Can Wii achieve the same level of Xbox's Doom3?

[Squeak]

I´ve just read an old article about Doom 3 in a magazine and it seems that the main feature of the graphics isn´t normal mapping, the main feature is stencil buffer.

Knowing that the 2MB of Framebuffer embedded inside the GPU I want to ask something to you

Is it possible to use tile rendering for giving more space to the stencil buffer?

I am asking this because we know that going to the eDRAM would be less clock cycles than using the main RAM for this effect.

You don't render directly to main RAM on the Wii, ever. The main issue with stencil shadows has always been fillrate (which the Wii has plenty of) and extracting the silhouette.

BTW. regarding the CLUT BM technique. Why would you have to computer each and every normal of the map? Do like in normal mapping and interpolate.

 

[sfried]

If anybody has a copy of the new Nintendo Power with the Silent Hill pics in it using the flashlight, could someone say if that's a tencil shadow or not? Whatever it is, it looks unified just based on the way the shadows angle off...

 

[DeadlyNinja]

The game is being made by Climax, makers of Overlord Dark Legend on the Wii. Overlord already showed off some pretty impressive shadows in in the game, and I'm sure it'll benefit a game like Silent Hill. As to how they do it, we won't know unless someone asks. It's hard to tell from magazine images.

 

[Turok]

The game is being made by Climax, makers of Overlord Dark Legend on the Wii. Overlord already showed off some pretty impressive shadows in in the game, and I'm sure it'll benefit a game like Silent Hill. As to how they do it, we won't know unless someone asks. It's hard to tell from magazine images.

They also did Silent Hill: Origins on the PSP, which sported a flashlight that cast some pretty impressive shadow maps on most environmental geometry.

 

[fearsomepirate]

The game is being made by Climax, makers of Overlord Dark Legend on the Wii. Overlord already showed off some pretty impressive shadows in in the game, and I'm sure it'll benefit a game like Silent Hill.

Played SH3? It has the exact same kind of shadowing (it's also one of the very, very few PS2 games to have self-shadowing in-game). Konami had an article a while back on how they did. I think they used VU0 to draw the silhouettes to textures.

 

[Mobius1aic]

The game is being made by Climax, makers of Overlord Dark Legend on the Wii. Overlord already showed off some pretty impressive shadows in in the game, and I'm sure it'll benefit a game like Silent Hill. As to how they do it, we won't know unless someone asks. It's hard to tell from magazine images.

PS2 games with self-shadowing:

Shadow of the Colossus
Ace Combat 4
Ace Combat 5
Ace Combat 0

That is all I can think of :/

 

[Fafalada]

(it's also one of the very, very few PS2 games to have self-shadowing in-game)

Define very very few. I can think of at least 20 off the top of my head, and I doubt I can name more for other platforms in the same generation.

As for SH3, it uses shadow volumes, like those that have been debated for most of this topic.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Define very very few. I can think of at least 20 off the top of my head

I define "very few" probably about as rigorously as you define "off the top of my head."

I can't find the interview with Konami. I'm thinking it was on Gamasutra (since that's where such things usually show up), but it had a fairly detailed explanation of how they did it. I'm not saying they didn't use volumes, but he was very specific about using one of the vector units (I think it was vu0) to create a texture from the shadow. You can see this in-game if you can get the camera fairly close to a shadow. It was a pretty interesting read.

 

[Fafalada]

I define "very few" probably about as rigorously as you define "off the top of my head."

Touche
To be fair, it's really relative to pov. If say 100 titles used self-shadowing, that's still 'very few' from a library of several thousand. On the other hand, if most of those 100 are high-profile names people know about, it would be perceived as highly-supported feature, similar to how people in this thread have argued "lots" of titles on XBox used volumes, even though they were very scarce in the big picture.

I'm not saying they didn't use volumes, but he was very specific about using one of the vector units (I think it was vu0) to create a texture from the shadow.

