Alright, a week or two ago RedAlert came up with questions for Mr jeff. however, he was the first dev these questions went to. but, he had good ideas, so I'm gonna steal them for this week's dev questions: JeffL round two!

so, here are redalert's questions:
1. Where do you see Star Sonata in 5-10 years?
2. How many active players would you like to see on Star Sonata average?
3. Do you play any other game besides SS?
and i'll add:
4. what are your thoughts on my little idea of these dev questions?

and thanks also go to lordjeroen, whose (kind of) whining convinced me to bring the questioning back around to Jeff!

np

Alright, not sure if I've polled him or not, but this week's
Q & A is for The Suit.

A. hours of SS played weekly?
B. recent content influenced?
and C. Is Skyward REALLY an idiot for attempting the fuzz glitch? oh, and for the the uneducated, you'd best explain the fuzz glitch when responding. oh, and JeffL, PLEASE answer my second round of questions!

This is not even remotely related to the original topic, or even Star Sonata. I will (regretfully) be locking this post if that does not change immediately.

I'll answer these here (I should really split this post out into a new one, but it seems I can't right now).

Pixel depth:
This is the 'quality' of colouring used. Older people will remember the days of 8 bit graphics, these days most computers use 16, 24 or 32 bit colouring models,quality it's relevant to the number of different colours you can get from each one (eg, 8 bit = 256 individual colours, 24 bit = 16 million). This setting has no effect if you run Star Sonata in windowed mode, and whatever your display is set to normally use will be used. You can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth


Resolution:
This is how 'big' the game appears on your screen. The amount of space it will take up will depend on your screen size and display settings (resolution, again). The auto option for resolution in windowed mode takes your native resolution and removes a small part, so you have a small area around which you can click to get to other applications (same as alt+tab or using the task bar to switch).

You can change this on the fly by resizing the sides of the window like any other windowed application.


Graphics Quality:
This one gets a bit complicated, but I'll try to keep it short.

Some visages (how stuff appears in games, like drones, bases, suns, wormholes, background effects and just about everything else) have settings to only be visible if you have a certain graphics level turned on. This lets us not flood low-end computers with intense amounts of things which would cause lots of lag for the user. Commonly this is particles and multi layered backgrounds.

At medium and above we start using things called shaders. Shaders modify what you see in certain ways, and allow us to do new things. Players using graphic levels medium and above can see this in the form of things like glow maps, they make parts of things, well glow. A good example of this would be the modules on the Earthforce capital ships and the colours on the Paxian ships.

At Very High graphics, two new options become available, SSAO and HDR. SSAO is a special algorithm for calculating fancy looking shadows (it's a bit more complex than that). HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, and again is a shader effect that makes things look more colourful and detailed, even at lower lighting levels. You can read about SSAO and HDR on the following links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_spa ... _occlusion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-dynam ... _rendering


Use Hardware Cursor:
We have special cursors in game which change for different things (like your mouse cursor changes from a pointer to a claret shape when you hover over a text field). This option simply toggles whether to use that or what your computer normally uses.

Vertical Sync:
This makes sure that the game's frame rate (the speed it sends new data to the display device) is the same as what the display device is. Turning this on can eliminate issues like tearing and partial frames being rendered (displayed).


Orthographic camera:
By default, the camera you get is 'perspective', how you would see things in real life. Orthographic forces the camera to be facing down and the angle isn't changeable. It also causes everything else to appear 'flat'. In orthographic mode you don't see the 'speed bump' effect (flying over suns) and ships don't roll as they turn. This is to recreate how client 1 looked like. Personally I think it also removes parallax errors (issues caused by looking at an object from a different angle to normal (like trying to read a clock when you're sitting under it instead of 5 meters away)).


DDS Textures:
This feature uses special compression algorithms to reduce the texture sizes, and therefore reduce the amount of memory the client needs to run. The downside is that to do this, the client has to generate the DDS textures the first time it's run (and again for any new textures added), however the bonus is definitely worth it. DDS textures offer around 50% memory reduction if I remember correctly, and at no noticeable quality loss. This option you should be using (unless you have a really old computer which doesn't support it).


Preload Textures:
This option causes commonly used textures to be loaded into memory when the Death Striker loading graphic appears before you can log in. This causes a slightly longer start up time, but means that when you jump into a galaxy that needs a texture, it doesn't need to be loaded from the hard drive. Essentially you should use this option if you have lots of memory free before you start the client (RAM, about 2GB+) and you want to avoid a small lag (less than two seconds) sometimes when jumping into new galaxies.


High Quality Textures:
This option basically scales down all the textures we use. At the cost of lower quality you get less memory use when running the client.
There isn't a case where you'd want to use low quality textures instead of DDS versions unless your graphics card doesn't support DDS.

well, here's the thing. the last several posts have been 100% off-topic. even you, blue dwarf! now, let's get back to the topic before anilv locks it, and lets get some devs actually answering questions again! BTW, the last two sets are still waiting for answers.

I just returned to read what's new.

I Edited a Typo in one of my Postings..."Doctor Who" wasn't in the proper Font Format that I was using.

The Devs have rendering this Topic Thread DEAD by not Answering any Questions Posted here.

Thanks for Answering my Questions. I made a Printout of your Answers.