WiiGeePeeYou (Hollywood) what IS it ?

I was talking about things that can be added without breaking the legacy architecture from Flipper.

 

Isn't that just amazingly wierd though?! Has there ever been anything like, where the games being developed for the next-gen used assets from the previous gen as it were because the devs didn't know what to aim for? And then they'd get a nice surprise after the machine launches. That's sounding mighty kookie to me. Fantastic if true, but I can't wrap my head around the notion.

 

It could be just me but that looks a ATIs Frankenstein facet making a GPU.

 

http://youtube.com/watch?v=qYGeIci48zA&search=mario galaxy
Look on the outside edges of the world Mario is fighting on. It looks like it might be pixel shader effects to me.

 

Just look to the water in Mario or Splinter Cell on GC, Wii will be able to do pixel shading, the question is how much and if there is what there will be more.

 

Well, PS3 Grand Turismo demo used assets from GT4 on PS2, so there's surely some kind of prescedent for it. Undoubtedly there are past examples as well, though most of them not publically known as it's not something you really brag about and show around to other people.

It'd be internal development builds only I think.

 

apparently you need to see the prime3 footage.
oh, bwt, are you sure you can distinguish shaders from fixed pipeline when you see them?

brainwashing?

 

Really? I thought ExciteTruck was one of the worst looking games shown, have any high quality images of it that show it off in a good light? The videos make it look like it has graphics on par with Battalion Wars...

Look at what we're seeing on the 360..
The best looking games are just PC engine ports, the console games tend to be using last gen engines and look very similar. 360 will see a big improvement. Perhaps with the Wii, devs are just porting over Gamecube engines (most of which weren't made for gamecube's strengths anyway), and it will take a while before they develop engines that cater to the Wii's strengths. Though Nintendo would probably be wise to start providing advanced engines to devs, ala Microsoft and the UE3 engine.

Dreamcast also used quite a few straight from Playstation and N64 engines, along with from PC and arcade engines, though I'd say Sonic Adventure 1 was definetely built pretty much for the DC hardware (perhaps it started development somewhere else though).

 

What video's have you seen? The ones I've watched show very nice texture quality, good water effects, good particle effects, nice looking motion blur and draw distance and a great framerate. Certain parts of the game don't look as good as others but it is still in development after all.

I haven't seen any pictures of the game, though I doubt they'd do it justice, I think its the kind of game that looks best in motion.

 

I would agree with you but yesterday I saw it on TV in BBC click a report from E3 and they had had show a few seconds of it (the dark curse) and for some reason I thought it looked really good althought all the other media look bad. It looked better in the same way that the MP3 direct feed video looked way better than every other media, still I will wait for anouther opportunity to confirm it.

What videos have you seen?

 

Well, after taking another look at some Wii games, I'd say we probably can't expect them to look better than what they are. While they may not exceed the best seen on gamecube, they do exceed the best nintendo did on gamecube, and show noticable improvements from similar games.

Super Mario Galaxy
Not only does it look better than Sunshine by a bit, but it runs at a solid 60 fps instead of an unsteady 30fps.

Excite Truck
Special effects are decent, along with the truck models and draw distance. It blows away similar games on Cube (which were....Smuggler's Run?) but the environment still looks bland and uninspired, very much like many Dreamcast and PS2 games of this type. F-Zero GX pulled off a much better looking desert.

Metroid Prime 3
Despite the comments about special effects and lighting, I really can't see much of a graphical change from the earlier two games, and it runs at the same framerate, though perhaps a bit more solid. The changes seem to relate more to increased cpu speed and an increased amount of memory. Animation is significantly improved and more fluid, there appear to be some actual physics now, it can have more enemies on screen at once, there's no longer a pause to load new areas, and we may see a chance at some grand outdoor environments. Special effects (including lighting), polygon counts, and textures haven't seen much improvement to my eyes, but since the game's development was started in 2004 it probably started as a gamecube title, plus the dev's said they werne't focusing on anything graphics wise besides lighting. The animation is a big jump though, I wonder if it's just due to the faster cpu, or if it's evidence of vertex processing being offloaded to the gpu now. Sadly, the AI still seems like crap, and will probably focus on powerful enemies with lame patterns or hoards of weak dumb enemies.

Super Smash Bros Brawl
Looks like the gamecube game to me, not even really improved animation, just a bit better texturing and larger environments and I suppose better special effects. Disappointing considering the original was practically a launch game, but I imagine it uses the same engine.

That Rayman game
Due to the mass of characters on screen, I wanna compare it to Pikmin 2. Once again, stable 60 fps against unstable 30 fps, and the special effects are in wider use.

Overall, Wii looks to be offering at least a 2x (and then some) increase over gamecube, just there's a reason next gen is generally defined as a 10 fold leap in power, it takes that much before it becomes blatantly obvious, where you can just look at it and go wow. PS2, Xbox, and Gamecube had some trouble differentiating themselves from Dreamcast in graphics (since even xbox was only like a half gen leap) at first, and some people still look at 360 games and say they look just like xbox. We're probably looking at a dreamcast to gamecube leap here, except that was a 3 year gap, and this is a 5 year gap.

 

You didn't take a close look, did you? The video and the screenshots show that the models have been significantly improved. (at the beginning of the trailer you see the old models being replaced by the new ones.)

 

They looked like the same polygon count, with new textures applied, and I mentioned the textures were better. (though not significantly so) If the polygon counts have been upped, it doesn't seem to be a huge difference, especially considering the original smash was made 5 years ago. Even a sequel on gamecube should have shown fairly large differences after that period of time, just on devs getting more familiar with the hardware.

 

Really not sure what you are trying here because even if it is runing on wii representative HW they are made in GC SDKs till to weeks prior E3 (see EA/Ubi coments) so IMO what is impressive is that one think that it looks like made on HW 2x as powerfull. How about Wii Sports it looks 2x better than N64 what does that mean?

If there is games on both GC and XB (the worst we heard is a souped up XB) I dont know how someone can say that he did not expect games to look better, meybe not from Nintendo but that isnt HW fault (eg Retro said that they could do bump maping with bloom althouhht it seems they will only put bloom, but dont you think that MP3 with bump maping and bloom will be noticiable better than E3 one).

I personally think that many will be suprissed as I think we will at least see the same kind of diference we saw from SW:RL at first to the final game (which as manly things like EMBM/shaders/animation(?)).

 

To be honest I'd say that even if the games we're seeing were fully developed on 100% Wii hardware I would still expect them to look a decent amount better by launch (with even better looking games post launch). Of course none of us know for sure how much development time these games have had on final hardware or indeed what that final hardware is so the difference could be quite pronounced, lets wait and see.

 

I have a question.

If TEV is equal to a Pixel Shader and with the Pixel we can give certain properties to the textures why is this feature unused?

 

Considering it's still in development, and stuff like Radeon 9700 is like 4 yrs old, uhhh lol.... I'm pretty sure it'll be neato.

 

I really hope so. The banding and dithering in Red Steel was pretty gross.

Super Mario Galaxy has some great PS effects, but a couple GC games did as well (Crystal Chronicles, RE4). Hell, the PS2 has done pixel shader effects that people have thought impossible of the hardware (God of War, Path of Neo).

I've played the game, and I'd agree with those observations. Looked like it couldn't run on the GC, and might run on the Xbox but with a lower framerate.