How about a new Wii tech discussion thread? (Games Analysis)
- Thread starter DeadlyNinja
- Start date
That looks really nice, I'll be keeping my eye on this one.
DeadlyNinja
Veteran
Isn't that also a WiiWare game? Once again, WiiWare does what 99% of the developers can't do.
Megadrive1988
Veteran
My guess would be that no matter how much time they spend on optimizing for that hardware, it will never compare to the other consoles. So why bother throwing money and time at it? Does the majority of the audience even notice or care? That seems to be what Nintendo has proved with the Wii: it will sell as long as it finds a niche, graphics don't matter much. They probably learned that from their portables.
I bet MS and Sony wish they were selling millions of units of ~9 year old technology at $200.I also see that some of N's first party games are still at $50 even after being out for years now. Moneh MONEH!
The GameCube-based tech used in the Wii, is more like 10~11 year old technology, now.
http://cube.ign.com/articles/099/099520p1.html
I think Wii's base is more supportive of lots of small niches, as opposed to the "one big niche" audience of the HD consoles. Judging by software sales, the Wii audience is pretty diverse--and it can be, because developers don't have to sell 1m units of every game to make a profit. Everyone looks at the blockbusters, but when you get outside of the Wii's mega-hits, there are lots and lots of games selling in the 100K-500K range that are making money for smallish developers, and there's really no one dominating theme. It's everything from first-person shooters to fitness games.
Disclosure: As a young, single male, I have a PS3. As a young, single, engaged male, I'm pretty sure a Wii or its successor is in my future
green.pixel
Veteran
That one big niche will soon become fragmented with the arrival of Move/Natal.
That is a problem of the industry in general. Majority of population seems interested only in 20+ mill. polished-to-death me-too games.
I think Wii's base is more supportive of lots of small niches, as opposed to the "one big niche" audience of the HD consoles. Judging by software sales, the Wii audience is pretty diverse--and it can be, because developers don't have to sell 1m units of every game to make a profit. Everyone looks at the blockbusters, but when you get outside of the Wii's mega-hits, there are lots and lots of games selling in the 100K-500K range that are making money for smallish developers, and there's really no one dominating theme. It's everything from first-person shooters to fitness games.
Disclosure: As a young, single male, I have a PS3. As a young, single, engaged male, I'm pretty sure a Wii or its successor is in my future
congrats on your ingagement.
I think Wii's base is more supportive of lots of small niches, as opposed to the "one big niche" audience of the HD consoles. Judging by software sales, the Wii audience is pretty diverse--and it can be, because developers don't have to sell 1m units of every game to make a profit. Everyone looks at the blockbusters, but when you get outside of the Wii's mega-hits, there are lots and lots of games selling in the 100K-500K range that are making money for smallish developers, and there's really no one dominating theme. It's everything from first-person shooters to fitness games.
Disclosure: As a young, single male, I have a PS3. As a young, single, engaged male, I'm pretty sure a Wii or its successor is in my future
Well lets hope the next Wii has decently substantial hardware for developers who want a good feature set with plenty of capability for realizing their visions. The cheap developers can still make their crap.
we should at least be getting Metrio Another M, Rogue Squadron,Mario Galaxy 1-2,RE4,Re 0, or Rayman RR but instead we get what we see. Even downloadable game look better?
Why do you suppose shadows, especially self shadowing are so under utilized except in a few select titles on the GC then? I've noticed a few Wii titles trying to push the effect like Fun Fun Minigolf as well as Endless Ocean as being the only games that come to mind when it comes to pushing that much. Suppose it's memory heavy (wouldn't be an issue on the Wii then)? All the pieces to the puzzle to making a properly decent version of Far Cry for the Wii are here now..............this form of shadows (accept with no self shadowing), using bumpmapping for the water surface a la Super Mario Sunshine/Galaxy with added refraction. Bump and gloss mapping where it counts. I'd leave out normal maps though. Memory shouldn't be a constrain at all, especially with texture compression. I'm sure the Wii could meet those needs. Goddammit it kills meMan I'd love to have a proper FC with Wii controls. Vengeance controlled so well, but just looked and ran like ****. Maybe Crytek will bring Crysis to the Wii
What comes to mind first is that Hollywood can be a headache to work with. I pointed out that shadowmapping patent, but I had to read it like a hundred times before I even understood a small part of it myself. Ofcourse, at that point I didn't know the GPU so well yet. In addition, drawing an embossed texture mapped triangle is fairly simple. So I understand why developers choose not to implement more advanced shaders, it simply takes a lot of time to sort everything out and get it to work. This goes for stuff such as fast dot3 normal mapping too (I think I found a way to perform 2 tangent space dot products in 4 GPU cycles, which should be about as fast as the XBOX does it. At the cost of requiring the CPU to provide normalized per vertex light and half vectors though. Still have to try it to prove it can be done).
However, Silent Hill shows what can be done using this shadowmapping technique pretty well. They also used it well in the last level of House of the Dead overkill. Even Mario kart uses it. I don't suppose memory speed is an large issue, especially if it is just a single light; if I'm not mistaken the GPU cache runs at the same speed as the SRAM (I assume the cache is there because we have 4 ROPS reading simutanously). So we only have to cope with cache misses which can reduce the performance by 15% at a maximum (according to some usefull sources).
Wow now that's a great post DRS.
