Mod Idea: Smooth Daggerfall

[LorrMaster42]

You still have to worry about layering clothes and armor, animating models to truely interact with the world now that they are 3D, and also make sure that NPCs don't clog up your computer power. I personally actually really like the 2D sprites for NPCs.

[Biboran]

You still have to worry about layering clothes and armor, animating models to truely interact with the world now that they are 3D, and also make sure that NPCs don't clog up your computer power. I personally actually really like the 2D sprites for NPCs.

I too, but 2d will requre a lit time and artists to re-implement arena feature with visible actual weared armour on enemies.

[Narf the Mouse]

AFAIK, with a modern computer, the draw call for a 2-3k character model takes longer than actually drawing the model. So sprite or model, with a small enough model, doesn't make a difference.

The animations, though, yeah, that's a problem. But...

Ok, so if you read up on practices of big game studies, they don't make games for the computers they have now; they make games for the computers that will probably exist in 2-3 years. And in 2-3 years, what can we expect?

DirectX12/Vulkan will be wide-spread and well-understood, with plenty of tutorials/techniques for getting the most out of them.

6-8 core CPUs will be the norm. AMD's Ryzen is the obvious one, but Intel is going to have to match AMD to stay ahead. If Ryzen 2 (or whatever it's called) fixes the major problems slowing down Ryzen, and adds another few hundred MHz, as we can reasonably expect, and stays largely a 6-8 core CPU, then Intel's going to look even worse in comparison, especially if AMD keeps their prices under Intel's - which they probably will.

So in 2-3 years, you can probably expect 6-8 core CPUs to be the norm. You can also expect another couple of processor generations, but probably nothing exceptional there. If there is something exceptional, it'll probably be a new processor material revolution, and we can throw all these predictions out the window, in a very good way.

AMD's Vega will probably compete with NVIDIA's 10XX-series GeForce. How well is a question; but NVIDIA will likely feel pressure on their 11XX-series launch. In 2-3 years, through, we'll probably be on Vega 2 or 3, and NVIDIA 12XX or 13XX. And with about a *35% increase per generation, we'll be looking at about 1.8x to 2.4x faster GPUs.

So in short, if you want to make Daggerfall Unity fully 3D, go ahead, and don't worry about it. The tech will catch up, barring disaster or sudden, unexpected downward shift.



* Anyone who's really familiar with the GPU space increase, feel free to chime in here and correct me.

[Nystul]

the limiting factor is the unity engine anyway...

[Narf the Mouse]

the limiting factor is the unity engine anyway...

It isn't actually slow, these days, for most things. Creating a lot of game objects is slow, but *pooling solves that.

Draw calls used to be a slow-down factor, but batching solved some of that, and instancing means that Unity can do the same "tens of thousands of the same character model on-screen at the same time" as any other major engine.

C# isn't as fast as C++, and the C# used by Unity Engine is, in computing terms, very old; but their roadmap shows upgrading to the latest compiler, and then upgrading to the latest C#, is proceeding fairly smoothly. Correction: I just checked, and it seems Unity 5.6 supports C# 6? I don't have it installed; can someone check? And in 2-3 years, expect C# to get faster; and probably have fairly-well developed C#-to-native projects for platforms other than Windows.

You can probably (almost certainly) also expect more multi-core support in Unity Engine in the next 2-3 years.

Add to that faster physics processing.

So, overall, these days Unity Engine's reputation for being slow is mostly unearned, and it's modernized quite a bit.

* Pooling introduces some memory problems that would be somewhat less of a problem with C++, but on PC, likely nothing to worry about. Especially given that, in 2-3 years, I think we can feasibly expect a minimum of 32 GB of RAM to be the norm.

[Nystul]

With limiting factor a more refered to limitations and bugs. For example just recently fog stopped to work in reflections (somewhere around unity 5.3). It worked correctly before but is broken now and no solutions an no help in unity forums by devs...
This engine has so many shortcomings it is just annoying.
Take the terrain system for example. It is state of 10-15 years ago.
I usually spend hours and hours on workarounds for problems that shouldn't even exist in a decent engine.
Don't get me wrong unity has its strengths but it is also very raw in many aspects. I am tired of it most of the time

[Narf the Mouse]

With limiting factor a more refered to limitations and bugs. For example just recently fog stopped to work in reflections (somewhere around unity 5.3). It worked correctly before but is broken now and no solutions an no help in unity forums by devs...
This engine has so many shortcomings it is just annoying.
Take the terrain system for example. It is state of 10-15 years ago.
I usually spend hours and hours on workarounds for problems that shouldn't even exist in a decent engine.
Don't get me wrong unity has its strengths but it is also very raw in many aspects. I am tired of it most of the time

Oh, you meant bugs and limitations, rather than speed.

Yeah, I totally agree.

Fortunately for terrain, at least, it's on the roadmap to upgrade. Still... Not a very well-managed engine.

At least they seem to be getting their act together, but still... Definitely not there yet.

[Narf the Mouse]

Making a new post so it's noticed: 5.6 does not have an upgraded C#. That seems to be part of something called "Unity 2017.1 beta".

Link: https://unity3d.com/unity/beta?_ga=1.25 ... 1457766490