Shadow of the colossus and framerate issues

[Edge]

I've seen the mountain pop-up, but it's rare, and it's for mountains like 5 miles from your location. I hardly criticize the LOD issues in this game. You can see for miles, the lighting is amazing, among other things. Just climb any of the "save game" towers, and look around. I love doing that.

Oh, let's make this clear, the first colossi attacked me first before I even took my sword out. The manual is a bit strange in calling these things peaceful. I certainly don't feel sorry when I plant my sword in them.

Strange, I have yet to experience any slowdown, and wondering if owning the PSTwo makes a difference?

 

[MrWibble]

I've seen the mountain pop-up, but it's rare, and it's for mountains like 5 miles from your location. I hardly criticize the LOD issues in this game. You can see for miles, the lighting is amazing, among other things. Just climb any of the "save game" towers, and look around. I love doing that.

Oh, let's make this clear, the first colossi attacked me first before I even took my sword out. The manual is a bit strange in calling these things peaceful. I certainly don't feel sorry when I plant my sword in them.

Strange, I have yet to experience any slowdown, and wondering if owning the PSTwo makes a difference?

I didn't see any slowdown, I just experienced fairly variable framerates. I doubt the model of PS2 has anything to do with it. It seems just that certain aspects of the renderer chew up too much frametime.

For example, in several of the cutscenes the engine actually runs at 60 so long as the camera is pointing at the roof. As soon as it pans around and brings and characters into view it drops almost immediately. This isn't with a lot of geometry or fur on screen, just simple a simple room and a few characters. Most of the time it seems to stay at 30, which isn't exactly a hanging offence for a game of this nature, but it did seem to me that it still dropped further on moderately complex scenes.

Yes it has nice effects - but many of them are fixed cost. The light blooming and DOF stuff should all be constant.

Also the texture aliasing seemed worse than it needed to be. That's not a performance thing, that's a choice on the part of the artists/designers and programmers to not mipmap quite so much. I do wonder if that was actually deliberate in places, but it did seem a bit jarring to me.

Anyway I don't like criticising it too much - my complaints are relatively minor. I just find it a bit of a shame that such a wonderful game doesn't quite perform as well as I think it could.

Of course I haven't actually stuck the disk in my T15k yet, it's always possible that it's the best renderer ever - but that cutscene issue is difficult to explain.

 

[Squeak]

Seeing all those (20+?) layers of fur, makes you really wonder why not one single PS2 game has used ingame bumpmapping.
I mean, with fur shading there is a slight transformation going on every pass, bumpmapping is just two passes (ambiant colour included!), with some PP on GS, FFS!

Also the texture aliasing seemed worse than it needed to be. That's not a performance thing, that's a choice on the part of the artists/designers and programmers to not mipmap quite so much. I do wonder if that was actually deliberate in places, but it did seem a bit jarring to me.

Japanese developers are notorious for not wanting to MIPmap. Even xbox with its 64Mb has a lot of shimmering in most of the Japanese games.
Maybe it's a cultural thing? Like they want to keep things pure, and MIPmapping feeling like a compromise, or they are just really really tight with their mem budgets...

 

[Edge]

The texture shimmering (aliasing) is really bad in this game. Also, the whole game seems to lack color fidelity, and not sure if that is because of 4-bit textures used through out, or a design choice.

Anyway even with those issues, the game has so much going for it in the graphics department. Very detailed polygonal landscape (with vast draw distances), and monsters. The colossi are outstanding in their detail. Awesome animation also, on the colossi and the horse!

If the frame-rate being discussed here is a 60 to 30 fps issue, than no wonder I don't notice it. It would have to drop below 30 for it to be a concern for me. I notice frame-rate drops in other games, so it's not like I am not sensitive to it.

 

[Squeak]

The texture shimmering (aliasing) is really bad in this game. Also, the whole game seems to lack color fidelity, and not sure if that is because of 4-bit textures used through out, or a design choice.

