Shadow of the colossus and framerate issues

[London Geezer]

I'd say there is almost certainly IK in places, though maybe not in the situation you mention. I think the death sequences, to me, look like canned animation.

However there are other motions that probably involve IK in one form or another.

Still no sign of your multi-region thing?

Nope. Got the game but not the hack thing. DAMMIT!!

Besides i want to wait till i can play the game on my new HDTV, which "should" come tomorrow but probably won't, so i'm still ok with it...

 

[MrWibble]

Nope. Got the game but not the hack thing. DAMMIT!!

Besides i want to wait till i can play the game on my new HDTV, which "should" come tomorrow but probably won't, so i'm still ok with it...

Cool... it looks a bit nicer in widescreen progressive.

What screen are you getting?

 

[_phil_]

I'd say there is almost certainly IK in places, though maybe not in the situation you mention.

the main character has IK everywhere.the horse too. from ground/leg correction to hanging on colossi.

 

[London Geezer]

Cool... it looks a bit nicer in widescreen progressive.

What screen are you getting?

Samsung LE32R51BD (their new range, 8ms compared to the 12ms of the ones they're using on X360 pods, which are the R41 range i believe).

 

[MrWibble]

the main character has IK everywhere.the horse too. from ground/leg correction to hanging on colossi.

Yeah, that's the things I was thinking of... The climbing/hanging-on stuff would be pretty tricky to get working with just animation blending.

 

[MrWibble]

Samsung LE32R51BD (their new range, 8ms compared to the 12ms of the ones they're using on X360 pods, which are the R41 range i believe).

Aha... I have the 26" variant of that as a spare TV for my bedroom - it was the model Microsoft gave away at GDC (at least for us Europeans - I think the US folk got and older/smaller model...)

It's ok... I find the digital TV quality a bit ropey (it seems to be internally hooked up on composite or s-video - even the menus aren't crisp, which is really strange for an LCD panel), but the VGA feed from a PC is quite good. I only briefly hooked it up on component (to a PS3 devkit, before I brought the thing home) and it looked pretty decent.

I had no idea what the refresh on it was, but I haven't noticed any problem with it.

I don't know if they have similar panels to their own laptop range, but my laptop suffers from a bit of temporary (at least I hope it's temporary) burn-in, which I didn't see on my other machines. Might want to watch out for that if you're playing games, though I'm pretty sure it won't be permanent.

 

[London Geezer]

Aha... I have the 26" variant of that as a spare TV for my bedroom - it was the model Microsoft gave away at GDC (at least for us Europeans - I think the US folk got and older/smaller model...)

It's ok... I find the digital TV quality a bit ropey (it seems to be internally hooked up on composite or s-video - even the menus aren't crisp, which is really strange for an LCD panel), but the VGA feed from a PC is quite good. I only briefly hooked it up on component (to a PS3 devkit, before I brought the thing home) and it looked pretty decent.

I had no idea what the refresh on it was, but I haven't noticed any problem with it.

I don't know if they have similar panels to their own laptop range, but my laptop suffers from a bit of temporary (at least I hope it's temporary) burn-in, which I didn't see on my other machines. Might want to watch out for that if you're playing games, though I'm pretty sure it won't be permanent.

Burn in on a LCD?? Strange!

Oh and what exactly do you mean "MS were giving them away at GDC"??

Well i'll be happy with it whatever happens, getting it for half price

 

[MrWibble]

Burn in on a LCD?? Strange!

Oh and what exactly do you mean "MS were giving them away at GDC"??

Well i'll be happy with it whatever happens, getting it for half price

I posted about it back when it happened - anyone that turned up to Microsoft's keynote speech at GDC got handed a coloured badge. At the end they had a prize-draw thing - playing a video of same racing game, I forget which - and 1000 people with the same colour badge as the car which won the race got given an HDTV...

Took ages for them to sort it out for Europeans (I guess because there wasn't a proper HDTV model in the range over here and they didn't want to ship us US tellys) but it was a pretty good deal in the end

 

[London Geezer]

I posted about it back when it happened - anyone that turned up to Microsoft's keynote speech at GDC got handed a coloured badge. At the end they had a prize-draw thing - playing a video of same racing game, I forget which - and 1000 people with the same colour badge as the car which won the race got given an HDTV...

Took ages for them to sort it out for Europeans (I guess because there wasn't a proper HDTV model in the range over here and they didn't want to ship us US tellys) but it was a pretty good deal in the end

You BEACH!!!1oneoneone


Well i guess that's one of the good sides in a rather unrewarding job - most of the time that is, from what i hear.





Uhmm... Shadow of the Colossus. Great game.

 

[pixelbox]

For the furry patches you might be looking at 10x the number of polygons and fillrate for doing 10 layers. That's probably in the ball-park for the games discussed here.

Given that there is only one (albeit huge!) character on screen using fur, and even then only in patches, the number of polygons is probably quite manageable. Especially as they're trivially transformed from the base polygons and so cheap to calculate. The fillrate is no problem for the PS2, so on the whole it's not too hard a technique. You can probably write an engine churning out more polygons per frame using stuff like that (or any multipass technique) than if you try to use the extra polygons to make more detail or add more instances of characters.

