitions are tiny - if you removed a single word from a single line of dialogue, you could fit more shaders than any current machine could reasonably run. Indeed, storage-wise, tessellation would actually give you a lot *more* space to play around with, because it removes the need for everything having multiple models and textures for distant views, and can generate them on the fly.

Fancy graphical effects in this case would actually allow for more content to be placed on the disc. Also, as time goes by, compression algorithms get better and better.