Its quite clear enough. If I can see it very clearly, there is no doubt progamers can see it clear as it can be in a single glimpse. And there won't be much 'visual' changes in the future for SC2. The engine is If anything, the most they are working on is the smooth unit feel SC had.

SC2 is pretty clear even on a youtube video for me. Even though my eyesight is plagued with artifacts and hallucinations.

I wish SC2 was flashier, myself. There needs to be more explosions, more glowy stuff. They've cut back way too much on the effects.

^Its funny you say that. This screenshot was taken from a high resolution (not HD) video feed from Blizzcon of a ZvP game. Tell me how many zerglings you see:



That's normally better quality video than you would find of SC games on youtube, I know this because when SC was being streamed on live feed I could clearly read unit names and on the average youtube sc video they're almost indecipherable.

EDIT: Also I just noticed that isn't a full screen capture, if this were full screen it would be even harder to see.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Oct 24 2008, 4:03 am by chuiu.

If you bloat up a shitty screenshot and pick a night map on the darkest possible terrain, anything will be hard to see. I actually saw that video in motion, both on the stream and on youtube, and it was just fine.

So did I, I took the screenshot from the video. I was watching full screen because its easier to see things on full screen. How about this then, count the zerglings OR the zealots:



You can't deny its hard at times to see clumps of units attacking each other or just clumps of units on certain terrain/certain maps. Its messy and the visuals aren't clear enough for the streamed feeds commonly used. (especially when they hold the alt button a second later and health bars fill the screen making it HealthBarCraft instead of Starcraft)

Your example is again, terrible. I can take a screenshot of a Flash game with tons of shit in a big bunch and you still won't see anything, especially with air unit stacking.

Let's take this into perspective. On youtube, the quality of a SC1 game is at best atrocious. Sc1 is 640x480. Sc2 is, at the very least, 1600x1200 in their videos. The resolution is already getting raped for their HD stream, which isn't even HD, it's still a shitty resolution.

Again, you're talking about a bloated low-resolution screenshot destroyed by video compression in comparison to motion video that people would be watching. No one is going to be trying to investigate tiny little screenshots anymore. This isn't 1992. Most of the arguments seem centered around zerg on creep, but that's only because zerg are just various shades of cartoony brown and have next to no player color on them. Judging by what Blizzard's responses have been to streaming and battle.net, the days of squinting to make out zerglings in youtube videos is just about over.

I see at least 9-10 zerglings, 6 zealots, and a Spine Crawler.

1) He's in Korea [norulez]
2) Nazi's weren't all bad, the technology advancements were very important.

Anyways. A game is designed to sell. Hell, sometimes the point is for units to be non-distinguishable. When you look at a colony of ants swarming over an apple, can you count them all?

In sc ground units are easy to see, its air units that clump up and are difficult to see. Your argument is stupid, its like comparing apples and oranges, try to stick to ground units. Resolution has nothing to do with this, the only thing that determines is the level of smoothness, not the shape or color or size. These aren't HD streams (really we wont see HD streams in the mainstream for a while) but they are high resolution and comparable than something you would see over at GomTV.

In motion the game is just as hard to see as in a stand still screenshot which is also dumb because screenshots are supposed to be easier to see than the game in motion - take ANY SC screenshot for example. I purposely picked a part of the video where its on creep because that is a huge problem, units are blending right into it. Its funny you say Zerg are mostly brown, well BROWN and PURPLE don't blend so why is it so fucking hard to tell Zerg from creep? They need to enhance the colors on the Zerg and the new Protoss so they are clear to people not only what player they are but where their units start and end. Also you cannot deny that the mass of Zealots is hard to decipher either. The point is the game is hard to see on video, when zerglings are moving in a group in SC2 they tend to 'bounce' in their movement colliding into other Zerglings or the opposite, thus making it hard to tell one from the other and to someone who actually understands the game and wants to count them to see if he's going to be able to break the protoss cannon wall or bunker full of marines it matters to be able to see them.

Its 8 zealots and 16 Zerglings, by the way.

Now I don't disagree that the game is much MUCH easier to see when you're playing it, but it still has a long way to go in terms of clarity especially if they're trying to make it a good esport.

... Wow. Down goes your entire argument.

ehhhm.... 5 lings? so many pixels... you just can count the brighter pixels, one pixel for each ling.... my eyes Oo

Its exactly because of the resolution. You have no problem seeing Starcraft on a crappy resolution such as YouTube (and GomTV supports much better resolution than flash crap can ever have.) because Starcraft isn't that different from a few pixels. This is like trying hard to watch a crappy Cam movie instead of a DVD one.

...And to make it a good e-sport the game needs an inexplanably high skill pyramid. Just like SC. And most people don't count units when they play. They just take a glimpse at it and have an estimate in their minds. Just putting units into groups while ever pumping more units. SC2 does not fail at this. If anything, they should really be concentrating on perfecting unit smoothness and removing MBS which inexplicably shortens the height of the skill pyramid SC has.

I will completely agree when someone says, "The creep makes zerg hard to see on Twilight." This is true, because the zerg are very dark by nature. While the creep is bright by nature, the game has actual lighting now, so the creep is now very dark on twilight.

Everything else can almost entirely be blamed on the resolution.


Allow me to expand on this.

