ArenaNet Licenses Umbra for Guild Wars

http://www.umbrasoftware.com/index.php?company&news=29
found @wartower.de

ArenaNet just killed Guild Wars 2.

New GPU technology = unplayable on low end systems = DEATH.

No.

Just...no.

Completely wrong.

It's a technology that reduces the number of rendered polygons.
How is such a thing making a game worse for lower end machines?

Because lower-end GPUs will never get the drivers to support the Umbra technology. There's a reason developers haven't embraced DirectX v10.

Also, I checked out the website for this Unbra thingy, and it has zero information whatsoever.

Hmm... I don't know what to say on this. Looks like I might reconsider getting Guild Wars 2 as early (a month after release) as I originally wanted to...

Because Zinger's talking out his ass (no offense <3) and has no clue about what Umbra is. Umbra isn't even new technology, it's been around since September of 2007. What it does is occlusion culling - it removes hidden surfaces and such, if something is behind other opague objects, it is culled and not drawn, the result is that only things that can be seen are drawn which reduces the load and increases FPS on lower end (and higher end) machines by a shit ton (depending on various factors, you can get well over a 600% FPS increase.).

Basically it does the exact opposite of what he just said.

Like this. You don't need drivers to support Umbra at all. It's a middleware function for game engines, not an entire API for multimedia.

sooo basically really really shiny bling and better particle spell effects, etc..

ok, as long as the graphics engine is near completion as well as the combat's is on the same phase of completion so it means
potentially beta is out by end of next year?

So basically....it still works even if you don't have GPU acceleration. Probably not as nice as the GPU based stuff, but CUDA, OPENCL, etc have only really caught on recently. This probably amounts to a new implementation of something that's been used before, like Physx being ran on nvidia cards instead of on it's own board.

Considering how GW operates already to reduce bandwidth, server costs, etc. Seems like a good program to pick up.

Yep although by the time GW2 comes out you'd be hard pressed to find a GPU without that feature, even on lower end machines.

EDIT:
srsly Zinger all this does is improve performance for the lower end by a ton, not everything Anet does is gonna kill Guild Wars even if it seems that way. (even tho I think that too, this only has good things attached to it.)

So I guess this means GW2 is alive.

Ok, I may or may not be talking out of my ass, but seriously, I can't find anything on Umbra.

That was the more notable thing I gathered.

As long as Guild Wars 2 doesn't require Vista or DX10 or extremely high requirements it should do ok.

People need to remember that a big part of GW1's success is that its requirements are rather low compared to most other games of its day.

I have no clue what you're looking for, there's not much you can say beyond a really good middleware program that does occlusion culling very effectively that wouldn't be redundant with that. (It's like trying to find stuff on SpeedTree. A program that creates trees fast like.)

What are you looking for, in other words?

They won't require either of those, they aren't completely stupid. And you are most right about the last paragraph, that's actually one of the things they try to strive for in their games, like Blizzard they make games very compatible with low end but still look fantastic for good rigs.

If people don't have dx10 cards by 2010 somethings wrong.

by that time DirectX 11 will be on the way, they will be looking that way by then

Their download section has a video and a pdf brochure.

Even a vid-stream:
http://www.umbrasoftware.com/index.php?videoreel

Apparently Umbra branched off from Hybrid Graphics, when those were bought by nVidia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbra_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Graphics

I went to the umbra page and they were gloating about how their software was used in AoC. That isn't exactly the best game to be bragging about. When I played AoC (with a geforce 8600) I was lucky to get 15 FPS in some areas.

Occlusion culling can only do so much, if the graphics and associated systems are poorly optimized it's not going to help you (and AoC was...VERY badly optimized). But while there's a lot you can say bad about ArenaNet, you can't say that their graphics engine etc was poorly optimized. It's one of the best things they've ever designed easily and it runs smooth, so I have high hopes for GW2 especially with this. The middleware is only as good as the engine its put in, and the AoC engine was very bad.

(Although without it you would have had ~7FPS or less.)

Dude... this is obviously great for GW2!

I remember some time ago a post mentioning that NCSoft bought the license for the U3 engine. (found post: http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10271531)
If they have both at Gw2, well... its going to be one hell of a piece of art! (for those who do not know the U3 engine gives incredible lighting features and low poligon use) (video about U3 engine http://br.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_Xmxd...eature=related)

Or they just don't want to use vista, which locks them out of dx10. I have no idea whatsoever why people wouldn't want to use vista though... /sarcasm

Yeah, guild wars is very well optimized. My backup computer with a radeon 9800 can run it at medium specs pretty well. Those were from like... 5 or 6 years ago I believe.

I highly doubt GW2 will use the UT3 engine; in fact if it does that really just be a display of how little effort Anet is putting into GW2.

Hum, i dont see why that would be a bad thing for the game. If it makes the game look better, why not use it?

Hey look everyone, Zinger has a kneejerk ill-informed anti-Anet reaction. Aren't you shocked?

If your computer isn't terrible, why wouldn't you want to use Vista? There's nothing wrong with it.

I already admitted that I was potentially wrong, yeesh, what more do you want?

It does tell us that, but it also tells us how far along they are in development.

Thank you very much for the tech-speak to plain english translation DarkNecrid.

