Can someone please tell me what Shadows, Bump Maps, Auto Quality & Antialiasing mean. The user guide talks about these things but does not explain what they are or what they do.
Thanks
Definitions - Shadows, Bump Maps, Auto Quality & Antiali
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Re: Definitions - Shadows, Bump Maps, Auto Quality & Ant
Shadows:Wiljanda wrote:Can someone please tell me what Shadows, Bump Maps, Auto Quality & Antialiasing mean. The user guide talks about these things but does not explain what they are or what they do.
Thanks
Instead of just doing lighting on an object (ie rending the way an object looks in the light) it also calculated and renders any shadows the object throws on other objects. Really slick looking near stations and in combat. CPU intensive, only turn on if you have 2GHz+ and a Geforce FX+ or a Radeon 9000+
Bump Maps:
A "trick" used in modern 3D cards to make a surface look like it's not just flat, but actually has a 3D texture. Supported (fully): Radeon 8000 series and newer, Geforce 3 series and newer. You can turn this on if you have a Radeon 8000+ or a Geforce 3+ (but not a 4MX), it's pretty low on the CPU cost.
Automatic Quality Control:
To reduce the "load" on your computer, the game constantly adjusts the models of all items in the sector depending on their distance from you and your framerate. For example, the Sector gates go from featureless decagons (or dodecagons, can't remember) to featureless "near circles" to detailed "near circles". I tend to leave this on, some people say the game plays a bit smoother without it.
Antialiasing:
A technique (essentially taking a pixel on the edge of a shape and averaging it with the ones around it) to make edges of shapes look like clean straight lines, not "jagged". Looks nice, but CPU intensive. Up to you.
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The Man, The Myth, The Legend, the Action Figure.
The Man, The Myth, The Legend, the Action Figure.
I'll give you the simple version. Shadows- just as it sounds. If a sun is shining across your ship or a station, cockpits or anything protruding from the object will cast a shadow across the object, or unto another object next to it. Bump mapping. That's a fun one to define simply. Makes otherwise flat textures more 3 dimensional. like bumps on a surface. Autoquality is an attempt to drop features when your framerate gets too low, or when the game looks like it's running slow to you. It drops features to try to speed things up. It doesn't seem to help, so you should leave it off for now IMO. Antialiasing. Diagonal lines tend to look like this due to pixel rendering on a screen:
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Antialiasing draws in some filler pixels in shades of color slightly darker than the line to create an effect that fools you into seeing this:
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Well, not actually darker, but a shade that blends the line in better. Like a blue object against a red background? It would draw some purple pixels (dots). Red on top of yellow? Some orange pixels (dots)It helps visually with any diagonal or curved line the computer renders.
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Antialiasing draws in some filler pixels in shades of color slightly darker than the line to create an effect that fools you into seeing this:
\
o\
oo\
ooo\
Well, not actually darker, but a shade that blends the line in better. Like a blue object against a red background? It would draw some purple pixels (dots). Red on top of yellow? Some orange pixels (dots)It helps visually with any diagonal or curved line the computer renders.
Last edited by Wags on Tue, 23. Dec 03, 05:41, edited 2 times in total.
Behind every self made man are 100 disgruntled employees who brought him where he is today.
Anisotropic filtering is a means to address a problem that occurs when you view a plane with a texture on it, for example, a cube with a picture painted on each side.captainfred wrote:OK, what's Anthroscopic filtering mean then!!
When you view the cube straight on, the picture looks normal. Without any filtering technique (there are two main types, isotropic and anisotropic), when you view the image on a slanted plane it looks misshaped.
This is best viewed at this page:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3 ... 380,00.asp
Gimme another, I like this game.
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The Man, The Myth, The Legend, the Action Figure.
The Man, The Myth, The Legend, the Action Figure.
Re: Definitions - Shadows, Bump Maps, Auto Quality & Ant
Thats Vanilla Antialiasing like you use for Cleartype and other font smoothing but games like X2 and others that use Anti-Aliasing use Super-sampling which is a quite a different ball game.jpublic wrote: Antialiasing:
A technique (essentially taking a pixel on the edge of a shape and averaging it with the ones around it) to make edges of shapes look like clean straight lines, not "jagged". Looks nice, but CPU intensive. Up to you.
Super-Sampling involves Rendering the game at a higher resolution then you intend to play in (hence the 2x , 4x ...) and using a special algorithm you shrink that image back to intended resolution. IIRC
Anisotropic filtering: You can also call it "deep 3D texture sharpness"
meaning textures which are far away are staying in full texture quality.
Imagine a long hallway with a very complex texture on the groud/wall/sealing.
w/o it, the texture gets blurry after some distance and almost undefine far away.
if you switch it on (2,4,8,16) the texture keep clear and sharp further into dept so higher you set it...... 4x should be fine, a difference between 8 and 16 is almost not noticable, but very GPU intensive.
meaning textures which are far away are staying in full texture quality.
Imagine a long hallway with a very complex texture on the groud/wall/sealing.
w/o it, the texture gets blurry after some distance and almost undefine far away.
if you switch it on (2,4,8,16) the texture keep clear and sharp further into dept so higher you set it...... 4x should be fine, a difference between 8 and 16 is almost not noticable, but very GPU intensive.
Nice one bigmac. I couldn't think of a way to make it sound simple. That's pretty good. We should get together on a website that takes computing acronyms and jargon and translates it to English Then again, if we did that, I'd probably be out of a job for life.
Lol. Sory Kiwi, I couldn't resist a Monty Python quote. I suppose I should have asked "What is the average wingbeat to volume ratio of 2 coconut laden African Swallows carrying the coconut between them on a peice of string whilst migrating to England?"
Then again, if we did that, I'd probably be out of a job for life. Lol. Sory Kiwi, I couldn't resist a Monty Python quote. I suppose I should have asked "What is the average wingbeat to volume ratio of 2 coconut laden African Swallows carrying the coconut between them on a peice of string whilst migrating to England?"
Behind every self made man are 100 disgruntled employees who brought him where he is today.
Re: Definitions - Shadows, Bump Maps, Auto Quality & Ant
Actually, that's not quite true either. There are actually multiple types of Antialiasing, but I chose to explain the one that was easiest for me to explain. In fact, Super-sampling (also called FSAA) is almost never used. It's far too computationally intensive - the only ones who ever thought it was really a goal to work for was 3Dfx.troj wrote:Thats Vanilla Antialiasing like you use for Cleartype and other font smoothing but games like X2 and others that use Anti-Aliasing use Super-sampling which is a quite a different ball game.jpublic wrote: Antialiasing:
A technique (essentially taking a pixel on the edge of a shape and averaging it with the ones around it) to make edges of shapes look like clean straight lines, not "jagged". Looks nice, but CPU intensive. Up to you.
Super-Sampling involves Rendering the game at a higher resolution then you intend to play in (hence the 2x , 4x ...) and using a special algorithm you shrink that image back to intended resolution. IIRC
The technique that's used (and that is referenced by the 2x, 4x) is Multi-sampling (a DX8 technique) that only renders polygonal edges at a higher resoultion, and then blends it back into the original scene.
NVidia's Quincunx and Accuview Antialiasing are also types of multisampling antialiasing.
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The Man, The Myth, The Legend, the Action Figure.
The Man, The Myth, The Legend, the Action Figure.