Yeah, it's one of my more anticipated games. :smile:
Ok, full interview from anonymous third party about Wii GPU.
- Thread starter DeadlyNinja
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Yeah, it's one of my more anticipated games. :smile:
DeadlyNinja
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Here's a question: Now that normal mapping is confirmed possible on the Wii, do we know if there's a limit to how much normal mapping a game can use? I'm sure it'll eat up fillrate, but could there other limitations due to the Wii's weaker hardware? Let say the Wii has a game like Dynasty Warriors with like 20 characters on screen, is it possible for all 20 of them to have normal mapping? If I have 10 characters on screen instead of 20, could each of those 10 characters have more normal mapping on them than having 20 characters on-screen?
The reason I ask is that normal mapping has the potential to save up polygons and them used for other things. I mean, Leon in RE4 is composed of 10,000 and he looks virtually flawless. He might not have as much facial detail compare to the more modern games, but his face is still very smooth and organic looking. I saw the little explanation on Epic's website on normal mapping, and saw how they could turn a 5,000 polygon character into something with far more detail than Leon could look with just regular polygons! All I really ask for is to have organic looking human characters and RE4 on GC could already provide that.
The reason I ask is that normal mapping has the potential to save up polygons and them used for other things. I mean, Leon in RE4 is composed of 10,000 and he looks virtually flawless. He might not have as much facial detail compare to the more modern games, but his face is still very smooth and organic looking. I saw the little explanation on Epic's website on normal mapping, and saw how they could turn a 5,000 polygon character into something with far more detail than Leon could look with just regular polygons! All I really ask for is to have organic looking human characters and RE4 on GC could already provide that.
It's really hard to say. From what I understand, Konami (in Dewy's) came up with their own method of doing normal mapping. So really, we'd have to ask them to find out.
Them or Nintendo.
I imagine as time goes on, they'll find more effective ways to impliment normal mapping.
It shouldn't be, but the reality is that Conker is perfectly "next-gen" monicker compliant. Conker BFD is a impressive display of rendering technology, and save for its SDTV inherent nature, it schools more than a so called X360/PS3 game. It sports a shakey framerate, though, but given that most games we were presented with on X360/PS3 do also struggle to render at 30Hz, it can't be reasonably held against a Xbox, first of the name, game.Hell, look at Conker for the X-Box. That game looks damn near next gen to me.
But then again, we are talking about a game from what I consider the most technology savvy development house Microsoft Game Studios owns, so it might be expected to see it hold it own very well against newer game on new consoles.
NV2A and it programmable capabilities gave enough tools to the best developers last gen to create complex and well featured renderers that can compare nicely with SM3.0 compliant engines running on Xenos/RSX. And yeah, I'm being apologistic toward developers who couldn't pull impressive engines on X360/PS3... Talk about lowering my expectations and rising the entry level for being worth of my negative remarks about laughingly bad renderers; eveidence that's we're hitting a perculiar point in time for dimishing returns.
Anyway, comparing top developers work on well featured hardware last gen against X360/PS3 games, as-is, is not really telling the whole story.
Now, you may argue that the thread is about the Wii and that I only adressed the X360/PS3... Well, yes indeed I did just that. But, I will let you conclude on your own what I think about many Wii games engines when I do consider Conker BFD's rendering engine more impressive than many X360/PS3 games' renderers.
Honestly, only Super Mario Galaxy and its nice use of EMBD and radiance transfer/occlusion information to color/ambient textures on Wii, as far as I'm concerned, compares in a positive manner with Conker BFD... And, yeah, I've seen many (if not all) footages and pictures from Wii games. When I didn't play the games. In this case, I don't feel bad for being overly apologistic toward Wii developers, though. They're doing what they can with what they were giving, if you ask me.
Of course, some nice thing can be done, notably static PRT effects like the ones in SMG (also like the ones in Hot Shot Golf 5 on PS3), but these things are much more subtle on more intricate and realistic designs and do not standout as much. So, yeah, nice things can be done, but I repeat, I can't get myself to argue about teh developers (un)willingness to produce complex renderer on Wii, when they're working with what they were given, which is not the pinnacle and the state of the silicon art.
Oh, I agree with you. But I'm just really interested in what they can do on that weaker hardware. Shadow of the Colosus is a good example.
