Don't hold your breath: the final game should look even better. Mostly missing are the fresnel reflections of the environment and some ambient occlusion ( local, smooth shadows ).
I had to fine tune all the parameters so that it looks good in the screens. I'm not sure yet how i'm going to handle all those different models / lighting in the final version, as it seems so far each model requires tweaking to look good.
Finally, the framerate is abysmal. As mentioned in my previous update, GPUs do not support HDRI + FP16, and my RGBE code path doesn't support shadows yet. In order to make a "best quality" possible, i had to reuse the old fp16 code, so antialiasing is done by supersampling a x4 times bigger buffer, ie. render to a 2048x1536 texture. Since the bottleneck is mostly in the shaders, the framerate goes in the 10-15 fps range on my ATI; on my NVidia card ( 7800 GT ), it's a lot better, around 40-45 fps, but that's still not very good for a single ship.
The ship is around 100K triangles and was modeled by Supernova. All i can say is, it's an incredible work. Perfect modeling, no smoothing problems, no mesh errors, and an insane quality/balance of details. Along with Jack's Trireme/remora, it's probably the best ship i've seen so far. I almost had a tear on my eye when i saw it the first time :)
Note the Culverine, a 20 meters long corvette hovering over the Flamberge. Feels small, heh ?
Click to open the images in fullscreen (1024x768 AAx4):
