Could Dreamcast et al handle this/that game/effect? *DC tech retrospective *spawn

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Cloofoofoo said:
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?
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Feel like space channel 5 part 2 used it on some of their materials. Especially different metals and such. The level where you save the president on the ship. That boss had some interesting things going on. Same for the platform they were on. Also i suppose the knives and handcuffs on shenmue 2 had something special going, too?
 
The fake bloom light is definetly possible to emulate, the floor well I still need to get the correct textures and figure ir out lol.
 

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EsppiraK said:
I ripped it myself
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Namco isn't using the planes to mimick bloom mind you. They are mimicking light shafts. Although the generic idea of the technique is similar, Namco did a pretty good job at handling properly the values and the edge softness. You can see in the ingane image above how the fake light shafts pass through the openings. In addition the background has animated fog.
 
Cloofoofoo said:
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?
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It's possible to multitexture everything and still hit 60 FPS, but you wouldn't have a lot of headroom. It might be more HW friendly to try to fake some of it with spherical harmonics for vertex colors, but that's a big drop in quality. Maybe run the game at 640x384ish?

The accumulation buffer isn't that useful. It's a single temporary storage value for multitexturing equations that need a parenthesis, so it's really only useful for things like the fire effects in Ocarina of Time, or lightmap on dirty glass, where you need to combine two alpha textures before rendering to the final FB. It's fillrate hungry, since it implies you have to do at least four passes to use it (one opaque pass on main FB, two passes to accum. buffer, and another pass to combine accum. with FB. For opaque polygons, you usually don't need it.
 
Sonicfan said:
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Feel like space channel 5 part 2 used it on some of their materials. Especially different metals and such. The level where you save the president on the ship. That boss had some interesting things going on. Same for the platform they were on. Also i suppose the knives and handcuffs on shenmue 2 had something special going, too?
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Its basically the same ideas but with a few tweaks . They seem to use an alpha map for some form of control over the specular layer and an (red)env map on that layer. For stuff like jins flame pants they did small clever cheat, they modeled the flame tips into the mesh to make it seem very accurate. stuff like that. I asked the Sc2 dreamcast model guy what he thinks, he did a rough small test and it seems like alpha map+ env map on fake material on top of regular texture gives is a silky subdued sheen(and if like jins pant fire modeled in gives the illusion of something more complex). This is on ninja2 for dreamcast so I guess there wouldnt be anything stopping from doing this on dc. Just the cost of model x2.

Another way they could do it could be using actual materials, for example in the second test he did he shows that ninja2 on dc allowed to set specular strength/size and even color! It wont be quite the same but at least you woud still have alot of control over it if you apply it as multiple sub materials. It isnt free , Specular highlights still a hit to the dc cpu since it adds complexity to the lighting but its probably cheaper than having mesh x2 I imagine. Definitely would require testing. Alot could have been done with this.

The fake material approach of (red)env map + alpha mask on base texture for silkier look(rough test), highlight visible in center:
https://i.ibb.co/1RDszSg/dcspec4.jpg


Actual material setting with control over the specular highlights, same 1 light(white) but specular highlight has its own stat for harshness / color/ how concentrated per material :

https://i.ibb.co/Lnsz28J/dcspec3.jpg



https://i.ibb.co/ZB8BCSV/dcspec1.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/QXDxKT7/dcspec2.jpg
 
davis.anthony said:
Nice video on YouTube that shows things like reflections in the PS2 version that are missing on DC.

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Did not see this post, but this just proves that you haven't played the game on Dreamcast, this floor also has reflections on the Dreamcast on the original game, it just that the angle where those reflections are seen is different between versions, If you move the camera there are angles where the ps2 version won't show any where the Dreamcast does.
 
I was going to show some interesting features and tricks in TTT visuals, that have been carefully treated to achieve it's visual presentation.

I m going to post some images when I have the time.

Namco experimented with the desired look offline and then tried to replicate them as close as possible. There was even an offline concept render shown by Namco before PS2 was fully revealed of Howarang's stage and Nina, taking place in a similar setting and lighting condition as in TTT.

A lot of elements in the environment were offline rendered and baked into textures. A great example is the indoor Ogre stage. The symmetry of the stage was a great trick to add a lot of detail and mirror the detail without killing the limited VRAM. Eddy's stage also has this on the huge background rock that looks like it's normal mapped. The grass shadows were also rendered offline, baked on texture and re added to the realtime ground with the grass planes

Elements that are dynamic in nature (material effects that can't be faked and lighting) were manually replicated in EV maps and lighting was adjusted to mimic the color values of the offline render as much as possible. The lighting in TTT is the best implementation I ve seen that gives the illusion of proto-global illumination. Other elements like volumetric lighting were skillfully replicated via alphas (Jin's stage)

Hues on characters come from the right directions, often mimicking light bounce from the environment. Even the ground (see Xiaoyu's stage reflecting a metalic hue from underneath or Yoshimitsu's stage, where The underneath of characters receive color values that give the illusion that the snow is reflecting white light on them). It's all a trick but does wonders in blending all elements and give a CG look.

Textures look like they are sampled from real life materials

Namco also handled properly baked textures in background objects were they could such us objects that can be duplicated and still look natural in the environments lighting and angles. I.e the wooden columns in Jin's stage I believe have baked speculars into the texture. But I d like to see a free camera hack to confirm. Golden lion statues probably due to their complicated detail didn't look right therefore they also relied on baked textures to mimick a metalic look, not actual metalic material. Heihachi's statue in School stage is fully metalic. It saves memory to have duplicated objects with one metalic material, rather than have two textures with baked lighting for each due to different placement in the environment.

On the other hand most, if not all metal objects in Nina's stage are metalic with EVs. That stage does some thing really interesting though. The floor has some detail that doesn't look geometrical from some angles but the lighting behaves so convincingly that they look like they are either normal mapped or geometrical protrucions. The protrucions are too smooth to believe they were actually modelled. If it's just specular maps that's some crazy magic Namco has done there. Edit: Checking again I think they are actual geometry
 
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