"Yes, but how many polygons?" An artist blog entry with interesting numbers

[Sonicfan]

its exactly the same effect. its not accumalative , they just change how opaque it is. just an guessing example: the effect is on by default in the tengu boss fight, defaults to 30% opacity , looks light/clear. Tengu hits you and maybe its programmed to change the alpha of the full screen quads to 70% opacity making it really pronounced/trippy and goes back to 30% once you hit tengu back. its the same effect just that they added conditions to it.

the interesting about the espirral motion blur video it seems like for example when fighting zack when he is using env map suit , it might be doing render to texture of the stage at a slow interval to use that as the env map texture. which is why you see a really wide fov version of the stage covering the full screen instead. Didnt think the game did that at all, this is just my guess anyway.

Btw, I wonder why they didn't implement the blur on DC. Maybe it couldn't keep adding as much?

 

[xaeroxcore]

Ok great info! Many thanks! I myself was thinking minimum 8 tracks / vehicles so that maps nicely. Regarding characters idea was to not have any, as no racer really have any. And its a LOT more production effort to make those vs just ships

So idea would be this regarding players:

- 1 Player mode: 60 fps mode without some framebuffer FX (like glows, blurs, more dense particles and more close LOD switching) for those who really enjoys a 60fps racer. And a 30 fps mode with more nice FX
- 2 Player mode 60 fps with less detailed geometry / lighting and 30 fps with similar quality as the 60 fps single player mode
- 4 player mode 30 fps with lowest details

Does that sound like a good compromise for you as a player. So 1 player mode has the choice of 60 vs 30 fps mode. And if so what do you think would be best as default? The nicer looking 30fps mode or the more smooth running but less visually impressive 60fps mode?


Actually that is a great reminder. I totally forgot about it. It would be great with VMU features that adds but the game does not rely on (if we want to release it later on other platforms)

If you have any idea you want to share, please do. Either directly here or if you prefer to tell in a PM that is also ok.

Btw, I wonder why they didn't implement the blur on DC. Maybe it couldn't keep adding as much?

I´d say you answered that yourself, they probably added motion blur effect on PS2 and that "new lighting", which is nothing special, to try to actually add some graphical value on PS2 port, in order to "justify" the Hard*Core subtitle and also hide the horrible lower native res and aliasing...And didnt work. DOA 2 looks better on DC, and it´s natural, because is game built around its strenghts. So, they didnt used the blur on DC, cuz its not needed. I have both versions (DC and PS2) and even made a YouTube comparison video, and find that blur effect on Tengu´s PS2 final boss fight very annoying.

 

[Sonicfan]

I´d say you answered that yourself, they probably added motion blur effect on PS2 and that "new lighting", which is nothing special, to try to actually add some graphical value on PS2 port, in order to "justify" the Hard*Core subtitle and also hide the horrible lower native res and aliasing...And didnt work. DOA 2 looks better on DC, and it´s natural, because is game built around its strenghts. So, they didnt used the blur on DC, cuz its not needed. I have both versions (DC and PS2) and even made a YouTube comparison video, and find that blur effect on Tengu´s PS2 final boss fight very annoying.

Yeah, it's a bit overdone, but they liked it enough to keep doing it on later games. If anything it's pretty balanced; if you're good enough not to be hit too much, it's significantly reduced. It's supposed to be a play on tengu manipulating reality. Doau did it to a better effect, for sure.

 

[xaeroxcore]

Yeah, it's a bit overdone, but they liked it enough to keep doing it on later games. If anything it's pretty balanced; if you're good enough not to be hit too much, it's significantly reduced. It's supposed to be a play on tengu manipulating reality. Doau did it to a better effect, for sure.

Now i recall they also used motion blur on DOA 3 final boss fight....and was annoying as fuck! hahahahaah

 

[StefanHQ]

this esppiral, its one guy that sifts through values to see what turns on and off stuff . that seems more like radial blur. I remember some one( the person who did soul calibur 2 model demo on ninja) said that its pretty much copying/saving prior frame to use for a rtt , cost up to 16ms without increasing scene complexity. its probably the same here because i doubt very much they would like to render things twice for a seperate render texture or even have resources to do so.

I think you are correct in this. Makes sense.

 

[Cloofoofoo]

Btw, I wonder why they didn't implement the blur on DC. Maybe it couldn't keep adding as much?

Its very likely alot harder to maintain 60 fps with it on. I notice his video has a mouse cursor, thats probably emulator video. Ask him if has tried on real hw to see if the radial blur has any adverse effects on framerate. Also it was kind of to be expected, they didnt backport all the content from ps2 anyways. ( there was left overs like the bamboo forest cutscene from ps2 , models still on dc disc).

 

[Sonicfan]

Now i recall they also used motion blur on DOA 3 final boss fight....and was annoying as fuck! hahahahaah

Yep, it was the same case, but they made it even worse with the silly camera angle

 

[Sonicfan]

Its very likely alot harder to maintain 60 fps with it on. I notice his video has a mouse cursor, thats probably emulator video. Ask him if has tried on real hw to see if the radial blur has any adverse effects on framerate. Also it was kind of to be expected, they didnt backport all the content from ps2 anyways. ( there was left overs like the bamboo forest cutscene from ps2 , models still on dc disc).