As time goes on, Wii games will improve much like DS games have. They'll be nothing on the side of the 360 and PS3, of course. But they'll be impressive in their own rights. That's what I want to see. That's what I'm most interested in.
I guess it's because the industry has never been faced with a situation like this before, that makes it so fascinating. :smile:
It's not my intention to make this next question OT, but isn't it a bit disrespectful to a consumer of a nintendo platform to hear 3rd party positions like that? What I'm referring to is the unwillingness to make most of what is there and expect us to pay full price for it. If a restaurant took the same philopshy and said hey lets only go all out for good tippers how many do you think would still be in business after a few years. I'm not a developer so I can't relate to the struggle of a demanding publisher who wants results and doesn't give you the right tools for the job. Yet as a video game consumer it's alarming to hear type of thought at times posted as a reason for doing shovelware but expecting nintendo like sales for the effort.
DeadlyNinja
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I disagree with that. You see, people claim that the Wii is GC 1.5 due to the graphics, but IMO they should have called it GC - with most of the garbage we're seeing. Many games don't even look on par with GC! Look at the first Manhunt 2 screens on IGN. I mean, games like Escape From Bug Island even looks on par with Dreamcast. Have you seen Spiderman 3? The city looks like something rendered with the FX 2 chip from the SNES. It doesn't even look like the developers are taking advantage of what the GC had to offer.
The problem is that a lot of the games people complain about on Wii have the PS2 or the PSP as lead platform. And the reason for that is simple, the Wii hardware capability is in the same category as the PSP/PS2/GC/Xbox (in that order) family and for that it gets, like the GC and the Xbox, games that have PS2 as lead platform. Just like most last gen multiplatform games didn't take much advantages of the Xbox or the GC capabilities (nor did they take fully advantage of the PS2 capabilities) the Wii will suffer the same fate in numerous cross platform scenarios.
Now, you may argue some games that were made from ground up for the Wii look barely, if any, better than GC games, if they don't look much worse. That's true, but that's conversely true for most consoles out there. Not all exclusive PS2 platformer can compare to Naughty Dog's games and neither do the racers to Gran Tourismo. Same thing on Xbox, all the FPS didn't have engines that could rival Chronicles of Riddick's.
It takes three things to make a great looking game, assuming money is not a issue (if it was, it would be the first on the list of four points): computational power, talented coder and talented artists. On a console, the first is a known and invariable quantity and thus a non issue in the grand scheme of things. The latter two points is where it's at. These points can be translated by the ability to use a finite source of calculation capabilities in the most visually impressive manner.
It's a fact, all devhouses are not all to be put in the same bracket when graphics are the matter. Some get better results than others.
Thus, the average graphical output from a console game library is a testament of the average usage of that finite computational ressouce by the devhouses that worked on the machine. The corollary to this is that this average is also a testament of the extent and nature of the available computational power. This corollary can be nuanced by information such as the inherent complexity of the said architecture.
Now, is the Wii architecture really complex to work with? While most architecture have their intricacies and difficult to tap entirely parts, we can safetly say that it's not a difficult machine to work with. In other words, if on the average, exclusive games look bad to you than accept that's what the hardware can do on the average at that point in time (with this SDK and knowledge in the development community).
I think that more often than not, the people who are the most disappointed about the look of Wii games, on the average, are thoses who have unrealistic expectations for the console's hardware. They, for the more reasonable ones, go by the simple rule that it's a 50% faster GC, with performance tweaking and more RAM available and thus exclusive games, should on the average look better than exclusive GC games on the average. Well, that's a false premise, for they're expecting the same harware features to make visual differences due to having 50% more increased quantity. But the thing is it's not.
Many developers will tell you that they had at the beginning on this new generation a meeting to talk and decide what is "next-gen," visually speaking. They of course R&D ideas and thus to prove or disporve their ideas. And all will tell you that more polygons and more textures is not enough to that "next-gen" monicker. Now, the guys were talking about 10 -100x fold leap in terms of polycount. Try to imagine having only half more polygons to work with, and the exact same (limted) feature set, running half faster, to work with. Do you really expect that to make a visual difference? The Xbox is multiple time faster in most areas than the PS2, do Xbox games that do rely on features that the PS2 can handle (texturing, polygons, distortions) look visually to be on a different league?
