Nintendo Revolution: Displacement Mapping Be The Last Key Factor?

[pc999]

Does the use of displacement mapping does need any more work from devs in a artistc side, or they simple do a 3k poligons model and after DM it looks like a high poligon model , or if it does more work is significantly more

IF they dont need (significantly) more work I can really see Nintendo pushing this a far as they can, once that it would keep game production costs down and reduce even more (no HD) the need for much and fast memory (?and it also give much less work to the CPU?), plus is just my impression or Nintendo (they do have the patents and already implemented in GC) and ATI also like this they have some close solutions (or at least they look soo) like TrueForm and Xenus with their shader array and tessellation unit , would make a great LOD system and even make much more reasonable why Rev dev kits are basead on GC ones (they also said that some of the main features of flipper would be improved and then appear in Hollywood and ?also share to some extent the same API? after all the tools are more or less the sames as they said right?), if it does the above (firsts lines)I will change my mind about Rev HW devolopment at all.

Edit: I meant I could see they using a powerfull and easy HW solution for DM (if they can do it) also it would explain the comments about a diferent form of rendering on the "official blog" (if we asume it as true) as well some interpretations on why call the GPU hollywood (as sugested in the blog) that in H. there are simple things that look complex and life like, like in the movies. Indeed this is very interesting.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Why make the effort when none of the GCN owners would buy anything other than 1st party titles?

That's a patently false statement. Timesplitters 2, Soul Calibur 2, Sonic Heroes, Rogue Leader, RE0, and WWE: DOR all jump to mind as 3rd-party games that have done reasonably well on Cube. I can think of a couple 1st party titles that got outsold by 3rd party competitors as well...the SSX franchise did much better than 1080 Avalanche, if I recall.

There's a trick to getting a 3rd party game to sell to Cubers. The Midway/Acclaim usual tactic of taking a dump on a disc and sticking it in a case worked for the PS2 and Xbox demographic, but not for Cube. 3rd parties who do poorly basically misunderstood the Cube demographic. 3rd parties who do well figured it out...it's a combination of tailoring the game for the demographic and figuring out how to market to them.

 

[Teasy]

Why make the effort when none of the GCN owners would buy anything other than 1st party titles?.

Clueless, Rogue Leader sold over 800,000 copies in the US alone.. And that's just one game from the company referred to in the post you replied to, there are plenty other none first party games that sold very well on GC.

 

[pc999]

Find here (however about ATI´s true form) that it only uses minimal cost in model preparation and code modification code, his this a good indication for displacement mapping cost in terms of art

 

[Li Mu Bai]

How come Factor 5 was the only company to implement self-shadowing in a Gamecube game?

AFAIK, Luigi's Mansion used self-shadowing as well as stencil shadows. LOZ:TP looks to be using it in areas as well. I'm also confused by its lack of implementation in games, as the global lighting came in two variants iirc, one with self-shadowing & the other without.

 

[ector]

One thing that's pretty telling about how much developers used the flipper, is that my TEV->Pixel Shader conversion doesn't even support indirect texturing (it does support most other states though) and still TONS of games look correct or very close in Dolphin ...

 

[Fox5]

One thing that's pretty telling about how much developers used the flipper, is that my TEV->Pixel Shader conversion doesn't even support indirect texturing (it does support most other states though) and still TONS of games look correct or very close in Dolphin ...

I'm assuming rebel strike has a lot of errors in its graphics? That game had graphic quality on par with doom 3 on xbox.
Does Resident Evil 4 suffer errors? The game didn't look like it used indirect texturing.

Oh, and took a look at the screenshots on your site....and I think they're very telling of how much HD res could have done for this gen, not to mention what it will do for the even more detailed next gen. Metroid Prime already looked like a crisp vga image, but those hi res emulated shots are just so much better.

 

[OtakingGX]

Sorry to drag this old topic out of the annals, but I had been thinking about displacement mapping more and didn't want to start a new one.

ERP kind of mentions what I had in mind in passing in another post:
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=515570&postcount=2

Displacement mapping is usually about 3 things.

Authoring - the fine detail is easier to paint than model
Performance/Quality (LOD) - you can Mipmap and dynmamically tesselate - you need to see the problems a VERY high polygone count model causes with aliasing to understand this.
Memory - it's a height field with implicit tesselation rather than XYZ per vertex + connectivity information

If, perhaps, you built an engine around displacement mapping then it seems that LOD would be incredibly simple. Just create a mip-mapped texture for your displacement map, and as the object gets further and further away from the screen the number of polygons it is made of is automatically reduced. This method seems like it could save memory, as multiple models wouldn't have to be loaded in, just a larger displacement map texture.

 

[pc999]

I think this also answer my question, from artist POV (then money POV) it takes much less work to do (in game) high detail caracter/environments/models leading to much lower game costs, I am right?

 

[Blazkowicz]

Sounds like Displacement Mapping too me..............

Use of Displacement Maps

for me, this only says that displacement mapping has been used for content creation. so, L3Dedit supports it, but no word on gamecube usage. It may well be just converted to triangles in their editor; or alternatively the conversion from displacement map to triangles could be done in software when loading the level but I'm not sure why you would do that.