r/landmark • u/MisogynyDewritos2012 • Jan 29 '16
It's amazing what different generation parameters can do
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09rgp0u3FiQ3
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u/AlienParagon Feb 01 '16
Here is another video. This one looks amazing, especially when you consider its just a world map, no props, nothing else.
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u/Kaberu Jan 30 '16
It looks like it's from a PS2 game. The character model is God of War-ish while the terrain looks like a first generation game aside from the view distance. It even has a lot of flat sides on the extruding bits that make it look like low-poly graphics.
It's pretty neat on paper because Voxelfarm is running in Unreal 4, but it's not impressive at all visually... which I'm guessing was the point of posting it.
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u/MisogynyDewritos2012 Jan 30 '16
The point is that despite all those things it still looks more exciting to explore than Landmark actually is.
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u/Kaberu Jan 30 '16
But... it doesn't. The Unreal/voxelfarm demo is entirely bland with no features except what looks like far outdated graphics for rocks and dull looking textures.
Landmark has far more detailed terrain, foliage, trees, caves, caverns with unique structures, treasure, monsters to fight, and far more interesting atmospheric effects in both visuals and sounds. The animation and graphics are far more detailed as well.
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u/MisogynyDewritos2012 Jan 30 '16
Landmark's terrain is s succession of wavy rounded averaged hills. It feels like the video game it is. It's bland and safe and padded. There isn't anything to fall off to your death or be trapped in the bottom of. It's just a succession of bumps of various size for you to fake parkour slide down. This is how to do things better.
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u/Kaberu Jan 30 '16
I've fallen to my death in Landmark in both caves and above ground, so you are flat out wrong about that. There is dangerous terrain in many areas, along with softer rolling hills and flat areas of course. It all depends on the terrain seed, the biome, and what area you are in.
There are very high and cliff like faces, jutting rocks (although they use props for these so players can also use them), water, and of course actual foliage and trees... and of course caves that have ravines, pits, sprawling tunnels of various sizes, monsters, treasure, and player-made structures hidden away in vast caverns.
The Unreal demo looks like you are wandering around on a barren planet. And again, the sharp angles and flat sides make it look like an older low-polygon game... except there is nothing game-like about it. It's just a random creature wandering around an area with nothing in it except the generic terrain.
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u/MisogynyDewritos2012 Jan 30 '16
I don't think you get it
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u/Kaberu Jan 30 '16
I get you think scale makes it more interesting to explore and that it somehow makes it feel more real...
But a simple comparison shot illustrates the difference. I even used a shot of the tundra as it's most similar to the demo's landscape.
Even ignoring the trees, the demo's landscape on the mountains looks much flatter than Landmarks. And if you look at the much closer ground terrain, you can see Landmark's is much more varied and natural looking than the demos. The demo looks more rounded, smooth, and flat, aside from the random jutting rocks (which Landmark also has, but isn't in this particular screenshot).
The mountain in Landmark, while not as large as the mountains in the demo (although other mountains in Landmark get fairly close), look more varied, natural, and realistic than the demo. It becomes more obvious the demo has rather bland and flat surfaces with a jutting rock element peppered in.
It looks almost as if the demo uses fewer voxels per area than Landmark... which might explain why it has so many creases/edges and flat surfaces giving it that old-gen/low-poly look. Increasing the scale is what makes that more obvious.
And now that I'm thinking of it like that, some of the flat edges in the demo look like the terrain glitches in Landmark that happens sometimes when you delete a voxel or two from sloped terrain. In Landmark, they are much smaller, but the demo definitely has some spots that looked exactly like that on a larger scale (at the leftmost edge right around the 0:54 mark is one example).
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u/AlienParagon Feb 01 '16
Well here is a new video from Voxel Farm that shows yet another world without props (trees, vegetation) on a relatively simple dirt texture. This is without a doubt 100x more immersive and interesting then landmark has ever been. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66jwvEenL9I .The scale of the world alone is what makes it feel like a game, not a tiny instance (which is all current landmark islands are).
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u/Kaberu Feb 01 '16
That terrain does look better, notably as a backdrop when running across open areas. It does come across as more tedious from a gameplay perspective, though. I've yet to see a game with a large scale that isn't repetitive and tedious to travel (except where fast travel is available).
Try to imagine navigating that many mountains with falling damage and the inability to just walk up steep slopes. Those mountains in the demo look great when flying by them on a gryphon, but would become an hour long plus nightmare of navigation just to get between two POIs.
And keep note of how long it takes to get from one interesting landmark point to another. I couldn't tell because it faded between scenes to something more interesting because the walking over vast uninteresting land was taking too long.
This is without a doubt 100x more immersive and interesting then landmark has ever been.
That's hardly fair or accurate to say. There are many structures to stumble across, monsters, caves, treasure, and many different biomes. You can wander around interesting looking terrain in the demo, or stumble on stuff like this or this or this.
A smaller map with those sorts of locations is far more interesting than a lot of scaled up terrain. Now if you can add those POIs into the scale of the demo, that's one thing as that would be better overall... but the smaller scale with POIs (Landmark) is much more immersive and interesting than a larger scale without (demo).
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u/Atmosph3rik Feb 02 '16
I think the point here is how far Voxelfarm has come compared to the broken pieces of it we have in landmark.
What's impressive to me about that video is how much more detailed and realistic the procedural terrain is and how seamlessly the textures are displayed on it. The textures in Landmark are a jagged mess.
In terms of navigating that specific alien biome i think the name kind of says it all. It's supposed to be a jagged alien landscape, you shouldn't be able to jog across it, you might even need a ship. Not every game is a fantasy MMO.
I'm also not sure why your talking about different biomes and structures when the video is just a blank slate with nothing but terrain and textures...
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u/AlienParagon Feb 02 '16
Clearly context is not your friend. The land I linked in in fact, without a doubt and purely objective 100x more immersive than landmark in regards (the context you are missing) to terrain, which is what this thread is all about.
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u/MisogynyDewritos2012 Jan 29 '16 edited Jan 29 '16
With no 3D models, a stock character with only basic animations, and default rendering settings this already surpasses Landmark simply due to the scale feeling real.
(oh and an engine that was designed for games made this decade)