So, expecting a visual leap from a 50-100% processing speed increase is an unrealistic expectation.
Another point of view would be to argue that publishers may decide to allocate a large budget to the game development because "Nintendo said graphics are not importants and actual sales prove that point as being correct" or that developers do not plan on pushing the envelope for the aforementioned reason.
Well, it's an interesting point of view and I address it briefly in the next paragraph answering ninzel.
I will ignore the part about the maturity of such a point of view, since it seems out of place to argue such a thing, I will just address the point "should we be lenient toward developers who do not strive to offer the best renderers Wii is capable of?"
I would argue that yes, we should do just that. Why? Simple, most of the developers working on exclusive Wii games do not work with large budgets, because publishers appreciate the "graphics do not matters" motto much more than anyone else. And if the developers, on their own, budget considerations a side, decided to adhere to the line that says the Wii experience is not about graphics, then why would you blame them to agree with something that the platform holder and creator publicised? What should we hold accountable developers for something they didn't instill?
And more importantly, as I said, sales comfort both of their positions.
You vote with you money, if you don't want mediocre graphics, you say that with your money. If you don't want ports that do not take advantage of your console capabilities, then cease to buy these. Just to take an example, I found it useless to read about PS3 owners complaining about Ubisoft giving them a raw deal with the ports of their game to the platform. The only way to say that in an extremely effective way is to denounce it publically (bad publicity of the sort is never appreciated in these days of viral marketing) and more importantly do not buy the games in question. And no, don't fear, the publisher will not stop publishing or porting their games to the platform if it's a viable one (has a large enough install base and carters to the game demographics), the publisher will just do what it can to maxmise the sales on the platform and if a better product, graphically, if what it takes, they'll do it.
If you buy the game, your complaints will have very little echo with the suits sitting meeting rooms at publisher's headquarters when discussing budget and priorities. Well, that's true for publishers and consoles manufacturer alike.
If graphics matter, they do all the time, not just when a "game publisher/developer isn't even trying." Because you have to look at the big picture: the Wii is a last gen console slight refresh sold at a premium on the basis and premise that it offers new game experiences without any emphasis on graphics. Well, it's true that a game design can be carried without intricate graphics, you can definitely model a character using a few boxes, same for the enviroment and yet have the same gameplay as Gears of War or Uncharted, that's true. So it's a simple line of thought, do quality graphics have an impact on the gaming experience or not? Wii buyer, tacitely or directly vote with their money that no, graphics just need to be functional, high quality is irrelevant to their game experience; well as I far as I'm concerned I respect that opinion but as I said a in a few occasions I entirely disagree with it.
Don't be mistaken, I'd be eager to defend the "publishers/developers could at least try" position if Nintendo did release a console that while servely underpowered compared to the PS3/X360 would still be a new design, a cost cautious one, obviously (a 1.5Ghz PPC, a R300, 128MB or RAM would have been enough to say that they tried).
But the fact is, from my point of view, Nintendo is the one that didn't even try, they're selling the same architecture, on a smaller node (thus selling you less silicon for more...), with some tweaks and some more RAM, what we call in the GPU space a "refresh part," bundled with a controller that maps postions to accelerometers, 5 years later and at a premium.
The only way Nintendo could have said "We really don't care about graphics and computational power" would have been to sell a machine weaker than the GC.
So no, I do not plan to pass the bucket to the developers/publishers on this one, nor do I understand how could anyone do so. The situation is blatant, Nintendo chose not to compete on the computational at all. And no, adding a 64MB GDDR3 chip to the board doesn't qualify as trying in my book. So they made the message clear, we're a technology enthusiast community and thus you all perfectly understood the nature of the machine and one who accepted this as being fine by their standards has to stand by that choice, or reconsider it entirely and not try to act surprised when the least responsible of this situation, the publishers/developers, are catching on the trend that says "graphics don't matter, they just need to do the work."
The first thing I did after playing a bit of Conker was to try Starfox, just to see the progression, and thus not to rely only on my recollection of the game.
And no, technically it's not on the same level at all.
Devs should do the best job possible if they expect to do well,it's really that simple. And while less graphically intense games may be acceptable to some parts of the Wii consumer base, devs should be careful not to paint the entire Wii fanbase with one brush.
