Excellent Harry Potter Wii video.

[ninzel]

http://www.infendo.com/wii/harry-potter-wii-graphics-do-not-disappoint/

This is a developer walk through and I think demonstrates good use of the Wii remote. It looks pretty good as well. It's nice to see EA stepping up.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Looks pretty good, visually. The Wiimote is the perfect controller for this game too, though they ought to have voice control too!

Edit : Having seen another dev vid, I think there's just a shed-load of prebaked lighting going on. The dev vid didn't say what platform it was, but I thought I caught sight of a boulder rolling down a hill and the shadow underneath rolled over the top... Needs more material before we can see what techniques are being used. Obviously you'd expect Wii to benefit from more texturing than GC, but it'd be nice if they had some more advanced lighting/rendering models too.

 

[Zaphod]

That looked pretty good. Watching the HD version though, I noticed one thing I fear will hurt the Wii as developers harness the power that is there and create less cartoony games with more geometry: Edge crawling was really, really distracting, more so than in worse looking Wii games I've seen.

 

[pc999]

Seems fun even being a Harry Potter game, but it looks very good, nice shadows, great outside ground (bump mapped?) and nice physics ( I wonder how many object can you move at once), plus no loadings.

Looking forward to know more about it.

 

[fearsomepirate]

You'll not get away from the edge crawling. Since Wii's GPU has the exact same amount of eDRAM as Cube's, AA is a near-impossibility.

 

[Zaphod]

Yeah, I know. Perhaps it's just me, but I find that aliasing artifacts bother me that much more the better and more natural a game looks. With stylized art it's not so bad. Just mentioned it because the game did look nice and this effect the most prominent thing that might keep me from enjoying a Wii. Still want one though... :smile:

BTW: There were talk around here about ('fake') AA-ish techniques that might be workable for the Wii. Are there any released Wii games using such effects, and does it have any reasonable effect on IQ?

 

[DeadlyNinja]

You'll not get away from the edge crawling. Since Wii's GPU has the exact same amount of eDRAM as Cube's, AA is a near-impossibility.

Wasn't Factor 5 able to get 2xAA into Rebel Strike and Rogue Leader?

 

[Natoma]

Wasn't Factor 5 able to get 2xAA into Rebel Strike and Rogue Leader?

Yes. Flipper supports AA and it was used in several GC games, the F5 star wars in particular. Star Fox Adventures had AA and Fur shading, real time lighting, and high res textures.

The Wii is certainly capable of this and more. Great looking game EA. Wow, I'm actually adding Harry Potter to my purchase list.

 

[fearsomepirate]

According to ERP, there are two ways to do AA in Gamecube: Halve the vertical resolution, or write your own tiling engine without any hardware to help you. Small wonder that only a few of the best developers used it.

 

[Blade]

It looks good [graphically] next to other Wii games, but really?

Eh.

 

[Natoma]

It looks good [graphically] next to other Wii games, but really?

Eh.

The biggest thing from this is that 3rd parties are finally starting to push the system a little. The Wii can do more than this, but it certainly is a far superior graphical effort to their Tiger Woods golf game. And that's what's important at this time imo.

It shows that they're finally getting into the system and not trying to throw graphically inferior shovelware. The games that have blatantly used PSP assets, for example, need to die.