Why RE4's lighting may be the GCN's Best
- Thread starter Li Mu Bai
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? what does prince share with mairo and zelda? I really don't see the connection... other than the fact they ar eall old franchises, but prince was designed as A PC game first and foremost.
Anyway, the amount of people on the teams is just the way I've always said difficulty of development would work.
GC = the easiest to develop for.
Xbox = the next easiest or middle.
PS2 =the hardest.
The reason Gamecube is easy to develop for is because you don't have a whole lot of optimization room due to the API's provided. This was explained to me by a gamecube programmer. It's hardware T&L capabilities are more limiting than the other two consoles. Unless you want to do things on the CPU but that I've much more limiting as the CPU isn't as fast as the GPU. Gamecube does have some programable texturing hardware, but it allows you to do things in a different way then other consoles, and in most cases features a whole lot of games don't bother using. From what I';ve been told it's only capable of vertex lighting (so that may explain the difference in appearence in some games, not many). Due to the higher level API this made it possible to emulate the hardware for early developers to begin working on games. Before Gamecube was released they had emulators that ran on PC and Machintosh.
Xbox allows for some more tinkering with the vertex shaders and trying to balence the UMA usage between CPU and GPU. On top of that the audio chip is programmable, there are many different ways to handle the lighting and it's quite a bit faster in the graphics are then the gamecube.
PS2 is extremly programmable, more so then both competiing consoles and that's why most devs can't get the best out of the hardware. It doesn't really have a higher level API to code for (unless you consider renderware something like that, render ware certianly isn't a 3D engine in the traditional sense). Good developers that are capable of keeping all the processors busy will exceed in making technically impressive games.
Anyway I know what the person from IGN is implying, but do they really understand where te games bottlenecks are? of course they don't. For all we know teh reason it's only running at 30 frames persecond was because they were drawing too much geometry to make the framerate stable at 60 fps on PS2 and gamecube. This goes right back to that argument of frame rates when I said that developers make trade offs. sometimes they trade off visual appearence for framerate and sometimes it's the opposite. I think the highre res textures and better lighting ar etwo things that the xbox can afford to provide at a resonable cost.
Anyway, the amount of people on the teams is just the way I've always said difficulty of development would work.
GC = the easiest to develop for.
Xbox = the next easiest or middle.
PS2 =the hardest.
The reason Gamecube is easy to develop for is because you don't have a whole lot of optimization room due to the API's provided. This was explained to me by a gamecube programmer. It's hardware T&L capabilities are more limiting than the other two consoles. Unless you want to do things on the CPU but that I've much more limiting as the CPU isn't as fast as the GPU. Gamecube does have some programable texturing hardware, but it allows you to do things in a different way then other consoles, and in most cases features a whole lot of games don't bother using. From what I';ve been told it's only capable of vertex lighting (so that may explain the difference in appearence in some games, not many). Due to the higher level API this made it possible to emulate the hardware for early developers to begin working on games. Before Gamecube was released they had emulators that ran on PC and Machintosh.
Xbox allows for some more tinkering with the vertex shaders and trying to balence the UMA usage between CPU and GPU. On top of that the audio chip is programmable, there are many different ways to handle the lighting and it's quite a bit faster in the graphics are then the gamecube.
PS2 is extremly programmable, more so then both competiing consoles and that's why most devs can't get the best out of the hardware. It doesn't really have a higher level API to code for (unless you consider renderware something like that, render ware certianly isn't a 3D engine in the traditional sense). Good developers that are capable of keeping all the processors busy will exceed in making technically impressive games.
Anyway I know what the person from IGN is implying, but do they really understand where te games bottlenecks are? of course they don't. For all we know teh reason it's only running at 30 frames persecond was because they were drawing too much geometry to make the framerate stable at 60 fps on PS2 and gamecube. This goes right back to that argument of frame rates when I said that developers make trade offs. sometimes they trade off visual appearence for framerate and sometimes it's the opposite. I think the highre res textures and better lighting ar etwo things that the xbox can afford to provide at a resonable cost.
Well Prince is Persia is all about platforming and puzzles AFAICS, which is the main idea behind games like Zelda and Mario.
I agree that GC is easier to get games up and running then PS2 and even XBox, but can it be that much easier? Surely GC's ease of use vs's XBox's can't be as drastic as the difference between an entire team (I'd imagine that's at least 6-10 people right?) and 1-2 people? I'd also imagine that Fran would have a decent amount of experience with GC dev teams and would have a very good idea of what sort of development resources GC normally gets vs the other two consoles. I don't really think he'd speak up like that if he didn't have a really good idea that this sort of difference in development resources isn't normal. Also just a thought here but if that difference is normal then I don't know why developers whine about poor GC sales. They must spend at least 5 times less making the GC version then the XBox version, and even less compared to PS2.
BTW I don't think its that GC doesn't have a lot of room for optimisation. I think its more like devs just don't need to optimise much most of the time (GC's memory latency is one reason for this, it makes for a very forgiving system). Also perhaps getting closer to the metal isn't as widely known about by devs as it is with PS2 and XBox (probably partly because of GC's ease of development).
