WiiGeePeeYou (Hollywood) what IS it ?

[Teasy]

You edited it about 4 times, I'm sure one of them suggested that they were still scans

I'm sure they did Mmmkay......

Seriously thanks for the links. I just wish one of them had a decent unique shot of the game,

 

[Teasy]

I'm pretty sure in the same interview ATI claimed that Hollywood was not a superset of Flipper. I wonder how long its going to take to actually find out what this GPU can do, its beginning to get boring now.

 

[darkblu]

I'm pretty sure in the same interview ATI claimed that Hollywood was not a superset of Flipper, so can we really believe anything ATI are saying?

well, it does not have to be a VHDL-wise superset, but it still has to do well what flipper did. that or otherwise a flipper replica must be sitting somewhere among the sillicon of the Wii.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Darkblu, what sort of things is "indirect texturing" good for? I see the term a lot, but I couldn't tell you what's different about indirect vs direct texturing. Any particular effects you find especially interesting, or forsee being developed on Wii? I'm asking because Gamecube just seemed to be so incredibly underutilized, but a handful of games really showed some cool stuff.

 

[pc999]

I second fsp question.

 

[swaaye]

I've seen far better scans then you just posted, not that it matters of course.

Well, that image is a downsampled 300 dpi scan. I did some at 600 dpi but it didn't improve quality much and took an annoyingly longer amount of time, and sure was big, eh. You are seeing basically exactly what the printing of the mag looks like if you use your eyeball to examine it. The image colors are made with what look like little asterisk patterns. Printing is just not very high quality in mags. There is no way those huge screens are mag scans.

Once can reduce the annoying patterns with some filtering, but you inevitably lose detail and sharpness. So I don't bother.

 

[darkblu]

Darkblu, what sort of things is "indirect texturing" good for? I see the term a lot, but I couldn't tell you what's different about indirect vs direct texturing. Any particular effects you find especially interesting, or forsee being developed on Wii? I'm asking because Gamecube just seemed to be so incredibly underutilized, but a handful of games really showed some cool stuff.

indirect texturing is a way to overcome the 'planar uniformity' of the canonical texture mapper. as 'direct' texture mapping follows a fixed hyperbolic formula when addressing the texels from within screen space, it accounts strictly for (perspecitve) planar mapping. though succeptible to substantial optimisations (access pattern predicatibility, etc) this strictly limits your options for transformations/variations in the texture addressing. you can still apply mapping transformations but they don't break the mapping's planarity. with 'indirect' texturing, you pretty much overcome this, i.e. the dependency between the mapping of subsequent texel fetches in texture space does not have to be hyperbolic anymore. so you get the possibility for transformations on an individual texel accesses level. a sort of 'randomisation' of the access, if you wish. think of it as a 'random-ish' look-up facility. something recent shader models can do naturally, but also something which could cost you dearly if your GPU is not, erm, mentally perpared for this : )

so to try to answer to your 'what effects' question - any effect which cannot be done with a hyperbolic, i.e. planar-based, access to your texture source array. like bumps on an otherwise planar surface, anisotropic lighting when light-mapping, any sort of irregular mappings. well, pleny of stuff, really.

 

[Ooh-videogames]

indirect texturing is a way to overcome the 'planar uniformity' of the canonical texture mapper. as 'direct' texture mapping follows a fixed hyperbolic formula when addressing the texels from within screen space, it accounts strictly for (perspecitve) planar mapping. though succeptible to substantial optimisations (access pattern predicatibility, etc) this strictly limits your options for transformations/variations in the texture addressing. you can still apply mapping transformations but they don't break the mapping's planarity. with 'indirect' texturing, you pretty much overcome this, i.e. the dependency between the mapping of subsequtive texel fetches in texture space does not have to be hyperbolic anymore. so you get the possibility for transformations on an individual texel accesses level. a sort of 'randomisation' of the access, if you wish. think of it as a 'random-ish' look-up facility. something recent shader models can do naturally, but also something which could cost you dearly if your GPU is not, erm, mentally perpared for this : )

so to try to answer to your 'what effects' question - any effect which cannot be done with a hyperbolic, i.e. planar-based, access to your texture source array. like bumps on an otherwise planar surface, anisotropic lighting when light-mapping, any sort of irregular mappings. well, pleny of stuff, really.

Thanks for that post. And thanks fsp for asking the question.

I wonder if there's any images of any known effects being done with IDT on the net?

Is this how F5 acheived light scattering for RS?

