ArenaNet Licenses Umbra for Guild Wars

Just my thoughts.

Like every other game, Guild Wars 2 will have low and high graphics settings. How the game will perform on low end pc's, that will depend on the engine.

I rather wait long and get a good GW2.

- Ganni

Am i the only one that think Umbra looks suhweet? Is GW2 actually going to like like this )http://www.umbrasoftware.com/index.php?videoreel), or is that prettyness going to be changed? I'm especially happy about the foliage, imagine a World v World with people hding everywhere, or just running a solo quest in that!, Whoa! I'm still getting GW2 Collectors Edition/whatever other super nerdy edition there is. Yay.

People who are complaining are just outright silly. Of course GW2 is going to have a higher system requirement. No one would expect anything less. It certainly is not death especially if the game remains free which they said it will. If that's a problem stick with GW.

But as others said, yes this is great news for Guild Wars 2. I can't wait to hear more about it and of course see it BTW the umbra demo video screams Guild Wars. It also is not so over the top that will cause it to be the death of guild wars as some people have said.

Umbra doesn't "look" anything, it's not a graphical engine, it's an engine that ties into the graphical engine (whatever that may be) for top notch collusion culling.

But yes it'll look like that & better, pretty much.

True that DarkNecrid. Most of the "prettiness" of that video comes from the Speedtree rendering program which is not a part of Umbra. And we ALL know how badly that ended up for AoC.

Still a cool video that explains how it works (though it could be better with a voice over doing the explaining).

But still, not sure if it will really look that good, because you still have to remember there are bandwidth limitations in an MMO that will always make it look worse then a single player game that is out at the same time (ie, compare the graphics in Aion or Warhammer online to... Crysis or Assassin's Creed). I doubt that Umbra video is anything more then a display piece of its power on a single computer.

...You fail.

The whole point of Umbra is to stop it from rendering un-viewable things, meaning less stress on your graphics card.

Get your facts right before spouting off.

Try reading the whole thread m8... he apologised twice

Sigh can you guys really stop doing this? SpeedTree is a very good program that happened to be in a very poorly optimized game. :/

Also yeah, Zinger apologized twice leave him alone and read some of the thread at least Shiing.

Not to mention how badly Speedtree turned out for Lineage2, Oblivion, Grand Theft Auto 4, Ratchet and Clank 2, Gothic 3, Unreal Tournament 3, Age of Conan, Gotham Racing 4, and of course Fallout 3.

Everyone and their lame pet goat uses Speedtree because it is so amazingly good and scalable. The designers can adjust how demanding the graphics are by adjusting the complexity of the vegetation - it's the same engine doing the trees and grass in Everquest 2 as it is in Gotham Racing 4.

DaoC managed to suck all on their own, DESPITE using speedtree.

And how many of those are MMOs...
Only 2 of them, and one of them was a collosal failure.
That's my point. MMOs are by definition different from regular single player games in terms of what they can do visually.

Well, bandwidth has nothing to do with graphics complexity in general. Bandwidth only limits a maximum number of moving objects/acting objects/server-wide changing objects in a scene. It doesn't limit polygon counts or texture resolutions or pretty shadows %)

Uh... What?

What is definitionally different about the graphics of Everquest2, Lineage2, and Age of Conan and in your opinion?

You're confusing the engine with the graphics. The Speedtree engine is very good at drawing foliage, so (unless you've got the time and talent to code an even better foliage engine) using Speedtree means you can either get lower required specs for a given complexity, or you can up the complexity with maintained specs.
Yeah, MMORPGs traditionally have weaker graphics than FPS's, because they have different marketing strategies: FPS's sell on wow-factor, of which graphics is a big part, MMORPGs sell on social interaction, so they need to keep requirements low so everyone & their friends can run it.
It's a marketing decision, that's all.

DAoC sucked because it was poorly coded, and despite using Speedtree.


EDIT: And by the way, GW uses a bandwidth of about 1 kilobyte per second, give or take a little. It's playable on dial-up with a 28.8 modem.

I actually think this will be good for GW2. But I thought it was Oblivion Umbra...

This news tells us nothing at all about what GW2 will look like. All it really says is it's complex enough to warrant changing the occlusion culling system from GW1 (or maybe just different enough from GW1 in some way or other), and that they decided it would make more sense to license something good that did the job rather than spending the man-hours programming it themselves. From that you could perhaps infer that programmer time is either limited enough by the schedule for this kind of thing not to make sense, or they'd prefer to use their time fine-tuning the game at the end of the development cycle.

On a side note, I did hear that the GW artists' blog has slowed down a fair bit, which could indicate they're pretty busy right now. Read into that what you will.

Guild Wars Artists' blog?? where? pretty please

Over here: http://www.sketchwich.com/