Why are shells and bullets so detailed?

OK so I've been capturing some screens recently using Dxtory and I have to say I've been pleasantly surprised by some of the things that I actually miss when in game. Fleeting moments, frames that you never really see or take much notice of, you can really appreciate how good this game looks at times.

And then I came across this screenshot below and I got a little annoyed. That tank shell looks pretty amazing. You can see the NS logo on there, the detail of the whole thing is bang on. Therein lies my problem.




In all seriousness, how many tank shells do you actually see when playing? How many have you ever seen up close like that? It is going to be rare, given the speed at which they move. So why has so much effort been put into making them so detailed in game? It looks pretty I'm sure, but how much effort has gone into the rendering of this object? How much effort has gone into the rendering of all the tank shells in this screenshot, and all the bullets?

Why is it that what could potentially be hundreds or thousands of these objects on screen be rendered so well and look so good, when some textures on vehicles and facilities - the objects people see most of the time which tend to be far fewer in number - look so bad?

I'm no rendering guru so I can't possibly comment with any knowledge on impact to performance. I can speculate though for now, and I'd wager it will have some impact, however negligible. Surely that amount of objects with that level of detail can't be good?

In this age and time it is actually a surprise for me that people complain about details.
But yeah, do we have any programmers here that can answer?

Most models have LODs (level of detail). As you get closer to the model the game switches to more and more detailed LODs while further away it uses a simplified version of the model. Maybe shells only use the 'good' model when they're really close and use a simplified one the rest of the time.

You can see this in action really well on the Halberd turret. Far away it looks like it has a pointy end, when you get closer it'll suddenly pop into its more detailed shape.

I understand that, but imagine all the bullets and shells that are fired 'close' to you in a typical 96+ firefight. That is a lot of 'good' models being rendered when there really is no need.

Once upon a time, you used to see shells or rockets floating in space all over the place and I marveled at the detail.

I often wondered how much computing power could be gained by turning the detail off completely as NO ONE sees this during game-play.

Especially since they changed the detail level on vehicles, yet stuff you don't see have detail that's pointless.

When i first saw this i thought "This must be shooped" But wow, the detail on that thing is incredible lol

With the amount of memory leaks in this game, i believe small items such as tank shells should be addressed. As OP has said there are millions of these things flying around in a large battle. LOD is probably another area that has memory leaks and should be addressed

I wouldn't normally care, but given the performance of this game, every little helps.

I'd like to see what a Dalton round looks like.
Vanu Sovereignty rockets would probably look like a screaming blue head flying through the air

I really don't see why you're complaining. I mean, all this does is give the game a bit more detail, and make it look cooler.

Even though it does have high detail... I ask you this.. How much of that detail do you really think is rendered at a given point?

did you know that your CoS (cone of sight) is all that is ever rendered? if you don't believe me, go find a nice little corner when your having some trouble with frame rate and walk slowly around it... If done collector you may notice something "pop" into existence.

that said, this shell is only "rendered" for less than one second, and that detail is fractioned even further as there is a literal limit on how close the object must be to transfer to the above produced model. That shell will also only render when it is capable of doing so... if your computer is boged down, only 'lesser" models will be rendered... I know this one all to well... some people have pixeled camo on my comp in larger fights...

But with all that in mind. I'm glad that they put that much detail in the construction of this game ( as this is something that has been there from the get go) and would love to see such detail in more of it.

Looks more like a missile than a tank shell. :/

Dang, that's pretty. They should scatter some of those in arsenal related bases so we can see them more often lol.

Blimey quite surprised at the detail - I have noticed shells in-game for fleeting moments but honestly had no idea they were quite so well rendered.

Ultimately, as the shell(s) are only drawn locally on your PC, they don't take any more server-side processing to look so pretty. They can effect YOUR PC performance though so if you're chugging along, you might want to turn down the graphical detail settings.

Wonder what they look like on a lower setting ?

You can also see the missiles when using an AV Turret from behind - i've noticed a cross shape which I presume to be a tail-fin but very hard to register exactly what they look like as they don't stay still for very long !

Now that you mention it, why are these assets whizzing around in the air eating my RAM/video performance instead of being located in a base to give it some sort of theme???

The only thing i can think of is for slow motion playback of gameplay, yes this would look cool but i don't believe we need these active at all times. I'm not a game dev but I am going off of what i know. And i know that projectiles such as these take graphical resources

The polycount of a tank shell is so far below anything else that you would need to render thousands before they'd even approach the performance impact of a single player model.
I run with shadows disabled so I don't know if they cast shadows, but it seems unlikely.

I doubt that regular bullets have models, but you could probably find out by getting a pistol, silencing it, and having someone do a high-speed recording from your side.

OP now i am curious. Would you be able to get screenshots of other weapon projectiles? Better yet pull up the projectile file and just render an image for it? I am super curious to see how the others look now

Computers haven't gotten a crapton more powerful over the past ~15 years, not like they did in the time before that. The large part of why games continued to go through leaps and bounds graphically while the hardware did not is due to better standardized practice in coding and a crapton of work by mathemagicians to work magic in the process of how the hardware is used. One of the biggest leaps, which was used sporadically in the 90s and became the standard before 2000 was the concept of instantiated content - the culling of unique objects, and progressively better handling of common objects by rendering systems. Even before that was the idea of dynamic level of detail, that you dont need to have details that the user will not notice, and all the background and hardware systems built to support this on the processing level.

With a cursory understanding of just those two very basic concepts you can start to see what's going on.... the cost of rendering hundreds of those shells at full detail (which they would not, ever, due to the detail levels), is comparable to the cost of making that grass in front of you animate.

As has been said countless times by the devs, the cost of PS2 computationally has extremely little to do with "how pretty it looks" but is a computational cost of all the crap that's going on. How pretty you make these things or not is fairly negligible relative to the fact that it's happening.

Looks sweet though!

(I think this is an M710 tank round, according to google search. Most other rounds are similar.)

So given your example of the shell only being rendered for less than a second, lets say one quarter of a second. If you are running at 60 frames per second that very detailed shell has to be re-rendered 15 times.
Given the number of players who struggle to play this game, would it not make sense to simplify the model and texture to improve the performance?
On the other side of the discussion, has anyone managed to capture a similar scene on low graphics settings to see how this would appear?

So given your example of the shell only being rendered for less than a second, lets say one quarter of a second. If you are running at 60 frames per second that very detailed shell has to be re-rendered 15 times.
Given the number of players who struggle to play this game, would it not make sense to simplify the model and texture to improve the performance?
On the other side of the discussion, has anyone managed to capture a similar scene on low graphics settings to see how this would appear?