a7's capabilites vs wii, continued from ryan's thread

hey spike, here's a thread for our discussion regarding a7's capabilities.


where to start...
or i gain credibility by being honest about my lack of experience specifically with wii. you still haven't shown me better.

anyway i didn't say i've never played wii. i've played it heaps. i said i don't have one.

that god of war screenshot is pretty. it is a very low-poly scene, though, with low-res textures and hardly any shaders.
what kind of a challenge is that? that's all artwork. i'm not an artist.
do you think i'm stupid? that i would buy a game on a console i don't own? you can show me a ps2 screenshot, why not a wii screenshot? i've played the wii a lot and never been impressed technically, only artistically.

it's 1 am here so i'm off to bed.

julz

I dont know what this previous thread was about but Wii video hardware is similar to Geforce 2, with 8 lights and no shaders. Many Wii games have surprisingly good graphics still and use many tricks, but its obviously nonsense to compare A7 with Wii. It would make more sense to compare A5 with Wii, thats almost the same features.

no, youre not stupid, obviously
its just that a discussion on this level is rather pointless.
let me show you simple results, and argue about my point a little, and maybe you understand what i mean^^

this is the conduit:

an early unfinished level shot.

Mad world


Metroid Prime 3


residente vil Umrella Chronicles


those are all ingame shots, and actually look way better in motion. check the videos for those games^^

now, NONE of those games show what the wii can really do. the conduit will, once completed, or at least they are promising this.

Now, have a look at a Ps3 game:

thats soul calibur 4.
now lets double check this with the xbox (not 360) version of soul calibutr 2, for this is what the wii can do, and wii can do probably even better:


now, have a look at some screenshots i took from the A7 gallry page:
[img]http://www.conitec.net/images/gallery/dfield1.jpg[/img]
[img]http://www.conitec.net/images/gallery/citroen08.jpg[/img]
[img]http://www.conitec.net/images/gallery/kabus_sword.jpg[/img]

i played the kabus 22 demo.
i have a decent system, not too shabby, i can run all games at full speed, except crysis, but i dont have vista or general interest in that game, but i never encountered a problem for now.
but kabus 22 was slow as hell on my system. nice shots, unplayable game.
but it looks decent. static everything, but decent.

my main point was it, that ps3 style grahics are simply noit doable with A7. look at the specs of that machine. it jsut cannot be done. it can, with a FPS of 1, but not in any playable state.

setting for PS2 type graphics is jsut fine. this can be done, palyable. you need to trick alot, and probably will take years, but it can be done. thats my original point.
look at rage of tyr. this was playable. it rusn with a pretty solid framerate on my system. those screens were what that experiment really looked like. this was A6. with A7 it probably looks better and runs faster, when i optimize it (if i optimize it). however, this still is not even close to PS3 niveau. its PS2 gamecube xbox at max!

I thought this thread was coming , maybe this will interest you
http://www.phyreengine.com/

https://www.newdev.scee.net/AreaNewLicensee/MainSystem/CFModules/ScreenLayout/nl_master_template.cfm

This is what will get you PS3 graphics, i agree that it is unrealistic to think that PS3 graphics can be achieved with A7 .

ps3 isn't possible, but wii or higher can be obtained with an expirienced full time modeler, shader designer, artist, and programmer... take a look at a team made of these members...

alienHeretic
Andavari
rv_Exile
ChrisB
Slin
BohHavoc
DavidLancaster
Ichiro Lamb...



your telling me them all put together couldnt put together a wii or higher graphical game with A7???? I beg to differ.

Edit: I meant ps3 isnt possible... typo.

I don't think PS3 graphics are realistic with this engine , framerate wise, etc. but i dunno ,lolz

First i want to say something about the capabilities of the Wii. Almost nothing is known about the graphic chip 'Hollywood' used by the wii. Even the clockrate of 243mhz is not confirmed by Nintendo, so you simply cant say what the wii can and what cant do graphic wise, even after 1.5 years.

For determining the grapic power of A6/A7 you must also consider that the engine can be enhanced with plugins. If you don't use this feature it is a lot of work to achieve Next-gen effects or even impossible. If you do you can achieve exactly (at least more or less) the same quality as those AAA-games, it is just much work (sure somebody will say "hey if you do that you could also write your own engine", well maybe, but there are some feature of A6/A7 like memory managment, simple scriping language, editors, level format, collision detection etc etc which saves you a lot of time).

