ArenaNet Licenses Umbra for Guild Wars

Yes because as we all know your system is going to be perfectly fine and totally not a low end system by 2010.

Clearly.

UT3 didn't require a dual core, just a relatively beefy single core. Also, I just got a system that could max out UT3 for under $350, and by the time GW2 is out that price will probably drop to the $200-$250 range. If you can be satisfied with just a medium level of graphics you can probably do under $250 right now.

I highly doubt GW2 will require a dual core though, Anet knows they need to get system requirements down somehow. MMO's aren't designed to be graphically intensive games, but games accessible to a majority of people. Just because it uses the same engine at UT3 doesn't mean same requirements.

Actually I hope they DO add optimization to use multi core processors...

This is something lacking in software at the moment, we need multi core support or having them is a waste of time

I'm sure they will take advantage of at least dual core processors, and if they are using UT3 its built into the engine. That doesn't mean GW2 will require dual cores, it will just have lower performance on single cores. Chances are good it won't support more then 2 cores though, every step beyond single core gets increasingly difficult to program, difficult to support, difficult to debug, has more overhead and provides less of a performance increase. AFAIK even crysis didn't support more then 2 cores.

QFT.

12chars.

This has been discussed earlier (in April, when the licens of the UT3 engine was announced), and it's was said then that the UT3 engine was not licensed for GW2, but for other NCSoft games. Last I heard GW2 would use a proprietary engine.

Umbra is a plug-in library of functions to avoid drawing hidden surfaces, thereby speeding up the rendering of the graphics. It's not tied to any particular engine, although it comes "pre-adapted" to integrate with the UT3 engine. Umbra is used in e.g. Star Wars Galaxies (proprietary), Age of Conan (Dreamworld engine), Project Entropia (Crytek engine), and Everquest 2 (proprietary).
That Umbra will be used in GW2 does not prove that GW2 will use the UT3 engine, or say much of anything about GW2 development status.

From the interviews, they are using an upgraded version of the current GW engine

It better be 3D... which would be pretty much a complete overhaul of the GW engine as far as I can tell?

Since the original thread got locked...

I believe that the game engine itself is now essentially complete. I reckon it looks impressive but ArenaNet are having major problems with its performance currently. They've probably been testing and tweaking the new engine for a month or two now, with only slight improvements in most cases. So, a few days ago, they finally decided to go ahead with licensing Umbra to boost performance dramatically. Over the next few weeks they'll be getting Umbra to work with the new engine.

I also think this means progress has been made on some game maps/areas. After all, why license performance-boosting technology without testing any maps with the current engine and seeing how they perform? There would be little point buying this technology beforehand, only to find that the engine works great without occlusion culling. As I say, progress has probably made on some maps - maybe one or two have been made so far, and this was where the performance problems came in. As there is still a very long way to go in terms of maps, this will take until about next Autumn to be completed.

The game engine's completion might also mean the server-side technology is progressing well. Switches of servers might be a reason for the current lag in GW1, as the newest and fastest servers are being prepared, tweaked and tested for GW2.

In terms of lore, the main story is almost certainly complete now. After all, the team knew what they wanted to do by the beginning of GW:EN's development, which began around the beginning of 2007 or earlier. The biggest task now is writing lore for the GW2 universe - side quests, characters etc. This is probably being done alongside the GW2 novels to save time, but will still take at least until next summer.

Some essential parts of the game mechanics are now by and large in place, confirming the main game features mentioned when GW2 was first announced. This part probably requires the most work out of all. I suspect the professions/races have been decided now, with the first skills being fleshed out in terms of their functions. Again, this is only the start of the skill mechanics, and the team are nowhere near balancing them. I bet this won't happen until the first betas next year.

Overall, based on my current (founded and unfounded speculation), I reckon more artwork will be revealed some time during the winter. Next, the first screenshots will be here next spring with more game information, followed by a slow but steady trickle of news/information/media over the summer into late autumn '09. Then, around November/December, the betas will begin, where players will begin to balance the game's skills through feedback, as well as try out a few quests, even missions. This will follow through into early 2010, with the last betas in March or so. Then the final game will be finished by late May, with the release in summer 2010. This is what the team meant by "closer to the release" in terms of betas.

Why do I think this? Well, ArenaNet have shown they can produce entire chapters incredibly quickly, and I don't think GW2 will take much longer than a year and a half more of development.

huh?

Guild Wars is 3D

or do you mean will it have a Z-axis allowing you to jump, fly, etc? Cos thats been confirmed and really not that much of a change to the engine

Yes it is. Going from 2.5D (the current state of GW1, where our characters simply travel along several planar structures organised into interconnected layers) to 3D can in the worst case scenario (very bad programming, which I do not believe Anet does at all) make your engine unusable/slow. The Z-axis is not like an X or Y axis, obviously because of gravity, and I guess getting the right balance between freedom and consistence of movement (you do not want an Aion game, or event the simple "Fly" button of Second Life) is key to make your graphical engine do just what it should do, and not make your GW experience like flying in a Descent game (I absolutely love the classic franchise, but I've seen serious gamers completely lost by the lack of 3D orientation).

On second thought, I think we shouldn't read too much into what this means for GW2's development. Let's take it at face value: they're progressing well and are somewhat on track with their (changing) schedule. I'm of the (subjective) opinion that we'll have more about GW2 by the beginning of 2009, even if it's just a bit of lore, or simply dev news. This thread clearly shows why GW2 is so much "anticipated"! (anticipation is also about getting ahead of the info and second-guessing, which makes us somewhat miserable in our own theories, instead of enjoying whatever MMO we're playing and wait for GW2 patiently ;P )

P.S.: an oldie I came across when browsing for more info, but it's still good, in case you haven't read it already: http://www.monashreport.com/2007/06/...rs-game-notes/

EDIT: about the 3D engine stuff, look at this very nice Prince of Persia gameplay video:
http://www.gamershell.com/download_35162.shtml
there's such a nice&fluid 3d experience (in addition to the awesome cartoony graphic style), but at the same time you can imagine how it's not really 3D, if you can't fly...

