Cube maxed out???

[Paul]

XB has more potential for growth imho. Especially with polybump, shadows and whatnot DX8 pixel featues, which were sparringly used in earlier games.

Halo 2 will be just about the best Xbox will be able to handle. Hell its already looking to be a struggle keeping a solid 30fps with the game. Not that there is anything wrong with that, H2 looks real nice.

There really isn't any hidden power when it comes to Xbox, it's using pretty standard PC parts that we all know is capable of. You exploit it pretty quickly.

 

[Fox5]

Even with dx8 and harddrive streaming largely unused in pc games?

 

[chaphack]

Halo 2 will be just about the best Xbox will be able to handle.

H2 will *probably* be just the best *FPS* Xbox will be able to handle.

Hell its already looking to be a struggle keeping a solid 30fps with the game.

Looking very smooth in all videos so far.

There really isn't any hidden power when it comes to Xbox, it's using pretty standard PC parts that we all know is capable of. You exploit it pretty quickly.

ERP might just be *more* suitable to tell us more.

Even with dx8 and harddrive streaming largely unused in pc games?

DX8 features werent that commonly used during the early 2001/2 days. I like to see it as Xbox being a little pushing hand for DX8 stuffs in today games.

 

[Fafalada]

DX8 features werent that commonly used during the early 2001/2 days.

Except that even the crappiest games like Shrek wounded up using global shadowing&selfshadowing, normal mapped environments (perhaps characters also I haven't really paid attention that much) etc, but nah, that doesn't mean anything was used since the games didn't have a DX8 sticker and the respective feature list with DX8 references attached to their discs did they?
Come now Chap - it's not what you want to SEE, it's what you want to be TOLD you are seeing. Unless XBox dev comes out and technobabbles to you about DX8 features for an hour, you'll just glaze over them no matter how much they are used.

 

[chaphack]

Except that even the crappiest games like Shrek wounded up using global shadowing&selfshadowing, normal mapped environments (perhaps characters also I haven't really paid attention that much) etc,

Except IIRC, Shrek started life on the Xbox, not to mention its more a small techie demo than game(ala Bouncer). If you could take more note of my previous posts, it might just make better sense.

Still faf, whats your take on this PS2/GC/XB mazzzxxed out thing?

 

[notAFanB]

we pretty much know what the xbox (and by extension DX8) is very capable of. the only issue here is that u should see much more prevalence of said features on the xbox front, thus no xbox box game really suprises me because I am aware of what the limits are.

 

[Grall]

Even with dx8 and harddrive streaming largely unused in pc games?

Neither of these will make the game run faster. In fact, DX8 features are only likely to do the opposite. Hardwired t&l runs faster on GF3/4 than vertex shaders, and pixel shaders will take their toll on fillrate too.


*G*

 

[darkblu]

not wanting to hijack the thread, but i have to disgree on a couple of points here, fox5

Blade- I don't see how people say soul calibur maxed out dreamcast, the polygon counts are low, the backgrounds are often 2d, special effects are basic, it doesn't really play to any of the dreamcast's strengths..

SC hardly maxed out the DC; you should recall it was originally expected about the time of the console's launch, but did not appear before the next year.

certainly it was a very flashy game, and one of the sharpest games on the dreamcast, but with a major decrease in clarity shenmue 1 and 2 added many more things, and with a minor decrease doa2 and plenty of other games looked far better.

re DOA2, are you sure you didn't mean 'far more plastic' -- somebody should tell the guys at tecmo to tune down the specularity in their engines - that plastic phong look has been out of fashion for really long time now.

Heck, even when soul calibur came out, I didn't think it was that good looking, as it looked like a psx game put through some decent hardware acceleration, and didn't really look better than killer instinct gold, though that was a prerendered 2d game with 3d effects.

how could you compare IQ-wise the perfectly sound, realistic appearance of both stages and characters and crisp visualls of SC, bringing nothing but sheer delight to the senses, to the look and feel of a MK3-class game? heck, i'm a big fan of MK (moreso of SF) myself (having spent quite some time & money at the arcades playing those) but the visual sensation from a top-class 3D fighter is something no 2D figther can achieve, for the depth-ridden apperance of the characters in 2D gives your senses the 'cartoony' feel, no matter how well prerendered those chars may be. that said, some of the early 3d fighters may be seen as visually inferior to a brillinat-artwork 2D fighter, but SC is not one of those early 3D fighters.

Well, I remember doa2 and killer instinct looking better in motion....

