Hi, im building a GTA style game and i know i'll never even come close to GTAV type of graphics but i was wondering if there are any tips and tricks anyone knows to boost the visuals. I'm using C-script and commercial edition so no shader support which makes my game very limited. i want to get a similar type of clouds in the picture in the left and maybe some fake shadows and fake bloom/blur effects. Any tips are welcome no matter how small. In my game (pictured on the right) i have stencil shadows but i had to take it out because my fps went from 40fps to 0.5fps probably because it's not accelerated shadows. Thanks in advance

Commercial HAS shader support

Sorry i meant i have 'Extra edition'

Shader is up the A8 Version A7 I dont know if it has Shader or not. The Shots look good .

in extra you can make nice skies, you can combine sky cubes domes cylinders models. you can download 2 sky cubes from my homepage, or make your own ones in Terragen 1, both for free (you can find there a tutorial how to do it, and some scripts that handles auto camera settings and rendering, to do it faster).

Well I'd strongly recommend an upgrade, as Shaders are standard today.
On the other hand (as I have seen the gameplay video on Youtube): Use as highly detailed textures as possible, turn on anti-aliasing, use higher-poly models with - again - better textures. Improve some (or most) of the movement code (syncing animation and movement, no "strafing" cars, etc., etc.) Add effects (e.g. a proper explosion for the hand grenade)
This would polish things up a lot, I think.

Edit: I forgot: Probably better get rid of all the real brands in the game and make up your own (as they did in the real GTA series). I think Subway and Audi (among others) are not amused when their (trademarked) logos and designs are used in an indie video game portraying violence.

Another edit: Shaders won't make your game suddenly look great. Professional games do look good because of passion for detail and that stuff I mentioned above.

imo shaders are important and they can boost the visuals a lot.
but of course, shaders are not a magic switch you can flip that makes everything look awesome.
some careful tweaking and good resources (textures, meshes) are needed.

Actually, all you would see without shaders on current hardware is the clear color. It's not about any cool effects (although a lot is possible), but about determining the vertex positions in clip space for the rasterizer and determining the fragment color for output.

The "fixed function pipeline" used by gamestudio when not assigning shaders is outdated for more than five years (at least 6, but I think it's even longer) and emulated with shaders in your graphics driver, as the ffp required special hardware for its tasks.

Hi, I came across this http://www.opserver.de/ubb7/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showthreaded&Number=151794 which seems like it does exactly what I need but it's not working for me using A7 extra. Can anyone get this to work? i'll even pay you!

Also can anyone show me an example how I can create my own shadows using a decal sprite, I can't find anything about that anywhere