Wolfenstein: The New World Order

The lack of any anti-aliasing options is just unacceptable…WHAT THE HELL!?I am using “r_multisamples 8” command through console and it looks slightly better… fucking Id tech 5…

One thing I have a minor complaint about this game engine, and that is the low-res textures.
I mean why can’t Id tech 5 handled the high-res textures anyway? I just don’t understand, But tbh, I’ve never cared for the low-res textures anyway just the gameplay that matters imo, but still the low-res textures in 2014 is unacceptable.

You could try “r_multisamples 16”, be prepared for a potentially massive performance hit though. I think the “additional quality settings” option might affect the AA level, mine was set to 8x before I did anything with the console or config file.

Setting it to 0 seems to affect some materials in odd ways, eg. the dirt on the hands almost disappears and they get a weird waxy appearance. Set to 2 or higher to avoid this.

I’m currently trying to work out what’s causing this weird effect. It doesn’t happen during cutscenes, and only seems to affect certain characters

The engine itself could probably handle higher resolution textures, but the storage and VRAM requirements would be even higher than they already are…

If the textures were double the res, the game would be like over 100gb in size.

The megatextures tech is really neat but it needs to wait a few more years until it’s really feasible to do it with high res textures and no pop-in.

The “advanced video options” section is abysmall:
“VT Cache size”
“VT Compress”
“Max PPF”
“Scren space reflections”
“Haze Flare”
WAT!?

“VT Cache size” - (Virtual?) Texture cache: higher settings = less pop-in (after textures have loaded in at least once) but more RAM / VRAM usage
“VT Compress” - Texture compression: enabled = less RAM / VRAM usage but more GPU / CPU load
“Max PPF” - Texture Pages Per Frame: higher settings improve texture streaming but increase CPU load
“Screen space reflections” - reflections on floors/walls/shiny objects: enabled / higher settings increase GPU load and probably VRAM usage. Seems pretty intensive.
“Haze Flare” - hazy… flares… EDIT: it’s an effect similar to lens flares, if there’s something bright at the edge of the screen you get a fuzzy “reflection” of it on the other side of the screen like this.

(some assumptions / guesses there)


Apparently the game disables the “Ultra” preset if your graphics card has less than 2GB VRAM (scroll down to “Radeon R9 280X vs. GeForce GTX 770” section), and has performance issues if you try to force “Ultra” quality settings on a VRAM-limited system by using “Custom” options.

(good thing I went for the 4GB version of my card)

Whatever happened to the good old options like:
Anti-aliasing - type/level
Antisotropic filtering -type/level
Textures detail - level
Object detail - level
Shadow detail -level
Ambient occlusion - type/level and so on
…id tech 5 needs to die in flames…poor Evil Within…but I guess it didn’t look that great in the first place…

Well, some / most of those are in there, just rolled into other settings. Not exactly ideal.

There’s heaps of variables for all sorts of graphical options in the console (open console, type “r_” or “vt_” and press tab, use page up/down to scroll)… sadly almost all of them are locked/disabled.

The texture are fugly, but I’m surprised by how much better they are than the ones in Rage. Also, is it just me or do the objects with megatextures generally seem to lack depth? Are they not compatible with normal maps? Is it some other issue? Rage had the same problem: even if they had more fidelity, they look flat.

Most ighting is baked into the textures, if there are any normal maps there’s very few (or no) dynamic lights to illuminate them. There are specular maps though.

Wolfenstein: TNO doesn’t look as static as RAGE does from what I’ve seen so far, thankfully.


EDIT: this is what Haze Flares does:

The AA method doesn’t seem to like those stairs, looks like there’s some sort of sharpening being applied which is conflicting with it

People don’t seem to understand that games these days render differently than games in the past. That doesn’t excuse poor video options but the engine is built around adjusting to keep 60 fps which is why Rage and (presumably) this game lack a variety of video options. You can still edit a lot of things in the console. I’d be glad that the game has msaa at all given that deferred rendering pretty much killed it. AF seems to be limited by what we can do with megatextures right now. I mean look at Crysis, which didn’t support it either when POM was on. I think Rage supported at least 4x. Experimentation is a good thing.

I haven’t seen guys cut in half, but the shotgun can blow chunks out of their torso.

Also explosives liquify enemies kinda like a direct explosive in fear, though with really nice blood splatter.

When you do it on your own expense.

Anyways,I myself was generalizing a lot…so I apologize for that.Most PC games will still have those options that I named …and I for one am thankful for that.

This is a huge misunderstanding of the engine on your part. The textures aren’t low res at all. In fact, the entire point of the engine is to use virtual texturing, aka megatextures, aka the highest concievable resolution textures ever used in real time. The thing is, they are used for the entire/ huge chunks of the environment. Instead of a wall with a single repeating wall texture and a floor with its own repeating floor texture or a mug with its own mug texture, it’s all one big chunk containing every wall and every floor and every ceiling and every mug and every computer and every desk in that room.

Does the game actually have some sort of procedural gibbing system, like L4D2?

No idea

no
It’s got a single permutation for any one dismembered limb, like l4d1.

Still doesn’t change how satisfying it is tho

It does not. It’s fucking great. I think it’s the sounds that do it.

Not enough games with dismemberment have a “blow chunk out of torso” permutation.

Finished first 4 chapters and impressions so far:
Gameplay:Mostly enjoyable,not really digging the stealth sections and some of the guns sound really weak but as soon as I got my hands on two shotguns…oh my.
Story:The whole inner monologue thing was interesting at first but got old pretty fast.
Graphics:Apart from lack of AA and the occasional texture pop-in the game looks pretty solid.
Awesome:dual wielding shotguns
Awful:braindead enemy AI(even on the highest difficulty)
Known bugs:weird graphical artifacts,voice acting audio out of sync during cutscenes…

Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.