DeathKnight
Regular
Looks quite a bit granier in some areas and the shadowmaps seem to be extremely lowres.
Tagrineth said:DeathKnight said:
Those are STENCIL shadows, not maps...
But yeah looks like the buffer they used for storing them is very low-res... just as I suspected... the main reason this stuff wasn't used sooner was storage.
stencil shadows
if it's the case I wonder how they deal with the lattice (not sure it's the good word hope you understand though), it should generate a very complex silouhette and it would be very expensive to do it with shadow volumes. Even in Doom III the lattice doesn't have a shadow. I was pretty sure it was shadow maps like the Xbox version (well lower resolution shadow maps of course
)Edit : after a little reflexion (it's very late here in France
) it appears to me that the lattice must be an alpha texture so Stencil shadows shouldnt work at all !marconelly!
Veteran
SC on Xbox uses shadow maps and projected geometry (depending on the situation). I think it's been confirmed it doesn't use shadow volumes but I'm not sure.
some new vids, pics impressions...
http://gamespot.com/gamespot/stories/screenindex/0,10866,2908559,00.html
http://gamespot.com/gamespot/stories/screenindex/0,10866,2908559,00.html
marconelly!
Veteran
Gamespot has three high res videos of the PS2 version. It looks visibly worse than the Xbox version, but overall, UBI did a surprisingly good job. Things that made the Xbox version great looking are, as far as I could see, still there, just scaled down.
DeathKnight
Regular
Can you say eww?
marconelly!
Veteran
Thermo and night vision modes actaully look quite simillar to the xbox version. What is so 'eww' about it?
G
Guest
Guest
From the videos, I guess the game will look low res on PS2. ICO Cell?
Hi Tag,
I've played about 10 hours of SC on XBOX and two times the PC demo and I'm pretty sure they use shadow maps for most shadows. On PC with a higher resolution than 640x480 the aliasing of (relative) low-resolution shadow maps makes them look very different than stencil shadows (ala Doom3) to me.
marconelly:
Have you played SC? (honest question)
I've played about 10 hours of SC on XBOX and two times the PC demo and I'm pretty sure they use shadow maps for most shadows. On PC with a higher resolution than 640x480 the aliasing of (relative) low-resolution shadow maps makes them look very different than stencil shadows (ala Doom3) to me.
There are similar effects of missing or "wrong" shadows in the XBOX and PC SC.
marconelly:
I second that. Those modes should be IMO the least different looking effects of both versions.
DeathKnight
Regular
I'm guessing you've never played Splinter Cell on the Xbox because there's a rather large difference in visual quality between that PS2 screen and the Xbox version with thermal vision.marconelly! said:
marconelly!
Veteran
Actually, I have played it, and I've seen the high res video of PS2 version that shows thermal mode. It's simpler, but not strikingly different.
Of course, when you do side by side comparision, the differences are much easier to spot. Even then, I don't see what is so 'eww' about the PS2 thermal mode.
marconelly! said:
Well, I would't call it "eww", since it's still quite impressive (at least on screenshots, anyone knows a mirror for the movie without such thing as "Gamespot Complete"?).
Guessing by the screenshots, I'd say that the PS2 version uses a (kinda gouraudish?) per-vertex shading, while the XBOX/PC-Version creates this effect per-pixel. (Errrm. Yes. I know, my English is horrible.)
It doesn't. The shadowing was pretty much a mishmash of projected shadowmaps, shadowbuffers and vertex lighting.
To be fair, stencil shadows would be a much better fit for PS2 then shadow buffers (imo) but that would involve significant reworking of art assets, not to even mention different limitations and results you'd get with that kind of change.
Either way, the most recent shots seem to show they are indeed still using the shadow buffers too.
Of course, considering it's unreasonable to just normally draw modelled fences and tree leaves, let alone look for their silhouettes
But I was speaking more in general, shadow buffers already have enough aliasing problems even when you have z-texture support, and it only gets worse when you emulate that with 8bit channel encoding.
Though I guess for a game that mostly happens in closed spaces it's not too bad.
But I was speaking more in general, shadow buffers already have enough aliasing problems even when you have z-texture support, and it only gets worse when you emulate that with 8bit channel encoding.
Though I guess for a game that mostly happens in closed spaces it's not too bad.
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