Imagine a world where the villages of humans were scattered along mountaintops, and the world below was completely blocked off by an impassible wall of clouds. In a world like that, advancements in air travel would precede both land and sea. This is the kind of world that Aero Empire is set in. In this world, the player can rise through the ranks, from a lowly gunner manning a turret aboard an airship to the commander of several airships, ordering the crew of your own airship and the captains of the airships in your squad. Aero Empire is a cross-genre game, incorporating elements of role-playing games, shooters, flight simulators, and squad combat. Production on the game started November 25th, 2008, and is scheduled to release by the end of 2010, and a potential sequel focusing on nation management may come later. The single player version will be free to download and play, with no restrictions.
I've been working on a lot of cleaning up the code, optimization, and refactoring of the rendering engine lately (which I will discuss more about at the next progress update). One of the changes made can be seen in the image above: antialiased lines. This makes the scene look much cleaner and artistic, and while the difference is subtle, it adds a lot to the visual quality and clarity of the scene, and doesn't come at too much of a performance cost.
You'll need to see a full sized version to tell the difference. The images are 1440x900 (my screen size), and if they are scaled down in your browser to fit your screen, you should scale them back to normal size.
With anti-aliasing: I106.photobucket.com
Without anti-aliasing:
I106.photobucket.com
Note that both of these images have improvements to lines, so even the image without anti-aliasing enabled should look better than the old lines. I have an old image where I explained the aliasing here: I106.photobucket.com
Ah, I see a difference. Nice work. :)
I can see it as well. Is this AA an option the player can adjust in the menu?
Sure, you can disable it if you'd like, but it's really not that costly on graphics cards powerful enough to support AE. Anti-aliased lines only drop the frame rate by 1-2 fps, and lines in general only drop the framerate by 3-4 fps. The major rendering cost is the high quality shadows (which can be set to any quality setting - # of shadow maps and samples). With shadows and volumetric shading disabled, the program can run at 120-200 fps with all other settings on high (my graphics card is a Geforce 280 GTX).
In all fairness, that's a pretty beefy card. ;)
Very true, and you will be able to tweak the quality settings and disable many of the features to boost the framerate for older cards (although the oldest I can see running this game is a geforce 7800 or equivalent). However, this game isn't coming out until early 2011, and by then, a 280 won't be a beefy card lol.