 

[Refreshment]

My god Teasy, please man. Please

 

[Mariner]

Well, that image is a downsampled 300 dpi scan. I did some at 600 dpi but it didn't improve quality much and took an annoyingly longer amount of time, and sure was big, eh. You are seeing basically exactly what the printing of the mag looks like if you use your eyeball to examine it. The image colors are made with what look like little asterisk patterns. Printing is just not very high quality in mags. There is no way those huge screens are mag scans.

Once can reduce the annoying patterns with some filtering, but you inevitably lose detail and sharpness. So I don't bother.

I work in publishing and you can actually descreen scans to a certain extent with the correct software. Obviously these will still not match the quality of a screen grab.

That said, the two CoD3 images linked are definitely not scans of print images from what I can see. They do have very poor compression artifacts however and there is very little point, IMO, of trying to make too many conclusions from them.

As Acert says we still have no real idea about Hollywood's power/capabilities even after 30 pages!

 

[Teasy]

My god Teasy, please man. Please

Beg all you like mate....

Seriously, its not a good quality screenshot, anyone can see that.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Well, we do know that Sonic has some improved water shaders over what we saw on Gamecube. Not only do you have those nice, ripply reflections, but the surface is transluscent now. On Gamecube, I never saw reflections and transparency at the same time. I would venture that something's been improved beyond additional clock cycles to see what we're seeing. For one thing, Sonic Team never really programmed any interesting water shaders on the Cube to begin with. Best Cube water I saw was in FF:CC, edging out even BG&E. And I think Sonic is even better.

And could someone translate darkblu's post into English and maybe provide some examples? I don't really understand it.

 

[darkblu]

I wonder if there's any images of any known effects being done with IDT on the net?

well, if you have a cube some of the better looking titles on it have promonent indirect texturing effects - any framebuffer warping/distortion effects, bumped specularities, bumped reflections, etc. one thing that immediately jumps to mind is the warping effect and heat haze from samus' gun/rocket launcher but i believe fearsome brought that up already.

Is this how F5 acheived light scattering for RS?

well, i don't have either of F5's starwars titles for the cube*, but i just skimmed over Florian's RL shading techniques article at gamasutra - and though i could not find anything about light scattering techniques, they clearly mention they use indirect texturing for pixel-correct bumpmapping with specularities and/or reflections. again involving a bump and a light/reflection map. i could not find anywhere else they mentioning indirect texturing within the context of their lighting models. they do mention a couple of distortion effects, though, where they again utilise indirect mapping.

* as weird as it may sound, but it comes as a result from some complex alignment of rare circumnstances.

 

[Ooh-videogames]

well, if you have a cube some of the better looking titles on it have promonent indirect texturing effects - any framebuffer warping/distortion effects, bumped specularities, bumped reflections, etc. one thing that immediately jumps to mind is the warping effect and heat haze from samus' gun/rocket launcher but i believe fearsome brought that up already.



well, i don't have either of F5's starwars titles for the cube*, but i just skimmed over Florian's RL shading techniques article at gamasutra - and though i could not find anything about light scattering techniques, they clearly mention they use indirect texturing for pixel-correct bumpmapping with specularities and/or reflections. again involving a bump and a light/reflection map. i could not find anywhere else they mentioning indirect texturing within the context of their lighting models. they do mention a couple of distortion effects, though, where they again utilise indirect mapping.

* as weird as it may sound, but it comes as a result from some complex alignment of rare circumnstances.

There was this effect I noticed in RE4 on Salzaars Right hand man, after defeating him. When you approach his body, there seem to be what looks like pixel-correct bump mapping with specularities. Man, now I want to play the game.

Could normal mapping be acheived using IDT?

 

[darkblu]

There was this effect I noticed in RE4 on Salzaars Right hand man, after defeating him. When you approach his body, there seem to be what looks like pixel-correct bump mapping with specularities. Man, now I want to play the game.

that's alright. actually the opposite - a low drive for playing re4, can be considered disturbing ; )

Could normal mapping be acheived using IDT?

yes. although for full correctness you may need to update both the reflection/illumination map and the perturbance/bump map on a by-frame basis if you want to account for totally dynamic scene configurations.

 

[Ooh-videogames]

that's alright. actually the opposite - a low drive for playing re4, can be considered disturbing ; )



yes. although for full correctness you may need to update both the reflection/illumination map and the perturbance/bump map on a by-frame basis if you want to account for totally dynamic scene configurations.

Do you think it would be best for Nintendo to have someone like Epic to create a engine based on Wii hardware that really shows its capabilities and market it to devs?

What happens when PS2 support phases out, will thirdparty devs actually create Wii versions of their multiplatform games?

