I think it's down to hardware limitation in AW's case. If you take Rememdy, a self proclaimed highly technical development team, who's spent 5 years working on the engine and you would think they have exhausted every options available for the game but still ended with a 540p buffer. It's pretty clear to me now the incredible lighting and shadows of AW is the double edged sword for which most devs have been trying to avoid. I think there's a reason you don't see that many 540p games.
The technology of Alan Wake *spawn
- Thread starter nightshade
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corduroygt
Banned
Tearing is much more disappointing compared to 540p. I'd rather have a 480p game that doesn't tear.
At nightfall the dynamic lighting an be emphasized along with approximation effects. Muted color palette helps the aliasing. And indoor/daylight pulls the curtain on the models and the geometry.
I might be the odd one but tearing doesn't bother me nearly as much as a blurry low res output, tearing is momentary at least but a fixed frame buffer is fixed for good.
Billy Idol
Legend
Ew, this is some kind of heritical question you ask here Mr Mod!
I really hope (and I ultimately believe) that it is programmer limits!
For me it is obvious that Remedy had some serious troubles during the development of this game and that they did not master the Xbox360!!
I read an interview in my local game Mag, where even one of the Remedy heads admit that they loose a lot of dev time due to wrong choices (iirc, they planed this game as an open world game at the beginning and rejected rather late).
not to mention low polygon counts sometimes!
the wheels here have less polygons than mario kart wii
http://au.xbox360.ign.com/dor/objec...an-wake-20100504064329427.html?page=mediaFull
Yes I think memory issues are the largest problem theyve had
Well once again I think we're picking bad shots and having our fun, for example, this gameplay shot of another game looks quite blurry and low poly also http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/action/uncharted2amongthieves/images/0/58/?full_size=1 I'll take the Alan Wake shot, thanks.
That's what happens when you dont look at bullshots. And not too mention cherry pick the worst possible shots for your agenda.
That's what happens when you dont look at bullshots. And not too mention cherry pick the worst possible shots for your agenda.
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That's an MP game screenshot though.
Bringing U2 into the discussion is only going to make the thread worse.
EDIT: Ha ha, changed screen shot. ^_^
That room is huge with a gigantic sculpture in the middle (It's about 3-4 storey tall), great use of lighting and climbing for puzzle too. When you bring U2 into the discussion, the first thing people will think of is 720p. I suggest we abort this game comparison subthread.
Bringing U2 into the discussion is only going to make the thread worse.
EDIT: Ha ha, changed screen shot. ^_^
That room is huge with a gigantic sculpture in the middle (It's about 3-4 storey tall), great use of lighting and climbing for puzzle too. When you bring U2 into the discussion, the first thing people will think of is 720p. I suggest we abort this game comparison subthread.
The media is out there for anyone to link to. Where there are points of good texture fidelity and detailed polygon models within Alan Wake, you can link to those rather than completely different game.
Seriously though, this is the basis of sane debate. Someone presents a point, and someone else refutes with refutations linking to supporting evidence. In this case posit A, "Alan Wake has bad textures as evidenced here," would be refuted with, "ahh, but that's a worst case image, and these images here and here demonstrate good texture detail." Without the contrasting evidence, there's no meat to the argument. Or as the case may be here, the refutation may be, "yes, texture resolution isn't typical of current gen games, but the lighting model/particle engine/voxel tech/Digital Molecular Matter/yadayada which enables this (link to picture or video) is trading texture space to enable this effect."
Everyone here is smart enough to know these are finite boxes that can't do everything. If a game trades texture resolution, so be it. And if it doesn't, fine. But no-one should be getting shirty over the debate regardless of the game (Alan Wake's exclusivity is the real issue here
).May be they are preparing a stereoscopic 3D version ?
Or Natal....doesn't that take resourses away?
LittleJohnny
Newcomer
It was rumored that MS had done away with the internal processor and opted to use Xenon instead which would probably tie up one of it's cores. Based on that rumor and the link below I assume that MS had an Internal processor for Natal (Not prime sense) and were having trouble with lag, MS then scrapped the processor and tried using some of the 360 resources which caused an outcry from the Interweb whinnies, so they decided to go with Primesense, and from the looks of it, the spec's have improved, according to the article the sensor no analyses a 640 x 480 image at 60fps (Originally 30fps before the Primesense processor). This is just my guess based on Natal's published progress.
http://www.slashgear.com/primesense-confirmed-as-project-natal-hardware-source-3179868/
Alucardx23
Regular
Well I managed to play the game early and I must say that the trade off was worth it, I’m on the second part of the 3rd chapter, and I’m really impressed with how the game looks at night, no other game on console look this good at night in mi opinion, you only really notice that the game is Sub HD at day time, which is only 15-20% of the time, the gameplay is slower and more about talking and exploration at day, that makes me think that they could have used a higher resolution during the day because most of the effects that you see at night are not there, its true that some of the texture look a little bit blurry but nothing that’s out of the ordinary, but trust me when you see the game at night with your flashlight casting shadow on everything, the wind moving all the trees and grass around you and the fog casting shadows on the floor you will be convinced.
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ShadowRunner
Veteran
The specs you are quoting are from the primsense reference design not Natal. A reference design is usually scaleable to different cost/performance needs, GPUs are a good example of this. Natal is still 30fps as far as we know. From what i have seen it has always been primesense underlying tech from the very begining with MS helping to develope it further. They had an idea to add custom silicon but scrapped the idea for price or performance reasons. I dont think the natal situation is any more complex than that and certainly dont think Interweb whinnies had much to do with any decision MS has made with regards to it
Lightning was also a nice touch. Illuminated the fields and the trees.
corduroygt
Banned
The blue line, where benefit of 720p over 480p starts to become noticable for 32" TV's is right around the 9-10 feet mark which is 3 meters, which will mean you're right on the borderline on being able to tell 480p from 720p. Also the graph is not perfect, the scale might be a little off, who knows.
There is more to 720p or 1080p than just the increased number of active pixels, which by itself is enough. Colour depth increases and other artifacts disappear, so unless one is watching a 32" screen from a 20'+ distance, the advantage should be clear enough.
There are other factors, such as proper calibration of a TV, which makes certain a big difference too. So this chart's usefulness is very questionable at best.
sounds like my engine
Hmm Im guessing now its not just the memory that they had issues with but also lack of CPU power, since to do this stuff fast you need to do a lot of calculations per frame
It's more gpu for shadow maps no? Lots of fill rate and vertex work which the gpu is good at, it can overlap much of the work. It's gpu is also good at branching which makes using cascaded shadow maps easy. Or did they go some other route for the shadows in this game? Thought it was just shadow maps but I've only seen a few pics...
