Isn't the texture quality of spark engine fantastic?
MisterYoon
Join Date: 2012-08-18 Member: 155747Members
Join Date: 2012-08-18 Member: 155747Members
Comments
which has not much to due with the engine itself...... but the actual game logic.
I've made/seen better textures in source, honestly, and that's nearly a decade old. Material systems don't seem to really have advanced overmuch other than in terms of usability from a development standpoint. Source is a pain to work for because you have to reload the game every time you change it, spark can do it on the fly as I recall. Both I would assume are capable of rendering perfectly good textures.
But other than that yeah, slightly blurry if you actually look at it but good enough, you don't want to waste memory after all. The recent patch added better speculars, seems like it uses phong or something similar to add shininess when lit at extreme angles. Supports bump/normal mapping. Normal for games, so far as I know. Not sure why it's exceptionally good? It seems normal, using normal shading techniques and the necessary resolution for a modern game. You can make higher res textures though it'd be unnecessary in most situations.
The art style is nice though that doesn't have much to do with the engine.
Definitely something that would have been doable. We see it's versatility in Dota 2, CSGO.
CSGO actually has relatively similar map sizes, player counts etc.
Perhaps years of development time would have been saved, and of course because it's the source engine it would have run amazingly well even on potato machines. I understand in the long term having the engine built in house will allow them to lease it out and license it to perhaps make a profit, but in terms of direct relation to the game itself I feel that using the source engine would have been better for the game, worse for the company as a whole.
Oh wells.
Like I said, I have made better textures in source, but I wouldn't suggest doing that constantly. Very high res textures are wasteful other than on feature geometry. Something that is the focus of attention can have a good texture, everything else should have good enough textures.
Spark does everything source does, except maybe detail maps (little scratch/dust layers which add the semblance of high res to low res textures) so I don't think source would be any better for texturing.
About the only thing that would help is some sort of revolutionary new rendering method (such as tessellation or parallax mapping or suchlike, which source doesn't do) or the ability to render astonishingly high resolution textures easily.
Or maybe something like megatexturing that id software used, I think that has a bunch of other limitations though which would make it bad for the very animated alien environments.
Spark is... well, normal as far as textures go, so far as I can tell. So is source, if a little old fashioned in its development support for texturing.
Having full source code control over the engine allows for a lot of flexibility in development, and a full license where you can access the source code to the Source engine is very expensive, I would imagine.
I doubt they would've been able to implement the Lua interpreter in Source either, which they chose to promote an active modeling community.
But on topic, the textures NS2 are pretty good. It is a game that was developed for PC so they are higher resolution textures than most of the console to PC ports that people play now days.
Whether to use popular engine or to create a brand new engine, it's not just related to financial or practical problems, but also to passion and achievement of creation. Probably NS2 has lost lots of players etc. cos' of basical technical problems, but do you really think NS2 would have got so many interests and prizes, if UWE chose it to make with source engine? There are thousands of mods and games made by source, and being one of them cannot be never that special than being just the only one. Have you seen a game made by source which got more honor and popularity than Half-Life 2?
Most modern games actually have worse textures because they are developed for a console first and foremost......