myth looking

[carlinho]

anyone played this game? it's very myth engine looking....

http://store.steampowered.com/app/49337/

[BIG KROK V8 SS]

Pretty much looks like a Myth 3/Empire Earth type engine.

[Gleep]

Or Once Upon a Knight or a few flash games I've played over on Kongregate.

Myth 4 could be done by a small group of decent programmers.

[vinylrake]

can't tell for sure from the screenshots but it looks like one of those games where the camera angle is fixed and there's no real camera movement just a close-up zoom-out option and if lucky you can pick the compass direction (NESW) to view the fixed perspective 'real world' view from..

[carlinho]

Ah, never mind, reviews are horrible...
Still as gleep says, shouldn't be that hard to do a myth game...

[BIG KROK V8 SS]

Personally I think the sprites engine makes Myth work much better. Is it possible to make something more 3D though using sprites? Like I think there are only maybe 8-10 angles per myth unit, could that be increased to eliminate the "jump" you see from side to side, so its more like a circle rolling on the ground and not an octagon? The sprites make the game play faster and more precise. The same speed and effort you put into the game is exactly how your units will react. Other games the engine does it for you. The point of myth should be that it requires the most user input as humanly possible--which is a big reason why nobody will ever really come close to maxing out the full potential of this game in terms of skill---no, not even me, even though I'm wicked awesome at everything. Imagine if a computer were playing, and could move an army of 30 units individually and simultaneously. Dodging and weaving every single flying arrow or perfect micro ability in melee fights. Just saying, games like racing games can be maxed out because there is only one perfect way to do something, everyone copies it, and the best scores are all super close to each other until the ultimate best time is set. Not the case with myth.

[oogaBooga]

krok makes a good point - myth is why I cant play any other "RTS" game out there. theyre all just so dumbed down... myth gives you 100% individual control for everything. How many other games can you blow up a piece of shrapnel so that it flies over your (red) dwarf's head and nails the almost dead brigand chasing you? no other game has the micromanagement myth has

[Gleep]

A good 3d platform would be better than sprites. Sprites could look a lot better and be smoother than they are in Myth. That's what flash games are, but they aren't that high res either. There is a point though where it's more efficient to go 3d. I mean your modeling units and animating them to take renders of to turn into sprites, so why not just make the game 3d?

You have better lighting effects with 3d also. The problem is we see too many of these weak low poly games that just don't look good. Imagine a game built with a Unreal 3 Engine or better. Voxels are something I posted about that could really work well for Myth with all the explosions going on.

[punkUser]

3D and polygons would work just fine for Myth 2. You could easily reproduce (pretty much exactly) the look of the current sprites in real-time. In fact you could do a lot better.

That said, it would be a fairly large amount of work and mostly non-backwards-compatible at that, hence the lack of motivation to do it thus far. Myth isn't really about the graphics anyways, although we do our best to make them as unobjectionable as possible without being too disruptive to the original experience.

[BIG KROK V8 SS]

krok makes a good point - myth is why I cant play any other "RTS" game out there. theyre all just so dumbed down... myth gives you 100% individual control for everything. How many other games can you blow up a piece of shrapnel so that it flies over your (red) dwarf's head and nails the almost dead brigand chasing you? no other game has the micromanagement myth has

Definitely, the physics engine is superior to anything, not that I'm a huge gamer nor know much about new stuff, but its so evident that the game plays perfectly how I want it to every time, yet there are still so many uncontrollable variables-- duds, weather, particles, debris, carnage, bounces, archer accuracy or lack thereof, CB'ing or deflection in some form... the list goes on.

There is a Civil War plugin, I forget which one... maybe Blue vs Grey, that has high resolution landscapes and all kinds of advanced units. Its really really cool and well thought out, but it incorporates the replenishment of units. You get horse and buggy units that carry other units and drop them off near the artillery or unit that needs replenished. You also have lower levels of soldiers that pick up shovels and dig trenches or make walls for you. It's cool, since it is an exclusive plugin and those features are only available on Legendary I believe, but that type of gameplay style could not be sustained in myth, nor would it last.

[BIG KROK V8 SS]

3D and polygons would work just fine for Myth 2. You could easily reproduce (pretty much exactly) the look of the current sprites in real-time. In fact you could do a lot better.

That said, it would be a fairly large amount of work and mostly non-backwards-compatible at that, hence the lack of motivation to do it thus far. Myth isn't really about the graphics anyways, although we do our best to make them as unobjectionable as possible without being too disruptive to the original experience.

One thing I've noticed is regular M2 units look good from far up, but zoomed in you can see obviously how unrealistic looking they are.

However, for High Resolution units, a lot of them look scribbly or fuzzy from zoomed out, and when you zoom in they look amazing. However, during gameplay, when you are zoomed fully out for 99% of the game, the units look harder to discern among others and slightly harder to identify. Sort of feels like the old TFL-style graphics in its original form before better resolutions came out. I'm just saying there has to be a tradeoff somewhere, but when it comes down to actual gameplay performance, the standard resolution myth units work best because they look more solid from zoomed out.

Maybe that is only because of the sprites engine, so seeing a myth engine in 3d and poly (whatever the hell that is) would be something to think about. I haven't had much playing time with Myth 3, I can never get it to work properly, but I couldn't stand the gesture circles for the units. They were rough and not round and accurate like the myth ones. And not that M3 does it, but games like Empire Earth makes the circles bigger/smaller depending on unit size, which I am NOT an advocate of at all.

[punkUser]

Some of that "high resolution units look sparkly" stuff will be fixed in 1.8. They should look nice and equivalently smooth at any zoom level. Obviously there's nothing we can do about low resolution sprites looking bad zoomed in other than replacing the sprites though

[BIG KROK V8 SS]

What is being instituted to make them look more smoothly from zoomed out?

[Graydon]

New renders of the original Myth units at a higher resolution size is the start of the magic. The real magic gets going though, when the new system allocates mip-maps to the high res sprites, so that they uniformly "scale" up and down in resolution as you zoom in or out. The current issue you see with the 'sparkly' high res units is that it's got too many pixels to display at that given zoom and so it mashes them together making it look sharp and grainy. The new system will replace the super large sprite with a smaller version of itself at a far zoom, and then improve as you zoom in and get closer to the subject. It's pretty fantastic to watch actually, as a group of units walks from the far side of your screen towards you, they actually 'come into focus'. 1.8 for the win!

[BIG KROK V8 SS]

Can you increase the # of units selected up from 126? Playing a CWR Flat Top Coop map now and I can't select all of the front line units. 200 would be a good mark.