I read often that you must use tricks and hacks to do this and that, i don't think that these are tricks this is just how you program 3D-games. Everything is about faking, this begins with basic techniques like LOD or even normalmapping and ends with scene managment, streaming techniques and so on.
If you want to program a top-notch game you must know every point. A6/A7 only gives you some basics, which doesnt mean that you have to program plugins, most of the things you could even do with c-script (like programing portal reagions for scene managment).

All in all 3dgs is what it is supposed to be, a system for hobbyist with the abillity to extend it.

Spike, your screenshot of the Conduit basically looks... pretty poor. Thats not to say that I can do better, using A6, A7 or anything else, but I was merely saying that I'd be extremely disappointed if that was all the so-called graphics-wonder can do.
But then, the Conduit doesn't even interest me in the slightest.

I love the A7 vs. the World-threads, since there often is useful input regarding the other options as A7, but in a way, this comparision seems to make a lot less sense, since A7 is a game engine and Wii... is not. But what do I know! So what exactly is the questions you guys want to discuss? Is it: "Can you create games that look as good or better than the best ones (currently?) on Wii?". Because if it is, my answer is a resounding... uhm, maybe?

I'll admit it right here, right now: I'm, bascially, an idiot when it comes to the technical, pretty-pretty-graphics-side. I hear you guys talking about Shaders and Paralax mapping and Shader 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, and I'm sitting here, discovering environment mapping and all those other FFP-effects one wikisnippet at a time. But this is not because I'm absoutely against shaders, because I assure you, I'm not. I'm probably more careful about using them since I want my game to work on computers that are many years old, but I sure like them as optional pretty-makers.

Now, I'd be lying if I said that I find the discussion of technical specs of the current consoles mindblowing (maybe incredibly boring is more like it), but from time to time, I like to join those chats, and its at times like this that I find those statements very interesting:



Thats interesting, but since I'm a cold-hearted, mean-spirited idiot, you must forgive me for asking for a source for this sentence. I have played Wii games that for my eye look like they would definately not possible with a Geforce2 (many tricks or not), and given how many Wiigames seem to use a bloom-effect (or maybe they are just faking it well, that could also be true, but often it feels like the developers are trying to bloom my face off), I'd like to think that maybe shaders are possible. But again, I don't have any source for this other than the obversations I've made using my own eyes , so I suppose these don't hold much value in this discussion. Anyway, all I'm doing here is basically just asking you for a source.

Now attempting to destroy analyze Spikes post.



Ah, but since they apparently don't do so now, how much merit does this statement have right now? Not much, I'm afraid, unless you're trying to say that there is a developer out there with access to a development-kit - in other words, with more knowledge about this subject than us - assuring us that the Wii is more powerful than what was shown so far, but then, they are developers, making a game for Wii, and they know very well that statements like this are PR-gold. The Nintendo-fans just love sentences like this, and getting such positive fansupport is amazing for them. So... say its my cold-hearted, mean-spirited character, but I for one am going to ignore this statement until they show me a screen that makes me eat those words, which might definately be possible, and in which case (as unlikely it may be) I will certainly be glad about all the "maybe"s and "that-is-possible"s in my post.
So: Statement ignored.

Mad World - the screenshot you added (err, I guess?) doesn't show up for me, but I've seen screenshots of it before, and I really think that its "appealing" (I don't find them that appealing, to be honest, but again, I've read positive comments) look is entirely due to their artstyle, and not the technologic capabilities of the Wii. So... I'm going to ignore this too!

Metroid Prime 3 was not only an awesome game, but it also has great looks, but they werent that much improved from the Gamecube - Prime 1 looked amazing on it already. Seems like the main thing they did was adding bloom to it.
Now, don't get me wrong, I LOVE that artstyle, I really think it looks great. But again, I said "artstyle". It's hard for me to tell how much of this is due to Wiis power. It certainly doesn't help that the entire game takes place on very small chunks of the level, basically, one room at a time.