Yeah, maybe it's the emulator factor. I do recall a preview of the game where they did it on DC and it was going slow-motion. Maybe they could have done it at 30fps instead. I'm sure that wouldn't add too much delay

 

[StefanHQ]

Its very likely alot harder to maintain 60 fps with it on. I notice his video has a mouse cursor, thats probably emulator video. Ask him if has tried on real hw to see if the radial blur has any adverse effects on framerate. Also it was kind of to be expected, they didnt backport all the content from ps2 anyways. ( there was left overs like the bamboo forest cutscene from ps2 , models still on dc disc).

Yeah I just annoyingly keep saying "fillrate" and I go by the "if it walks and sound like a duck... it is a duck!" reasoning. If DC really could do all those frambuffer effects, bumpmap etc without any performance issues. It would have been used. Simple as that. Then one can always say "but this game had... and that game had..." yes but then it was in special case scenarios / or the game droppen in frame rate etc.

The simple truth is: Doing anything that takes seriously filling toll (and especially if its render to texture stuff) will eat up a lot of the alreadt quite restricted fill rate that the DC have.

 

[Cloofoofoo]

Yeah I just annoyingly keep saying "fillrate" and I go by the "if it walks and sound like a duck... it is a duck!" reasoning. If DC really could do all those frambuffer effects, bumpmap etc without any performance issues. It would have been used. Simple as that. Then one can always say "but this game had... and that game had..." yes but then it was in special case scenarios / or the game droppen in frame rate etc.

The simple truth is: Doing anything that takes seriously filling toll (and especially if its render to texture stuff) will eat up a lot of the alreadt quite restricted fill rate that the DC have.

well , i cant say i 100% agree with that. It sure does hit harder than other systems but its not useless if you only do like 1 post proccess effect at a time. The guy who did the soul calibur 2 dc thing did a prior test before that and told me of his test :layering. radial blur and bloom on vs just radial blur on. Each effect using 2 quad full screen covering quads ( 4 total) . Using the render texture method that makes takes prior frame to avoid doublle amount of vertices overhead. the scene is like 15k triangs/26k vertices cel shaded model.

interesting results , so bloom + radial blur is pretty much 2x rendering time cost than just radial blur. Just radial blur seems to be minimal amount of impact in the render time. If anything the biggest impact iam guessing in the cpus tnl time( i am guessing thats in the main time) or its that 16ms cost for the fb copy which seems to knock it to the 30 fps. on pvr2 side alone it looks with radial it should have been hitting 60 fps. I think its not dire at all and its perfectly usable provided youre aiming for 30 fps not 60. Who knows maybe on real hw is why doa2 avoids it during gameplay (just cutscens) since it strives for 60 fps?

dc test:
radial blur + bloom

just radial blur:

 

[Sonicfan]

@clthe same guy pointed out that vf4 pachinko is what vf4 would have looked like on DC, and it's amazing to see!

 

[Sonicfan]

 

[Sonicfan]

Only thing i think they'd add is speculars to the leather materials, kind of like force 5

 

[xaeroxcore]

@clthe same guy pointed out that vf4 pachinko is what vf4 would have looked like on DC, and it's amazing to see!

Where did you get that info? I mean if VF 4 Pachinko runs on Naomi or Atomiswave, totally true....

 

[Sonicfan]

Where did you get that info? I mean if VF 4 Pachinko runs on Naomi or Atomiswave, totally true....

It wasn't a confirmation, but more of an opinion. He points out the lighting differences, the textures, and poly counts. I wouldn't be surprised if this was running on something DC related. I've read DC regulation 7. It definitely has the PVR aesthetic.

 

[xaeroxcore]

It wasn't a confirmation, but more of an opinion. He points out the lighting differences, the textures, and poly counts. I wouldn't be surprised if this was running on something DC related. I've read DC regulation 7. It definitely has the PVR aesthetic.

I see..Where can we get more videos or images of VF 4 Pachinko? Looks very interesting! May be somebody knows in which hardware it ran...Obviously would be a waste of money to run VF 4 pachinko on Naomi 2, so totally makes sense they used regular Naomi or even better a DC. What our DC tech experts think? @Cloofoofoo @Nesh @StefanHQ According to the images, i see it possible to run on DC....

By the way, you guys saw what @EsppiraK made with DOA 2LE DC? This remaster looks great an its available to test! Is amazing that he managed to improve one of DC´s already most complex and demanding games!

 

[Sonicfan]

I see..Where can we get more videos or images of VF 4 Pachinko? Looks very interesting! May be somebody knows in which hardware it ran...Obviously would be a waste of money to run VF 4 pachinko on Naomi 2, so totally makes sense they used regular Naomi or even better a DC. What our DC tech experts think? @Cloofoofoo @Nesh @StefanHQ According to the images, i see it possible to run on DC....

By the way, you guys saw what @EsppiraK made with DOA 2LE DC? This remaster looks great an its available to test! Is amazing that he managed to improve one of DC´s already most complex and demanding games!

There's lots of footage of it on youtube, but it's mostly from the yakuza 4 arcade. I saw one filmed off camera, but it was very low res. I'll grab some links and show ya!

 

[Sonicfan]

 

[Sonicfan]

 

[Sonicfan]