Sub-Par graphics, congrats firaxis.

I thought the graphics looked great...

"I thought the graphics looked great..."

Yeah me too. I was instantaneously excited for the new look. I felt a fantastic familiar feeling I've only felt as a kid.. when looking at a new civilization game.

Obviously the honeycomb-patch look could be (is being/will be) smoothed out. And I think I saw someone else mention that mountains could be more.. mountain-y. I'd like to feel some sense of epic-ness to the mountains.. like.. ya know.. when you see mountains in the real world, and you get a sense of how small you are as a person.

Well, in the art so far, the troops really don't seem that insignificant compared to the mountains.

Looks fantastic though. I'm really excited.

The graphics could be stick men and tiles could just say things like "forest" and "tundra" and i wouldn't give a damn, so long as it was still civilization. All that matters is the gameplay, nothing else, the graphics are nice, but not at all what matters.

Though I do think Firaxis did a fantastic job with the graphics, more than I'd hoped for at least.

I have to give credit to Firaxis, they've done a great job evolving Civilization. And I actually like the graphics too, minus the mountains and honeycombing.

DPyro said:

Like this:


The tiles are still pretty obvious, but by sharing a small fraction of the total terrain on a tile you could smooth it out and make the map not look like a honeycomb.

Click to expand...

Yes, that looks good. But now you need to predict all possible layouts of grid shape for any given terrain, and render them each individually, while writing code to place the correct ones in each location whenever the map is generated (or as will happen in some mods and worldbuilder, the terrain is changed).

Other than the two brown hexes on the far left of the image, no 2 tiles are the same in that depiction. Not even the general SHAPE of the terrain within any tile is maintained constant (the dark green on top right ALMOST manages to match up with the light green directly below it that is cut by the water, but even those don't quite match).


The alternative to that would be to have something designed which can "blur" the terrains, but that means having something that seems out of focus between every terrain type junction. Or it means instead of designing full plot and multi-plot terrain layouts, you have to design a single TINY patch or twelve and have it look like an 8-bit amalgamation of tiny pieces. By doing that (rendered objects, each much smaller than a single hex to allow for gradients between terrain) you raise the poly count per hex dramatically. And if the terrain is animated (grass/trees blowing in the wind type thing) that means a MASSIVE overhead on the graphics card, all for some nicely blended terrain, which will probably be viewed with the grid enabled more than 50% of the time.

DPyro said:

Like this:


The tiles are still pretty obvious, but by sharing a small fraction of the total terrain on a tile you could smooth it out and make the map not look like a honeycomb.

Click to expand...

Great, that works for a static layout with no randomization, now, do that for hundreds of thousands of tiles laid out in a relatively randomized pattern. Then, do that a few million times and get smooth results every time. While your doing that, try to not make map generation take 2 hours, I will accept a maximum of 10 minutes(and I am being very lenient with that timeframe)

Good picture, but you should edit out the curse word before it's deleted.

xienwolf said:

Yes, that looks good. But now you need to predict all possible layouts of grid shape for any given terrain, and render them each individually, while writing code to place the correct ones in each location whenever the map is generated (or as will happen in some mods and worldbuilder, the terrain is changed).

Click to expand...

That's not how code works. You create everything at runtime, you don't just try and take tiles from some list and try to stick it in there.

xienwolf said:

Other than the two brown hexes on the far left of the image, no 2 tiles are the same in that depiction. Not even the general SHAPE of the terrain within any tile is maintained constant (the dark green on top right ALMOST manages to match up with the light green directly below it that is cut by the water, but even those don't quite match).

Click to expand...

That's the point.

xienwolf said:

The alternative to that would be to have something designed which can "blur" the terrains, but that means having something that seems out of focus between every terrain type junction. Or it means instead of designing full plot and multi-plot terrain layouts, you have to design a single TINY patch or twelve and have it look like an 8-bit amalgamation of tiny pieces. By doing that (rendered objects, each much smaller than a single hex to allow for gradients between terrain) you raise the poly count per hex dramatically. And if the terrain is animated (grass/trees blowing in the wind type thing) that means a MASSIVE overhead on the graphics card, all for some nicely blended terrain, which will probably be viewed with the grid enabled more than 50% of the time.

Click to expand...

Oh ye of little faith. These are exactly what computers excel at. Graphics cards won't be used to generate the terrain (but if you did, it would take a fraction of the time it takes to calculate in CPU). I mean, GPU's already processes hundreds of millions of polygons a second, whether its polygons in a hexagonal or more roundular position is not really going to matter to it.

paradigmx said:

Great, that works for a static layout with no randomization, now, do that for hundreds of thousands of tiles laid out in a relatively randomized pattern. Then, do that a few million times and get smooth results every time. While your doing that, try to not make map generation take 2 hours, I will accept a maximum of 10 minutes(and I am being very lenient with that timeframe)

Click to expand...

It's a solved problem that's been done way before computers were invented.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curve_fitting. How else do you think the smooth paintbrush in paint works? It would take seconds at most to do these calculations on a modern CPU, even on a massive map.