SotC is one of the very few games where I would say that the choice of an unnaturally toned down palette (but not B/W) suites it well.
And rest assured it is a choice. Even if 4bit textures only allowed for brown and grey nuances (which they do not, they allow for 16 completely independent colours), you could still use vertex colouring to give vibrant colours to all objects.

 

[MrWibble]

SotC is one of the very few games where I would say that the choice of an unnaturally toned down palette (but not B/W) suites it well.
And rest assured it is a choice. Even if 4bit textures only allowed for brown and grey nuances (which they do not, they allow for 16 completely independent colours), you could still use vertex colouring to give vibrant colours to all objects.

Oh the colour schemes are absolutely a choice.

I think it gives a really nice feeling of this being some kind of other-world. Somehow everything being washed out in colour makes it feel really old (to me, anyway).

In the original game I think it's possible that some of the art direction was a hang-over from the PS1 origins. It doesn't even run in interlaced and many (if not all) of the textures aren't bilinearly filtered. It works well with the castle setting, because mostly it's all bricks and tiles with sharp edges (though it doesn't help much with the aliasing).

I wonder if it had been designed entirely with PS2 in mind from the beginning, how it would have affected the final product and whether that would have impacted SotC...

 

[pixelbox]

I think time constraints has something to do with the slowdown and popup. With a little more time i think this could have been solved. I wonder how many passes it takes for fur shading...And if the game dropped to 30 from 60 with vsync, wouldn't the rez be cut in half also?

 

[Branduil]

Oh the colour schemes are absolutely a choice.

I think it gives a really nice feeling of this being some kind of other-world. Somehow everything being washed out in colour makes it feel really old (to me, anyway).

In the original game I think it's possible that some of the art direction was a hang-over from the PS1 origins. It doesn't even run in interlaced and many (if not all) of the textures aren't bilinearly filtered. It works well with the castle setting, because mostly it's all bricks and tiles with sharp edges (though it doesn't help much with the aliasing).

I wonder if it had been designed entirely with PS2 in mind from the beginning, how it would have affected the final product and whether that would have impacted SotC...

I'm pretty sure Ico uses bilinear filtering. And even though the display resolution is only 240x320, it seems to use something like FSAA to give the game a higher resolution look.

Anyways, hasn't mipmapping always been a problem on the PS2? It seems like PS2 games only use mipmapping for distant textures, and not textures that are simply at a sharp angle.

 

[_phil_]

I'm pretty sure Ico uses bilinear filtering.

some textures in ICO are not filtrered ,that's true.As for the fur ,it's single pass alpha ,hand made ,just with a lot of love.

 

[MrWibble]

I'm pretty sure Ico uses bilinear filtering. And even though the display resolution is only 240x320, it seems to use something like FSAA to give the game a higher resolution look.

Anyways, hasn't mipmapping always been a problem on the PS2? It seems like PS2 games only use mipmapping for distant textures, and not textures that are simply at a sharp angle.

It may use bilinear for some textures, but definitely not for all (and I'm pretty sure it's 640x240, I very much doubt they've slashed the horizontal res... maybe 512x240 at a push).

And yes, it used a very basic FSAA technique, but not one that wouldn't have worked for interlaced. Not sure why - maybe they wanted to save a bit of memory, or maybe they just liked the non-flickering display. It's not a problem - just something that always struct me as odd... just another thing that makes Ico different.

Mipmapping on the PS2 is a bit of an issue - the hardware only calculates mip-level by distance, not pixel coverage. You either have to insert extra code to do a per-polygon adjustment of one of the mip-factors (almost never done), or find a weight that works reasonably well for a given texture, which isn't too bad if they're always seen at more or less the same angle. Otherwise you have to compromise and find a balance between overly blurred or overly sharp.

In the case of SotC it just seems that it's weighted a bit too much towards aliasing rather than blurring (or it's turned off).

This could actually be a sign of one of their performance problems, because if you have a filtered texture and it's still aliasing, you're overcooking the number of samples required to feed the filter and the GS starts to stall - bilinear is only free if you don't need too many texel samples per clock to feed all the pixel units.

