Higher GFX IMO

[Gradius]

Would it be possible for the community to make a high-definition reskin pack like they did for HL2?

[TWD]

StarCraft 2's graphics are actually very fresh. They've made effective use out of shaders and effects. The textures are just fine, and make full use of your videocard memory. In the past Blizzard games have felt kinda behind the times, but that's not really the case this time. They're using the same tech every other game has right now. The only reason they haven't upped it is because if they add more polygons and effects it won't scale well.

Right now the game scales extremely well. You don't really notice any problems until you get to where both teams have 200/200 and clash. A lot of people think their game runs the game fine because they get 30-40fps when the game starts. It's because we aren't really seeing the engine put to the test like it will be when tower defense, evolution, and other custom maps come along.
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[Maul]

You can always say that they coded the game so long ago, the engine can't handle it, etc, and these may be valid points. However wouldn't be a better design practice to build an engine that's robust and scalable?

Crysis may have it's elitists but StarCraft already has those. EVERYTHING has those.

Also, if 20gb is too big for some people (I may be out of touch here), I'm sure you could also have the option in the installer of what types of files you wish to install. Ie a normal setup and a advance setup? This used to be very common when installing games.

[TheEconomist]

1) StarCraft II's engine is old. In order for the graphics to blow you away you would have to demand a shorter development time which would result in "just another RTS".
2) In order to use that much processing that would have to have ridiculous special effects and other things harmful to competitive gaming.

Lastly, if it were as easy as saying "we're going to code an engine that will challenge graphics card twenty years from now" then we'd have Crysis level graphics back in 1994 with Doom and the low settings would be Doom as we know it.

[Nicol Bolas]

Does anyone know why they don't allow this?

You seem to think that graphics is just a dial that you can turn up or down at will. That Blizzard is somehow preventing you from turning that dial up more.

This is not how graphics works.

Each one of the features in those drop down boxes represents a set of programs (shaders) and associated art assets (models and textures). Each set of programs and art are created by, well, programmers and artists.

Programmers and artists have a limited time to work on things, defined predominantly by the shipping date of the product. Each set of programs and art must be tested on a variety of hardware. Each set must look up to Blizzard's quality. And each set must be constrained within a particular set of performance and/or memory parameters, and each set must be tested against various hardware to make sure it conforms to those constraints.

There are already a lot of features in the renderer. Adding more means doing more art and programming, which means more debugging and testing time.

And will it help sell the game? No; nobody's going to not buy it because of a lack of a super-extreme-ultra-infinity graphics mode. So why waste the money?

Will it look that much better in the super-extreme-ultra-infinity graphics mode? No. Graphics are already reaching the point of diminishing returns; a higher-end graphics mode wouldn't make the game look that much better.

It already looks very good on the current renderer. Why waste the time and effort to make a higher graphics mode when you wouldn't even get that much out of it?

[Crazy_Jonny]

StarCraft 2's graphics are actually very fresh. They've made effective use out of shaders and effects. The textures are just fine, and make full use of your videocard memory. In the past Blizzard games have felt kinda behind the times, but that's not really the case this time. They're using the same tech every other game has right now. The only reason they haven't upped it is because if they add more polygons and effects it won't scale well.

Right now the game scales extremely well. You don't really notice any problems until you get to where both teams have 200/200 and clash. A lot of people think their game runs the game fine because they get 30-40fps when the game starts. It's because we aren't really seeing the engine put to the test like it will be when tower defense, evolution, and other custom maps come along.

I agree with this.

I think when trying to measure the power of the SC2 engine compared to modern games, especially the First Person deals, you should look at the single player(http://www.sc2blog.com/wp-content/up...oryscreen1.jpg). The characters look so damn real. When its scaled down, its not quite as real, but still beautiful, especially when the map maxes and battle are going on.

[Kaiser]

I'm not sure why all developers don't do this, but why don't Blizzard have higher settings for SC2?

Right now my PC can handle max/extreme everything at 1920x1080 and the game looks great, but why not have real "extreme" settings that are just plain ridiculous that modern cards/cpus can't handle.

I'm not sure how they could go about it, but perhaps have more detailed models, or higher resolution textures or more dynamic effects?

Blizzard go out of their way to make their games accessible to a wide range of lower-end PCs which is great, but they never really have true "extreme" or "insane" settings for graphics (especially with WoW.)

Does anyone know why they don't allow this?

They don't need to plain and simple. The game is amazing as it is. It's better for them to cater to as low specs as they can.

[Wankey]

I don't think the OP understands how graphics works. There is art completion or over the top graphics engines that go by the road side in 2 years max.

Blizzard aims for art completion, so that in 10 years, people will still be playing this game.

[SlickR]

You seem to think that graphics is just a dial that you can turn up or down at will. That Blizzard is somehow preventing you from turning that dial up more.

This is not how graphics works.

Each one of the features in those drop down boxes represents a set of programs (shaders) and associated art assets (models and textures). Each set of programs and art are created by, well, programmers and artists.

Programmers and artists have a limited time to work on things, defined predominantly by the shipping date of the product. Each set of programs and art must be tested on a variety of hardware. Each set must look up to Blizzard's quality. And each set must be constrained within a particular set of performance and/or memory parameters, and each set must be tested against various hardware to make sure it conforms to those constraints.

There are already a lot of features in the renderer. Adding more means doing more art and programming, which means more debugging and testing time.

And will it help sell the game? No; nobody's going to not buy it because of a lack of a super-extreme-ultra-infinity graphics mode. So why waste the money?

Will it look that much better in the super-extreme-ultra-infinity graphics mode? No. Graphics are already reaching the point of diminishing returns; a higher-end graphics mode wouldn't make the game look that much better.

It already looks very good on the current renderer. Why waste the time and effort to make a higher graphics mode when you wouldn't even get that much out of it?

I completely agree with this statement.
or do I ?
Maybe the OP is right, since he knows SC2 will be played 12 years from now, so having graphics that can stretch even graphic cards 12 years from now is maybe a good idea.

Than 12 years from now the GTX 990 ultra could run it fine with 30fps, as well as the ATI HD 58.700 XTXT would run it at 30fps also.

[dynamiK-]

Just don't zoom in and the graphics look fine as is.