WiiGeePeeYou (Hollywood) what IS it ?
- Thread starter Megadrive1988
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fearsomepirate said: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.
Rebel Strike had some nice water. Some really nice water actually, quite possible the most impressive effect in the game. FF:CC's was nice too, I don't think Rebel Strike had translucency for its water.
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Just want to know if I could get comments on the self-shadowing in this image, this is an image posted today on IGN, they have several others. Actually it was posted yesterday.
Ooh-videogames said:
Personally I tink it looks like a GC game, I suposse that between the E3 versions and final version (or render targes) there should be some good suport for shadows (in HW) as it is hard to belive that every body who try to give a better look to its game ended with high qualitity and similar shadows, for me this is a prove that we must wait to really see what as been done to wii. You can see that others E3 games (eg Sonic, also new ss on IGN) is similar to this too.
Ooh-videogames said:
What self-shadowing? All I see are some very low-res, pre-baked shadow maps and a real-time player shadow. The shadows from the trees look particularly horrible. I am noticing the lack of FSAA, though. It almost seems like Nintendo is going out if its way to make the GPU unreasonably underpowered.
fearsomepirate said:
do you think the same about xenos? you know, early titles exhibiting zero AA : )
fearsomepirate said:
well, the simplest explanation would be, just think of it as a facility for cotrol over the texure stepping pattern, which otherwise is quite rigid, i.e. some line in screen space inverse-projected to texture space (producing a hyperbolic patter).
ps:
zeckensack, it was much worse - having to do with the deepest, darkest recesses of human mind ; ) i can't say nobody got hurt.
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pc999 said:
The screenshot is a off-screen image, not a direct feed shot. Also it should be looking alot better considering they have more memory to work with. Remember they started on GC devkits just like everyone else.
What pixel format does GC have?
I want to compare to this patent, http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-...=Nintendo.ASNM.&OS=AN/Nintendo&RS=AN/Nintendo
darkblu said:
Oh, it's all so clear now. No, seriously, explain as you would to a child.
Ok, indirect texture access can be used to create effects such as heat-shimmer in air and refraction in glass and water. You've probably played Doom3 or Farcry for example on Directx 9 hardware and for example looked through glass windows in the Mars base and seen how they distort the screen. What is happening is - described as a layman understands it, I'm not an engine programmer - that first the scene is rendered straight up to a texture, without the transparent glass. An engine could be smart and use portals or such to only render the view visible through the glass, and not the stuff around it. Then the scene is re-rendered for real, with an invisible "offset" texture map covering the window. This offset map indicates how much the GPU should shift the next texture read from the previous render-to-texture map of the view behind the glass. This will distort the view of what is seen through the glass. *Edit: that wasn't so good an explanation.fearsomepirate said:
I will try again, heh.*Edit 2: Ok, simplified and hopefully more accurate:
First pass in this Doom3 example is to render the view through the window, sans glass, into a texture.
Second pass is to render what is around the window only, and then texture the view through the window using the render target from the first pass, using an offset texture map/indirect texturing. At the same time, blend in the texture of the glass itself (dirt, smears, cracks etc).
Not a single "hyperbolic" in sight!
So basically, you could say indirect texturing uses one texture (or pixel shader math) to modify from where texels are read in another texture. This creates various distortion effects in the resulting screen buffer.
It can also lead to a large performance hit, as normal texturing is quite predictable and can be cached, while indirect texturing is not predictable, and can lead to reads from all over the place in a texture map, in quite random-like order that can't be cached very well. But that's sort of beside the point.
Ah, that actually makes a lot of sense. So depending on how robust your indirect texturing is, you could do some pretty crazy effects. That would explain the artifacts I saw in the "refractions" in RE4, too. So if you were relying mainly on indirect texturing for your special effects, let me guess, it would really be optimal to have a large, extremely high-bandwidth, low latency texture cache right there on the chips?
Hmm, how come the doom 3 windows didn't have that same "low res texture" look that reflections in many games (the need for speed series comes to mind) have? Just higher res texturing?
Hmm, I was really hoping they'd go with a rechargable battery and a docking station...
BTW, all of those IGN rumors were reported on this forum a little while ago, think that's IGN's source?
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pc999 said:Still isnt 16Mgs overkill for indirect texture (like it is said to be ...... "somehere" in the GPU/LSI, in the last IGN report, many pages ago)?
I think it has something to do with the size of textures to be used, based on the patent I posted above. It mentions 1024.times.640 8 bit Y image; 528.times.320 8 bit U image; and 528.times.320 8 bit V image
OtakingGX said:
The most obvious case is the water in Resident Evil 4. The scene is pretty clearly being rendered to a texture and then fiddled around with the way darkblu described, since when you stand still, the borders of Leon's head will be seen in the "refractions" despite not being underwater. Mario Sunshine's water also distorts what's beneath it.
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