I agree that GC is easier to get games up and running then PS2 and even XBox, but can it be that much easier? Surely GC's ease of use vs's XBox's can't be as drastic as the difference between an entire team (I'd imagine that's at least 6-10 people right?) and 1-2 people? I'd also imagine that Fran would have a decent amount of experience with GC dev teams and would have a very good idea of what sort of development resources GC normally gets vs the other two consoles. I don't really think he'd speak up like that if he didn't have a really good idea that this sort of difference in development resources isn't normal. Also just a thought here but if that difference is normal then I don't know why developers whine about poor GC sales. They must spend at least 5 times less making the GC version then the XBox version, and even less compared to PS2.
BTW I don't think its that GC doesn't have a lot of room for optimisation. I think its more like devs just don't need to optimise much most of the time (GC's memory latency is one reason for this, it makes for a very forgiving system). Also perhaps getting closer to the metal isn't as widely known about by devs as it is with PS2 and XBox (probably partly because of GC's ease of development).
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Teasy said:
I think this is a result of Nintendo starting to late in the GC lifespan, as for as releasing demos of third party games. Viewtiful Joe is doing well because of the demo. Nintendo doesn't have to release demos of there games because they're almost guaranteed to sell atleast a million copies. I've read in other forums of people getting demos for POP on XBOX and PS2, but none for the GC. Nintendo has to start requesting demo builds of third party games. Release them to magazines, gamestores and they don't have to be free. I've always been weary of purchasing third party games, but a demo always ease your fears of making a mistake.
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Yeah I agree with that.
Speaking of demo's. I was in GAME today and I asked when they were getting the GC version of True Crime. The guy told me and then asked if I wanted to pre-order it. So I asked if it was free and he said it was £1.99 to pre-order but you get a demo version free when you pre-order. I was quite excited about that and pulled £2 out of my pocket immediately
Only for him to then tell me that he just realised that the free demo's only came with the PS2 and XBox versions
Anyone with a PS2 and GC will pre-order the PS2 version so he can get a free demo. Then when it comes out he'll buy the PS2 version even if he'd have otherwise bought the GC version. Because he'll have gotten used to playing the game on PS2 and will also have already paid a none refundable £1.99 for the PS2 version.
Of course this is just one of many different reasons for poor some of the third party sales on GC.
Yeah I agree with that.
Speaking of demo's. I was in GAME today and I asked when they were getting the GC version of True Crime. The guy told me and then asked if I wanted to pre-order it. So I asked if it was free and he said it was £1.99 to pre-order but you get a demo version free when you pre-order. I was quite excited about that and pulled £2 out of my pocket immediately
Only for him to then tell me that he just realised that the free demo's only came with the PS2 and XBox versions Anyone with a PS2 and GC will pre-order the PS2 version so he can get a free demo. Then when it comes out he'll buy the PS2 version even if he'd have otherwise bought the GC version. Because he'll have gotten used to playing the game on PS2 and will also have already paid a none refundable £1.99 for the PS2 version.
Of course this is just one of many different reasons for poor some of the third party sales on GC.
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Not to long ago I recieved a demo for Sphinx The power of set(whatever its called), but it was for the PS2. I don't have a PS2, and I'm still wondering how they got my address and name to even mail me a demo.
I'm curious as to who is releasing these demos in this manor. Is Sony and MS behind the demos that come with the pre-order that come with True Crime or is it Activision.
I'm curious as to who is releasing these demos in this manor. Is Sony and MS behind the demos that come with the pre-order that come with True Crime or is it Activision.
Well, that depends on the type of return you'd expect from it. If they are not expeciting large sales numbers for tha tplatform then it's hard to justify putting an entire team on it. I'd be willing to bet the PS2 team is larger than the Xbox team despite it being the main deveopment platform. Besides, they are probably using a cross platform 3D engine and it's a matter of dealing with specific issues for that ported platform. Look at it another way. Would you really need to have a seprate set of artists, animators, AI programmers, physics programmers, and tools programmers ONLY for the GC version? of course not.... I wouldn't be suprised if the PS2 version needs to have it's assets recreated or split up in some fashion.
I don't think fran would have any idea, as it's not the sort of thing they typically ask, even in interviews. Even if fran did know, that may only apply to games that were ONLY for gamecube, and as I mentioned above, the lead platform usually has the majority of developers.
Did he really speak up? I mean, he implied that the GC version wasn't getting enough attention, but he didn't in anyway say that attention would improve the framerate or anything like that. That was more to do with the opionion of some people in this and other forums that believe that think it's the case.
Well look at it this way. At one point there were more developers supporting the gamecube natively when the consoles launched then there are now. Part of the lack of support was that nintendo didn't want it when they launched. They even came out and said nintendo makes consoles for their own games, and needing to attract third party games was not what they were interested in.
Well not having a lot of room for optimization is one of the draw backs of being easy to develop for. If it's easy to develop for you have easy ways to do things and less need or in some cases the option to do things differently. Optimization doesn't always revovle around bandwidth. That's for moving things in and out of memory, but optimizing code, or graphical functions for specific needs are something left up to the compilers and developers.