Is there anything you've seen on Xbox retail games that would be difficult or impossible to replicate on the Wii ?
And are there any examples of tech heavy games besides "The Conduit" ?
And I'm wondering is there anyway you could see the Wii pulling off it's own version of games like "Grand Theft Auto IV" or "Red Dead Redemption" ?
Also I remember an HVS dev on the gamefaqs forums for "Conduit 2" stating that Conduit is running more advanced shaders than "Super Mario Galaxy", is there anyway to tell that by looking at the game ?
Or would that require someone whose worked on the games to point it out ?
Is there anything you've seen on Xbox retail games that would be difficult or impossible to replicate on the Wii ?
And are there any examples of tech heavy games besides "The Conduit" ?
And I'm wondering is there anyway you could see the Wii pulling off it's own version of games like "Grand Theft Auto IV" or "Red Dead Redemption" ?
Also I remember an HVS dev on the gamefaqs forums for "Conduit 2" stating that Conduit is running more advanced shaders than "Super Mario Galaxy", is there anyway to tell that by looking at the game ?
Or would that require someone whose worked on the games to point it out ?
Well...SMG is also a 60FPS game while Conduit is a 30FPS game, obviously conduit will be running more advanced shaders.
I'll mention the latest Red Steel game, it looks amazing for a wii tittle running and it runs at 60FPS game. Beside this I think No More Heroes looks pretty nice too.
Well yeah I figured that lol.
I mean you'll have to be doing something cheaper to get double the frame rate.
It was just an example. =]
I was really asking to see if there was anyway I could see the less/more advanced shaders and point them out/
Yeah "Red Steel 2" looks great.
Easily in the top 10/20 Wii games.
-edit-
=] Thanks for the answers by the way.
I mean you'll have to be doing something cheaper to get double the frame rate.
It was just an example. =]
I was really asking to see if there was anyway I could see the less/more advanced shaders and point them out/
Yeah "Red Steel 2" looks great.
Easily in the top 10/20 Wii games.
-edit-
=] Thanks for the answers by the way.
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Iron Tiger
Regular
SMG's artists really know how to use EMBM to great effect.
Yeah frankly I think the best looking Wii games are the ones that don't try to do realism at all. Realism fails on the Wii in every example. The other consoles blow it away. But Mario Galaxy and Mario Kart, for ex, have a nice simple look that reacts well to the basic effects Wii can dish out.
But if you again look at similar stuff on the 360 say, such as Kameo maybe, then again I think the superior capabilities turn the table. If we were still on interlaced SDTV it wouldn't be as big of a deal. Today's TVs, especially due to their requirements for native resolution for clarity, really make 480p look pretty nasty.
BTW, I set up my modded Xbox 1 with a Quake 2 port the other day. It runs what looks like 60fps at 720p with 2X MSAA. 4X MSAA is an option too but I think the Xbox runs low on RAM at that point (unstable framerate). The guy who ported the engine allows access to all of the NV2A MSAA modes, up to 9X MSAA, and even that weird Quincunx stuff. Anisotropic filtering is there too. Seeing that old console dishing out that level of clarity really has made the Wii even more ridiculous in my eyes honestly. I think old Quake 2 looks better than The Conduit due to the clean image and framerate. Conduit looked awful IMO.
But if you again look at similar stuff on the 360 say, such as Kameo maybe, then again I think the superior capabilities turn the table. If we were still on interlaced SDTV it wouldn't be as big of a deal. Today's TVs, especially due to their requirements for native resolution for clarity, really make 480p look pretty nasty.
BTW, I set up my modded Xbox 1 with a Quake 2 port the other day. It runs what looks like 60fps at 720p with 2X MSAA. 4X MSAA is an option too but I think the Xbox runs low on RAM at that point (unstable framerate). The guy who ported the engine allows access to all of the NV2A MSAA modes, up to 9X MSAA, and even that weird Quincunx stuff. Anisotropic filtering is there too. Seeing that old console dishing out that level of clarity really has made the Wii even more ridiculous in my eyes honestly. I think old Quake 2 looks better than The Conduit due to the clean image and framerate. Conduit looked awful IMO.
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You also forgot the art direction, which, IMO Conduit severely lacks.
I still think a better comparison would be Metroid Prime (or the 3rd one for that matter).
That can and should still be a lesson for developers and artists alike though - while the other consoles blow the Wii away now for doi. ng realistic stuff, in a maximum of five years, realistic games that look decent today will generally look bad in at most 4-5 years, whereas styles that make the Wii look good now will make those games still look pretty good ten years from now.
That's not to say you should always strive for 'surrealism' (to refer to nAo
) - there are definitely games (sims for instance, like the Forza's and Gran Turismo's) that are going to appeal more if they try to be as realistic as possible, but at the same time you can see that all of those games tend to age horribly. And while it makes logical sense to assume that wlil get less bad as we get closer to realism, our perception keeps adjusting and keeps perceiving new things that are missing from the game versus reality.Iron Tiger
Regular
Conker used fur shaders liberally, but it pretty much seems like an evolution of the Starfox Adventures tech. It doesn't have EMBM, and not much normal mapping from what I could see in screenshots, so surfaces and skin may seem flatter than SMG or Starfox. I just ordered a copy, and if I can get it to work on my 360 (the first copy I ordered did not), I'll post back with impressions.
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