SC has the second best motion capturing in a RT environment (heck, even including prerendered environments) i've ever seen, standing right after DOA3 in this respect. the character demonstrations of SC are nothing short of stunning. SC2 does not even get close to SC in this respect (damn, i'm still trying to swallow the disappointment..)

hell, i rememer when watching square's FF:TSW for ther first time i felt sorry that square had not hired namco's SC team to do the motion capturing for that movie!

in this repsect, how you can compare the spatial fluidity of a superbly motion-captured, 60fps 3D fighter to a game like killer instinct is beyond me

however I'd still say soul calibur looks very much like a pc port of a psx game except for the higher quality textures and background, and possibly better than doa2's models, though doa2's models had better physics(not just on the...bouncy parts) and animation that made the characters look better. However, soul calibur 2 is clearly better than soul calibur 1 in like every way.

would you care to name (and provide some backup material, too) just one PC figther that looks and feels anything near SC? and no, xbox fighters do not count. thank you in advance.

 

[Fox5]

Feels? I was just going on graphics. And I can't even name 1 recently released pc fighter, just that if soul calibur had been ported from the arcades to the pc, it would have looked like it did on dreamcast.

Well, the character models look about what the psx could do(minus the texturing, but the arcade hardware had a lot more ram than the psx) and lack skinning, the stages are flat, boring, and small, most of the backgrounds are 2d, and many of the special effects are 2d(look at the screenshot I posted, pretty sure those yellow explosion things are 2d, not sure if sc2 is any different but it looks better).

DOA2 has a major advantage in stages, a slight advantage in character detail(both polygon counts and textures, most noticable when viewed up close, the soul calibur faces just look so flat)

The way I see soul calibur is the way I see halflife with 3d rendering, it still pales in comparision to games that were made sepcifically for the hardware, even if it does look good and has many impressive things going for it. It's like taking quake 3 at 640x480 versus halflife at 1024x768, some people may not like quake 3 at such a low res, but it is still more impressive than halflife. This is a bit extreme though, as the difference between halflife and quake 3 is greater than soul calibur to doa2(I think), but the resolutions are also a bigger difference than the clarity difference between the 2 games.

 

[Paul]

H2 will *probably* be just the best *FPS* Xbox will be able to handle.

Best looking game.

Looking very smooth in all videos so far.

30fps.


There is nothing hidden when it comes to the Xbox architecture, really not huge amounts to improve upon as people have been developing for PC based systems for years.

 

[cthellis42]

"Maxed" is rather hard to claim for anything, because even if there's not too much headroom to stretch from, say, a Performance Analyzer standpoint (and sadly we see little information coming out about that ) these is always room to stretch creatively and artistically. Since the end user is blind to what work is actually being done, that is MOST of what will impact on us graphically. Devs can stretch a strength to impressive proportions while downplaying other ends, and we may not even notice.

I think we will mainly see the same thing as ever, with the solid developers continuing to invest more time and effort on top of their old achievements and push out even better games.

About the time we'll see platforms "maxed out" is when developer attention gets shifted primarily to the next generation, I think.

 

[chaphack]

Best looking game.

Says Mr Paul himself.

30fps.

Good enough considering amount of stuffs H2 throws at you, from the graphics to the scale to the AI to the audio. I have doubts whether any other FPS on competitive console can even sniff a whiff of whats H2 does on Xbox.

There is nothing hidden when it comes to the Xbox architecture, really not huge amounts to improve upon as people have been developing for PC based systems for years.

Again, says Mr Paul himself x2.

Still, Xbox architecture does what it is needed to do and does it well. No point having some unorthodox innards in which possibly resulting in medicore graphics. Though, admittedly it is nice for bragging rights. My 3Deee is DifferenT!!!

 

[notAFanB]

Still, Xbox architecture does what it is needed to do and does it well. No point having some unorthodox innards in which possibly resulting in medicore graphics.

non DX does not mean unorthadox. still we can agree that DX/xbox is pretty much exposed for all to see which can only be good for devs.

 

[darkblu]

Feels? I was just going on graphics. And I can't even name 1 recently released pc fighter, just that if soul calibur had been ported from the arcades to the pc, it would have looked like it did on dreamcast.

ported now or back in 1998? - i pretty much doubt that in the latter case it would have looked like it did on the DC.

Well, the character models look about what the psx could do(minus the texturing, but the arcade hardware had a lot more ram than the psx) and lack skinning, the stages are flat, boring, and small, most of the backgrounds are 2d, and many of the special effects are 2d(look at the screenshot I posted, pretty sure those yellow explosion things are 2d, not sure if sc2 is any different but it looks better).

