well.. of course shaders is the future.. but we don’t need it...
And shaders are good…
^^ nothing more to say... it is a fantastic tool...

But i will not use shaders for the moment. And many graphic cards out there can still not handle any shaders at all. And as long as there are people not caring about graphics and shaders then there is a market for game play ;P...
The ultimate game will have the same game play as a game without shaders needs today and it would still use shaders as a option... That a game can handle shaders does not make it less good? O.o... But not better either... Just better looking, that in very few cases leads to more atmosphere and a better feeling.

About the normalmaping... That is probably one of the most useful parts of shaders ^^... just take a look at this...





But isn’t this starting to get a little of topic?
Or is it just me? ^^

(well.. sorry if i spells crappy :P… )

Great!!!! it shows one ore time, that gstudio isn´t just a kids tool!!!
Congrats to this great Pics!!!

Those screens look cool, looking forward to a demo ! I like the Coldfear style very much! Don't worry too much about shaders, but Matt's right it could improve the details quite a bit when implemented correct... it's not just a nice feature, it cán make huge differences indeed...

OT:

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I cant belive anyone would like Halfe2 better than Doom3.. HL2 is very plain looking and boxy, with basic phot based textures and not much in terms of lighting and such. The artwork is mostly this ugly sewers and industrial stuff.. looks New Jersy or somehting.. I'm sorry but if i want to see that I can go outside and to the dirty river near my house.

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Infact, I think Chronicles of riddick: escape from butcherbay looks even better than DOOMIII. DOOMIII has a kinda overall plastic look sometimes, and HL2 sometimes just lacks shaders at certain points. Casual gamers might not even notice it, but it happened plenty of times that I thought by myself 'huh? this still HL2?', because in certain areas the textures look like Max Payne 1/2, photorealistic, yet very flat and sometimes even a bit blurry. Chronicles of Riddick does a way better job. For a good comparison, take a look at characters in HL2 and compare them with those in DOOM3 and Chronicles of Riddick and tell me which you like best, between DOOM3 and Chronicles of riddick it's a close call, yet HL2 is far behind imo.

Cheers

I found with Half Life 2, the start bit with the train station and the square you come out on, that was the amazing part.

Im not talking about shader really, Im looking at the 3D spatial set design, the colours, the technological designs etc. Yes, if it was all shaders it would look amazing.

Thereafter, it was so big, the rest pailed a bit, I only got half way through though.I agree, it started to look a bit stale in bits.

I admit shaders are great but its the 'gersamtkunstwerk' (excuse spelling), total work of art that makes it sing surely?

Still dont know if I can turn off the soft shadows in Matts demo? Wrong forum, u not going to tell me here?

this debate is sily, shaders arent special "extras". they are how modern hardware handles rendering. There will on most modern cards be no Fixed functions, all will be done via the shader architecture. You do need it, as much as in the old days they used hardware acceleration.

To say poeple dont care about shader, and that you can get good results by splashing some high res photo textures over everything and call it great misses the whole point of what the shader architecture is and what it does for you. A flat texture mapped on a cube is still just that, it never gets any more realistic-- it has nothing to do with the real appearance of things.

Shaders move the artist towards ever-better approximations of the real world, and to more complete control of the final image. 3D art isnt about the texture you slap on a polygon anymore, it's about how that polygon is rendered.

Also there is a myth shaders are slower than fixed functions. Using the various shader algorithms for certain things are better and faster than using fixed functions. Say you want to create a multitextured surface, you can write a shader that does it in a more efficient way than a fixed fuction routine, with less texture stages and passes. You can render a terrain with 5 texture blended by alpha masks in shader in one pass, whereas you may need 5 passes to do it in a fixed function approach. So there is no reason not to use shaders, and frankly poeple with older cards need to upgrade, or not expect all the newest effects.

I have to agree with Matt. If you ever did work with a 3d rendering software then you know what we are talking about: Artists often work with quite simple textures but the bumpmaps, the lighting, specular effects and other options make it photorealistic. The same way will be the future for 3d games. We already have that. Riddick / Chronicles did show very perfect how cool a shader game can be. The characters where so real with correctly illuminated muscles and so on. You will never achieve that with textures only. Faked lighting on your character that is baked into a texture will not be needed in the future.

just have to agree to that riddick point. if you search for an awesome shader game, that´s so close to perfection (though the architecture could be a bit less angular sometimes).

ah, some numbers at the end: a bump mapping FFE reduces the framerate at my system to 60, a normal mapping shader leaves it at 125 (both values for level blocks). so decide youself what is better.

That looks really good. Great work.

Yes, the screens looks very cool.
Now i whait for the first playable demo or in game video.

Edit:
I had something here continuing the discussion about shaders.. But i don’t want to bring things to much of topic... so i removed it.
Lets start a thread bout it instead? ;P.. I cant possibly find a better way to waist time ;D

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How linear will the story bee in this game?