The best lighting on the other two consoles was readily apparent. The Box? Splintercell without absolutely any doubt. The lighting incorporated in SC, heavily utilizing the vertex shaders, is easily the best upon any console currently. (although shining over brilliantly, almost blindingly in some areas)The PS2? SH3 easily. The GC? Not quite so easy to pinpoint, but I've narrowed it down to 3 titles with generally individual impressive lighting engines.
Luigi's Mansion, SFA, & LOZ:WW. The GC hasn't had a game that relied quite so heavily on lighting barring LM. I would have to say out of those 3, currently the Wind Walker would be the best IMO. The way the reatime light & shadows reacted in that game's environment was extremely impressive.
Sadly, I had to eliminate RE & RE0 as viable candidates due to the lighting for the most part was part of a FMV background. The majority of the time it is simply just animated & nigh identical to how a looped back video would function. (the torches, chandelier swinging, lighting moving past the train's windows etc, as examples) The shadows casted by the character and enemies were in real-time, though the shadowing didnt blend into the environments like it would with real time light sources since it possesses no means of detecting the background's depth from the FMV unless the developer actually made the mesh for it.
Capcom cast one hell of an optical illusion however, albeit not technically. So this brings me to RE4. I was discussing the TTS proposed unified lighting pipeline, shadow maps, real-time shadows, & pre-lit areas over on the GA forums. The unified pipeline as well as projected shadows have yet to be implemented. Anyhow, I was discussing the Cube's lighting capacity advantage over the PS2's with Panajev. (the PS2's most ardent tech. defender there & here) He inadvertently brought some things back to my attention which I realized would/could give RE4 superior, & at the very least the equivalent lighting of Splinter Cell X-Box if implemented.
If you had a game with almost all geometry being static and not dynamic, (ala the mansion) and without too much complex skinning and morphing to be performed, (and this last part would push Flipper past the NV2A chip as the extra flexibility of the Vertex Shaders would not be needed) then the GCN has a nice advantage in the lighting department. This is essentially what RE4 appears to be exploiting.
Flipper does handle its lighting in parallel to the geometric Transform (Vertex Shaders perform lighting serially, after the Transform phase) and has acceleration for local lighting support. The fastest Transform for Flipper is 5 cycles for a Vertex and with lighting done in parallel. The NV2A's Vertex Shaders take each, 4 cycles per Vertex with no lighting included. The point? RE4 may have the best lighting of any GC game, &/or the best or equivalency to any platform software to date. I would liken it to SC, though shadows & lighting are used here for overall mood, & ambience instead of stealth.
I was at Biohazard 4's sight, examining pics & rewatching the hi-res trailer when this dawned on me. I must admit it's somewhat premature, as more of RE4 needs to be shown admittedly, but the tech. possibility is indeed there. From what little we've been shown, the flashlight behaves more realistically than any point generated light I have seen. Yes besting even Heather's lamp vest from SH3 IMO. I will explain why later as this is already a lengthy read.
Luigi's Mansion, SFA, & LOZ:WW. The GC hasn't had a game that relied quite so heavily on lighting barring LM. I would have to say out of those 3, currently the Wind Walker would be the best IMO. The way the reatime light & shadows reacted in that game's environment was extremely impressive.
Sadly, I had to eliminate RE & RE0 as viable candidates due to the lighting for the most part was part of a FMV background. The majority of the time it is simply just animated & nigh identical to how a looped back video would function. (the torches, chandelier swinging, lighting moving past the train's windows etc, as examples) The shadows casted by the character and enemies were in real-time, though the shadowing didnt blend into the environments like it would with real time light sources since it possesses no means of detecting the background's depth from the FMV unless the developer actually made the mesh for it.
Capcom cast one hell of an optical illusion however, albeit not technically. So this brings me to RE4. I was discussing the TTS proposed unified lighting pipeline, shadow maps, real-time shadows, & pre-lit areas over on the GA forums. The unified pipeline as well as projected shadows have yet to be implemented. Anyhow, I was discussing the Cube's lighting capacity advantage over the PS2's with Panajev. (the PS2's most ardent tech. defender there & here) He inadvertently brought some things back to my attention which I realized would/could give RE4 superior, & at the very least the equivalent lighting of Splinter Cell X-Box if implemented.
If you had a game with almost all geometry being static and not dynamic, (ala the mansion) and without too much complex skinning and morphing to be performed, (and this last part would push Flipper past the NV2A chip as the extra flexibility of the Vertex Shaders would not be needed) then the GCN has a nice advantage in the lighting department. This is essentially what RE4 appears to be exploiting.
Flipper does handle its lighting in parallel to the geometric Transform (Vertex Shaders perform lighting serially, after the Transform phase) and has acceleration for local lighting support. The fastest Transform for Flipper is 5 cycles for a Vertex and with lighting done in parallel. The NV2A's Vertex Shaders take each, 4 cycles per Vertex with no lighting included. The point? RE4 may have the best lighting of any GC game, &/or the best or equivalency to any platform software to date. I would liken it to SC, though shadows & lighting are used here for overall mood, & ambience instead of stealth.
I was at Biohazard 4's sight, examining pics & rewatching the hi-res trailer when this dawned on me. I must admit it's somewhat premature, as more of RE4 needs to be shown admittedly, but the tech. possibility is indeed there. From what little we've been shown, the flashlight behaves more realistically than any point generated light I have seen. Yes besting even Heather's lamp vest from SH3 IMO. I will explain why later as this is already a lengthy read.
