Climax: First next gen game development engine

[Phil]

Nick Laslett:

Renderware is better than most in-house developed engines.

That in itself might be true, taking poor developing efforts into account. It is a fact though that very good in-house game-engine/tools can tap much further into the hardware than a middleware could. How much is really up to the dev and a lot of respect goes to Criterion for making RenderWare as good as it is. Looking at games like Jak II or ZOE2/Metal Gear Solid 2/3 and I think it is clear that they are above what any middleware will possibly achieve.


London-boy:

Burnout2 was pretty though... but yeah, enough PR.... 30million polys on PS2??? no way... and not with a middleware for sure...
JAK2 must be pushing around a hell of a lot of polys and i dont think it goes further than 15 million and thats being optimistic.
none of the current gen consoles can push 30 million polys in game, not even PS2, unless the game is texture-less...

If the middleware specifies in geometry, I don't see why 30 million polygons should not be possible? Anyway, I am pretty certain there are demos that push as high as 30 million polys easily - you'll have to check out the playstation2-linux site for more information (though I doubt that there are official numbers around).

As for Jak II. The game uses quite a smart LOD engine to reduce the amount of geometry that is drawn, so it probably isn't that much (way less than what the things on screen are actually made of).

 

[London Geezer]

As for Jak II. The game uses quite a smart LOD engine to reduce the amount of geometry that is drawn, so it probably isn't that much (way less than what the things on screen are actually made of).

Hey Phil, hope u're gonna be online for a while cause i'm bored here at work (errrmmmm) and need to discuss about anything ahahhaha...

anyway, back to topic...

Yeah the LOD in Jak2 is pretty neat, still i'm pretty certain it acts on textures first, then on polys if there is a need. That means, polys that are far away are still drawn, but they are untextured. And we all know that Ps2 feeds on untextured polygons and churns them out like there was no tomorrow so it's rather easy for the hardware....
Sometimes there is just so much properly modelled 3D detail on screen it's frightening... And u can see it's too much for poor old PS2 at times, from the tearing that occurring...
Also i must say Jak2 also has some of the most detailed textures on PS2, especially in the interiors, some textures are higher res than most Ps2 game i've seen. And i've seen them all more or less.