Okay, after hearing people criticize poor Zelda: TP for having bad ground textures sometimes, I felt the need to mention that it is afterall a HUGE game. Textures have to be spread out, right? So, if you have a game where you're in a closed environment, then of course you can devote more textures to that place that you would for a field or something right?
Question about textures
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I think zelda is more limited because it was developed for the gamecube and a 1.5GB disc
I guess they could use better textures on the wii version but if they didn't start with higher res assets and scale them down it may not be worth the extra work
I may be opening myself to flamming and stuff, but do correct me if I'm wrong. I think perhaps the platform itself is partly to blame as well? I've been reading here and there that the Wii is pretty much an overclocked Gamecube. In that sense, I don't think people should expect the kind of jump that PS2->PS3 is going to bring. I don't suppose that Wii will bring that much of a difference visually from what is capable on Gamecube / PS2. Thus the subpar textures compared with the other next-gen systems.
More storage on the disc can give you more variety over the course of the game.
But this doesn't play much of a role if you're interested in the amount and quality of textures in a scene, which is more limited by memory and, to a lesser degree, the speed of that memory.
If you look at the in-town stuff I think Zelda TP is actually showing some nice texturing work.
That the outdoor scenes (at least the ones I've seen) look comparatively bland is IMO more due to the lack of proper foliage. A flat surface with a grass texture on it will not look particularly impressive, no matter how you slice it. But I don't think that even there textures are particularly bad.
But this doesn't play much of a role if you're interested in the amount and quality of textures in a scene, which is more limited by memory and, to a lesser degree, the speed of that memory.
If you look at the in-town stuff I think Zelda TP is actually showing some nice texturing work.
That the outdoor scenes (at least the ones I've seen) look comparatively bland is IMO more due to the lack of proper foliage. A flat surface with a grass texture on it will not look particularly impressive, no matter how you slice it. But I don't think that even there textures are particularly bad.
Aonuma said that aside from Widescreen and the mirror switch, the graphics are identical with the GC version. So it's not taking advantage of the extra RAM or anything.
Yes. And no
As far as we can at the moment know, the Wii has somewhere around 100MB of memory, which really is laughable in comparison to the other console updates, but OTOH it is a lot more than on the Gamecube, so there is some extra room now for higher-res textures.
Oh yeah, and of course Zelda TP should not be used as a quality benchmark for the Wii.
This particular post does pretty much sum up what there is to say on this issue, ad far as I'm concerned. Disc storage is definitely not the element to blame in this case. They chose not to use detailed ground textures or some detail textures for some other technical reason, mainly some reason related to the way their engine work. If they have a fully open world, and therefore an engine relying on streaming, memory management constraints may have forced them to make some compromises.
They could had implemented detail texturing, but that would have meant a performance hit, and given that the game is already pushing the machine (GC) quite far, they probably chosed not to bother.
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SotC was pretty demanding because of the boned character that had as many polys as a small environment. That's a lot of tris to skin and bend. Quite a feat!
It definitely wouldn't have been a waste. Even at 640X480 its pretty easy to use more then the memory Wii has for textures. Also resolution has no baring on the amount of ram you can spend on game data (engine, sound ect). So even if you reached the limit of texture quality a 640x480 scene could support you could always use the extra ram to make the levels bigger.
Though of course there is a limit to how big a level can get without the processing power available to create the scene. So perhaps adding a lot more ram would have been a bit of a waste without increasing processing power, its hard to say without knowing 100% what Hollywood and Broadway are.
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You can always use it to get more variety in gfx, (more/better) destructible environments, more animations, AI (I remember some board games that used up to 256MB (and only asking for PII-PIII 2-3 years ago) and such. I doubt that evident beneficts of more memory very distant from the expected 88MB, just as a exemple the GF4 (that is very close to the XGPU) already had 128MB in good use. Althought would be interesting to know at which point devs would prefer more processing power than memory (by the coments of some devs (even here) it seems that it is a very distant point).
Of curse some games/devs may not need/want such features so it could need more or less ram after processing power beyng a limitation to gfx.
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As I said I agree that more ram then 88MB certainly wouldn't be a waste (say 128MB main and 64MB video), but a PC system isn't a good example IMO.
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