High Voltage Software's Quantum3 Engine for Wii

The artwork's been terrible since day one, and the gameplay looks generic like most shooters, but the guns are very cool. I love the weird zippy blue balls that fly around and the homing (?) laser that flew in an arc. It moved too fast to show off much of anything, but I thought the guns could use better shaders. It doesn't even look like there's dynamic lighting on them.

 

Well it looks alot better in motion than in still shots, that's for sure. At least it's coming together and does look like an Xbox level game in many ways. I really admit though, I really enjoyed watching the trailer, looked exciting, even if the graphics weren't the best. Looks like a lot of fun even if it is generic. I wonder though, how close to a game like FEAR or Doom 3 do you people think the Wii could get to (full dynamic lighting/shadowing)

 

Looks like it's more fleshed out than I thought. The earlier stuff seemed more like proof of concept while this seems like gameplay and world design is mostly developed. I wonder what's up with the little investigative orb? Seems to be hinting at some sort of illuminati/conspiracy-theory plot.

 

Edit -- Ok, this is what I originally wanted to post -- Gyrostarr. It's by the same people who are making Conduit. This is just a WiiWare game.



This was revealed a month ago. I forgot to post it. They even have a video of it in action.

http://wii.ign.com/articles/868/868645p1.html

 

That's what I theorized (and that sounds pretty badass to me!). Game looks fun at least, people I pretty sure will enjoy it immensely.

 

Interesting that he mentioned HDR. I wonder how "super creative" the rest of his methods are, since some of them are things the Cube was specifically designed to do well, and others are things I've seen on other games and talked about in detail on Gamasutra.

What's end-to-end illumination?

 

http://www.thatvideogameblog.com/2008/07/01/interview-condiut-developers-high-voltage-talk-shop/

New interview with HVS

An extract:

TVGB: High Voltage has mentioned before that the Quantum 3 engine allows the use of bump-mapping, but how about normal mapping? There’s been great debate whether this technique can be used extensively on the Wii.

MC: The technique that we’re using to generate the character models are exactly the same for a PS3 or 360 game. All of our models are being built in z-brush and then we’re applying them to the lower res models. What you’re seeing in the game are normal mapped characters. The thing we need to work out is the lighting systems. The more we continue to tweak, the better it will look. I don’t know what the debates are but we are in fact running full normal maps on everything, not just characters.

EN: In the game when you run up next to a wall it clearly has it on it and that’s true of pretty much everything in the game.

TVGB: What about aliasing?

MC: Like everyone, we’re restricted to the 480p resolution that the Wii puts out. As far as dealing with that, we’re coping.

EN: There are some hardware limitations with the system and we’ve said from the start that we want the game to look as close as possible to the 360 and PS3. We can’t somehow do a pack-in that will allow us to kick out at 1080p. It’ll look as pretty as it can look within the resolution.

 

They say normal mapping on every things.
I guess it work like this way.....Just a guess
not really know the math abilty of wii gpu , could be wrong.

A simple diffuse bump process
Use CPU to preprocess every vertex,
IN Wii CPU
1. For ervey vertex , read vertex's tangent binormal and normal
Use those vector to convert the Light Vector to tangent space
2. Put the tangent space light vector as a vertex attribute,
like color or something.
put vec3(2,2,2) and vec3(-1,-1,-1) as a vertex attribute, too.
3. pass the new vertex to gpu

In GPU T&L unit
1. Do vertex Transformation, but no lighting,.....

In GPU pixel/Tex unit
(It has multiple texture stage can do some math....)
1.Read a texel vec3"bump" in normal map
2. mul it by vec3(2,2,2) and add vec3(-1,-1,-1)
than you get the normal XYZ in 1~-1 range.
3. Dotproduct Lightvector and Normal you get the light Intensity .
4. Read a texel, vec3"basemap" in normal map
5. Mul intensity with basemap , you get a diffuse bump normal mapping pixel.


Only two texture sampling and one MADD and one Dot product, one MUL
The math is simple enough, maybe it is possible to do it
in fixed function hardware,

The downside is the lightvector does NOT get normalize per pixel.
So the normal mapping quality may not as good as pixel shader,
but it's look good enough for most people.

If they work like this, The CPU has to do a lot of extra work,
may limite total polygon count.....
Wii cpu was not much faster than Xbox1 cpu
And Xbox has VS unit to perform the vertex job.
So, Wii maybe can do normal mapping , but the polygon count will be limited
(lower than no normal mapping game).

 

Wii can do normal mapping, dewey´s adventure (capcom) uses it.

 

Dewey is from Konami.

 

Yeah, Dewey's Konami. I think that game also uses per-pixel lighting for their normal maps too. At the very least the lighting and overall picture quality looks better than most.

 

That sounds about right. I remember someone saying that to do normal mapping on the GC you have to do it in multilple passes and do the per-vertex calculations on the CPU for tangent space normal maps.

 

Before



After



The gameplay looks very fast paced too! I like my shooters fast paced.

 

Going from 60 to 30 FPS certainly helped.

 

I don't think it was ever at 60 fps though. I mean, the very first interview said they wanted to go for 60, but they never said whether they were able achieve it then. Now it looks like they've settled at 30 fps. I guess 60 fps would be nice. They mentioned HDR in the other interview. I wonder if they could get it to 60 if they dropped the HDR and used bloom instead.

Oh yeah, there goes my hopes for 2x AA.

 

As long as its a constant 30fps then that's fine, I'd much prefer the look of the graphics in the after picture at a stable 30fps then the ones in the before picture at 60fps.

 

Here's a few interesting bits from GoNintendo's E3 2008 impressions of The Conduit (the second paragraph is quite astounding to me..).

 

Mod : I've removed the business talk as that isn't Tech Forum applicable content. Please keep to the subject of the rendering tech, thanks.