All the weapons look the same

Then he lied, you understood it wrong or the engine is a piece of ****.
My bets are on that last one.

Modular weapon design is possible.
Look at Borderlands 1/2, you can have very unique guns out of randomly generated parts, there is no excuse for this.

Given that most of the guns right now are already kitbashes, there isn't an excuse.

The problem comes from performance. If you want to draw 1000 people on screen, it'd be easier if they were all mostly the same model.

Its why there are only 4 basic models for players, with 20-30 camos. As the model is the same its just the texture that's changing.

what game are u playing?

Gun camo lol.

The art department funds are used exclusively to buy clothes and p1mp hats for Mr. T_Ray, after that there's hardly any money left to spend on actual game development.

That's why all weapons look the same, animations are bugged as hell, cosmetic items look like ****, and composite armor on vehicles looks like someone stapled some plastic on your ride.

The only time part of the gun I ever look at it the sights as I line them up with someones head.

First of all, the engine cant render 1000 people on screen, its why render-distance for infantry is so **** and what contributes to explosives-spam (since its a spawned object and "sees" the non-rendered players)
At any given time you might be seeing max 100 people.

Second, it doesn't matter, as other games out right now have greater weapon and model diversity and the same scale than PS2 and do just fine performance wise.
The game being multiplayer changes nothing about rendering beyond the bandwidth that you need to send the information about equipment you are seeing, everything else is done client-side.

If a gun is a kitbash made of 10 parts, the amount of polygons and textures is not changed, it just needs to know what cached parts it needs to render in what configuration.

The limiting factor might be unique models, and storage space (to call up said models).
So instead of having 10 unique guns, how about 10 unique gun -parts-. Nothing changes about performance in that case. In fact, loading something piece-meal could even increase performance.

This is why tile-able textures exist and UV textures are frequently reused (as seen in PS2) because you only cache them once, then you just place them in different ways to make a unique look.

Name one game that has 200+ people in a an area with mmo esque customization? Even Aion couldn't manage it, and would turn off player models.

Right now the engine renders in a substandard way. It renders everything around you in a radius. When you turn they don't flicker as they quickly load textures. Alot of games use a fov render path. Thats why when you quickly turn in most games they have the texture flicker.

In Planetside 2, everyone and everything is rendered around you the player regardless of if it should be or not.

But it being multiple player changes ALOT about whats being rendered. More objects means more work.

What really should be done, is make two clients. One for the standard trash pc for f2p players, and a higher quality client that has the ability to stress current machines. But even then its a stretch.

Vanu weapon models are the worst. The thing that bugs me most about this is when I die and I can't even tell what kind of weapon killed me. And obviously I don't play that faction so I'm not going to tell by the name.

i completely agree, this isn;t the important issue however.

there's lots of bugs and glitches that need to be fixed first.

My question is if SOE knows everything looks the same, why are they charging $7? Aren't they admitting they're sub-par products yet are selling them for a "premium" price?

It's complete BS. Of course they can have weapon variation but it was confirmed that all the weapons use the same parts. They just mix and match the parts. That's why they look similar. There's no reason they can't have more variation in the weapons, hell they even sound the same, but they can make 4 or 5 different hub caps for the Flash and Sunderer and a boatload of other cosmetics.

While I agree with you, it's more because the payment system in this game works a different way. You aren't buying an Upgrade or something special. You're basically just paying so you don't have to grind. Do you know what I mean?

This is one of the reasons why I dont buy em with money, 7$ for a gun that looks nearly identical to 6 other guns.


Might be an issue with the engine, whatever. drop the price then.

Ofcourse we can compare to other games . Specially on model variations .
Guns are important part of game ,you know .They should look different , they should feel different .... whats the point of getting new gun if its exactly same as you currently have(only whit higher fire rate )?

Makes you wonder if the engine really is up to the challenge, all the hype and yet it renders no better than eq2. Objects and people pop in and out there also. All the guns look the same becuase thats all they have. It's not like they just added GUNS, they had years to make a few more models.

The amount of ram to store 2 textures (diffuse&spec, normal) is pretty small. Especially for something that takes up a very significant portion of the screen at all times.

Planetside 2 renders a lot, yes. But I'd wager even a game like Battlefield 3 is going to have a much higher render-batch before culling. PS2 is very lightly detailed.
Past a certain range, cosmetics on players aren't rendered. Getting further away and the models, textures, animation are all simplified. So you may have hundreds in your area, but few are close enough to have detail. Even fewer are in your actual field of view.

Requiring a block of texture is good when things don't need to be detailed, but you can't have the subtle parts on the weapon that make it feel real. Scratches on the corners, mud in creases, grease coming out the ejection port. It's hard to add depth for the model too.

I came to this conclusion myself shortly after seeing how most weapons look nearly identical. Then I saw all of the cash shop cosmetics and guessed what some others here are saying. It's perfectly possible to have different gun models and textures, SOE just chose not to at this time.

It's not a big deal to me, but would be nice to be able to see what weapon an enemy is using before I'm already dead.

Weapons don't look the same because of RAM, the weapons look the same because the game was rushed out to launch.

Absolutely agree with the OP !

Vanu weapons are superbly booring with similar looks and gunsounds. Wheres more armor special options etc etc ect etc etc bling bling !