Alright fellas, this isn't a thread to voice your opinion on if you think it looks great or awful, but to take a look at the upgrades made to the game. So far the obvious ones are a lot of high res textures, and a bump in rendering resolution that I am thinking is 1080p. Outside of that, I am struggling to see many improvements. Wind Waker HD had gutted its lighting engine, but from what I can tell, this looks to be the same lighting engine used in the original. I went back a took a look at Digital Foundry's analysis of Winder Waker HD, and their assessment of its improvements. Tantalus has been working on this port since at least February. From what I can tell, this looks like little more than Twilight Princess running on Dolphin with the HD texture pack. Any ideas on why the same lighting and shadow technology from Wind Waker HD wouldn't be implemented in Twilight Princess HD? DF made note that the shadows in Winder Waker HD were actually pretty low res, but because of the textures and filtering they got along well with the aesthetics of the game. What do you guys think?
Zelda Twilight Princess HD (Tech Analysis)
- Thread starter Goodtwin
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Alright fellas, this isn't a thread to voice your opinion on if you think it looks great or awful, but to take a look at the upgrades made to the game. So far the obvious ones are a lot of high res textures, and a bump in rendering resolution that I am thinking is 1080p. Outside of that, I am struggling to see many improvements. Wind Waker HD had gutted its lighting engine, but from what I can tell, this looks to be the same lighting engine used in the original. I went back a took a look at Digital Foundry's analysis of Winder Waker HD, and their assessment of its improvements. Tantalus has been working on this port since at least February. From what I can tell, this looks like little more than Twilight Princess running on Dolphin with the HD texture pack. Any ideas on why the same lighting and shadow technology from Wind Waker HD wouldn't be implemented in Twilight Princess HD? DF made note that the shadows in Winder Waker HD were actually pretty low res, but because of the textures and filtering they got along well with the aesthetics of the game. What do you guys think?
What else were you expecting from the HD remake? It looks like a straight art overhaul of the original game (upped texture detail substantially and resolution). Likely texture filtering improvements too (aniso level).
Did this game need a lighting engine overhaul? Tbh I assumed Wind Waker was the exception rather than the rule purely because they were using its lighting engine as a stepping stone for the next Zelda game. The shadows here seem about as good as you'd need them to be for this game content and I suspect the underlying geometry isn't going to be good enough for anything too fancy along the lines of self shadowing and ambient occlusion.
Could you make a better looking game with the same storyline? sure. Is this a reasonable result from a < 9 month HD remake/port? seems pretty reasonable assuming it wasn't heavily resourced.
Did this game need a lighting engine overhaul? Tbh I assumed Wind Waker was the exception rather than the rule purely because they were using its lighting engine as a stepping stone for the next Zelda game. The shadows here seem about as good as you'd need them to be for this game content and I suspect the underlying geometry isn't going to be good enough for anything too fancy along the lines of self shadowing and ambient occlusion.
Could you make a better looking game with the same storyline? sure. Is this a reasonable result from a < 9 month HD remake/port? seems pretty reasonable assuming it wasn't heavily resourced.
I think there's just a misunderstanding of the different approaches here... [Caveat: dolphin emulation isn't an area I'm particularly clued up on].
Twilight princess is a Gamecube game. Gamecube was a fixed function GPU and therefore the games for that GPU are going to used fixed function techniques. I haven't kept up but I assume WiiU probably does have shading capability but it's got to be very modest/limited. Certainly not at the level they can abandon their fixed function hardware and just do everything with shaders.
Conversely, despite not knowing much about Dolphin I'd assume it's running on a modern GPU and using shaders to emulate the functionality of the Gamecube. If that's correct then the emulator has already effectively ported the game to afully programmable GPU and by extension has access to the full range of shader code available to any modern game engine. You can do a MASSIVE amount in programmable shaders and compute that simply won't be possible/viable on the WiiU.
Perhaps a better way of thinking about it would be you're comparing two ports. This port was likely done by a handful of people working within the constraints of a fixed function system for < 9 months. Likely that team will not have been all software engineers/rendering specialists but rather artists, play testers and performance profiling and a chunk of the time will have been spent on just re-compressing original assets and creating new textures. Dolphin on the other hand has been going a little longer and is running on an unconstrained platform. Realistically, the only thing limiting the quality of the Dolphin emu is probable the skill of the person writing the shaders and the performance overhead of the emulation. There's no real upper ceiling on quality once you're running the game with programmable shaders...