On PS2, there was no physical stencil-buffer, you used a color buffer to count, and then in final pass apply it through a texture blend or alpha-test.
As a side-effect, that meant majority of titles that used volumes also post-processed them in some way (soft-shadows) and/or used a different rendering resolution for them.
SH3 rendered shadows lower-res then Frame-buffer, which also gave them a softer look - but the aliasing is all in screen-space, independent from shadow-camera distance. The first commercial title(on any platform afaik) to use soft-shadow like that was actually ICO (together with self-shadowing and all).

 

[DeadlyNinja]

I found an interview with High Voltage with some talk about normal mapping on the Wii. This part struck me as rather odd.

Um...the Wii specifically? Technically no, only because we are the first game that I even know of that we've investigated, a lot of these other games that are actually doing real-time normal mapping on the system. I know a couple other games claim that they did it, and we looked into that, but we haven't actually seen it actually happen in real-time on the Wii. So we have a lot of those effects going. We also have the real time normal mapping, the full bloom HDR type lighting, we have an advanced rendering and lighting system you know.

So Dewy's Adventure isn't doing it in realtime? What does that even mean? I thought they were all done in realtime.

Here's the interview: http://www.n-philes.com/news/4634/interview-high-voltage-software/

 

[SG79]

That's the thing, Nintendo did in fact pursue 3rd parties. You probably don't get my Resident Evil 4 example. Back in 2002 or 2001, Nintendo paid Capcom promised 5 exclusive Gamecube games. They were Dead Phoenix, PN03, Killer 7, Viewtiful Joe, and RE4. Eventually, Capcom screw Nintendo over in the entire deal. Dead Phoenix got canned, and the other 3 came out on PS2. Hell, Capcom announced RE4 PS2 just a week or so before the GC release just to stifle sales of the GC version.

There wasn't an exclusivity deal of any sort formally. After struggling with the development of DMC1 (which was initially the first version of RE4), Shinji Mikami being the head of the R&D 4, decided to pursue a developer friendly console. Whatever happened between him and someone at SCEI was nasty enough that in April 02, he trashed Sony and pretty much called them thieves during a radio interview.

Being Capcom's then-golden boy, management let him have his way but things didn't turn out well commercially so the plans fell apart. He was eventually demoted by late 2002. Things got messier and to make an already long (and off topic) story short, he has his own company and is working with Platinum (ex Capcom staff as well). One of his projects is for EA oddly enough.

During all that time of GC "exclusivity, they did develop a great engine for the GC that was modified for the final version of RE4. Initially, RE4's environments were claustrophobic like the older games. Check out the gameplay footage that Capcom included with a bonus DVD in Japan:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWpEE_5pDzQ

Incidentally, it's the same engine that Capcom still uses for their GC games. I'd say it's about time to build a new one instead of revising a 6 year old engine (with roots going back to 2001).

 

[Mobius1aic]

I remember seeing that footage a while back, very impressive looking, lots of character animation in Leon's hair and clothing as well as copious amounts of bump mapping it seems, and not to mention those are some really nice looking shadow maps though I don't see self-shadowing.

 

[Fafalada]

I remember seeing that footage a while back, very impressive looking

It's a good example that Art>>Tech was true last gen too. They were doing even less then SH2 with lighting (no self-shadows, no environment shadows, per-vertex dynamic lights/flashlight) but you couldn't say the video is dramatically worse for it.

 

[Mobius1aic]

It's a good example that Art>>Tech was true last gen too. They were doing even less then SH2 with lighting (no self-shadows, no environment shadows, per-vertex dynamic lights/flashlight) but you couldn't say the video is dramatically worse for it.

No it looks wonderful, and yes art has taken a backseat to technology these days to our dismay.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

Ok, seems like self shadows will be used in Silent Hill. They are saying even the snow flakes will cast shadows.

IGN: Tell us about the 3D engine you've created for Wii. It's really impressive.

