What technology's used for the dynamic shadows Overlord for Wii?

[DeadlyNinja]

I just saw some new footage from NYC Comic Con for Overlord Dark Legend for the Wii. The shadowing is amazing. At first, I thought they were using pre-baked shadows, but then I saw the HD youtube video and notice the shadows are projected onto the character!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5it5O8RmJc

Click watch in HD to really see it in action.

The pop-ups are pretty bad, but I'm used to seeing it after hours of Crysis on my PC. Still, that's pretty crazy. I read something about dynamic light maps recently, could they be using dynamic light maps?

 

[DieH@rd]

So self shadowing? Shadow of the Collossus team created a nice selfshadow sistem on PS2

Go here a see it for yourself, its a nice read:
http://edusworld.org/ew/ficheros/2006/paginasWeb/making_of_sotc.html

 

[DeadlyNinja]

It's not self shadows, at least not from what I understand of self shadows. The trees can cast their shadows on the character, but self shadows only casts them on themselves. Besides, I think only the characters cast shadows in SOTC, whereas this game, you can clearly see shadows on everything, and they are projected onto the characters.

 

[Mobius1aic]

Such a level of shadowing in a Wii game is still pretty impressive. Lots of pop-in though :/

 

[assen]

It's not self shadows, at least not from what I understand of self shadows. The trees can cast their shadows on the character, but self shadows only casts them on themselves. Besides, I think only the characters cast shadows in SOTC, whereas this game, you can clearly see shadows on everything, and they are projected onto the characters.

Nope.

Casting shadows from one object onto itself is harder than e.g. trees casting on characters, so the term "self-shadowing" is taken to mean "everything casts shadows on everything".

The Wii is inherently capable of dynamic shadows - it's just a matter of overall performance, what tradeoff will be chosen by the developer.

 

[Rodéric]

Nope.

Casting shadows from one object onto itself is harder than e.g. trees casting on characters, so the term "self-shadowing" is taken to mean "everything casts shadows on everything".

The Wii is inherently capable of dynamic shadows - it's just a matter of overall performance, what tradeoff will be chosen by the developer.

I would have said that "self-shadowing" means "it even casts shadows on itself", implying that it's casting shadows over other items already, making it an improvement over "shadowing".

 

[Nano]

Its very capable of dynamic shadows, and yes I think I saw an instance of self-shadowing which the Wii is also capable of. Just happens to be that few focus on pushing these types of techniques.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

I would have said that "self-shadowing" means "it even casts shadows on itself", implying that it's casting shadows over other items already, making it an improvement over "shadowing".

Ugh, I was always under the impression the word "self" had an important meaning to it. Wait, so let say a character casts a dynamic shadow on the ground, but not on himself, that doesn't quality as self-shadow does it?

 

[Rodéric]

Ugh, I was always under the impression the word "self" had an important meaning to it. Wait, so let say a character casts a dynamic shadow on the ground, but not on himself, that doesn't quality as self-shadow does it?

It doesn't indeed.

I meant that self-shadowing is an improvement over shadowing.
(A number of games don't have self shadowing because of filtering artifacts or just precision issues.)

"it even casts shadows on itself"

(Self quoting for the win !! ;p)

 

[Fafalada]

could they be using dynamic light maps?

Shadowsmaps (aka shadowbuffers).
GC came with as much native support for this as the Xbox (32bit compare operand), the small VRam just makes it trickier to use.

 

[sebbbi]

They could be using simple projected textures that affect only the character and the ground. 8 bit (or 4 bit) greyscale textures with the trees prerendered at the sun direction and the texture blurred a bit to generate soft shadow look. Blurry projected textures for shadows do not need to be that high resolution either (bilinear filter works very well for low frequency data).

 

[_phil_]

Most probably projected textures.

 

[Fafalada]

Projected textures are filtered. The overlord shadows painfully aren't - at least in the above blurry video.
Also, there's self shadowing on the overlord.
And last, it's a multiplatform title where projected maps would be a completely different render path, while single-light-source shadow map already works on 2 platforms. It's not that far-fetched IMO.

 

[fearsomepirate]

It might a variant of the technique that Factor 5 developed for self-shadowing on Gamecube:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2945/shader_integration_merging_.php?page=3

Also, I wouldn't assume that an effect's presence in a Wii game means it's going to be in the PS2 and PSP versions. If the Wii is the lead platform, I wouldn't be surprised at all to see some of the effects disappear or the overall texture quality reduced.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

It might a variant of the technique that Factor 5 developed for self-shadowing on Gamecube:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2945/shader_integration_merging_.php?page=3

Also, I wouldn't assume that an effect's presence in a Wii game means it's going to be in the PS2 and PSP versions. If the Wii is the lead platform, I wouldn't be surprised at all to see some of the effects disappear or the overall texture quality reduced.

