High Voltage Software's Quantum3 Engine for Wii

[sfried]

http://wii.ign.com/articles/867/867498p1.html

What is perhaps more intriguing is that High Voltage has built a custom engine designed to really push the Wii hardware's graphic capabilities. The game-maker's "Quantum3" game engine brings polish to The Conduit by way of a "full 16-TEV stage material pipeline using up to eight texture sources and a host of innovative blend operations."

In short, it allows the developer to create graphic effects normally seen on other consoles with vertex and pixel shaders – specifically, dynamic bump-mapping (via tangent space normals or embossing), reflection and refraction (via real-time cube or spherical environmental maps), light / shadow maps, projected texture lights, specular and Fresnel effects, emissive and iridescent materials, advanced alpha blends, light beams / shafts, gloss and detail mapping, seamless resource streaming, projected shadows, heat distortion and motion blur, interactive water with dual-wave channels and complex surface effects, animated textures, and more.

So, we know it's no UE3, but it looks far better than Retro's own Metroid Prime 3 engine.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Looks interesting. Hopefully the game gets a publisher and they can finish it. The tech demo looks pretty good for the Wii. Would be nice to see a higher quality video.

 

[sfried]

The high resolution version is on IGN's video section. (Unless you're talking about a full 854x480 downloadable video)

 

[DeadlyNinja]

sfried, you didn't even quote the best part.

In short, it allows the developer to create graphic effects normally seen on other consoles with vertex and pixel shaders – specifically, dynamic bump-mapping (via tangent space normals or embossing), reflection and refraction (via real-time cube or spherical environmental maps), light / shadow maps, projected texture lights, specular and Fresnel effects, emissive and iridescent materials, advanced alpha blends, light beams / shafts, gloss and detail mapping, seamless resource streaming, projected shadows, heat distortion and motion blur, interactive water with dual-wave channels and complex surface effects, animated textures, and more. Readers may not know what all this technical jargon means – that's not the problem. The problem is that too many Wii developers don't know what it means, either. (Zing?)

Zing? Like hell!

BTW, if you watched the tech demo, it seems that they're implying the engine will be licensed to other developers. The demo kind of reminds me of the little benchmark test used in FEAR. It would be nice to have 2x AA though. I wonder if they can implement that and still keep it at 60fps.

So what's the verdict on this? Impressive or not? Do you guys think it's matching up to your expectations of what Wii games should look like based on what we know?

What's the 16 stage TEV thing, though? Can someone clarify this for me?

 

[pjbliverpool]

So what's the verdict on this? Impressive or not? Do you guys think it's matching up to your expectations of what Wii games should look like based on what we know?

I would love to say yes but when you look at games lik Doom 3, Riddick and HL2 on the Xbox, this doesn't look that great at all IMO. And shouldn't Wii at least be able to pull off Xbox level graphics?

 

[archangelmorph]

I would love to say yes but when you look at games lik Doom 3, Riddick and HL2 on the Xbox, this doesn't look that great at all IMO. And shouldn't Wii at least be able to pull off Xbox level graphics?

It's been on my mind since the very first Wii game I saw..

Really, SMG is probably the most technically advanced Wii game (that actually looks good) IMO & it's the combination of effects & adaquate poly count models that really help it shine..

 

[fearsomepirate]

Some of the shots look pretty good, but it's way too early of a stage to say it looks better than Prime 3. There are too many untextured surfaces and areas that have yet to have any light maps or anything applied. The enemy soldier model looks like it's from a Dreamcast title. OTOH, this is pretty impressive:

Hope everything in the final result has that quality.

 

[Color me Dan]

I don't see how any of those shots even surpass MP3, let alone RE4, which I've personally set as the low-bar for the Wii

 

[sfried]

It's obvious that High Voltage needs improvement as far as the art direction is concerned. Alot of the aliens in some pics look too jarring from the backgrounds. And the guns could use more work. Many of their modelers could also pre-bake some color shades just to get that unified look, and the library stage looks downright out of The World is Not Enough for N64. (Perhaps that's where another developer could step in?)