I think these questions are important, if we are going to see any games that really take advantage of the hardware.

 

[pc999]

Do you think it would be best for Nintendo to have someone like Epic to create a engine based on Wii hardware that really shows its capabilities and market it to devs?

That could help as it would set a standard, but the problem is tied to your second question and to how much effort they put on gfx (even with UE3,5 on a R600 you can have horrible gfx if they dont work on them).

BTW/Side note: Nintendo is in talks with Epic (said Clyff B at E3).

What happens when PS2 support phases out, will thirdparty devs actually create Wii versions of their multiplatform games?

This is probably the bigest problem but if predictions are right and it get many exclussives then (every) devs may get pressed to create better gfx, if Nintendo pushed for gfx too it may help.

I think these questions are important, if we are going to see any games that really take advantage of the hardware.

Personally I doubt that many will try to put something that looks like a PS2 after games like RS (assuming it is sucefull) and such, meybe at first.

 

[darkblu]

Do you think it would be best for Nintendo to have someone like Epic to create a engine based on Wii hardware that really shows its capabilities and market it to devs?

epic - no. they've been producing hog engines ever since the UT-era, and it's been getting worse with every new iteration. the wii, being a classic console platform, i.e. tight on mem resources and maximally departed (again, resource-wise) from epics 'home' platform - the pc, is a last candidate for epic's "latest and greatest".

reading that gamasutra article i origininally referred to, seems like factor5 would have been a good candidate for becoming 'the' vendor of a standards-establishing engine on the platform - RL's engine seems to have an excellent shading techniques portfolio, wrapped in a 'unified' lighting model, backed by a proven levels editor and an apparently working assets pipeline (they made RL in 9 friggin months!). the guys seem to be darn talented console devs, how did ninty manage to lose them in the first place?!

What happens when PS2 support phases out, will thirdparty devs actually create Wii versions of their multiplatform games?

call me old-fashioned, but i've never been a fan of multiplatform console titles. the pc is traditionally the 'multiplatform' platform (being the schizophrenic platform that it is), i like my console titles to the point, lean and mean (that 'my' from a consumer's perspective), demonstrating the virtuosity and creativity of their devs.

so to answer to your question - i think wii will be best off when 3rd parties see the potential in it for what it is - a popular, sane-to-work-on platform (if the current promises bear fruit), not for being yet another sku for their multiplaformers. the cube had its fair share of multiplatformers - did they help it a single bit? and moreover did they help the cube's custormers? and before you say 'soul calibur' consider this: sc3, a ps2-exclusive, kicks the ass of its predicessor technology-wise. and it's on the arguably least-advanced platform. so draw your own conclusion.

 

[Ooh-videogames]

epic - no. they've been producing hog engines ever since the UT-era, and it's been getting wrose with every new iteration. the wii, being a classic console platform, i.e. tight on mem resources and maximally departed from epics 'home' platform - the pc, is a last candidate for epic's "latest and greatest".

reading that gamasutra article i origininally referred to, seems like factor5 would have been a good candidate for becoming 'the' vendor of a standards-establishing engine on the platform - RL's engine has an excellent shading techniques portfolio, wrapped in a 'unified' lighting model, backed by a proven levels editor and an apparently working assets pipeline (they made RL in 9 friggin months!). the guys seem to be darn talented console devs, how did ninty manage to lose them in the first place?!

I've been wondering about the work their doing, are they contracted to develop for Sony or anyone exlusively?

call me old-fashioned, but i've never been a fan of multiplatform console titles. the pc is traditionally the 'multiplatform' platform (being the schizophrenic platform that it is), i like my console titles to the point, lean and mean (that 'my' from a consumer's perspective), demonstrating the virtuosity and creativity of their devs.

so to answer to your question - i think wii will be best off when 3rd parties see the potential in it for what it is - a popular, sane-to-work-on platform (if the current promises bear fruit), not for being yet another sku for their multiplaformers. the cube had its fair share of multiplatformers - did they help it a single bit? and moreover did they help the cube's custormers? and before you say 'soul calibur' consider this: sc3, a ps2-exclusive, kicks the ass of its predicessor technology-wise. and it's on the arguably least-advanced platform. so draw your own conclusion.

Can't argue with that, it would put a smile on face.

 

[Rolf N]

I've been wondering about the work their doing, are they contracted to develop for Sony or anyone exlusively?

They're doing Lair which is supposed to be a PS3 launch title.
I think I recall something along the lines of them really wanting to do bleeding edge stuff and the Wii just wasn't the right platform choice for that.