Thats for the shells - if you add fins then it gets more interesting because they look bad (and can make the whole fur effect look worse) unless you blend them in well at the right viewing angles, and thats not necessarily cheap. For those though, you're only adding a small number of polys. At most, with the nastiest available hack, you're adding one quad per edge, which is in the order of one more textured shell.

However it's actually surprisingly hard to make it look really good, so you need to experiment a lot with the textures involved. The SotC guys did a nice job. If I was highly unscrupulous I'd be very tempted to poke around and see exactly what their rendering passes look like.

Well if it's around 10 passes, they should have used the "shader fur" instead. And londonboy, the slowdown really happens when the type of light they use is on the screen, not when the collossus is on. And if it does, the particles are to blame.

 

[_phil_]

Well if it's around 10 passes, they should have used the "shader fur" instead..

passes and layers aren't the same thing.And the best result visually is with hand made method.

 

[MrWibble]

Well if it's around 10 passes, they should have used the "shader fur" instead. And londonboy, the slowdown really happens when the type of light they use is on the screen, not when the collossus is on. And if it does, the particles are to blame.

Maybe you missed the earlier posts on this subject, but there is not some magic "shader" that renders good looking fur. Fur on every current platform that I've seen is done in exactly the same layered way. Shaders are used to make it look better, not to render it in the first place.

 

[pixelbox]

Maybe you missed the earlier posts on this subject, but there is not some magic "shader" that renders good looking fur. Fur on every current platform that I've seen is done in exactly the same layered way. Shaders are used to make it look better, not to render it in the first place.

gotcha

 

[Branduil]

So how is the fake HDR done? You can tell it's not real HDR since the brightness doesn't adjust based on time, but based on whether or not you're moving towards or away from the source of the brightness, which I found strange.

 

[BlueTsunami]

So how is the fake HDR done? You can tell it's not real HDR since the brightness doesn't adjust based on time, but based on whether or not you're moving towards or away from the source of the brightness, which I found strange.

Sony Pixi magic! A sprinkle of this, a sprint of that and you've got HDR Likeness.

 

[Branduil]

Sony Pixi magic! A sprinkle of this, a sprint of that and you've got HDR Likeness.

Shh, you'll give Kutagari buzzword ideas!

 

[MrWibble]

So how is the fake HDR done? You can tell it's not real HDR since the brightness doesn't adjust based on time, but based on whether or not you're moving towards or away from the source of the brightness, which I found strange.

I'm not sure what you mean about real HDR adjusting based on time... Certainly you can use HDR (and more specifically, the mapping done between an HDR render and the final output which still generally has to be a narrow range) to emulate exposure time (like in a camera) and then adjust that exposure as you move from light to dark or vice-versa. That can be rigged to respond in a similar way to the human eye, which should give the player more of a feeling of the brightness of the scene.

However that's just one effect that HDR can be used to try to achieve - and as with most things attributed to "HDR" it can be done with a traditional render, it just involves a bit more hackery.

HDR itself doesn't produce most of the artefacts you probably associate with an HDR based engine. Most of the effects come in a post-process as you map the HDR image to something capable of being output on a normal display. It's likely we'll never get a true HDR display because it would be insanely dangerous to stare at a device capable of outputting more light than the sun. However displays with much more range than current ones are on the way, and may well reduce the amount of hacking being done in that mapping stage.

Regards the lighting effects in SotC... I think I know the one you're talking about:

If you stand in the starting location and look at the windows, the lighting coming in is blindingly bright and blooms outward from the window - nothing outside is really discernable through the glow. However if you move side to side the bloom kind of lags behind and you can see stuff outside.

I don't know for sure what they're doing - I haven't analysed it closely.

However if I had to guess, I'd suggest that they do some of the blooming by blending a blurry version of the previous frame's bright areas back on top of the current frame. Over time that will give you a smoother, larger bloom, but at the cost of motion changing the effect.

Another thing that SotC seems to do, is wildly oversaturate the lighting. Old-school texture blending works by darkening the textures according to the light influence - 0 light gives black, 255 light gives the texture colour. However the PS2 vertex-colour/texture blending isn't normalised around 255 - for a traditional lighting effect you have to divide one of your factors by two (usually the vertex colour), otherwise it actually brightens the texture. SotC seems to exploit this and allow lights to oversaturate the scene. Sometimes it looks like they overuse this a little, but it's probably necessary to get their bloom working. Essentially they're using the PS2's ability to overbrighten the render as a kind of poor-man's HDR.

 

[pixelbox]

Maybe you missed the earlier posts on this subject, but there is not some magic "shader" that renders good looking fur. Fur on every current platform that I've seen is done in exactly the same layered way. Shaders are used to make it look better, not to render it in the first place.

Yea that's all i wanted to know. But how exactly do the shaders make it look better?

 

[MrWibble]

Yea that's all i wanted to know. But how exactly do the shaders make it look better?

The same way they make any other geometry look better; by applying more complex shading - usually lighting effects.

I don't think SotC suffers much from the lack of these, because the hair used is generally quite dense and rough, and the lighting is often quite diffuse. It's not a shampoo advert

 

[_phil_]

little OT note :
HDR display : 200 000 :1
http://www.brightsidetech.com/

looks like the perfect next gen screen,ain't it ?