Do hexes make this problem that much worse than squares? I honestly think that smoothed out hex terrain will look quite natural compared to the Legend of Zelda thing we have going on in Civ4.

I have to say that I think Civ graphics have been declining steadily since Civilization II.

Civ II has clear, crisp graphics that are instantly recognizable.

Civ III muddies them by adding noise, like shadows and animation.

Civ IV adds pointless 3d graphics, so that you need an advanced computer to show them. And, they change the model frequently: different directions, animations, damage... It's near impossible to recognize a unit without being zoomed in fully. Luckily they avoid many of the usual 3d traps, terrain obscuring important information and insufficient ability to zoom out. (They do add a layer of clouds when zoomed out though. I guess they didn't want the map to be too useful.)

If that trend continues, Civ VI units will be unrecognizable unless zoomed in enough to count the nose hairs, but that's okay since it will be impossible to zoom out anyway and there will be thick fog everywhere.

IMHO the Civ5 terrain so far looks superb, having a touch of real images you can take during a flight. Of course you have to take into account that for Civ you cannot use real scaling, because mountains would not fit, trees wouldn't be visible etc.

As creator of the Civ4 BlueMarble graphics mod, where I invested weeks trying to create similar graphics, I always dreamed about seeing a terrain like the one on the Civ5 screenshots, and I hardly can see where this beauty could be improved much. IMHO only the Civ5 rivers do not fit well to the landscape yet.

"Sub par"?

Define "par" - or are you just throwing words around?

Civ has the benefit of being pretty much the only significant TBS, and certainly the only recent one - so tell me, what are you comparing it to? Crysis?

Can someone explain to me why we're discussing terrain rounding when it's pretty obvious that Civ5 already has this? For example, take this screenshot:

http://www.civfanatics.com/gallery/showimage.php?i=2775&c=36

Hexagons? Where? The river could be better but the rest looks good.

The honeycomb is only obvious in some of the other screens because the grid display is turned on.

Especially at this stage, I think it looks brilliant, and can't wait. My only complaint was how the farm fields looked.

Skyre Noktis said:

Can someone explain to me why we're discussing terrain rounding when it's pretty obvious that Civ5 already has this? For example, take this screenshot:

http://www.civfanatics.com/gallery/showimage.php?i=2775&c=36

Hexagons? Where? The river could be better but the rest looks good.

The honeycomb is only obvious in some of the other screens because the grid display is turned on.

Click to expand...

Just to throw it out there - I really really dislike what they've done with rivers. That horrible bevelled effect they're using that makes it look like someone dug out the path of the river then just poured water into it, not quite up to the top. Ick.

Hopefully that is one of the more alpha aspects of the graphics. Rivers have banks! Not smoothed corners where they just drop off down into the water.

Skyre Noktis said:

Can someone explain to me why we're discussing terrain rounding when it's pretty obvious that Civ5 already has this? For example, take this screenshot:

http://www.civfanatics.com/gallery/showimage.php?i=2775&c=36

Hexagons? Where? The river could be better but the rest looks good.

The honeycomb is only obvious in some of the other screens because the grid display is turned on.

Click to expand...

I agree it seems to me they've already done what dpyro put in his scheme. The only really hard edge that I can see is between plains/grassland where the color border seems to be the hex border. In screenshots I see beaches in water tiles, water in land tiles, forests spilling over the border of hexes, and hills continuing onto flatland. Lakes and forests that take 1 tile look more like irregular circles than hexagons. Overall I just don't see the complaint about the shapes being too well defined.

odalrick said:

I have to say that I think Civ graphics have been declining steadily since Civilization II.

Civ II has clear, crisp graphics that are instantly recognizable.

Civ III muddies them by adding noise, like shadows and animation.

Civ IV adds pointless 3d graphics, so that you need an advanced computer to show them. And, they change the model frequently: different directions, animations, damage... It's near impossible to recognize a unit without being zoomed in fully. Luckily they avoid many of the usual 3d traps, terrain obscuring important information and insufficient ability to zoom out. (They do add a layer of clouds when zoomed out though. I guess they didn't want the map to be too useful.)

If that trend continues, Civ VI units will be unrecognizable unless zoomed in enough to count the nose hairs, but that's okay since it will be impossible to zoom out anyway and there will be thick fog everywhere.

Click to expand...

Just cause you are still playing on a 486 doesnt mean the rest of us want to be stuck in 1985. Now we are going back to the future. ;p

I don't really care about the gfx that come with the game, as long as it is easy to mod them. No designer can compete with hundreds of people willing to create gfx out of love for a game, or even just love for creation

Civ II is by far my favorite Civ, at least for nostalgic reasons, but I do not know about the graphics being so "crisp and clear" always. Granted, many of them were in my opinion, and as I said earlier, I do not value graphics as much as gameplay. But, I had a hard time telling what some of the resources (silk for example) were in the game just by looking at them on the map. Some were pretty obvious, though.

I find the Terrain very good for an Alpha/very early Beta