SC is 640x480. Youtube is what, half that? Okay, SC is a sprite game, and you halve the resolution. We all know what sc looks like, so it's relatively easy to follow except on very dark maps, like ash world, and even then because units have a ton of player color we can easily pick them out. Most of Blizzard's screenshots are more than triple that resolution. If you bring that down to 320x240, what do you get? A big goddamn mess. Throw in video artifacting and you have an even bigger goddamn mess. If the map is dark, of course it's going to be hard to tell what the hell is going on. SC2 is not designed to be played on 640x480, not even 800x600, and most unlikely 1024x768. It's built for high-resolution, and on the monitor, units will be relatively scaled as they were in sc1. But if you downscale it, you get an exponentially more significant distortion and decrease in readability.

This is very basic stuff here.



wat da fuk is dat?



i cant see shit make it brighter omg qqqqqqqqqqq



Oh, it's Supreme Commander! Everything looks fine! Fancy that.

And that's on a far zoomout. SC2 will be even easier to see if you stop squashing it.

Youtube might be a bit bigger but my point still stands.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Oct 25 2008, 8:22 am by IskatuMesk.

Your resolution arguement is still invalid. This is a resolution getting squished into a smaller resolution for streaming video. Not high resolution vs low resolution in normal circumstances. Here's what I'm talking about:

Company of Heroes in 1280x1024 resized down to 300 x 225:



Company of Heroes in 1024x768 resized down to 300 x 225:



Company of Heroes in 800x600 resized down to 300 x 225:



Notice how they all fucking look the same? That's because resolution doesn't matter.

lul.... this actually is for graphics/results instead of SC2

Hey look, it's CoH. It looks like shit without resizing it, but that's beside the point. Have fun telling what's going on when you have a clusterfuck of tanks and infantry touching each other and the C&C-esque AoE spells going off in a 320x225 peephole.

Oh, and you forgot video compression on the level of the sc2 shots you gave us.



Oh yeah, let's get ready for some hardcore micro action in CoH!

Good grief man, I don't even need to say anything.

I guess what I like most about your futile attempts to justify your faulty argument is that you take the lowest quality cam shot of sc2 you can find on the darkest map with zerg on creep and claim the game is completely screwed up and then try to say that resolution has nothing to do with it by posting a virtually uncompressed CoH image with 3 guys and a single building out in broad daylight. The second Sc2 image is also garbage, any game using that kind of compression won't be viewable. I mean, look at my AO Alpha gameplay video in youtube. Half of it is a fucking greeble soup because of camtasia's compression. You can't even pick out the bright red Scavengers against Badlands dirt half of the time, for christ's sake.

Assuming we're using a real video compression and not the crappy garbage you threw up...





If we suddenly up the resolution, even by a bit.




Hey, well, it doesn't look like shit. Even the stupidly dark zerg units look pretty readable. In motion, this would be perfectly fine.

But no way would someone be broadcasting something like sc2 or COH in 320x225. Again, your posting horrible images of zerg units that are clearly too dark on creep that is clearly too dark. I'm agreeing with you that they need to be fixed, but I'm also saying the resolution is far too small to expect the game to be nearly as readable as sc1. Only a braindead mailman would think otherwise.

The fact they're getting squashed at all is what I'm talking about. Is 320x225 1920x1200? No... 320x225 is a tiny fragment of 1920x1200. If you shrink 1920x1200 to 320x225 you get a bunch of pixelated garbage. Suddenly, it's unreadable! Oh noes, the game is broken! What are we going to do!? I know, go back to brood war!

/edit

For extra lulz I lifted some images out of some of Blizzard's videos. I even compressorized them like the above ones for added lulz.



^ Announce video. Fuck, zerglings with wings. Good resolution, though. With this compression, you could stream it on a good server.



^ Half the resolution. Okay, now it's getting messy, but still readable, especially if it was in motion. The new zergling model has more player color on it than these, so they'd be easier to tell apart.

The age of tiny videos is over.

Oh, and out of curiousity, have you seen the videos on the unit pages on the sc2 site? Do you consider those too hard to tell what's going on in?

A lot of people at TL said the game is hard to read, but everyone who has actually played it has said it's fine. I think I'd take the opinion of people who've played it over some random jocky who's just going by really bad videos.

Post has been edited 6 time(s), last time on Oct 25 2008, 2:04 pm by IskatuMesk.

Well since you're making the argument something its not (This argument was originally about SC and SC2 on video streams I don't know why you changed the subject) I'm going to stop arguing. I don't know why you chose to do this, maybe because its obvious you lost?

It doesn't matter in the long run anyway, the game will be changed so that its more clear its just a matter of when.

EDIT: As for the videos on the SC2 site no those are all mostly clear because they are high definition videos. Youtube/Streaming video isn't high definition though.

EDIT 2: Oh yeah I know I've said this a few times already but ONCE AGAIN: I'm not saying its that hard to see while playing the game. I'm saying it can be much clearer while playing the game but its fucking terrible on video streams.

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/38779.html

There's an actual video. Well, an actual video as far as cam goes.

SC1 and sc2 will never look the same.


Yes, I lost. That is totally the reason I just obliterated everything you said.

lol

I have to agree with chuiu.

I'm sorry, but if you're telling me it's easier and quicker to see and fully understand what's taking place here:

As compared to here:

I must have some serious vision problems.

*sigh* I can already see where Iskatu will pick out the weak points in your argument Moose.

A): Yet again, Resolution.
B): It isnt Zoomed to the same amount in both pictures.