I can understand Zinger not finding any information on his own though (I couldn't really find anything when I search either) even if his reaction was a bit over the top.

Anyways, sounds very useful and cool.

<hizyped.

The "no monthly fees" is what sold me with GW1, the optimization + prettiness was the thing that held me. ANet would be silly to not go the same route with GW2.

All in all, it looks like they know what they're doing.

lol, pretty much any game you buy now uses a middleware engine. 95% of the games on the market don't turn a substantial profit for the company involved which means for every 100 games released, only 5 games are going to actually give the company involved any substantial money back.

But yea...screw ArenaNet for possibly (I say possibly cause I dunno if this is confirmed or not, need link) wanting to secure more profit from their games...

Japan is notorious for refusing to use middleware engines, they build a new engine for each game and throw it away, and it costs them tons of money and the games take longer to make, and they make even less profit back. With the current economic situation, Japan's been relying on mostly casual games that take less money to make to stay alive and not blow out underneath itself.

Very few companies make their own engine now and days, and when they do (See: Funcom, Age of Conan, Dreamworks Engine built in-house) it is usually suicide. ArenaNet is either going to use a middleware engine like Unreal 3, or expand on the GW1 engine by a ton (ie: keep a similar structure but rebuild it, since they're adding a Z axis etc). But using a middleware engine doesn't automagically mean you didn't put in a ton of effort, it means you're trying to keep yourself stable and not go under (with something that can do everything you want it to do anyways), a very harsh reality in a volatile industry that's already gone under once. (Videogame Crash of 1983) ArenaNet got pretty lucky and is a rare occurrence of a company making its own engine and it being stable and optimized and the game selling well enough to turn a substantial profit for them, to expect them to be able to do both of those twice in a row is pretty silly.

No problem.

EDIT:
@Meth below:
you can use the Windows XP/Windows 98 classic theme and disable all the fancy crap and wind up with a pretty good OS with DX10 support, better search capabilities, better RAM usage, and with Vista 64, the best 64-bit OS with the same specs. (++++ you can have more than 3GB of RAM with it!). Windows XP is more bug free and such, but Vista is damn good after SP1 (not completely useless, anyways

just sayin! (tho RAM is cheap, so you should get another gig of it anyways.)

Warning: mini rant on vista and dx10 coming.

Because I see no reason to take up another x gig of space on my hard drive and buy another gig of memory just so that the windows GUI can look fancier and be 3D? There is a reason most games these days have different minimum requirements for vista and the former Windows OS'es.

Besides, I haven't seen a game yet (an actual game, not mockup screenshots and crap) where DX10 has produced a noticeable improvement. Even if it did, I hardly care about not having the newest game with a new layer of bloom and shit. Half of the 'special effects' developers are adding today are BS that looks totally unrealistic and unlifelike anyway.

Unreal 3 was a pretty good engine. Sadly it did NOT work with my radeon 9800, but my geforce 6800 was able to run both UT3 and Mass Effect at mid to high settings at 1280x1024. I wonder how it will do in a MMO where you can have 100+ people on the screen at a time though. On the other hand so many people in the area at a time does mean having a good occlusion process helps quite a bit.

Better search capabilities? I haven't used search once. Better RAM usage? Thats why every game I see says it requires 1 gig for XP, 2 gigs for Vista, amirite? In theory Vista has the superior management, but Microsoft has a history of badly implementing good ideas, and it shows. I see no reason to upgrade from my 2 gigs of ram I have now. My current Windows XP install is completely stable and has been running 24/7 with no crashes for 2 months. Why should I buy a new OS just to spend a week turning off everything to make it back into XP? I certainly don't benefit from any of the exclusive vista stuff now.

Glad you added that

I love Vista, i wish I could install it on my new Asus Eee PC instead of XP

I did have only 7 FPS when I wasn't lucky.



What in particular made AoC's engine so bad?

Cool so there might be a GW2 after all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_...res#Technology

That stuff, and being made by a team that had no idea of how to make an MMO.

EDIT: beat darknecrid by 2 minutes!

Quote of the day

They used a bunch of high tech stuff and didn't optimize anything at all (i'd go into more detail, but the simple answer is: everything). On similar settings, it is more taxing than Crysis is, which is just wrong.

That's due to the programmers having no ability to code. They had no GPU optimization, and just threw everything at the processor and had your CPU chug at 99% while your GPU was sitting near idle.


edit: beaten =(

Wrong. Read that post again, this time verrrrrrry slowly and carefully. Like others have said, guild wars never introduced TOO much graphical optimization for lower end systems. This means, if i understood correctly, the people with lower system specs will still be able to enjoy a decent looking game without sacrificing too much aesthetic pleasantries. Naturally though, as computer hardware is updating ridiculously fast, the standards of "low end" and "high end" systems will be much different than they were at the time of GW1's release.

Well this is good news, hopefully. Being that it does seem like a fairly new system here, i hope it doesn't come with too many bugs upon release.

anyways..why should people have problem with graphics these days if you can get a decent 2core cpu with a nice graphic for the price of an ipod

Echo, some of us are ballers with 945GM integrated chipsets.

I bet you Tommy doesn't have a 10x card

Dear Arena Net, whatever you decides to use, make sure it does not make the beautiful scenery ugly or when players try to take screenshots everything is culled and you get half of the scene... lol