Glorious 3D battles....not!

**Morindin** · 10-06-2004, 23:34

Originally Posted by frogbeastegg

Ugly graphics solution: antistrophic filtering. I have it on at X2 and the game went from but ugly to as good as the fancy screenshots. You have to enable it outside the game in your graphics card's control panel and it takes a bit of extra juice but it makes a huge difference.

The ingame setting worked for me, and made a huge difference with barely any performance hit. Normally my Nvidia cards suck for AA too.

Only problem is I cant take ScreenShots's with AA turned on :(

**Thoros of Myr** · 10-07-2004, 00:29

Morindin you are talking about anti-aliasing(AA).
AA removes what people like to call "jaggies" which is straight lines of 3D objects not looking sharp and clear which is a side-effect of digitized graphics similar to how a line in MS paint can look segmented.

Frog is talking about anisotrophic filtering (AF).
AF usually works to remove flicker of textures (especially ones in the distance) and improves image quality by sharpening textures etc (probly other things I don't know about) AF can not be turned on in-game in RTW.

**Duke John** · 10-07-2004, 05:48

Not to worry, for a solution is close at hand... our artists would also have complained at doing two sets of artwork ;) The 'imposters' in Rome (which is really just a fancy way of saying "a sprite which is pretending to be a 3d object") are all auto-generated from the 3d models. The auto-generator is built into the main Rome exe but is not exposed in the current build; I'll see if we can make it available in a patch. But be warned it does take a while to run.

JeromeGrasdyke, watch it now! You are starting to spoil us modders

Thank you very much. It's good to see that you and the other programmers have thought seriously about modding. This game is just getting better and better, before you know it you are telling me that we will be able to make our own campaign maps

**Ulstan** · 10-07-2004, 15:36

"You have to enable it outside the game in your graphics card's control panel and it takes a bit of extra juice but it makes a huge difference."

Do you have to override letting the application pick the AF?

Or can you leave that checked, and select 4xAF, and RTW will go with the 4xaf?

**Suraknar** · 10-09-2004, 01:29

Hello,

This is an Interesting Topic here.

I would not want to disagree with any of the Veterans of the Org here, specially not Duke John ;)

However, I think what you are observig, and I read all the posts in this thread to make sure that I am not repeating here, is actually LOD.

So that at different distances, the actual model changes to a simpler model, sometime very simpler model, like a rectangle face, containing 2 polys per.

I am thinking that this transition from a Higher LOD model to a lower LOD model is what is being observed here. I would have trouble immagining the amount of work of making two sets of graphics.

Just a thought.

**frogbeastegg** · 10-09-2004, 16:35

Originally Posted by Ulstan

"You have to enable it outside the game in your graphics card's control panel and it takes a bit of extra juice but it makes a huge difference."

Do you have to override letting the application pick the AF?

Or can you leave that checked, and select 4xAF, and RTW will go with the 4xaf?

I'm not sure if the ATI drivers will default to the X4 if the program doesn't set its own preference; I have never got around to experimenting. I know my default in my card's settings was X0, so I had to alter it anyway. I just left it as an override for all programs, since I am not playing any other 3D games.

I wish this option was included in the in-game menu; it's a bit of an oversight.

**CrackedAxe** · 10-09-2004, 15:48

The battles look awesome, no complaints here.

**Tyrac** · 10-09-2004, 16:36

I personally was shocked at how nice and smooth everything runs, even at higher settings. In alot of games to get the smooth play I want I turn everything to the min setting. Not this game! I am very impressed with that part of the game.

**Morindin** · 10-07-2004, 06:21

Originally Posted by Thoros of Myr

Morindin you are talking about anti-aliasing(AA).
AA removes what people like to call "jaggies" which is straight lines of 3D objects not looking sharp and clear which is a side-effect of digitized graphics similar to how a line in MS paint can look segmented.

Frog is talking about anisotrophic filtering (AF).
AF usually works to remove flicker of textures (especially ones in the distance) and improves image quality by sharpening textures etc (probly other things I don't know about) AF can not be turned on in-game in RTW.

*doh* You're right. Skim reading is bad sometimes :P

**tombom** · 10-07-2004, 07:27

I have a Radeon 9200 with 128mb, an Athlon 64 3000+ and 512mb of RAM. When I saw this, I found that setting it to highest detail made the game lag until I removed high quality shadows. Now it works fine.