changing the screen resolution...

You can't.

The game resolution is fixed at 1024*768. The simplest explanation for why they did this is to reduce the processing overhead, and allow the AIs to benefit from the processing time saved.

~SDC~

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by Ambassador Lucky Jack
The game resolution is fixed at 1024*768. The simplest explanation for why they did this is to reduce the processing overhead...
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

how does that work? once the ui resolution you choose is onscreen, how is processing time used up?

i'm not complaining, my monitor maxes out at 1024, just curious.

I'd like the option to increase screen resolution too

Maybe a later addition via game update?

Sith

~SDC~

The gfx are made for 1024 I think, it's not rendered so it would take more work to have them in 1280 or 1152
Rather use the remaining cpu cycles for more usefull features

~SDC~

When you have to factor in the screen resolution an additional calculation has to be made to determine just where an icon has to be placed. If on a 1024*768 screen an icon has to be placed at 740*290 and the icon has to be 32*32, if you have to translate that to a 1280*1024 screen then you have to multiply the placement by 1.25 for the horizontal placement and 1.3333+ for the vertical placement, then you have to increase the icon size to a more appropriate size (maybe 40*40) and select a larger icon. This takes processing cycles, and would slow the game down, especially when you get to the extreme capabilities of the game (gigantic galaxy, abundant planets, lots of ships and star bases, etc.).

Don't forget, The people at Stardock (I am not one of them) are trying to reach the largest market they can. The minimum requirements are important and every processing cycle saved helps reach the lower powered PCs.

~SDC~

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by Ambassador Lucky Jack - 3/23/2003 2:04:25 PM

When you have to factor in the screen resolution an additional calculation has to be made to determine just where an icon has to be placed. If on a 1024*768 screen an icon has to be placed at 740*290 and the icon has to be 32*32, if you have to translate that to a 1280*1024 screen then you have to multiply the placement by 1.25 for the horizontal placement and 1.3333+ for the vertical placement, then you have to increase the icon size to a more appropriate size (maybe 40*40) and select a larger icon.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

this is where i am a little confused. why does it have to be translated or multiplied from 1024? what i mean is somewhere in the code or in a file there is a list of all the positions for all the icons, windows, and other stuff, right? then if you want to get a new resoultion you said they have to multiply all those by 1.25 and 1.3333. but why do the 1024 positions have to be multiplied? why can't the higher resolutions be pre-computed or written down somewhere in the code or in a file?

The Obliterator probably explained it when he said it wasn't rendered but i didn't quite understand that...
-russellmz, screen resolution n00b

I think graphics are one of the major downfalls of the strategy genre. The developers of these games tend to target the widest audience possible because they think their potential market relative to the total number of gamers is very small. And to some extent, that is true -- a lot of gamers want instant gratification these days. But I think strategy game developers unintentionally keep their potential market small. By lowering their technical specs to archaic standards, they run a large risk of turning off gamers who might otherwise get interested in the genre.

There is a feeling in the space strategy community especially that graphics are not really important, or that you must made a choice between gameplay or graphics. I think the fact that we're still seeing simplistic sprite graphics on a game released in 2003 is disappointing. There are so many middleware 3D engine solutions that could have been used without requiring the dev team to code something from scratch. For those that treat space strategy games like chess, I suppose the graphics merely serve as representation. But for the rest of us who care about RP (and I think Stardock is in this camp, or they wouldn't have worked to make the backstory and event system so robust), graphics indeed provide a way to immerse yourself in the situation. And let's be honest...it's hard to go from playing the graphical splendour of Unreal Tournament 2003 and then look at GalCiv. It's like a time warp. It's a lot harder to deal with sprite graphics, now that the bar has been raised so far, than it was 10 years ago when sprites were the norm. Even Harpoon 4, a series which has never been big on graphics, is using a 3D engine now to represent units.

All this is not to say that I won't enjoy GalCiv. If I decide to purchase and play it, I'll hopefully enjoy it a lot. But that doesn't mean I approve of the graphical choices they made, or moreover the choices of the space strategy genre in general because I believe these choices have been a factor in keeping the genre from growing.

What if you saved a game and changed the system display properties via the system console settings to a new resolution? The game would have to take this into account if it was going to support this change. Otherwise, making your resolution smaller would make the saved game unloadable.

A caveate here: I don't know the details of the game. I do know that Stardock visited this question very early in development (I saw a post where they said so). Whether they found that they would have to make the calculations I mentioned above, or they found that the ship movement calcuations would have been more complex, or some other problem entirely, the problem prompted them to settle on the 1024*768 size.

~SDC~

Sebadoh, you make some valid points, and your opinion that a sprite based game in '03 is disappointing is one I won't argue with, but one I do disagree with. For example I felt much more 'immersed' in Baldurs Gate II then Neverwinter Nights in part because of the sprite based graphics. My experience has been that with 2D the graphics can be artistic or even photo-realisitic, while in 3D it always looks like to me like textures painted on polygons. I love 3D for action games obviously, but for slower paced games like TBS, or even RPG, I find well done 2D graphics more attractive. But that's just my opinion.

~SDC~

It would be nice to have support to resolutions up to 1280x1024 in the future, I thought this was the original plan too.

'this is where i am a little confused. why does it have to be translated or multiplied from 1024? what i mean is somewhere in the code or in a file there is a list of all the positions for all the icons, windows, and other stuff, right? then if you want to get a new resoultion you said they have to multiply all those by 1.25 and 1.3333. but why do the 1024 positions have to be multiplied? why can't the higher resolutions be pre-computed or written down somewhere in the code or in a file?'

