WiiGeePeeYou (Hollywood) what IS it ?

[wazoo]

Wouldnt it be a little strange to only see a small improvement if the system really is 3 times faster? I mean, whats the use of sticking in 3 times more ram if its not going to improve anything?

It would help less talented devs to get more juice out of the wii by removing bottlenecks.

It is like the mythical "222/333MHZ" switch of the PSP, that helps games to keep 60fps/sec.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

If its to help less talented devs wouldnt it be better to spend more time on the tools instead of letting the hardware make up for the lack of skills? Now nintendo spend alot of money on designing a ''new'' chip and they will be stuck forever with the higher costs of the parts even if its just a couple of bucks. The less talented devs will still make ''ugly'' games no matter wheater they use GC or Wii hardware so there isnt any gain for nintendo in making the wii a bit faster so that less talented devs can get something like RE4 gfx instead of a bit below RE4 gfx. Nintendo might as well build a superb GC engine and give that to all the devs for free. Saves nintendo money in not having to do a bit faster hardware and would solve the problem of less talented devs.

 

[fearsomepirate]

What I'd guess from the games we've seen is that Wii has

a) substantially more fillrate, as we've seen a lot of fillrate-burning effects like motion blur, depth of field, etc
b) better T&L unit, due to seeing fewer color artifacts related to lighting (see PN03 on Gamecube for details)
c) and a somewhat more powerful TEV, as there are some shader effects in Sonic and Red Steel that are quite a jump beyond what we saw on Gamecube.

Beyond that, I don't think there's much. The T&L is apparently still fixed-function, and all fancy effects have to be done with the highly flexible texture unit rather than programmable pixel pipelines. I have some suspicion that it still can't take arbitrary dot products, due to the absence of normal mapping in any of the games.

 

[pc999]

There is a new game with self-shadowing, Wii screens (not in the rez)

Warner Bros. claims these are from the Wii version of the game.

http://media.wii.ign.com/media/879/879261/imgs_1.html

 

[Corwin_B]

What I'd guess from the games we've seen is that Wii has

a) substantially more fillrate, as we've seen a lot of fillrate-burning effects like motion blur, depth of field, etc
b) better T&L unit, due to seeing fewer color artifacts related to lighting (see PN03 on Gamecube for details)
c) and a somewhat more powerful TEV, as there are some shader effects in Sonic and Red Steel that are quite a jump beyond what we saw on Gamecube.

Beyond that, I don't think there's much. The T&L is apparently still fixed-function, and all fancy effects have to be done with the highly flexible texture unit rather than programmable pixel pipelines. I have some suspicion that it still can't take arbitrary dot products, due to the absence of normal mapping in any of the games.

Sounds pretty believable. What really irks me is the lack of FSAA and AF. I can understand that games developed on GC devkits would not use any "hidden" fancy effects on the Wii, but if there was HW in place for AA/AF, switching those on should not be too difficult even for early games.

 

[The_legend_of_drtre]

No it wouldn't be strange at all. The GC wasn't really RAM limited as shown from games like RE4. Increasing the RAM will allow better textures but the graphics bottleneck will be the GPU which doesn't seem to be anything more than a clock increase. Nothing we've seen so far indicates the GPU has got some secret processing ability. What we can expect is slightly higher polycounts and slightly higher resolution textures and maybe slightly higher framerates. Lighting and screen resolution will probably stay the same other than widescreen. I doubt you'll see HDR or simulated displacement mapping etc., none of that fancy stuff.

Hollywood is almost 3 times bigger than flipper and is on the 90nm process instead of 180 process with the GC. If it was simply an overclocking, hollywood would not be over twice as big as flipper. It would be smaller than flipper. Broadway and gekko are very similar but flipper and hollywood are two different beast that sahe some similarities. We won't really see how different they are until awhile from now. Basically every thing out for the Wii right now was made using flipper since Hollywood wasn't ready until June for most 3rd parties. They didn't have enough time to completly overhaul graphics with launch only a few months away.

 

[fearsomepirate]

There is a new game with self-shadowing, Wii screens (not in the rez)

These have been touched up so aggressively that we really can't draw any conclusions from them. Self-shadowing on Gamecube didn't look nearly this good, so I'm not going to believe it until I see it.

 

[The_legend_of_drtre]

These have been touched up so aggressively that we really can't draw any conclusions from them. Self-shadowing on Gamecube didn't look nearly this good, so I'm not going to believe it until I see it.

It's a Wii game not a Gc game. Wii is more powerful...

 

[pc999]

These have been touched up so aggressively that we really can't draw any conclusions from them. Self-shadowing on Gamecube didn't look nearly this good, so I'm not going to believe it until I see it.