Look at it this way. On Gamecube you have a basic DX7 style T&L implementation or you can perform transfors on the CPU. Not many games would use up CPU cycles for transforming geometry, so just about every game will use the hardware T&L. Now since it's a DX7 style T&L, this means the pipeline is streamlined and more simple to work with. On Xbox you have a felixble T&L impelmentation using vertex shaders, and writting your own shader programs gives you more flxiblity and more areas of optimization (and bugs potentially) for any special cases you may encounter.
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Qroach said:
Nobody said there's no room for improvement. I do agree the gamecube ports can probably be visually better in some cases, but as I also said before, it depends on where the bottleneck are in the game. If it's in the area of transforms, then PS2 and GC are pritty much equal in performance (with PS2 being more programmable). Stuff like large rtexture in teh xbox version could come down to the gamecube version not being able to hold the larger textures in memory. it depends on the problems with the game really. using rebel strike isn't fair comparrison.
Rebel strike is a GC only title designed around the strentghs (and weaknesses of the platform) They aren't going to implement things in a way that wouldn't make sense for that platform like you would/could with a multiplatform title. I bet if gamecube wa shte lead patform on most titles you'd be able to port them at least to xbox easier then if the game was on Xbox as the lead.
PS2 has a dedicated processor that is full programmable for T&L in a sense it's not that different from the NV chip in Xbox. As they are both programable.
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Qroach said:
They're not porting from the Xbox version, they're porting from the PS2 version. I agree it would be easier to port from GC to Xbox, because it has more memory.
I guess your answer to my question is NO. I didn't ask if it was programmable for T&L. This sounds like a court case.
The problem is not the sales (MS is not selling more and in the European Union Nintendo sells more than MS) the problem is for me that Nintendo ignored a lot of european and american developers in the NES-SNES era and for this developers PSX (where they grown) and XBOX (XBOX uses the PC libraries that they used in the last years) are more familiar than any of Nintendo.
I ever believed that PSX is not a new machine and a new ideology is the ideology of 8 bits game computers, Amiga and Atari 16 bits machines evoluted.
I ever believed that PSX is not a new machine and a new ideology is the ideology of 8 bits game computers, Amiga and Atari 16 bits machines evoluted.
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How do they stuff like specular mapping or gloss mapping then? Or four-pass DOT3?
Again, the PS2 is the lead platform for most cross-platform titles. So obviously receiving the bulk of the dev. & code optimization time, & still 98% of the PS2 versions are visually inferior to the GC/X-Box ones. (though many times not by an appreciable amount) The PoP will probably fare no differently, although I do wish the teams would take the time to exploit the GC's individual platform strengths. As Lucasarts did with Bounty Hunter, Criterion w/Burnout 1 & 2, etc.
Just because PS2 is the lead platform it doesn't mean that version will use hardware better then others.
You still get things like LOTR:TT which on PS2 is an atrocity in terms of hw utilization (especially memory), and while XBox don't need to worry about those things, GC port had to squeeze things and hence actually took nice advantage of the hardware - as opposed to PS2 one.
(not that it matters, I liked the game regardless but it serves my point).
Of course, when artwork is simply reused you can't expect the games to look a lot different regardless of how well they use the hardware (often it boils down to minute differences in texture and display filtering which sites like IGN then blow skyhigh since there's nothing else to talk about in comparisons).
But I disgress... if you wanted platform strengths to be leveraged properly on multiplatform titles - you can't reasonably expect large scale resource sharing between versions. Heck, even high level code sharing will usually be detrimental to platforms with less CPU core resources (and that usually hurts PS2 versions the most).
But then - forgoing that would defeat the idea of multiplatform titles in the first place...
Li Mu Bai said:
well, of course the GS is NOT the same of 16 doped Voodoo's put together... thats how...
i was saying, that generally one could say that the GS "acts" like the above mass of Voodoo's...Qroach said:
"The results of global lighting can be computed in three different ways: per vertex, per pixel using emboss mapping, and per pixel using bump mapping. All three of these methods come in two variants one with self-shadowing and one without."--Florian Sauer & Sigmund Vik http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20021002/sauer_pfv.htm
And you believed somehow that the PS2 was capable of more? SH3? Vertex lighting. If anything, the PS2's lighting would be primarily all vertex. It doesn't matter how "programmable" a system is if it's the weakest hardcoded function wise of the three. (which it is) Lighting comes at a higher system resource cost on the PS2 than the GC, & the GC does it at no performance hit as well as in parallel to other features. (although custom lighting is a different beast)
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Li Mu Bai said:
Good job with the research, sometimes when you have a fanboyish dislike for another console you do your best to undercut it. I bet Qroach doesn't respond to your post to save face.
Li Mu Bai said:
You missed his point. The post was an explenation on how the difficulty of a platform can effect the resources a development studio may alocate for it. From what I can tell, he made a good effort in summerizing the differences each platform has, despite him being wrong on the vertex lightning (which he did mention to have heard by an alternative source). Lightning was one example (obviously a bad one), but I think the point about progammability and the rest of the points he brought up are still very valid.
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