Considering how few devs are pushing graphics with Wii,it seems like an even greater opportunity to stand out. When you make a great looking game on a console like the 360,it will get lost in a sea of other wiz bang looking game like Halo3, Bioshock,FEAR,Condemmed, Mass Effect etc etc. On the Wii a graphically intense game would literally be like an oasis in the desert. Plus devs are already starting off with a cost advantage on Wii. There is literally no excuse to not make certain games that push the graphical boundaries. No matter how you spin it a half assed effort is a half assed effort and you will be paid back appropriately.
Edit: And the reason I said immature is because complaining about the lot you are handed is an immature attitude. You do your best within the context of what you are given. And no one is forcing third parties to dev on the Wii and Nintendo has been clear from day one it wants to appeal to casuals as well as hardcore.Develoers also know from past history that well done games will sell very well on Nitnendo platforms, and sloppy ones won't. . If they make that choice they should make the effort to make their product as best possible,not just a cash in. That goes for any dev on any system. I'll simply never agree that sloppiness and laziness should be accepted
Considering how few devs are pushing graphics with Wii,it seems like an even greater opportunity to stand out. When you make a great looking game on a console like the 360,it will get lost in a sea of other wiz bang looking game like Halo3, Bioshock,FEAR,Condemmed, Mass Effect etc etc. On the Wii a graphically intense game would literally be like an oasis in the desert. Plus devs are already starting off with a cost advantage on Wii. There is literally no excuse to not make certain games that push the graphical boundaries. No matter how you spin it a half assed effort is a half assed effort and you will be paid back appropriately.
Edit: And the reason I said immature is because complaining about the lot you are handed is an immature attitude. You do your best within the context of what you are given. And no one is forcing third parties to dev on the Wii and Nintendo has been clear from day one it wants to appeal to casuals as well as hardcore.Develoers also know from past history that well done games will sell very well on Nitnendo platforms, and sloppy ones won't. . If they make that choice they should make the effort to make their product as best possible,not just a cash in. That goes for any dev on any system. I'll simply never agree that sloppiness and laziness should be accepted
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We should not just factor the increase of processing speed over the GCN, though. As you stated eariler, the graphics of most GCN third-party games were hindered by the base of the game engine being designed for the PS2. Therefore, most third party games did not take full advantage of GCN and Xbox's enhanced features. Since the GCN by itself is stronger than the PS2 in a most areas, would it be really "unrealistic" to expect games that were designed with the Wii graphical capabilities in mind to have some type of graphical leap over most of their "last-gen" counterparts, as minor as it can be?
It also does not seem to be a coincidence that quite a few Wii games that have underwhelming graphics are suffering from severe gameplay problems (Farcry, Spiderman 3, etc).
I don't think anyone is asking for miracles out of the Wii,just a real effort.
PS3 and 360 devs could make the same arguement that they don't have enough power. They could point to PC's now over the next 5 years and whine that will have to make do with only 512 MB of RAM vs. 1GB of system+256-512 MB of Video RAM etc.
The comparisons could be endless.
What do good devs do? Well I assume they just make great games regardless of the system.
PS3 and 360 devs could make the same arguement that they don't have enough power. They could point to PC's now over the next 5 years and whine that will have to make do with only 512 MB of RAM vs. 1GB of system+256-512 MB of Video RAM etc.
The comparisons could be endless.
What do good devs do? Well I assume they just make great games regardless of the system.
We should not just factor the increase of processing speed over the GCN, though. As you stated eariler, the graphics of most GCN third-party games were hindered by the base of the game engine being designed for the PS2. Therefore, most third party games did not take full advantage of GCN and Xbox's enhanced features. Since the GCN by itself is stronger than the PS2 in a most areas, would it be really "unrealistic" to expect games that were designed with the Wii graphical capabilities in mind to have some type of graphical leap over most of their "last-gen" counterparts, as minor as it can be?
It also does not seem to be a coincidence that quite a few Wii games that have underwhelming graphics are suffering from severe gameplay problems (Farcry, Spiderman 3, etc).
tongue_of_colicab
Veteran
You can hardly judge wii power over the current games as all of them are either ports or based on some sort of ps2 engine, not even something designed for GC. As far as GFX goes the last (few) levels of red steel are probably the best to base things on. The rain level doja looks really nice, if it had a bit more geometry you could almost call it next gen(ish). Even though RS was a rushed launch game (early levels look extremely bad comapred to later ones) it still looks alot better than all other Wii games. IMO its just devs not making something tailored to Wii, not Wii totally not being able to do something even a bit above GC.
