StefanHQ
Newcomer
Funny you should mentions just those, as its them I was directly involved with (and a bit Wolfpack HQ) as they where the first environments we had in the game so later on when the project and company grew I unfortunately could not do any more hands on work.Amazing bro!! First of all, i´d like to thank for your work in one of the Dreamcast games i love the most. It gave me many great gaming moments 21 years ago!!
Headhunter really impressed me at the time for the quality of the stages specially. At the beginning, remember the Stern Mansion and being shocked cuz to me it looked prerendered quaility, but in real time. Also the Grey Wolf boss fight...The rain effect, lightings and reflexions of stage objects still look unreal to this day....You really felt back in the day that with Headhunter, Rez, Shenmue 2, Test Drive Le Mans, Virtua Tennis 2, Ikaruga and DOA2, DC wasnt that far on the visual level from PS2.
Now you proof us you can make a fantastic looking game with less than 15k polys on screen at once....Question is: Do you think DC could have been pushed further? Graphical level of the likes of PSP´s GTA LCS, Need For Speed Most Wanted or Burnout Dominator, could have been reached by DC? or even that is out of league?
And yeah it proves how much art direction helps. I think we was quite early also starting to use photos over handpainted textures. That made it look more realistic I think. We had bought two 1.3mPixels (was A LOT back then) cameras and two guys in the art team went to LA for two weeks to shoot around 10k photos. DC was great in that photos worked really well with the PVR compression. No limits to color and as the packing could make them a but noisy was less visible as the photos themselves was a bit noicy by nature
Regarding prerendered I also think we was quite early in baking in lighting not just into vertex colors, that had been done quite a lot PS1 era but directly into textures. So we basicallt lite the scene in 3DS max where we had many object mapped to textures space was used over all object. It took a bit more texture use but allowed us to, especially on floors, bake lighting into kind of lightmaps. Then of course we compromised. Like those leather chairs in Angelas place have the same texture lighting on both with a little adjustment of vertex color. And then we added fake reflections (shiny floor) nd a lot of transparency (curtains etc) to make those things look more real. Same with the greywolf bossfight. Its just particle systems and animated textures for the rain FX (and mirrored objects for the fake reflection) I mean objects reflect but Grewolf and Jack do not.. still few seems to mention or notice that
The falling rains itself is just a cylinder with an raindrop texture that I attached to Jack. So the rain always is around him. And then by code the texture is animated. In that way we could change the scrolling direction and speed very easy. To simulate the direction the rain is falling due to wind etc.. I think it worked pretty well.
Now you proof us you can make a fantastic looking game with less than 15k polys on screen at once....Question is: Do you think DC could have been pushed further? Graphical level of the likes of PSP´s GTA LCS, Need For Speed Most Wanted or Burnout Dominator, could have been reached by DC? or even that is out of league?
I think games like Shem Mue II and Dead or Alive pushed it pretty far tbh. A lot of people compare DC with the gap of early and late PS2 games but the PS2 is a completly different beast. Also there is memory limitations that actually caps the DC from reaching such hi poly count (simple version: the polygons to draw takes place in DC graphics memory so to achieve the combination of varied detailed textures and tons of polygons like say GOD of WAR 2 is not possible)
That said I think it would have been possible to make better games for sure. I mean we learned a lot from Headhunter, and with better art tool and direction we could make something LOOK more even if it wasnt more if you get what I mean?
So yeas I think games that used DC smarter and maybe even was optimised a little little better would have been possible. But it would not have been huge differences.