A reasonable facsimile of RE5 capable on Wii?

[Li Mu Bai]

I don't think it's Wii I put it on capcom which seems only to be doing what doesn't put a strain on their development teams. I can't think of a single Wii game that had the effort of RE4 that came from them this generation.

I can theafu, MHTri. Equal, if not more effort went into this title. (it definitely shows, best environments on the Wii)) Sorry about the links, all videos can be found here:

http://media.wii.ign.com/media/143/14328873/vids_1.html

LDR+bloom is NOT HDR, simple as that. The textures are horribly low res, the shadows are baked, the "lighting" is baked, the water doesn't reflect, no hint of shaders being used anywhere, no bump maps, no normal maps, not sure how you can do a "reasonable facsimile of RE5" when the wii can't even do an ON-RAIL, COMPLETELY SCRIPTED game with some decent current gen effects

While I agree with most of your points, muddy water does not reflect. Yes the water is horrible, I mentioned had you bothered to read, the absence of some of these effects in my initial post. (including subsequent posts as well) But I sense that you are speaking ignorantly regarding the Wii's technical capailities. SMG had most of these effects in "real-time." Normal mapping was present in both the Conduit & Dewy, RS3 from the GC (last-gen) had numerous bumpmapped environments, shaders, as well as one of the best real-time lighting engines for the time operating at 60fps primarily. Even S&P2 has bump-mapping, & Treasure are certainly no tech. heads. I stated that many of the textures were low-res, while others aren't.

Luigi's Mansion had real-time shadows last-gen as a launch title for christ's sake. TP's water even had reflections as well as transparencies. (both deved on the GC) I even pointed out that given the scripted events & fixed camera angles, the game should look infinitely better. Though given what was demonstrated in SA, as well as developer claims, a reasonable facsimile was indeed feasible & capable on the Wii.

 

[thundermonkey]

LDR+bloom is NOT HDR, simple as that. The textures are horribly low res, the shadows are baked, the "lighting" is baked, the water doesn't reflect, no hint of shaders being used anywhere, no bump maps, no normal maps, not sure how you can do a "reasonable facsimile of RE5" when the wii can't even do an ON-RAIL, COMPLETELY SCRIPTED game with some decent current gen effects.

Rawr?

 

[theafu]

I can theafu, MHTri. Equal, if not more effort went into this title. (it definitely shows, best environments on the Wii)) Sorry about the links, all videos can be found here:

http://media.wii.ign.com/media/143/14328873/vids_1.html

I hadn't viewed this title in sometime. The thing that caught my eye was the texturing despite loving RE4 in certain respects that part always grated my eyes now it's very tolerable and pops in certain places. Lighting and shadowing nuances have gone up as well the zombie fish video compared to other places with water in RE4 shows a difference between the two titles.

I'm with others capcom needs to give us a real title in the series I love rail shooters but I'd much prefer it in a separate franchise as this is resident evil not house of the dead. Wii owners have been nothing but diligent with the franchise and all I see now is just their buying power being taken advantage of in one of the worst ways possible.

 

[Nano]

LDR+bloom is NOT HDR, simple as that.

Excuse me for failing to see why it matters so much.

They've made an approximation of contrast levels that are physically impossible to express with current technology and it comes off well.

The textures are horribly low res, the shadows are baked, the "lighting" is baked, the water doesn't reflect, no hint of shaders being used anywhere, no bump maps, no normal maps, not sure how you can do a "reasonable facsimile of RE5" when the wii can't even do an ON-RAIL, COMPLETELY SCRIPTED game with some decent current gen effects.

I think this statement is just ridiculous.

"wii can't even do" blah, blah, blah.

It doesn't even take a well made scene to say RE5 would be possible on Wii. Of course it could be if done with the right approach and respect to the technology.

Hitting out at the hardware because your nitpicking has amounted to hatred over a product isn't justified or factually correct either.

 

[Kittonwy]

Excuse me for failing to see why it matters so much.

They've made an approximation of contrast levels that are physically impossible to express with current technology and it comes off well.

It matters because visually LDR+bloom doesn't come close to approximating HDR, visually LDR+bloom can't achieve the same look, otherwise developers wouldn't use HDR when simply using LDR+bloom is cheaper.

I think this statement is just ridiculous.

"wii can't even do" blah, blah, blah.

It doesn't even take a well made scene to say RE5 would be possible on Wii. Of course it could be if done with the right approach and respect to the technology.

Hitting out at the hardware because your nitpicking has amounted to hatred over a product isn't justified or factually correct either.

RE5 visually isn't possible on the wii simply because the wii hardware isn't capable of rendering all the effects in RE5, simple as that, there hasn't been a game on the wii that would suggest that the wii can render the same level of visuals, it has nothing to do with "nitpicking" or "hatred", but more to do with the hardware limitation, they could port RE5 but they would need to compromise the visuals significantly and the port wouldn't look anywhere nearly as good. It's like the Dead Rising port, they could and did port Dead Rising but the wii port looks significantly inferior to the original.

 

[Kittonwy]

While I agree with most of your points, muddy water does not reflect. Yes the water is horrible, I mentioned had you bothered to read, the absence of some of these effects in my initial post. (including subsequent posts as well) But I sense that you are speaking ignorantly regarding the Wii's technical capailities. SMG had most of these effects in "real-time." Normal mapping was present in both the Conduit & Dewy, RS3 from the GC (last-gen) had numerous bumpmapped environments, shaders, as well as one of the best real-time lighting engines for the time operating at 60fps primarily. Even S&P2 has bump-mapping, & Treasure are certainly no tech. heads. I stated that many of the textures were low-res, while others aren't.