We all know Wii wont be a gfx monster, but if you look at those RS levels, consider its a launch game build on mostly a GC devkit and GC specs I think something like hl2 and FC on pc should be managable on Wii.
We all know Wii wont be a gfx monster, but if you look at those RS levels, consider its a launch game build on mostly a GC devkit and GC specs I think something like hl2 and FC on pc should be managable on Wii.
How can you measure effort though? If you don't know what the hardware is capable of, you don't know what devs can achieve and if they're being lazy or not. Consider a small, black box of know distinguishing features. An unknown dev house demo's a game running on it that is comparable to RnC on PS2. Do we say 'well done they've tried and got great results' or 'is that all they could manage? I hope other devs achieve more!'? It depends what's in the box. If you find out it's a PS2, you are impressed. If you find it's a PS3, you are disappointed.
The problem with the Wii is we don't know what the maximum results are going to look like, so we have no idea if the RnC looking title on the black box is impressive or not. We don't know when looking at that game whether the developer has tried and this is the best they can come up with (and as Farid points out, for most devs the 'best' is well short of the platform's maximum capabilities), or is being slack and tardy.
Farid's other point is that rather than being an unknown black box, we actually have some info on it's innards, and that info would lead many to think that the maximum capacity of the hardware isn't far removed from GC. Thus when a title doesn't look far removed from a GC title, it might actually be the dev trying quite hard and that was the best they came up with. The effort may be there, but the results are below what some people are expecting, and they instead see the fault as lying with the develop rather than the hardware.
I think Iwill has a good point in specific GC engines, and if Wii were to get proper GC engine upscaled to its hardware, rather than PS2 cross-platform engines, you'd expect a more pronounced improvement. Still, a big question is what do people actually notice? You get people looking at Forza 2 and saying it looks like Forza, or Halo 3 looks like Halo 2, or Motorstorm looks like it's CGI trailer. Even large differences can go quite unappreciated if it looks fundamentally similar. Rendering with more polys, better quality, and more lighting, can produce something that's just a bit better and which without direct comparisons many a folk would think wasn't improved at all. Consider one game that uses simple round soft shadows for 20 critters on screen. Now consider exactly the same game but with stencil shadows instead. You've suddenly got a big increase in the amount of vertex work to do, but the visual differences is pretty minor. Side by side you'd spot the difference, but if after playing the simple shadow game you leave it a couple of months and then play the complex shadow version, you may well have forgotten the original had simple shadows and think it's exactly the same and not appreciate the extra work the machine is doing.
That may be a big factor in Wii. Those improvements that the hardware is capable of may actually in effect, but people aren't noticing, because the results are still close to GC's. I do also wonder if the trailers Nintendo showed before Wii was as understood as it is now haven't got people's hopes too high. The trailer showings of Pokemon and Pangya were fantastic, and (it seems) beyond the abilities of the machine. Where everyone looked at Sony's E3 showings and said 'it's impossible! They're lying to us!' I think they looked at Nintendo's showings and said 'Nintendo never lie and Pangya really will look that good!' Now seeing titles still falling far short, they believe the hardware is that capable and the devs just aren't delivering, rather than appreciating the hardware choices Nintendo made and the limits they ahve imposed on devs.
Oh come on what's with the long winded ramblngs to a simple concept. You see a game that looks like crap compared to what's on even GC,you know it's a crap job.
You play a 3rd person game that doesn't play as well as others,it's crap job.
You guy's just love to draw out these things and make them more complicated than they really are. You don't have to be an expert to know a good job and a well made game when you see one or even understand the technology behind it.
Even a layman can intuitively understand when one game is great and another is by comparison not so great.
That type of thinking is one of the reasons why Nintendo created the Wii in the first place; graphics has evolution to the point that where it is much more difficult for the average joe to determine next-gen from last-gen graphics.
Saying that, however, most of the Wii games with PS2-ish graphics in question did not even seem to add visually minor effects.