Thread: supreme commander

Recently I saw some screenshots and reviews of supreme commander on gamespot, I must say the graphics are a real eye candy and most of the reviews of the game are good. As a fan of Warcraft 3 I am wondering if I would enjoy this game. To people who have played both the Warcraft 3 and supreme commander, I would appreciate if you could tell me some of the similarities.

It's nothing like Warcraft 3.

The reason why it looks so good is because of normal mapping, which is an application of a high poly mesh over a low poly mesh and combining both, keeping the details of the high poly mesh with the number of polygons of the low poly one. Extensive normal mapping can also be seen in Gears of War (or just about any Unreal Engine 3 game).
This Berserker is made up of far less polygons that it appears to be:

The Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 are capable of such an amount of normal mapping, but the Wii cannot and this is why the Unreal Engine 3 won't see itself on the Wii anytime soon.

supreme commander is a very slow paced game.
I mean you have to build your economie for like 15 mins and building armys take for ever.If you want a game like warcraft,your looking at the wrong game,supreme commander is all about huge armys and big economies and warcraft is about micromanagement.

Originally Posted by Jyuu

It's nothing like Warcraft 3.

The reason why it looks so good is because of normal mapping, which is an application of a high poly mesh over a low poly mesh and combining both, keeping the details of the high poly mesh with the number of polygons of the low poly one. Extensive normal mapping can also be seen in Gears of War (or just about any Unreal Engine 3 game).
This Berserker is made up of far less polygons that it appears to be:

The Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 are capable of such an amount of normal mapping, but the Wii cannot and this is why the Unreal Engine 3 won't see itself on the Wii anytime soon.

There is no higher poly mesh, normal mapping is actually similar to bump mapping (but with much greater quality and benefits (like distance indexed detail scaling)).

Originally Posted by 98abaile

There is no higher poly mesh, normal mapping is actually similar to bump mapping (but with much greater quality and benefits (like distance indexed detail scaling)).

Actually no. Read the whitepapers on some of the engines out there. The way normal mapping is implemented now (as opposed to the traditional normal mapping in games like Far Cry), the higher poly mesh is used to get the details and the lower poly mesh is used as the base mesh.

Edit:
A better explanation is that traditional bump mapping is just an extrapolation of bump mapping but now they use a higher poly mesh to get the details which are then added to the lower poly mesh.

Originally Posted by Jyuu

Actually no. Read the whitepapers on some of the engines out there. The way normal mapping is implemented now (as opposed to the traditional normal mapping in games like Far Cry), the higher poly mesh is used to get the details and the lower poly mesh is used as the base mesh.

Yeah, the high poly mesh is used to get the details for the normal map which is then applied to a low poly mesh. Maps are applied much like a texture, not a mesh.
What you said was that a high poly mesh is applied to a low poly mesh.

EDIT: I read your edit, but thats not what you said in your first post. K?

Well it depends on the engine. The Unreal Engine, Cry Engine 2 and the Offset Engine (off the top of my head) can actually use the higher poly mesh itself and it is processed by the compiler.

I assume that by that you mean the compiler takes details from the HPM and creates a map from that. If so then the HPM itself is still not actually applied to the LPM, just the map created from it.

So everything is large scale huh? Well thats a nice change, I always felt that I can't really execute good strategic unit movement in warcraft due to the small number of units and the number of units that can be selected. Ok so maybe I am not that good a player but more units equals more carnage. I love carnage.

I played a four-player game the other day and I found myself splitting my main display in halves and using that together with my secondary display to effectively manage all the units.