Mark Simmons: One key new feature we've added is the streaming world. Our Silent Hill is now one large joined up town. There's no loading screens or long fades to black screens while the disc is accessed anymore. The creatures in the nightmares can now follow you across the entire location, the doors are no longer barriers for them. Our snow is amazing. Every snow flake is illuminated by the flashlight and casts a shadow onto the environment. It feels amazing just to point your flashlight into the sky and watch the snow falling down through the flashlights' beam. Our dynamic ice effects are amazing too, we can freeze up an entire street with lamp posts twisting over, park benches buckling in two, and whole buildings getting encased in amazing refractive glacial ice forms.

Sam Barlow: It's a great engine. It's been worked up in house and has a lot of great render features thanks to James Sharman, one of our elite programming brains. We have a ton of effects which I haven't seen elsewhere, or done quite as well. The lighting is an obvious hook -- full shadowing off everything, self shadowing on characters. Even the snowflakes cast shadows. Then there's the suite of ice shaders that are better than anything else I've seen on Wii. This should look like a 360/PS3 game running in SD. That's the idea.

IGN: We were blown away by what we saw. The main character holds a flashlight and the lighting is amazing. Tell us what you're doing to achieve this look.

Sam Barlow: The flashlight is amazing for two reasons. One, the tech is very clever. Two, the controls -- having the Wiimote become your flashlight -- just push it to the fore. You can play a PS3/360 game with cool lighting, but that lighting is mapped to static lights in the world or to a strafing character. You ever noticed how 360/PS3 games often go out of their way to show you how good their lighting is? The classic example is a light behind a wall fan, that kind of thing. We don't have to do that because the light is in your hand. It's awesome.

 

[Akumajou]

My answer is simple, using ID's 3d engine or Vicarious vision's port job, no, it would not look as good...

Getting its own custom and Wii console specific 3d engine and Doom 3+ RoE would look nearly identical of not better than the PC versions because it would not use programming practices that depend on various PC components as well as plenty of very vocal marketing.

you know this topic makes me laugh a little so I would pose my own question before you.

Do you think that if Doom 3 would have been reprogrammed using the Halo 2 engine that it would have been on the same level as XBox's Doom 3?

 

[fearsomepirate]

It's a good example that Art>>Tech was true last gen too. They were doing even less then SH2 with lighting (no self-shadows, no environment shadows, per-vertex dynamic lights/flashlight) but you couldn't say the video is dramatically worse for it.

There's a lot more to lighting than just whether or not you've got shadow volumes everywhere and self-shadowing. And if the flashlight in SH2 is anything like in 3 (I've only played 3), it's per-vertex, too.

 

[TapamN]

those are some really nice looking shadow maps though I don't see self-shadowing.

If it's not self shadowing, it's not really a shadow map. They just render-to-texture a silhouette of the character (with white as the uncovered areas, and black or grey as the character) and project the texture onto the scene to have it darken whatever is beneath it. If you're not careful, it's easy to project the shadow onto things on the wrong side of the light. (e.g. if you're projecting the shadow straight down onto the floor, it's easy to accidentally project the shadow onto the ceiling as well.)

Shadow maps do a render-to-texture of the character and store depth values. That gets projected onto the scene and character, and then checked to see whether something is behind the character or not.

 

[SG79]

And if the flashlight in SH2 is anything like in 3 (I've only played 3), it's per-vertex, too.

It is. I believe SH2 didn't have any self-shadowing either unlike SH3.

 

[Fafalada]

There's a lot more to lighting than just whether or not you've got shadow volumes everywhere and self-shadowing.

Which is what I already said - ie. Art>Tech.

As for Flashlight - I brought it up in relation to the bumpmap comments. SH series was vertex based on PS2, but not on XBox.

I believe SH2 didn't have any self-shadowing either

IIRC it did, just not nearly as accurate or detailed as SH3 on characters. Backgrounds were mostly correct though.