That said, IGN does mention they are aiming for 60fps.

This pic doesn't look too bad. But again, their asthetic level design itself needs some work. Alot of these shaders are poorly implemented.

Anyway, we'll see how this turns out compared to what others have in store. Let's not forget Factor 5 is making a Wii game, and they pretty much know the system inside and out.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

I don't see how any of those shots even surpass MP3, let alone RE4, which I've personally set as the low-bar for the Wii

It's not the art, but the technology that far surpasses either of those games. I don't think they even used bump mapping in MP3, let alone normal mapping. There are tons of lighting effects although I think MP3 did have some cool lighting too.

It's obvious that High Voltage needs improvement as far as the art direction is concerned. Alot of the aliens in some pics look too jarring from the backgrounds. And the guns could use more work. Many of their modelers could also pre-bake some color shades just to get that unified look, and the library stage looks downright out of The World is Not Enough for N64. (Perhaps that's where another developer could step in?)

Yup, the art needs some work. It looks like some of the screens don't even have most of their tech in place yet.

That sucker could seriously use some EMBM. Right now, they're only painted textures (blurry one at that) to try and pass it off as detail.

I would love to say yes but when you look at games lik Doom 3, Riddick and HL2 on the Xbox, this doesn't look that great at all IMO. And shouldn't Wii at least be able to pull off Xbox level graphics?

I agree with you on Doom 3, but not HL2 and Riddick. HL2 lost most of the bump mapping in the game, and what I saw of Riddick is nowhere near Doom 3. Doom 3 was the most complete out of the 3 games. It had pretty much everything the PC version had.

 

[swaaye]

Hmm.. It might look a little better than RE4. Depends on how dynamic the lighting/shadowing is, IMO. Textures and models aren't really very exciting, but what can you expect out of Wii.

 

[sfried]

Notice how the 4 back bugs are lit the same? Low-poly pipes and some ugly texturing on the ceiling.

Yes. This is where good textures can faint the eyes into percieving the level as being evenly lit or not. The problem is that the modelers have a bit of the...well...Silicon Knights syndrome, where to some extent they're relying too much on the technology to do the work for them. In the end, you have these really odd colour choices that just clash with each other in parts that would've otherwise look pretty solid.

IMO. Textures and models aren't really very exciting, but what can you expect out of Wii.

See Smash Bros. Brawl for a good example of where art direction can actually make a game look detailed without the need of much tech. It also has some of the best detailed textures for a Wii game.

While I wouldn't call the developers lazy, I'd say they need to have better modelers and skinners.

 

[wsippel]

Anyway, we'll see how this turns out compared to what others have in store. Let's not forget Factor 5 is making a Wii game, and they pretty much know the system inside and out.

Factor5 will definitely push the hardware quite a bit. I'm also very interested in Renegade Kids Wii engine, those guys do very impressive stuff on DS. And I believe id Software and Valve are working on Wii engines, too. Steve Nix already hinted at something, and claimed that, whatever they'll do, it'll blow everything else on Wii out of the water.

 

[Farid]

What's the 16 stage TEV thing, though? Can someone clarify this for me?

The TEV is a part of the rendering pipeline of Hollywood (and Flipper). The developers decided to throw that technical term, and many others, just for good marketing measure. And to clarify what it says, it means that their engine supports multi-texturing with certain materials using up-to 8 different maps.

Now, about the game itself, some of the pictures remind me of Killzone and others remind me of an old Acclaim N64/PS game Armorines.

I'll be honest and say that the artwork seems extremely uneven to me, quality wise. Only the screenshots showing the library/city hall map look actually good to me. Judging from the articles about this project, it's still early in the development process, so there's still a lot room for improvement. Let's hope the final game looks more like library level and let's also hope they redesign some of the weapons and enemies shown so far.