Twilight princess is a Gamecube game. Gamecube was a fixed function GPU and therefore the games for that GPU are going to used fixed function techniques. I haven't kept up but I assume WiiU probably does have shading capability but it's got to be very modest/limited. Certainly not at the level they can abandon their fixed function hardware and just do everything with shaders.
Conversely, despite not knowing much about Dolphin I'd assume it's running on a modern GPU and using shaders to emulate the functionality of the Gamecube. If that's correct then the emulator has already effectively ported the game to afully programmable GPU and by extension has access to the full range of shader code available to any modern game engine. You can do a MASSIVE amount in programmable shaders and compute that simply won't be possible/viable on the WiiU.
Perhaps a better way of thinking about it would be you're comparing two ports. This port was likely done by a handful of people working within the constraints of a fixed function system for < 9 months. Likely that team will not have been all software engineers/rendering specialists but rather artists, play testers and performance profiling and a chunk of the time will have been spent on just re-compressing original assets and creating new textures. Dolphin on the other hand has been going a little longer and is running on an unconstrained platform. Realistically, the only thing limiting the quality of the Dolphin emu is probable the skill of the person writing the shaders and the performance overhead of the emulation. There's no real upper ceiling on quality once you're running the game with programmable shaders...
Sigfried1977
Legend
I think they were more interested in improvements that didn't clash with the original art direction. I think those "enhanced" Dolphin vids look absolutely hideous.
From what we know, WUUGPU (Latte, or whatever the fuck the codename for it is) is based on ancient DX10-compatible Radeon 4000-series VLIW-5 architecture. If any improvements/modernizations have been made, Nintendo has kept it all well under wraps.
The chip is said to incorporate 160 (IIRC) shading processors running at 550MHz; shading performance should beat PS360 consoles, but obviously not come close to any current discrete GPUs - even modern Intel integrated graphics will whip this thing.
@PixResearch
Wii U's GPU is a DX10.1 level GPU, so its certainly capable of doing more than basic shader techniques. Now as you have said, what is the team at Tantalus really tasked to do? Is the team relatively small, primarily made up of some artist for textures, a few programmers to get the game running well, and some testers for quality control. Or perhaps certain gameplay elements are being totally reworked, and Gamepad integration could be more involved that we would expect. Perhaps Nintendo is very strict on keeping the changes to aesthetics very minimal, and maintaining the original look, albeit in 1080p being very important. I have assumed the game wills stick to 30fps, but is it possible that the game could bump to 60fps? I remember Wind Waker was locked to 30fps because the animations were locked to 30fps, but I am not sure if this applies to Twilight Princess. I believe the physics engines have always been tied to the frame rate in 3D Zelda games, so that could be a factor as well.
Wii U's GPU is a DX10.1 level GPU, so its certainly capable of doing more than basic shader techniques. Now as you have said, what is the team at Tantalus really tasked to do? Is the team relatively small, primarily made up of some artist for textures, a few programmers to get the game running well, and some testers for quality control. Or perhaps certain gameplay elements are being totally reworked, and Gamepad integration could be more involved that we would expect. Perhaps Nintendo is very strict on keeping the changes to aesthetics very minimal, and maintaining the original look, albeit in 1080p being very important. I have assumed the game wills stick to 30fps, but is it possible that the game could bump to 60fps? I remember Wind Waker was locked to 30fps because the animations were locked to 30fps, but I am not sure if this applies to Twilight Princess. I believe the physics engines have always been tied to the frame rate in 3D Zelda games, so that could be a factor as well.
And Nintendo is probably trying to touch things up without massively changing the core style, like they did with Wind Waker.
The stuff shown off in that video wouldn't as a port. Heck, you could maybe approximate that look half-okayishly on an original Xbox.
Certainly the end result is not that good, but such is the nature of such Add-Hock Hack of a mod. With good artists and finer access to game code, better improvements could be done while mantaining the original's look. Doing normal maps for the entire game takes time, but for link and the most common/important assets ( enemies, items, story characters...) along with a slightly higher poly-count model is not THAT unfeasable. Adding self shadowing ( which was added to wind waker ) wouldn't hurt either. Updated post processing... This type of "HD remaster" is very lazy, but certainly not unheard of. PS3 had equaly simplistic upgrades to their GOW collection, Jak, and a bunch of others... I'm not saying it wasn't expected, but we've seen more care taken to Wind Waker and 3Ds' OOT and MM...
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