The Guild Wars engine is 3D actually, it does support the Z-axis (arrows do more damage if you're higher up, less damage if you're lower, projectiles can miss if they hit walls from above or below, and the Z-axis is used for Camera Collusion in the engine.) but it is only used for limited things - a full implementation of the Z-axis that the characters could interact in would have prolonged the release of the game by a fair amount, especially since ArenaNet had to rework all the graphics from the original cartoony style they were using in 2003/2004 as is on top of a bunch of other stuff.

No. As Darknecrid says, GW1 is actually true 3D. You're confusing the melee combat mechanics, which for reasons of simplicity do not take Z-axis into account, with the gameworld.
You can easily see that GW1 is true 3D, because you can walk both over and under a bridge. That is not possible in 2.5D games like Doom or Neverwinter Nights.

The Guild Wars engine supports a lot of features (not just jumping and flying, but also e.g. dynamic lighting) which are not currently implemented, or implemented in a very limited way, in order to reduce computational load.

I actually thought in my previous post about the fact that GW1 is more than 2.5D, I wanted to say "2.75D" but it's just a play on names, or an academic question (i.e. choosing the "right" words). What's important is to distinguish between the data structure representing the world (that is not 3D IMHO) and the rendering (which is 3D). Wiki has more details on 2.5D and the related HW technique of Z-buffering. The fact that layers seem interconnected in GW1 suggest the idea of 2.75D (you have 2D structures between the 2D planes, instead of just stacking 2D planes and having stairs between them).

I'm not convinced there's a Z-axis, instead of a map of "interconnected layers", meaning that the movement of the characters is done in a plane, which is mapped to the map, which is itself rendered to give the illusion of 3D.

2.5D stricly speaking is a stack of 2D planes, where you do have a Z-axis but it's not used fluidly, as in early "3D games" à la Doom, where you already had things like stairs and jumping. It means that you just have layers leading to other layers (that's the data point of view), and you're apparently exploring the Z-axis, but you're in fact just walking from one 2D plane to another 2D plane through some kind of structure (bridge, twisting of one plane/slope, stair, etc.). And you can thus make game mechanics (arrow hitting harder) depend on the stacking height (interesting question: does the arrow hitting harder effect changes depending on where you are on the stairs? If so, then I'm wrong!).

Having a full Z-axis requires being able to move in the 3 directions at once, which is why I think there's not really one in GW1, but the illusion of verticality (a quite good one IMHO, but it fails when you can melee-fight mobs that are above or beneath you, as if you were in the same plane of data, but it's rendered at different stacking order). And of course, real 3D is much more computationally costly, as you move from quadratic movements to cubic

I'm not sure if I'm clear, and it's my opinion anyway, I may be wrong as it's only based on my interpretation of gameplay and the limited information we have.

The /jump emote is not much of a Z-axis proof IMHO, it's more the illusion of verticality I was talking about (early games such as Doom do it, it's just a special feature to implement, not part of the core engine properties of 2.5D, core engine just managing the data structure, while the renderer can then distort and manipulate the 2.5D data structure so as to give you the impression that you're really moving inside the whole of the 3D space you can "imagine").

Where is there flying in GW1? (the only thing I can remember is Kunnavang's movement or the crows in GW:EN, but then why is it so seldomly used? I mean, is it not just a case of specially designed features, instead of the proof that there's a Z-axis)

Ok, if it wasn't a true 3D engine you couldn't have bridges and the like and be able to walk under them aswell as walk over surely...

That may not be true, my "theory" (and you have to take it as a light theory, given that we have to infer from gameplay) is that walking under a bridge is simply being in a plane with lower stacking order that the "bridging plane", in terms of the data structure that the GW1 core engine manages. Then this is rendered as walking "under" a bridge. You have to differentiate the two aspects of managing data, and rendering this data on the screen. (if the two were the same, we wouldn't have the bugs of melee-fighting mobs under the bridge)

But you can't for example jump from the plane at the bottom of the bridge to somewhere in the middle of the bridge (or even to the plane at the top of the bridge). It seems to me that this is exactly what we'll be able to do in GW2, climbing stuff for example, by exploring the Z-axis, rather than simply having 3D information rendered on our screen.

EDIT:
P.S.: just in case someone mentions it, shadows do not prove 3D, as they can easily be created from the contours/profile of the character, as it is rendered.

P.S.2: what I'm talking about is exactly like the 360degrees picture you can take (see Google's Streetview), which are 2D rendered in such a way that it looks very close to 3D. The illusion of 3D.

Who cares? All that matters is the reqs of GW2 will be a large factor in its success just as it was for GW1. Lets hope Anet doesn't screw that up.

I won't disagree about the bugs and pathing issues, but the fact the game clearly has different levels and you can walk over them and under them proves a level of 3D

There's apparently a 2.75D technique already, used for "emulating" depth with pictures:
http://outsideinthemovie.com/blog/?p=52
You can here clearly see the difference between the data (a series of 2D pictures, Z-axis information is scattered among them) to the rendering (you invent a technique to show the depth in the pictures by a "joining of the pictures" as the guy says, it's not 3D really, as the first CGI model in the video, but it looks like it).

Ok, enough off-topic from me now.

Ok,but it still has to be full 3D to have multiple people on the map going in different directions and some going over, whilst some go under a bridge for instance