SC: Chaos Theory for PS2 (first movie!)

What I have discerened from the information presented so far is that the point is very simple: Replicate the effect of normal mapped surfaces on the PS2. And it seems that they have made an arbitrary algorithm to do this with polygons while avoiding the cost of unnecessary polygons. The point is that a floor like that is probably normal mapped in the Xbox version, so their "geo texturing" does the same with polygons. I think the number of poly's in the tile is really irrelevant as long as the their method works successfully.

This is all IMH(umble)O ofcourse.

 

Actually I didnt hear wrong, when the game was anounced it was said to be running a new engine.
Read the interview, even the interviewer was surprised.
http://interviews.teamxbox.com/xbox/1013/Splinter-Cell-Chaos-Theory-Interview/p3/

 

A nice trick for the PS2.

It doesn't look good for the Game Cube - the PS2 version is already going to be missing lots of details. The characters look like pandora tomorrow characters - not bad - but they look very weak compared to the new normal mapped ones.

Oh well.

 

Yep.

 

I think its a little sad that they have to go to lenghs just to get those results.

And I think London-boy is on to something - from the video - it looks like those tiles are made up of..

let me see...

2
4
6
8
10

10 triangles - 5 sides - 2 triangles per side = 10 polys.

I think the video made that pretty clear - did I miss something?

 

"he states 100polys for one floor tile"

He didn't say that a floor tile had 100 polys he said "suppose that you have 100 polygons".

 

I dont think he means what we se as tiles in the game, but geometry tiles.
The video clearly shows geometry tiles of 3x3 tiles being tiled for floor in the room. Each "visible" tile has five faces, each with two polygons in a strip or quad. So 3x3x10=90 or almost 100.

 

Nice - I should have watched it again because I swear he indicated 100 polys per tile.

Thanks for clearing it up.

 

Yes... And it also shows that a "tile" is made up of many "floor tiles" which are then grouped together to make the 20k+ poly floor. Now, let me ask, isn't a 20k poly floor made of tiles a bit of a waste? I guess he was just saying "IF we had a 20k poly floor, it wouldn't cost us that much in performance", which i still have to fully grasp as a concept.

 

If you want to do a floor with 3D tiles on PS2, this is probably the only way, waste or not. It is only 600000 polys @ 30fps so for some scenes it wouldn't be excessive. I remember a room in the fortress in Jak II that also had modeled tiles, so it’s been done before.

Not quite sure what you're asking, but do you know what instancing is?

 

Yes, i just wasn't too sure you could do it on Ps2 is all.
Making floors details with real geometry has been done before yes, i might be one of the few who noticed the system in Kingdom Hearts, at the very beginning when Sora is in a sort of dream dimension, where you basically learn the control system, and the floors are images of the "beauties" from different Disney tales. Because the textures would have to be huge, some details (the black lines in the image) are made of geometry, on top of a texture with the image of the "Beauty". To make the image look much sharper than it would with a simple texture. The same technique is used in other places, and i'm sure, in other games as well. It's not 3D detail, but it's a way of using geometry to make the image look sharper, somehow. It works fine so i'm happy.

 

I think in Kingdom Hearts the edges were modelled because the floors were supposed to be stained glass.
Because Ps2 can not do bumpmapping effectively, they had to medel the lead lines that hold the glass pieces together.

 

Yes, but they weren't trying to simulate bump mapping. The reference texture was way too blurry (for obvious reasons), so modelling the black outlines with real geometry made them look much sharper. And better. It was a 2D thing. No bump mapping effect at all.
Maybe you could say they were trying to simulate what can be done with a detail texture.
In the end, it must have been a few hundreds of black polygons with no lighting applied to them at all, so it doesn't get cheaper than that...

 

It's one of the things it's best at. VU1 was put in there to do just this kind of stuff. If you use the VU geometry compression, strips and instancing, you can get very high geometry "compression", saving both CPU bandwidth and memory.

I think Banjo Kazooi for N64 was the first to use this on a whole floor (the garden shed in the spooky level).
Maybe you could do luminance compression with gouraud shaded geometry for the colour layer? That way you could avoid a lot of the low frequency aliasing and chunkiness of regular luminance compression. Gouraud isn't perspective correct, but if it was used for vertical surfaces like walls and posters that wouldn't be too noticeable, if at all.

 

I hit 1 MB/s by the time the d/l finished. WOW.