Any 'advanced' gamers here who can tell me what this stuff means?

Proprietary game engine, using all the latest 3D technology :

-DirectX® 8.1 support
-Dynamic LoD* (Level of Detail),
-Hardware accelerated Transform and Lighting,
-Pixel Shaders and Vertex Shaders
-Hierarchical animation and skinning system,
-DXTn compressed textures Dynamic Damage system Particle system able to handle thousands of particles, influenced by various forces, fields…
-Special effects : glows, lens flares, reflections, Dot3 Bump Mapping, Per-pixel lighting

 

Proprietary game engine, using all the latest 3D technology :

-DirectX® 8.1 support
Doesn't mean much to you, because which dx8 features are used are outlined later.

-Dynamic LoD* (Level of Detail),
The game changes the level of detail of objects on the fly. when stuff gets further away from you, it loses detail so that things will continue to run smoothly. when stuff is closer to you, detail is raised.

-Hardware accelerated Transform and Lighting,
Basically means that most anything made after the geforce 256 was released will run it faster than if it didnt have T&L support.

-Pixel Shaders and Vertex Shaders
Directx 8 technologies. Pixel shader is of most interest to you because it can produce really nice effects, usually used for water effects (as seen in morrowind, most notably)

-Hierarchical animation and skinning system,
*shrug*

-DXTn compressed textures Dynamic Damage system Particle system able to handle thousands of particles, influenced by various forces, fields…

has compressed textures (standard now), a particle system (sparks, that sort of thing)

-Special effects : glows, lens flares, reflections, Dot3 Bump Mapping, Per-pixel lighting

lens flare is a now common effect that isnt so impressive anymore, looks like... well... a lens flare of a camera, simple as that.
bump mapping creates textures that appear 3d. makes things look like they're made out of more polygons (are more complex and detailed) than they really are, without the huge performance hit of creating the details by using polygons.

That's my (admittedly sloppy and quickly written) shot at it, left out some obvious stuff. The neatest stuff is pixel/vertex shader and bumpmapping. those are the not so common ones, and if they're used well can produce beautiful effects.

 

Well, color me impressed.... I don't know how on earth you know all that, but I really appreciate the help. I copied those specs directly from a website for some space-sim game coming out. The screens were absolutely beautiful. It kind of reminded me of the colorful space shots you see in movies like The Wrath of Kahn - the fact that it's a PC game already explains a large part of the quality graphics (though I normally pick console titles) - but then I saw this list of what appeared to be impressive specs and I couldn't help but wonder what it all meant.

 

BTW, I want you to see what I'm talking about: http://www.dreamcatchergames.com/hegemonia/profil.htm - I'm sure you'll see why I'm so interested. Have you ever seen such amazing space shots in a game or a movie before?

 

er actually yes
eve-online

and thats a mmorpg game. pretty insane graphics for multively massive

 

WOW... you're right! Those are beautiful too. Thanks for that. These games look better than the movies.

 

Looks pretty good. The neat thing about space games is that you save a ton of performance on rendering the backgrounds because well... there isnt much to render. Just a lot of space. So you end up with some pretty incredible looking ships. Having almost no background to render is pretty much unique to space games afaik.

 

Space games do tend to have backgrounds in the form of digital "nebulea" (The bright colored lights) It does take some processor power and some games run quite slow at times e.g Home world, Wing Commander etc