 

[MrWibble]

I think time constraints has something to do with the slowdown and popup. With a little more time i think this could have been solved. I wonder how many passes it takes for fur shading...And if the game dropped to 30 from 60 with vsync, wouldn't the rez be cut in half also?

Time constraints? How many years should it take to write a better engine?

Anyway, no, the rez would not be cut in half just for dropping framerate. This used to happen on some early titles (and probably on a tiny number of recent ones) where develoeprs only used a half-height display buffer, forcing them to alternate it every field or lose resolution. However if you have a full-height display buffer then the PS2 is perfectly capable of outputting alternate fields itself and you can take as long as you want to render the next frame. The output circuit will even antialias the display (slightly) for you if you want.

 

[pixelbox]

Time constraints? How many years should it take to write a better engine?

Well the gameplay in sotc is a new concept. I'm pretty sure they had to get that down before anything. And i heard that concept along with the game's art can and will be the bulk of the developing cycle. The game had to be out at a certain time and it already had been delayed, so i'm sure they cut corners and left things undone to meet the deadline. Anywho, maybe it was my imagination but the game has gotten cleaner and more polished 3/4ths of the game. The later environments were just so...WOW!

 

[pixelbox]

some textures in ICO are not filtrered ,that's true.As for the fur ,it's single pass alpha ,hand made ,just with a lot of love.

For fur-shading it's one pass huh...

 

[London Geezer]

For fur-shading it's one pass huh...

They're just alpha textures.

 

[_phil_]

For fur-shading it's one pass huh...

with good artists it's one pass + alpha texture,without and only coding solution it's about 15 passes (on ps2).
This example should provide some backgroung for understandig on how good artists are probably more important than HW feature list.

 

[pixelbox]

with good artists it's one pass + alpha texture,without and only coding solution it's about 15 passes (on ps2).
This example should provide some backgroung for understandig on how good artists are probably more important than HW feature list.

So it's faked then? Is this how it's done on the other platforms?

 

[London Geezer]

So it's faked then? Is this how it's done on the other platforms?

As has been said many times, it's not exactly "Fur Shading" the way it's done with pixel shaders on PC or Xbox. It's "fake", but in the end it looks like fur so one can still call it "Fur Shading". The fact that it's done by overlaying LOTS of alpha textured polygons (bit like smoke effects, but fixed to the Colossus surface and with a "hair" texture on them) shouldn't detract it from being called "Fur".

 

[Shifty Geezer]

All graphics are fake. Until we have realtime raytracing it's all corner-cutting approximations that look about right. Just different techniques to achieve the same goal.

 

[London Geezer]

All graphics are fake. Until we have realtime raytracing it's all corner-cutting approximations that look about right. Just different techniques to achieve the same goal.

Even realtime raytracing is faking reality.
Only reality is reality.
Even if something looks completely real, as long as we have to process it and see it through a display device like a TV or a monitor (even a 3D monitor), it's still fake.

 

[MrWibble]

As has been said many times, it's not exactly "Fur Shading" the way it's done with pixel shaders on PC or Xbox. It's "fake", but in the end it looks like fur so one can still call it "Fur Shading". The fact that it's done by overlaying LOTS of alpha textured polygons (bit like smoke effects, but fixed to the Colossus surface and with a "hair" texture on them) shouldn't detract it from being called "Fur".

Actually the same basic effect is done on most platforms where I've seen fur. The only difference would the use of pixel-shaders to do better lighting on the hair - the actual hair effect itself would remain the same. The PS2's fillrate and cheap alpha-blending would make it pretty good at the technique.

If you look at screens from Conker on XBox and compare them to close-ups of the fur on SotC you'll see the same tell-tale signs:

http://media.xbox.ign.com/media/490/490304/img_2827822.html
http://media.ps2.ign.com/media/490/490849/img_3002525.html

Especially near the edges you can see the textured shells making up the vulometric fur effect (as the angle of view becomes sharper at the edge, you can see between the gaps in the blended layers and you get a kind of broken-up, striped effect).

This is one area where I think the SotC guys did really well by the way...