• SC does not lack skinning. AAMOF its skinning is fairly decent.
• stages are flat at and close to the action area but they have sufficient eye candy in the background. and i think that's the way fighter stages should be -- having overdone stages with tons of background distractions and frequent occluders popping infront of the camera then doing different tricks to avoid them as applying translucency/panning the cam never seemed a good idea to me. about SC stages being boring - they never occured to me as such -- they all have a distinctive arena feel (as opposed to a catfight in the ladies room in some other titles)
• furthest backgrounds are _always_ 2D. aside from that i can't think of a single SC stage which does not have sufficient 3D scnerery in the background around the stage.
• highly translucent SFX in any 3D game are most often build up of 2D sprites.

DOA2 has a major advantage in stages, a slight advantage in character detail(both polygon counts and textures, most noticable when viewed up close, the soul calibur faces just look so flat)

they look a bit anime-like, but definitely now flat. or at least not more than any other top-notch 3D fighter, even the latest ones.

The way I see soul calibur is the way I see halflife with 3d rendering, it still pales in comparision to games that were made sepcifically for the hardware, even if it does look good and has many impressive things going for it. It's like taking quake 3 at 640x480 versus halflife at 1024x768, some people may not like quake 3 at such a low res, but it is still more impressive than halflife. This is a bit extreme though, as the difference between halflife and quake 3 is greater than soul calibur to doa2(I think), but the resolutions are also a bigger difference than the clarity difference between the 2 games.

well, and the way i see SC is as being the best public-released fighter with weapons up to date (SC2 was a step back, sadly). btw, it was originally developed as a Naomi game - should be fairly native to the DC IMO.

 

[Jabjabs]

Is xbox maxed? It depends if Microsoft will allow it or not, if they release the assembly coding abilitys of the machine or not, that's all the question is.

 

[Fox5]

well, and the way i see SC is as being the best public-released fighter with weapons up to date (SC2 was a step back, sadly). btw, it was originally developed as a Naomi game - should be fairly native to the DC IMO.

SC2 was everything SC was plus more. Unless you're talking about the story, I can't see how it was a step back.
BTW, I'm fairly certain I saw Soul Calibur on the PSX arcade hardware, system 256 or 128 or whatever it was. Heck, I think in gamespy's recent virtua fighter 4 versus soul calibur article they say that.

 

[zurich]

SC1 was System 11 IIRC. Fugly as hell, but still fun!

 

[darkblu]

well, and the way i see SC is as being the best public-released fighter with weapons up to date (SC2 was a step back, sadly). btw, it was originally developed as a Naomi game - should be fairly native to the DC IMO.

SC2 was everything SC was plus more. Unless you're talking about the story, I can't see how it was a step back.
BTW, I'm fairly certain I saw Soul Calibur on the PSX arcade hardware, system 256 or 128 or whatever it was. Heck, I think in gamespy's recent virtua fighter 4 versus soul calibur article they say that.

i guess you just haven't spent enough time with those two. for one, SC2 has an "upgraded" feet and torso movement syncing system (probably to accomodate for the uneven and bumpy floors) and that has sent the precise effect from the motion capturing to hell. generally, the whole motion fluidity of the game has gone to hell: the original sense of fluidity from SC is replaced in SC2 by a sense of 'snappiness' typical for a 2D fighter. not to mention that that "upgrade" introduced bugs where you can see body parts and weapons intersecting each other (something unthinkable in the previous version).

re that arcade port, i too have seen it, and its visuals are nowhere near the Naomi/DC levels, as zurich rightfully noted (stuff like totaly-point sampled, low res frames somehow fail to induce the same effect as the DC visuals). ok, i'm not sure which arcade version came first and which is a port, but i've read a couple of interviews with the namco team where they were talking about how much effort and time it took them to develop the naomi version, which inclines me to think that if the naomi version was a port from the old arcade system it must have been more of a 'grounds up' port.

 

[Reznor007]

Actually Soul Calibur 1 was on System 12. Basically enhanced PSX1 hardware(more RAM/VRAM and custom sound chip). Soul Edge was System11 (standard PS1 hardware with custom sound chip). I have a Soul Edge PCB myself, and yes, it is beyond fugly

 

[Fox5]

Was there even a Naomi Soul Calibur? I've never heard of it, however, Dreamcast and Naomi hardware are basically the same, maybe someone mixed the words up. It would have been nice for a Naomi version, but I've never seen it, never heard of it, it wasn't in Gamespy's comparision thing(if it existed it must have bombed or something), and I don't know of any other Namco games on sega hardware...