Graphics Poll

[Andrew Lonon]

Hello Everyone:

I received the email below from a highly knowledgeable person who works with the history and recreation of the ships from the age of sail. He is quite concerned that Salvo is not accurate enough in the depiction of ships. I am not arguing with him on that, there is defiantly room for improvement. Hence: I would like to know how strong the general sentiment is.

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Dear Andrew London
I saw your game 'Salvo' mentioned on 3D games and was initially very interested, But I see from the screen shots that your ships have a 'couse' (lower sail) on the mizzen and no driver.
This glaring inaccuracy ruins the entire look of a game that has obviously had a great deal of time and money spent on it. I would think that a game of this type has something of a niche market and would mainly appeal to people already interested in the period, like myself.
I feel sure they would be put off buying such a game, because if something as basic as the look of the ships is wrong, then we might expect that there are other inaccuracies with in the games programming that we can not see.
I understand that I may just be an old Anorak, but I have been making models of Napoleonic ships professionally for the past 12 years and have been looking forward to such a game being released, after the fiasco that was Age of Sail 2.
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[RickAllen]

Andrew, I'm affraid he's right, but I would not say the graphics are unacceptable.

Rick

[Alex777]

Andrew, I think much depends on the advertising. If Shrapnel's ads portray Salvo! as a fun, playable, beer & pretzels-type game, then the graphics are fine. If you present the game as "realistic", then details of this sort are significant. There is a lot published on the period, and many wargamers are quite knowledgable about it.

Many of us have been hoping for a realistic simulation of naval combat in a 3D evironment. Age of Sail 2 and its many patches & sequels promised this but failed (miserably) to deliver. It would be nice to think that Salvo! will fill the gap. However, I don't read the current ads as making any particular claim to realism.

[Ed Kolis]

I'm actually curious about the graphics for a different reason - all the screenshots seem to portray extremely dithered graphics, as if the game were running in 256 color mode. Is this really the case, or did you just compress the graphics to save bandwidth?

[Andrew Lonon]

Ed Kolis:

The screenshots are actual (to the best of my knowledge) pixel for pixel representations of what you would see on the Salvo screen at any one time/frame. However, the screen is animated so some of the effect that you may be seeing is augmented by the sampling effect of continuous updates.

This could be optimized for a single resolution, but Salvo works at many resolutions. The Screenshots are at 800 x 600 but I will post some other screen shots as a reply to this not at higher resolutions so you can see the difference. <Gotta go make them � so check back in a few days.>


>>>>>>SCREENSHOT ADDED

[Combat Wombat]

I voted Not Acceptable because I have to agree with the person that emailed you. A fair ammount of accuracy for the ships is something that I would look for in a game like this.

Also a question if I used forced Anti-Aliasing or Anisotropic Filtering would that help smooth out the graphics, or even better does the game itself support them?

[GreyCloud]

I think that until the Demo is out, it will be difficult to decide if the graphics are 'spoiling' the game. Most of the strategy games I play, do not have 'flashy' graphics, I belive that there is a trap which many mainstream developers fall into, the concentrate too much on the graphics at the expense of better game play, HCI and most importantly - A Balanced Game! The graphics on the early SE games, were pretty basic! but the game has been a success because of its game play, HCI(?) and being well balanced.

If once the demo is out it turns out that the game play is as good as reported, then I think that most 'real' gamers will be prepared to overlook any graphics problems.

GreyCloud

[PDF]

This games looks promising, and I expect it to ba at least historically "acceptable". I'm far from a naval specialist but I agree that the ship models have wrong-looking sails... Is it that difficult to correct them ?

As for the graphics quality, the 3D looks Ok, but the bitmap images of captains (?) are so-so.. And indeed they look like 256-color pics - are higher settings supported ?

Edit : the ships'reflections in the water looked sometimes a little weird ... I checked some images, and indeed they are NOT reflections, but pictures some other ship !
Look at this, it's obvious :
http://www.spruegames.com/images/salvo/big/xebec.jpg

Surely it's a detail, but a rather too much seeable one ...

[RickAllen]

Andrew, check out the ships in Imperial Glory. Their bow sprits looks a little more realistic than Salvo's.

Rick

[lh]

The poll only had "acceptable" and "unacceptable" , I would like to have the graphics improved so voted "unacceptable". I am very happy to see this type of game coming to the Mac. I hope you make enough profits to continue to make incremental improvements. It would really be neat if the ships were more accurate graphically. Also the damage from broadsides of 1st raters vs 4th raters accurately depicted.

Once we get into this type of detail the discussion will go on and on. For example, I think some of the players of Combat Mission want to count the rivets in the combat vehicles. Sailors are probably worse.

I hope this is a great beginning for Salvo! with a long and successful development. I bought the game and looking forward to many hours of play.