I already answered that question. I was describing what I found particularly impressive and unique in TTT in general. There was no comparison. Cloofoofoo's argument was that there was nothing particularly impressive. While he was focusing in the general technique I was focusing on the result. At the end of the day whether we attribute it to art, hardware or engine or a combination, the result is the same. Materials were more convincing.
Well theres definitely something weird when it comes to the lighting. So basically there seems to be some 1D texture gradients that when selected it removes the lighting all together some chunks of the stage. I saw them in multiple stages. Its only my guess but it probably somehow samples the gradients to control the lighting in the stage , I mean cel shading kinda works like that so it might not be far fetched. Look at the screen below, When i select that specific gradient 1D texture it gets rid of that chunk lighting from the stage. I guess combine this plus the environment map material and you got the ttt look. I guess at its worse thats like 3x passes, 1 for base, 1 for env material , 1 for lighting?
Well speaking of that, comparing to my prior post of ttt lighting, now that I think about it theres a game on dc that if Iam not understanding wrong does something similar. Sonic adventure 1 and its somewhat recently discovered lighting engine " lantern" for the dreamcast. That game always did have peculiar look to it. who knows maybe these two things are the same technique? For sa1 it uses several control textures for diffuse and specular parts of lighting.I see. Would be nice to bring this back onto the topic of other platforms running the same games and techniques.
It's not the simple presence of roughness that gives TTT it's looks. Now that I m checking the visuals again, I think Namco first build the scenes how they would have looked like if there were no real time limitations to get an idea of the proper blending of light and materials, then baked the right environmental maps and lights on to the textures and lastly either placed the right light probes that correspond to the environment supposed lighting directions or the environment light was "baked" similar to environment maps to affect uniformly all materials. Jin's stage in particular exhibit multiple hues coming from the right directions. White from the direction of the open window, yellowish from the side of the painted wall and other hues from other sides. The fires also seems to have their corresponding hues casted to the character. The ground planks on the other hand exhibit their own separate environmental maps, not one uniform specular, with a subtle illusion of convex surfaces and bevels in the edges of each plunk.
They aren't textures (but I think the mod for the PC version that restores the lighting stores them in textures as an implementation detail.) The lighting code does a dot product between the normal and light vectors, then does a table look up with the result to get the final vertex RGB value. On the DC, it's all done on the CPU. Complex math, like exponents, can be precalcuated, and it allows for other effects, like making the in-shadow side be a different color than the lit side, or the weird spike near the middle of Ice Cap's specular lighting table, that might be difficult in a more standard system.
It's an interesting question since the DC had 16MB of RAM and 8MB of VRAM , whereas the PS2 has 32MB of RAM and 4MB of VRAM but with tremendously huge bandwidth for it's time for fast streaming.
If you are referring to my post you are misreading. PS2's DOA 2 was inferior to the DC version since PS2 had less VRAM, but then we have TTT that couldn't exploit the PS2's fast bandwidth, so everything is most likely stored in just 4MB of VRAM like DOA2. I don't know how PS2's RAM might have been used to achieve that presentation. So @davis.anthony's question is an interesting one and nobody came with an answer.
That was only the first Japanese version. Western, European, and 2nd Japanese versions were completed. Technically the US Dreamcast version wasn't nearly complete since they enhanced that too later on. If it had sold as well on DC, I'm sure a "hardcore" version would have come, too.
Yes. Itagaki spiraled when they did that to him. Tecmo is a terrible company for that
The reflections are on that stage on DC.
Thx for clearing that up. Maybe they could be doing something similar in ttt in this case maybe what ever values they are getting from this tiny textures to change the vertex color values(ala cel shading). Seeing how youre the man to ask about low level dc things, what do you think about those faked materials using env maps ttt does , on dc? Realistically in a scenario as ttt how would you expect the dc to handle? basically everything from the fighters to the stages use it. in all cases the fighters even use different multiple env map per each player model depending whether its clothing , skin and so on. And could the secondary accumulation buffer feature help?
