Silent Hill2 : (My) Restless Dreams!

[Tahir2]

I tried to play this game but I get nightmares real easy (for real)

 

[Blade]

Pana: I tried it, and I preferred the 3D scheme a little bit more.

 

[zurich]

Dean,

I always saw Pyramid Head as James' projection of himself out of guilt... ie: killing Maria over and over and over, raping the (very, very female-like) monsters [see sexual frustration out of Mary's illness], etc, etc etc.

Moreover, I saw the entire game as played through the (delusional) eyes of James.. that is, no one else sees any monsters (they see what haunts them, as in Eddie sees people laughing, Angela sees her father, Laura sees nothing because of her innocence, whereas James sees buttloads of womanly monsters being hunted by Pyramid Head).

Man, I better stop now

 

[DeanoC]

PC version also has per-pixel lighting on static geometry BUT has worse looking shadows than either PS2 or Xbox version. Also has some weird texture repeating seams that look kinda ugly :\

In other news Silent Hill 3 is officialy announced for PC! DeanoC was right all along (not that I doubted!) Team Silent again confirmed they don't have any plans for GC or Xbox ports, though.

We can't filter the shadows (the Xbox and PS2 are able to render the shadows and then run a filter over them, PC version can't) but apart from that, they are exactly the same (same shadow volumes etc).

Texture repeating sounds like a card specific thing, the textures are exactly the same as the Xbox, we do have to downgrade them on lower video cards and that produces seams. Other causes could be texture sampling being different from the default (any forced anistropy on?)

BTW What video card?

 

[DeanoC]

Dean,

I always saw Pyramid Head as James' projection of himself out of guilt... ie: killing Maria over and over and over, raping the (very, very female-like) monsters [see sexual frustration out of Mary's illness], etc, etc etc.

Moreover, I saw the entire game as played through the (delusional) eyes of James.. that is, no one else sees any monsters (they see what haunts them, as in Eddie sees people laughing, Angela sees her father, Laura sees nothing because of her innocence, whereas James sees buttloads of womanly monsters being hunted by Pyramid Head).

Man, I better stop now

None of us on the conversion team, could agree on the meaning either
Interesting their is some evidence that the original team (the real developers of Silent Hill) didn't have a single interpretation. It may be almost delibrate, so everybody 'reads' the story in a personal way. Which may explain why it works so well for so many people.

 

[London Geezer]

Dean,

I always saw Pyramid Head as James' projection of himself out of guilt... ie: killing Maria over and over and over, raping the (very, very female-like) monsters [see sexual frustration out of Mary's illness], etc, etc etc.

Moreover, I saw the entire game as played through the (delusional) eyes of James.. that is, no one else sees any monsters (they see what haunts them, as in Eddie sees people laughing, Angela sees her father, Laura sees nothing because of her innocence, whereas James sees buttloads of womanly monsters being hunted by Pyramid Head).

Man, I better stop now

oh my god that is so right!!! u're a geinous, i never thought about it that way, the fact that little laura can walk around with no weapons without getting seriously killed and other things..... i thought it was just *a thing about the game*...

 

[marconelly!]

Pretty much all that Zurich said is covered in that FAQ file chap posted, and I agree with most of it. Pyramid Head is some kind of physical manifestation of James' guilt and is forcing him to live through Maria's suffering, mutilation and death over and over again, Maria being a carbon copy of his wife's appearance, but different in personality (to make her even more appealing to him) His guilt is there obviously because he knows he was too weak and can forget himself for what he's done to his wife. Basically, Silent Hill is capable to materialize in reality everyone's personal nighmare, and to torture him/her with it. Although the story has some vague points, I think the basic idea behind it is pretty damn good, definitely not any worse than ideas used for blockbuster movies like 6th Sense and such.

We can't filter the shadows (the Xbox and PS2 are able to render the shadows and then run a filter over them, PC version can't) but apart from that, they are exactly the same (same shadow volumes etc).

Interesting, why is it so?

Can you tell me, btw. what kind of shadowing method is used in SH2 and why they decided to change it for SH3?

As for textures, I ran the game on GF2 card, but a friend with Radeon 9700 told me of the same problems (hard edge shadows, texture seams)

 

[Fafalada]

We can't filter the shadows (the Xbox and PS2 are able to render the shadows and then run a filter over them, PC version can't) but apart from that, they are exactly the same (same shadow volumes etc).

Hmm... I remember PC screenshots looking like using volumes yes, but PS2?
What I remember playing the game it looks very much like projected textures to me... (the falloff softness and all, and the selfshadowing limited to only certain geometry types).

 

[DeanoC]

We can't filter the shadows (the Xbox and PS2 are able to render the shadows and then run a filter over them, PC version can't) but apart from that, they are exactly the same (same shadow volumes etc).

Hmm... I remember PC screenshots looking like using volumes yes, but PS2?
What I remember playing the game it looks very much like projected textures to me... (the falloff softness and all, and the selfshadowing limited to only certain geometry types).

It nevers uses projected textures, but does use projected geometry sometimes (outdoors when it can get away with it, it just projects ontio a plane). Its also uses shadow decals (prefixed extra geometry)

The real shadows are a shadow volume technique (stencil on Xbox & PC, IIRC PS2 Dest Alpha counter but I could be wrong with PS2?). Used indoors with the spot light. Lack of self shadowing on the characters is due to the shadow volumes being lo res models (so volume doesn't match). Xbox blurs the shadow volume in/out buffer before draw the screen shadow quad. On PC we couldn't because no portible access to the stencil buffer (Xbox just casted the stencil an RGBA and run a pixel shader).

Its all a big hack At times there are upto 4 difference types of shadows in a single scene, but it does the job. The shadow volumes are carefully constructed to use minimal resources but look great.

 

[Deepak]

I saw your name in PC credits....lead programmer - Dean Calver... ...and I saw that there are only 4 programmers....lead one you and 3 others....only 4 guys coded this game??

btw how did you code the game....from scratch???