Luigi's Mansion had real-time shadows last-gen as a launch title for christ's sake. TP's water even had reflections as well as transparencies. (both deved on the GC) I even pointed out that given the scripted events & fixed camera angles, the game should look infinitely better. Though given what was demonstrated in SA, as well as developer claims, a reasonable facsimile was indeed feasible & capable on the Wii.

Muddy water does reflect.

Normal mapping was done on the xbox last generation in HALO 2, games are using parallax mapping now, they probably did some parallax mapping in Splinter Cell 3 on the xbox, HALO 1 used bump-mapping, RS3 using bump-mapping doesn't really make it look like anything other than a very good looking last-gen game, the lighting quality simply isn't there, the level of detail is not there. Luigi's Mansion and Silent Hill 3 both had real-time shadows, but neither of those games look anything like the best of current-gen games. ICO had reflective water and self-shadowing but I doubt anyone would mistake it for a current-gen game.

RE5 is a good-looking current-gen game because it's doing all those effects at the same time, at a level of quality that wasn't achievable on last-gen hardware and isn't achievable on the wii, at a much higher resolution and with a greater level of detail. You can give a laundry list of graphical effects that a game like the Conduit had achieved but I doubt if seen side-by-side anyone would believe that the Conduit has the same level of graphics as RE5.

 

[fearsomepirate]

You can always get rid of enough graphical detail. But how big are the levels? How complex is the AI? How many characters have to be onscreen, each with their own AI? That's more relevant to some hypothetical port of RE5 than whether or not the water would still be reflective.

 

[Kittonwy]

You can always get rid of enough graphical detail. But how big are the levels? How complex is the AI? How many characters have to be onscreen, each with their own AI? That's more relevant to some hypothetical port of RE5 than whether or not the water would still be reflective.

You can probably get rid of a lot of things in a game just to make it run on a platform but it wouldn't be the same experience. If you strip GTAIV of all the little details and interactions, throw a smaller number of NPCs on screen and take away endorphin, you can get it to run on the PS2 but then it wouldn't be GTAIV anymore. The biggest thing RE5 has going for it IS the visuals, it was never an exceptionally amazing game to begin with, you strip away the visuals and basically you have a last-gen game that doesn't even play as well as RE4.

 

[Mobius1aic]

Seeing videos of REC are nice, but still the game is lacking in visual appeal compared to RE4. I almost want to say it's the texture quality. Some textures like on the main characters are higher in RE4 while zombies and the environment look worse. I want to say some of the fillrate is being wasted on the bloom lighting too. That overly-glowing and golden look gets annoying real quick. Other visual point: the water, doesn't look as good as RE4s. Is it possibly a memory issue considering this game might have much larger environments and storage needs compared to RE4 or can we throuw that out the window considering RE4 had some huge environments while maintaining great visuals and smooth gameplay on the GCs small memory footprint? Either way I think the devs, like High Voltage with The Conduit, are wasting graphical resources on negligible things like over-extraneous bloom lighting.

 

[Nano]

RE5 visually isn't possible on the wii simply because the wii hardware isn't capable of rendering all the effects in RE5, simple as that, there hasn't been a game on the wii that would suggest that the wii can render the same level of visuals, it has nothing to do with "nitpicking" or "hatred", but more to do with the hardware limitation, they could port RE5 but they would need to compromise the visuals significantly and the port wouldn't look anywhere nearly as good. It's like the Dead Rising port, they could and did port Dead Rising but the wii port looks significantly inferior to the original.

No-one is arguing against mathematical absolutes in reproducing specific implementations of rendering techniques.

If they wanted to make a RE version Wii, which obviously isn't a direct port, they could and they could produce a similar environment with very good visuals and a lot of "similar effects" that made the original look stunning. They could have interesting unified lighting techniques, specular levels, dynamic water etc.

It wouldn't be on the same level, but that doesn't matter.

To a great extent there isn't much point in the topic, because its a no brainer than the game could be done on Wii if made in such a way it was developed with strict respect to the platform.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

Pretty lousy timing to lock the RE5 Wii article.

Apparently, the folks over at Capcom Japan now thinks it's possible after seeing the work from Dark Side Chronicles.

“At Resident Evil 5’s launch, it was announced that a Wii version was not technically possible. But after some of the work that Cavia has done (with RE: Darkside Chronicles), the producers of Resident Evil 5 over in Japan now think it is possible. Some of the light effects in the South America stage are pretty incredible. Whether it is going to come, I don’t know the answer to that question. But, it has been said that now at least it is possible.” - Product manager Matt Dahlgren

I think a watered down version might actually be good. I played the PC version a bit, and I HATE Sheva. She gets in your way, and has the intelligence of a rock. The co-op really killed the game. Either way, I'm not a big fan of RE, so maybe I'm just biased.

But surely one can agree, there's more to pushing graphics than applying bump mapping to relatively small productions. Conceptually that's rather easy. For the majority of games, be it smaller or bigger, I doubt they're given the go ahead to spend resources and time on pushing all sorts of advanced techniques from surfaces to lighting, as well as come up with a marketable, profitable title.

That's probably true. I always wondered what kind of Budget Pipeworks got for their Godzilla games. They have some hefty licensing fees to pay for 24 of Toho's monsters, but Pipeworks did some amazing things with Godzilla Unleashed. They not only have a heavily bump mapped game, but they also had interesting technology like dynamic building destruction. The buildings break apart based on where you hit them.

Either Pipeworks is really good with Wii tech, or they got a huge budget to work with.

 

[AlNom]

There was hardly anything technical to discuss, but ok, there's still not much other than PR statements, not a great basis for discussion.