There is no PSP/PS2 version of this game. It's ground up for the Wii.

 

[Fafalada]

I was talking about PS3/360 versions. I have no idea about the history of Wii version, but visually it looks like a downscaled HD version, right down to the shadows. So even if it's not a direct port, it looks like it was spawned from same code and art base.

While Shadow Buffers can and did get used on PS2/PSP, those two don't have pixel operands that do 32bit compares, so you lose out some further precision. Still doable, but harder.

 

[Mobius1aic]

It might a variant of the technique that Factor 5 developed for self-shadowing on Gamecube:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2945/shader_integration_merging_.php?page=3

Also, I wouldn't assume that an effect's presence in a Wii game means it's going to be in the PS2 and PSP versions. If the Wii is the lead platform, I wouldn't be surprised at all to see some of the effects disappear or the overall texture quality reduced.

The craft in the Rogue Squadron games did have self-shadowing, which already proves the GC and inherently the Wii capable of such techniques. Funny how we wonder to what extent the GC or the Wii can do things, all we have to point to is Rogue Squadron and we get a pretty good idea of what is capable on the GC hardware and easily transposed to the Wii.

 

[Mobius1aic]

It might a variant of the technique that Factor 5 developed for self-shadowing on Gamecube:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2945/shader_integration_merging_.php?page=3

Also, I wouldn't assume that an effect's presence in a Wii game means it's going to be in the PS2 and PSP versions. If the Wii is the lead platform, I wouldn't be surprised at all to see some of the effects disappear or the overall texture quality reduced.

The craft in the Rogue Squadron games did have self-shadowing, which already proves the GC and inherently the Wii capable of such techniques. Funny how we wonder to what extent the GC or the Wii can do things, all we have to point to is Rogue Squadron and we get a pretty good idea of what is capable on the GC hardware and easily transposed to the Wii. Also a large amount of shadow mapping in general was present in the RS titles along with copious amounts of bump mapping at the same time (we all love the Hoth levels for that!). Hell, I think I remember reading somewhere that John Carmack stated the GC would've been fine for a Doom 3 port with the shadow maps intact to some reasonable extent had the GC been equiped with more RAM to handle it. With 88 MB + eDRAM of the same size, I wonder if that makes a Doom 3 graphics type game feasible assuming bump maps are reduced in quality and perhaps normal mapping not even included? Also, I think the Quantum 3 engine (the engine for The Conduit) has self-shadowing support. And now that Dead Space has a Wii version in the works, it brings up again the possibility or large scale discussion is whether or not the Wii can support large scale shadow mapping and self-shadowing, as I really hope the Wii version does.

 

[rezuth]

http://www.revogamers.net/articulos-394-Dentro-de-Overlord:-Chat-con-Climax-3.html

There’re a couple of things that we did to help, there’re separate processes like the really good shadowing system on there. It would go, generally, with “next-gen” games and PC hardware, but we matched to get it working on the Wii hardware. We’ve tried to make it pretty much for the environment, to give that rich and luster feel. (Shadows from trees and leaves) Walker: yes, our real-time shadow system, that’s exciting, different; it gives us a really nice look. We’ve got bloom effects, 20 minions, 10 enemies on screen. We’ve worked to push the hardware, and there’s a lot going on.

Yeah, we did use the TEV stages, which is essentially the graphic hardware of the Wii has. We did that quite a lot, especially to integrate: we had some real time code which generates them, so the shadows could work with that material like on the fly. That’s it, the way that we managed to get our interesting shadowing system was by manipulating the hardware with the TEV stages. (From scratch) It’s designed very much for the Wii hardware, it’s a custom code written specifically to get high performance out of the hardware.

Ric: The level of detail that we’ve got on Wii is probably unparalleled at the moment. It’s thanks to the engine that we’re using, but it also is thanks to the techniques that we’re using, as well. We’re using a lot of instant shading, we’re doing visual calling, so when you go around corners things are added on the fly. We’ve managed to pack in an abnormal amount of data in only 64 MB around, so it’s quite an accomplishment.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

It doesn't indeed.

I meant that self-shadowing is an improvement over shadowing.
(A number of games don't have self shadowing because of filtering artifacts or just precision issues.)

(Self quoting for the win !! ;p)

Thanks man. I knew my knowledge of shadowing is insufficient. That's why I made this post.