Friends, have you noticed the anti-aliasing in GG seems to be quite heavy-handed? For many maps its fine, but a lot of the time the rendering seems to have a very soft quality to it (even without bloom). Is there a way to sharpen the rendering somehow? It's like the anti-aliasing is set to 11 at all times.

ok, the majority are looking to do the opposite, because of Jaggy Edges.

Could I get you to list your machine specs and operating system. as you might actually have a card that has a global setting that allows this.

Thanks

Allow me to expand on this. I do know I have FXAA turned globally on. I have a GTX 675MX card.

The edges are smooth alright, but that's not what I'm referring to. Perhaps it's more to do with how GG handles anisotropic filtering. It seems to be on a very heavy setting at all times, making road textures etc. excessively soft. It may be just my taste, but compared to other engines I would say GG is the softest with textures.

Edit: and I did get a similar result with FXAA globally turned off.

I see.
May I get a screen shot of your metrics settings please. and a shot of the road please.

Thanks you.

AF makes textures sharper not blurrier.

If textures are too blurry on terrain, you will need to increase the detail range to your liking. If closeup textures on things like placed entities are of sufficient resolution but seem a bit too blurry in game, try turning the bloom slider all the way off. Postprocessing tends to make things look lower resolution, in my experience.

Hi Farticus. As far as I am aware GG has no AA or AF, so I think whatever you are seeing is down to the settings on your card. FXAA anti-aliases the entire screen using a shader-based method which in my experience always gives a slightly blurred look to textures. Do you have the option to try other methods to anti-alias, such as MSAA?

A screenshot would be really helpful. Then we can figure out if what your seeing is the same as the rest of us.

To me it looks like anti is turned way down in gg or none at all.

I must agree since depth of field has been introduced the graphics do look fuzzier. Even when the blur effects are at 0. Yes, if you disable bloom entirely it returns to as before, but that is not really good. We might want sharp graphics and bloom as well. I must admit I am not a fan of these effects in games in general. I have never really seen any game do it well, it always just looks blurred. Trying to simulate this effect just doesn't work particularly well, as if we look into the distance and focus on something we expect it to become clearer. A game however can't tell where on the screen you are looking and hence looks fake overall.

I generally turn off this sort of thing myself, unless it is really, really subtle. I'm all for having the option, but think that disabling bloom altogether as the way to disable it is a little bit limiting.

Also, as a direct result of these effects the frame rate is lower than prior versions. Not something anyone wants to see, as GG already is in much need of a performance boost. Really these sort of touches in my opinion are final touches and should be done when the engine is ready. It is not close, so why add these graphical tweaks at this stage? At the moment they are just another slowdown factor. The lack of control to disable them completely, without also disabling the bloom effect, means that those of us who do not really want it, are forced to downgrade other features to avoid it.

I have to agree with DVader on this, and also noticed that graphics now look a little soft unless bloom is set to zero. On some levels I also now lose about 20 FPS compared to other versions of the engine.

i'm not seeing the frame rate drop as much as 20fps, i'm only losing 2 or 3 fps at most.

I agree performance needs to be improved, but with careful map making and if you are using indoor areas you could use goindoors.lua to increase FPS inside, just make sure you put gooutdoors.lua near your exits, and in a zone near your startmarker, because if you quit testmode and you were indoors, when you next run testmode the terrain will have vanished due to the goindoors script.

occlusion.lua might help too.