Concerning the fact that High Voltage Soft is still looking for a publisher. I wouldn't worry too much about that. HVS is not a newcomer in this industry -which gives it a plus in the "experience" category- and the devhouse has already released a few products on the market -- a big plus landing into the "reliability" folder of any publisher.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

The TEV is a part of the rendering pipeline of Hollywood (and Flipper). The developers decided to throw that technical term, and many others, just for good marketing measure. And to clarify what it says, it means that their engine supports multi-texturing with certain materials using up-to 8 different maps.

Yeah, I know the Wii should at least be capable of 8 different texture maps, it was the weird 16 level TEVs that got me. It really did sounded like something to randomly threw out to confuse the public while trying to sound smart.

 

[Mobius1aic]

People at Gamespot have been all over this the passed day. Right now I'm just impressed with their engine they've developed. The game screens look alright, and it's obvious the game is in VERY early development. The Quantum 3 engine I think is just what I was waiting for: a real engine developed for the Wii specifically to get everything it can out of the Wii's hardware. I was hoping for Factor 5 to be the ones to do it, but apparently someone beat them to it. The feature set even said support for self-shadowing which I bet is going to be really difficult for the Wii to pull off efficiently. Whatever goes down, I really hope this game does shine and leads to more Wii games that are actually nice to look at because Metroid 3 failed at that. All they did was go over the top with bloom lighting.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

Oh, I just found some old discussion from 2006 with ERP talking about the Gamecube having only an 8 stage combiner here and someone asking what would be possible if it was upgraded to 16 stages here. I thought that talk about 16 stage combiner sounded familiar. Although I probably under the impression that the x number stage combiner equals how many layers of textures. Let's forget what it means to have 16 stages and think about this -- could it be that they just gave away a small leak about another mystery to the Wii's GPU? That is assuming what ERP said back then about 8 stages being correct. It certainly isn't a mind-blowing upgrade, but still an upgrade never the less.

 

[wsippel]

Oh, I just found some old discussion from 2006 with ERP talking about the Gamecube having only an 8 stage combiner here and someone asking what would be possible if it was upgraded to 16 stages here. I thought that talk about 16 stage combiner sounded familiar. Although I probably under the impression that the x number stage combiner equals how many layers of textures. Let's forget what it means to have 16 stages and think about this -- could it be that they just gave away a small leak about another mystery to the Wii's GPU? That is assuming what ERP said back then about 8 stages being correct. It certainly isn't a mind-blowing upgrade, but still an upgrade never the less.

According to Julian Eggebrecht, the Gamecube already had a 16 stage TEV pipeline:

Planet GameCube: In a recent IGNinsider article, Greg Buchner revealed that Flipper can do some unique things because of the ways that the different texture layers can interact. Can you elaborate on this feature? Have you used it? Do you know if the effects it allows are reproducible on other architectures (at decent framerates)?

Julian Eggebrecht: He was probably referring to the TEV pipeline. Imagine it like an elaborate switchboard that makes the wildest combinations of textures and materials possible. The TEV pipeline combines up to 8 textures in up to 16 stages in one go. Each stage can apply a multitude of functions to the texture - obvious examples of what you do with the TEV stages would be bump-mapping or cel-shading. The TEV pipeline is completely under programmer control, so the more time you spend on writing elaborate shaders for it, the more effects you can achieve. We just used the obvious effects in Rogue Leader with the targeting computer and the volumetric fog variations being the most unusual usage of TEV. In a second generation game we’ll obviously focus on more complicated applications.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/specialArt.cfm?artid=1906

 

[ArturNOW]

It would have looked astonishing in 2002... on pair with DX 8...

 

[DeadlyNinja]

According to Julian Eggebrecht, the Gamecube already had a 16 stage TEV pipeline:


http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/specialArt.cfm?artid=1906

I guess we can blame ERP being one of them lousy 3rd party developers.

In all seriousness, I wonder if this new engine plus whatever Factor 5 will come up with will shame other 3rd parties into putting more work into their games. I figured it was sooner or later that somebody decides to show off their skills and get their time in the spotlight. I mean, look at MOHH2 for the Wii -- it's fundamentally a lousy game, but the controls are excellent, thus putting the game in the spotlight.