upnorthsox
Veteran
100 posts good job, I'm so proud of you guys. I knew that just a ps2 in the title would bring it out of you.
Questions about PS2
- Thread starter Liandry
- Start date
Man, how i love the lod solution of that game. Same engine would later be borrowed by ND on CTR. The use of untextured polygons was less obvious in that game, but was still there. It also introduced soft-morphing between lods for certain objects. Those same concepts would be used of jak n daxter's engine, which was borrowed back by insomniac for RnC. So you can see, if you are looking for it, lots of untextured polys used in far-away geometry in all jak and ratchet games on ps2.
PS2 is POWER!
PS2 is amazing in the way it came out as an engineering response to the competition back then.
Then despite GC and Xbox being varied on "more power capabilities" the PS2 devs kept doing Saturn like "that's not possible" type of thing making the smoke and mirrors illusion despite limitations amazingly and masterfully executed.
Then at some point during the early last gen the term "PS2 graphics" was used as an insult or slur to say that although PS3 games were at higher resolutions that the graphics didn't evolve over PS2.
I even raised the question because at the time I foolishly believed (and still do) that PSP should have been a portable EE-GS which at 90nm is impossible (maybe Nomad/GameGear/Lynx/NEC graphix possible) but perhaps at 65nm if there would have been money to shrink then PSP would have kept the PS2 1:1 #Crazytalk due to timing design decisions.
I would say Nintendo pulled a robbery on Sega by linking with Argonauts and SuperFX chip to make the rather convincing still to this day first Star Fox which was backed by the mighty Sony sound chip and was in the palm of your hands as a cartridge.
That is indeed crazytalk. Last thing you want in a portable is a ridiculously and deliberately overbuilt and inefficient device like the chipset from PS2. To draw the same polys over and over to do multitexturing and other effects is just terrible engineering in a device where processing and power consumption is a premium. The EE didn't even have an L2 cache for chrissakes.
So on PS2 to make multitexuring you should use polygons multiple times? Like if you want two textures, you should calculate all poygons two times? And what you mean by other effects?
But it have Scratchpad memory. Doesn't it was used same way?
Also can anyone tell which blocks in GS calculate sprites and particles?
I believe you don't have to calculate polys twice, to do multi-texturing you re-submit the same geometry, but with different textures each time.
Anything else the GS is capable of creating, using its limited feature-set in a clever manner. Like emulating bump mapping, indirect texturing effects and so on.
No, scratchpad is like regular RAM (only faster, because it runs at CPU clock and is SRAM so probably no or practically no waitstate cycles penalty for accessing it); it stores whatever you manually put in it and only that. Caches have logic to automatically mirror the most-used memory locations without user intervention.
There is no special blocks for those things; like in the original Playstation, the GS uses flat polygon quads for that, oriented parallel to the viewport. Since they're flat and parallel, I believe simpler calculations can be used to process these types of objects, making them fast to generate.
AFAIK, the Sega Saturn also used polygon flat quads for its sprites IIRC, and it was known as a sprite monster machine.
N64 would have done the same, if Nintendo had allowed any sprite titles to appear on it (well, other than Killer Instinct, sort of.
) Many titles did use particle effects though.*Edit: Quoting error fixed.
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Rikimaru
Veteran
AFAIK it's other way around. Sega Saturn used distorted sprites to draw 3D. 3DO too.AFAIK, the Sega Saturn also used polygon flat quads for its sprites IIRC, and it was known as a sprite monster machine.
According to IO Interactive's Rasmus Højengaard PS2 Hitman Blood Money had normal maps, refractions, specular mapping, bump mapping.
I've heard that before, and AFAIK no, it is not correct. Saturn used quadrilaterals instead of triangles, which meant some inherent disadvantages in 3D rendering; these quads were also used as sprites, which may have led to this confusion.
Surely two triangles to make a quad? That's how it's done these days. How would you draw a sprite on a triangle? Use equilateral triangles and draw to a region within?
Mario kart 64 says hello. Also, the billboards present in almost every n64 game, from mario 64 coins and trees to the bombs and items in zelda...
Yoshi Story? Mischief makers? There were a few...
While YS and MM are good example of sprite based games on the console, Grall was referring entirely to sprite based games and not sprite elements in games.
I figured as much. Just thought how fun it was to remember how much 2D fackery was used back then...
Okay, Mario Kart... Was so long ago I forget about these games. Anyway, billboards are a relatively insignificant amount of scenery in the majority of N64 games. Killer Instinct had two rather large and prominent fighters on-screen all the time, so it was pretty unique from that standpoint.
Insignificant is a bit strong of a word for billboards in that generation. Some games fared worse than others, but damn were there billboards all over the place. In Bomberman 64 the entire player character was a colection of spherical billboards. The only geometry on him was his face and belt buckle.