Actually, in Galactic Civilizations II ships do show sparks and damage as they take damage. 

But it has to be somewhat generic. If you are only dealing with a handful of ships, you can get pretty detailed but it would require a lot of memory to keep track of hundreds of ships.

What about bulges on the hull? that cant be to hard to make, can it?
Take this Gish game from reflexive that has some physics, that can be similar of bulges on the hull.

yeah i can see it would be a problem with sins. With the tech we got today.
But my point is games in general though.
Company of Heroes have the best ive ever seen. But its still not there. The building you shoot at still have this health bar, but they are close to what im looking for.

Im not much of a person for that kind of games. More scifi game like sins is my tast

Since i started this thread was because of the last episode of battlestar galactica. There was a the best detailed battle ive ever seen within a movie.
So this came op in my mind once again

Dunno if its because im getting older, but most games is kinda the "same" i mean its like its a copy and paste, just with other images and story. Take Prey vs Doom 1,2,3 vs Fear vs Max Pain, though pain did start the matrix like feeling with the time slowing down. And so on. New ideas is what draws me to them.

SoaSE is a new kind of game that nobody has done before, with its 4x possibility, and its scifi thats why im still around

I cant wait until they compactify some quantum computing technology , although its going to be at least half a century before *that* miracle becomes a remote possibility for market

Well, part of the reason why we don't see uber-graphics in games is ye old' lowest common denominator factor. While those of us here (most likely) are hardcore gamers and have dedicated gaming rigs, the vast majority of people don't. It's the vast majority that buy most of the games, so one of the key factors during development is making sure the title can run on a typical PC. Long story short, the money for uber-graphics just doesn't pay off since so few people will be able to experience them. It makes more monetary sense to spend the art budget towards graphics that the greatest number of people will actually be able to enjoy.

The bright side of this, however, is that as people buy new PCs, the minimum standard gets higher, so we should see uber graphics on the PC eventually.

For example, some modern simulations that are taking IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer years would only take a quantum computer a matter of seconds.

yeah SciAM has an article on quantum computation, and if they could actually make one (currently they are highly theoretical, and the phyisics behind the concept, while confirmed, will take probably centuries to make smaller ) you could do all sorts of amazing stuff

when it comes to normal computation vs. quantum computation, think cherry bomb vs. supernova

It's so hard to spot a Stardock member that it's frightening. You sound literally like one of us! I guess that's a good thing.

personally I think most people on this forum sound like they belong in IC or SD...

may i ask what you mean by "discovered"

oh and did you try out sins? can you tell us what the first thing you thought and did?

if you are allowed that is

since that creates expectations that people will then be sore over if they don't happen

sometimes those expectations aren't bad things... especially if it motivates the Devs.

of course, our Devs have been practically reading our minds on every topic so far (the way they predict us is downright creepy...)

personally I think most people on this forum sound like they belong in IC or SD

1337 user(s) active in the last 5 minutes.

I doubt they have THAT many employees

actually, I did have to hit refresh a couple of times...

Heh.

I actually think that the video card makers are going to solve this problem for us.

There are two things we game developers need:

1) The video cards to support variable detail easily. I.e. reduce polygon count on the fly based on the game's needs.

2) DirectX support to make it easy.

Some games do things like mip mapping and other techniques but it's very custom and you end up typically with a non-seamless experience (it's most often used when zooming in and out and you see polygon reduction as you zoom out but it's usually not seamless).

In another couple of years, I think it'll be part of DirectX and that will allow developers to optimize more.

That way, the guy with the mega system can have incredibly detailed looking ships while the guy with the low end system just sees fairly rough ships.