It's not the placemnent that's the problem, it's resizing the graphics when they're displayed. Either they would have to pre-render the graphics in every resolution they're going to support, which would require several times the 350MB already used by multimedia, or they would have to be resized and/or rendered on-the-fly, which would require compute-time resources.

Most games go the later route and let the AI and other game features suffer so the game will still have acceptable response time, which tends to leave single player gaming in a bad position because it's either too easy or the AI has to cheat to compete, making strategy literally impossible.

~SDC~

Mr.Lucky,

Perhaps you haven't seen some of the more recent 3D games; I think you'll find that the realism level of polygonal objects has vastly increased over the past couple years.

Case in point: Hegemonia, a recent space RTS, has spaceship units that look as good as the cutscenes in GalCiv, even though it does not slow down on a GeForce2. Check out their screenshot gallery:

hmm, my apologies, the link didn't show up. I'm not sure how to do links with this forum software. Let's try it again: www.hegemonia.info

FPS and TB games are two extremely different genres. You MUST have state of the art graphics for FS games because, with few exceptions, without them you have nothing.(Unreal 3 anyone?) They are nearly mindless shooters. Great graphic are needed for RTS as well because that genre is as stale as ten day old bread in a packages that wasnt closed properly. Sure, it would be nice to have 3 d graphics in GalCiv, but I play CIV2 even now and I couldnt care less about the graphics. Its the gameplay (how cliche but true.)I can be IMMERSED by play just as easily if not more so than by a flashy graphics. Heck animated diplomats would be nice too, but after awhile, you've seen the head twitch or the moving arms so much you dont even notice. You looking at the texy...what is he SAYING...thats the important thing.
At the end of the day, as long as the gameplay is riveting, who cares about pushing your latest 3d card. I've bought and brought back so many "eye popping graphics" games because after you finish cooing and gurgling over the eye candy, you realize that the gameplay is a lame as a one legged duck with its wings clipped.

thanks for the explanation, Arturus Magi! did not think about the other stuff besides the ui.

wampyre,

The choice between good graphics and good gameplay is not a binary one. I could just as easily say to you that flashy sprite graphics are not necessary and text representations are just fine. In other words, at some point a genre has to get up to current standards, and the standard now is 3D graphics. The space strategy genre has gotten small enough as it is; there's no reason to risk turning off a lot of potential gamers (except for the small number of hardcore fans) and subsequently reduce the economic viability of the space strategy genre so much that only small game developers will risk making a 4x game. Which leads to smaller and smaller budgets for these games, which leads to an even smaller focus on graphics, which turns off even more of the non-hardcore gamers...it's a downward spiral that I would rather see avoided for the longterm health of this genre.

Unless Galciv has some inherently three-dimensional data to present, or some other elements that would significantly benefit from that sort of thing, there's no reason it should go 3-D. Some types of games benefit from that sort of thing -- the "Combat Mission" games use it well, for instance, because terrain and line-of-sight *really* matters there -- and some don't need it at all. Imagine, for instance, "King of Dragon Pass" with a 3-D rendering engine for, oh, viewing your tula. Unless they lowered the granularity of decisions so that you had to decide things like where your sheep grazed, it wouldn't add anything except more burden on the programmers and a gee-whiz factor that'd fade rather rapidly. GalCiv looks to be the same way. How much time did people spend on overhead views of their cities in Civ II?

I ammend my above post with "in my opinion." You have yours and I respect that. I stand by mine.
Cheers.

sebadoah,
I can't agree with your assertion that the tbs genre is behind other genres and has to get up to current standards. It's akin to saying that since we've invented photography we don't need people to paint landscapes using oil on canvas. Like photography vs. painting the different gaming genres have similar but also vastly different goals. Action 'simulators' like Freelancer(boo!) or Splinter Cell(yay!) depend heavily on graphics, they really couldn't exist without them. Having state-of-the-art graphics can improve the gameplay immensely. RPG's that 'simulate' a character's, or party of character's, adventures need no graphics at all. Graphics can aid 'immersion' of course, good ones considerably. Empire-level TBS games simulate, in my opinion, an executive in his command center or war room. 'Go here, go there' 'build this, build that', those are the decisions being made. A 2d maps with units to 'push' around as well as a series of lists and queues to control various variables is state-of-the-art. I suppose you could add 3d 'film' of the battles that occur as a sort of after action report, but there's not much gameplay value-add in my opinion. As for turning off gamers, I don't see it, more people like action games then strategic games, it's just that simple. And trying to make a TBS game action gamer friendly only ticks off two groups of gamers instead of making one happy.
But then again, what do I know? :notsure:

well, after playing too much of Civilization II and DOOM at an old 486-40mhz (long time ago ) , now I really hate all this kind of "graphic-abuse" games.

What the hell! Why Galatic Civilization need all that screen resolution ? Ok! It could be best at a big video screen, but if I want to play at other? What? I can not change? Why?

Oh! This is really a poor programmer team! With 700 mb at Hard Disk a lot more could be done... perhaps the graphics and IA multithreading could allow the user take control over the computer (slow mouse ) and play a lot more (:(

About a good space 3d game look for "HomeWorld".

I'm waiting updates... or next year I will buy a super class HAL computer 2001 mhz!!!

Or use same graphics elements but just increase map area shown. The Operational Art of War did exactly this.

Think about playing game in windowed mode and when resizing window main map area would just get bigger/smaller. No need to do extra graphics etc.


~SDC~

I read somewhere that the ships are (pre?)rendered in 3d but the devs made a bad choice in making the viewpoint 100% top-down which killed the effect.

That's true. Brad wrote that in the post mortem.

~SDC~

an update or expansion or something should probably let
the game be seen at 640x480 resolutions up to 1280xwhatever heh...but that's just if they want to...

No need demanding things of them if they can't change
the way it is

doug