Same old engine for BO2

[CTC-Salchicha]

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/05/15/lamia ... e-of-engi/

We'll see...

[Mr Bean]

I think he made some valid points. The meshes, special effects, and sound quality seemed to be just fine. The engine currently suffers in the area of textures/materials, and lighting... which really go hand in hand. Light doesn't interact with plywood the same as with wet concrete. Gone are the days of importing a flat image, and pasting it to a mesh. Currently they incorporate a few semi-complex textures here and there, but not really that much better that UT2004. Another thing they should add is DX11. The UT3 engine initially shipped with DX9 or DX10, Then later upgraded to DX11. So upgrading an engine is absolutely possible. And they could definitely make the game look a lot better if the chose to. This vid's been posted before, but is a good example of what some proper lighting and textures can produce. Looks even better in 1080p



Hang your heads in shame Infinity Ward texture artists!

[CTC-JimRimya]

This comes off to me a smoke and mirrors. That guy took a very round about way to answer the question, which leads me to believe that that he didn't have an answer to it to begin with. As Bean said, maybe it can be made to look a little better with better textures, shaders, bump maps, etc. And maybe with the help of DX11, who knows. But can anyone name me a DX11 game that is out now? How about a DX10 one, for that matter? The whole directX thing has always seemed bullshit to me as well.

[Ghosted]

Here's an off the cuff and assuredly flawed analysis:

- There's a big difference between Epic games and Infinity Ward/Treyarch
1) Epic has Tim Sweeny, one of the few graphics programmers that has achieved well known god status (along with John Carmack and to a lesser extent Michael Abrash)
2) Activision's charter for them is to churn out iterations of the same game. I'd argue you don't attract top talent like that.
3) Unreal Engine and I believe it's middle-ware are sold and have become a staple in the industry, which is a major incentive to continually invest in it. The other guys are still patching up the old Quake 3 engine to my knowledge. Even if both were just patching up the same 'old' engines, it's clear who is the standout
- MW is Console First/Why does Battlefield 3 look so good?
1) BF3 was developed for PC first and then ported to console, so you get insane lighting/textures that would never work on consoles
2) It has a truly new engine
3) It runs at *half* the FPS on console (MW3@60/BF3@30). Higher frames means a competitive edge to all the mouth breathing, emotionally crippled children they're breeding on XBox live.

- Content (to reinforce what Bean said)
1) The textures are lazy. They just take pictures of shit and apply them.
2) This is apparent because the lighting, materials are garbage/close to non-existent compared to other games. From little I've seen from the latest BF3/Unreal 3.x tech demo's, lighting combined with realistic bump mapping/tessellation and particles is really the key to moving to the next level in graphics.

Truth is they make probably the most money of any game out there from a pure revenue standpoint. Profit = revenue - cost. It's a profit deal and as long as people keep buying their game with the same relatively shitty old engine, there's no incentive for them to improve it. I'm sure part of why there are probably less PC users buying the game is due to them falling behind on a number of fronts, graphics being one of them. It's that underlying cynical, callous attitude that makes me want to take my money to someone who cares more.

@Jim (Crysis2/Witcher2/BF3 = DX11)