I do agree that the ss do have much higer qualitity that it should, but Wii should be able to do it as GC can do this (althought in the final game it is diferent, I dont know why, meybe lack of raw power to the more complex scenes)

In terms of rendering they seems to be on par and once that this game seems much less complex than in the scenes here is people (in the RL) I think that, at least in the hands of good devs, it should be possible.

Anyway it is better to wait and see.

 

[Oblivion]

Sega is the only one of those companies that has really released footage and what they have shown is some of the best Wii visuals to date in Sonic and the secret rings.

It's on Rails and it's not even 60fps. So fuggin disappointing.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

It's on Rails and it's not even 60fps. So fuggin disappointing.

Yeah, I heard about that too. I mean, what the hell man? This is just sad. Of course considering Sonic Team's recent efforts, I think it's safe to say that whatever talent they had left is long gone by now. The only saving grace is that I heard the game isn't 100% on rails.

Also, forget about self-shadows, that Looney Toons game doesn't even appear to cast a shadow in the floor. If that even possible -- to have self-shadows and not cast a shadow on the ground?

 

[Oblivion]

The only saving grace is that I heard the game isn't 100% on rails.

Really? Can you elaborate?

 

[nihilistcanada]

Did the original demo contain soft self-shadows? Here's a link to compare.

The first trailer/demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lj2Jqz-rxk8

Real game footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKjopFeJkgg&mode=related&search= (no need to watch the entire thing)

The original demo is way too blurry to see accurately, but the shadowing on Pikachu looks the same in both videos.

Check out this video to see some of the effects used in the game. I can't say that there is or isn't any self-shadows from any of the footage online. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkEQ6Wcrejc&mode=related&search=

Here is a link to an actual clear video preview of the game. Top left corner.

http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?type=mov&id=16502

 

[fearsomepirate]

Also, forget about self-shadows, that Looney Toons game doesn't even appear to cast a shadow in the floor. If that even possible -- to have self-shadows and not cast a shadow on the ground?

Yes. On Gamecube, self-shadowing is done with some weird self-referential texture coordinate look-up method and doesn't seem to be connected at all to the use of a shadow map for the character's shadow.

The self-shadowing on the characters in the indoor missions in Rebel Strike was extremely glitchy. Part of it was that they had self-shadowing with multiple light sources. It was way more complex than anything I'd seen that generation, but it also didn't work right.

 

[pc999]

Also, forget about self-shadows, that Looney Toons game doesn't even appear to cast a shadow in the floor. If that even possible -- to have self-shadows and not cast a shadow on the ground?

The most evident case is here, look at the arms/shoulders of the big guy behind the mars ones.

Yes it is, the way that Factor5 do it is possible to use one but not the other, in fact they are similar technics, the big diference is the shaded (by the TEV) area.

Method 8: Projected Shadows
A similar technique [from self-shadowing] is projecting shadows. In this case, the shadow is not cast on the object in question itself but onto receiver geometry.

The self-shadowing on the characters in the indoor missions in Rebel Strike was extremely glitchy. Part of it was that they had self-shadowing with multiple light sources. It was way more complex than anything I'd seen that generation, but it also didn't work right.

So that is why it is so diferent from the render to the final game, I wonder I they didnt cut some lights/shadows.

 

[crystall]

Yes. On Gamecube, self-shadowing is done with some weird self-referential texture coordinate look-up method and doesn't seem to be connected at all to the use of a shadow map for the character's shadow.

AFAIK also UE3 uses different techniques with self-shadowing done with shadow-mapping and a depth buffer calculated only for the object (to reduce glitches due to limited Z precision) and shadows from the object and the (static) environment done with shadow volumes.

 

[fearsomepirate]

So that is why it is so diferent from the render to the final game, I wonder I they didnt cut some lights/shadows.

I don't think that render is in the game engine. I think it's with whatever 3D modeling program they use. In the indoor missions, the self-shadowing appeared to be a different technique than what they used outdoors, which resulted in sharper, nonblack, but glitchier shadows.

 

[bomlat]

for shadow,you need stencil buffer.
The implementation of stencil buffer mean bigger on-chip memory,and diferent architecture (the databus have to be biger than the flipper 48 bit wide path to the emory).

End of story.

 

[Teasy]

for shadow,you need stencil buffer.

Erm, no you don't..

The implementation of stencil buffer mean bigger on-chip memory,and diferent architecture (the databus have to be biger than the flipper 48 bit wide path to the emory).

Firstly bus width has absolutely no connection with the ability to perform stencil buffering. Second Flipper's memory bus to main memory is 64bit not 48bit. Finally, am I right in thinking that you've just tried to claim that GC could not render shadows?....

 

[DeadlyNinja]

Really? Can you elaborate?

I wish I could, but what I told you is what I know. The information came from the newest issue of Nintendo Power. They said the game wasn't 100% on rails, but outside of that, we know nothing else.