I've heard that "Wii-is-better-than-the-original-XBox"-statement a lot, but in a way, thats a statement thats not really saying much, since we don't know in what departments it is how much better. Can it display more kind of shaders, more polygons, etc, etc. There are lots of points on which you can compare the processing power of these things, and a general statement like this is easily understood as "better-in-everything", but actually, that they haven't said.


I hate to do this, because I like the Wii, but it has to be said that I don't like the Wii for the jaw-dropping graphics it produces, or, to be more exact, I don't like the Wii for its raw processing power.

I like it for Horse Adventures 2 and Babyz Party.

As i cba to really put a proper answer , i will put this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines#Free_engines

soul calibur indeed always looked great. i can't imagine my computer having any trouble with either of those scenes in a7 -- 1-on-1 beat-em-ups always have the best graphics, because they only need to render two characters at a time plus the environment (access of which is heavily controlled by the programmer in that kind of game).

also, how terrible do the early xbox games look relative to new ones? top-notch AAA console games hack and trick like there's no tomorrow to squeeze the best out of the hardware. like ChrisB said, that's just how 3D games are made.

btw that first a7 gallery shot was concept art.

@those commenting on the fact that a7 is software and wii/ps3 is hardware: i guess this discussion is whether or not a7 can be used to produce equal-caliber software on equal-spec hardware.

julz

EDIT: i forgot to mention which i mentioned in a previous thread and i think is important: c-script is a scripting language. lite-c gets compiled. lite-c is heaps faster than c-script.

First look at this demo:

http://www.wiiusers.net/wii/news-editorials/3455-high-voltage-quantum-3-gameplay-engine.html

I tried something similar with a skilled team of A7 developers (Slin also was part of it).

We failed. Shaders and a scene with a good amount of entities slow A7 considerably down. The camera movement becomes jerky very fast and the scene management is not suited for indoors when you use meshes. Blocks are even slower than that.
You see this jerky camera movement even in the official warehouse demo of A7 or in demos of Shader gurus like BohHavok.

So you need indeed so much hacks and tricks (your own scene-management, your own shader based renderer, your own entity-database) so that you almost could just create your own engine.

If you are realistic about this topic then you have to realize that A7 is good for beginners, good for learning and a good tool for prototyping or making small casual games. But forget about comparing it to the big ones out there! Look at the price and compare again!

@Spirit:





Hey Spirit... where are the Wii-like A5-games? If so, GS could shame Nintendo with a old technology.
Spirit, you are very funny.

@frank.... what kind of video card were you testing with???!!, I have a lowly $49 nvidia 8500 and still havent had one 3dgs demo lag yet. so im not sure were it is that your coming from.

It is not my video card. Just check the warehouse demo and move the mouse!

And the other project I am talking about (from BohHavok) is rendered at his PC and saved as a video.

The lag with our own project happened not only to me. The other team-members experienced it as well.

i never had a problem with the warehouse demo but idk.... maybe i didnt scrutinize it that much.

I wouldn't create a FPS like the Conduit with any engine unless I had a team of people. Since most everyone here is either alone or with a couple people, none of this should matter, as you should not focus on these types of games.

God of war is a very art intensive game as well; and it could be done in A7. This is just lightmaps on nice geometry, reflection shaders, and general atmosphere. But don't let that give you any ideas, you will need a very large team of experienced personal because the art, not the technology, will take years to create. Think about the amount of animation that you will need to do to compete. And if you had the means to do this, you would also have the means for a very expensive engine which would give you a better workflow and a faster renderer.

If you really want to do a fps, make it an arena style game where you can re-use levels over and over again. But this has been done so many times... you'd have to think of something different. Just remember to do smaller tighter projects, then get the ball rolling and go from there. I made a mistake creating too big of a project, and had to pay for it with years of work, and it's still risky. But in the end, you learn alot no matter what happens.

Yesterday I bought the Wii for my son including the game "Brawl". This game is some kind of an arena fighting game but with an additional story mode (arcade jump and run) and tons of cut-scenes, nice animated backgrounds and detailled characters (the heros from many Nintendo games appear in this one like Metal Gear Snake, Super Mario, etc.).

I found it quite interesting how good the graphics are in this particular game. You will find some great water shaders with ripples and real-time reflections. There is some kind of metallic normal mapping shader and there are tons of effects, animated skies and last but not least: nice looking soft shadows for the characters.
Did I mention the depth of fields effect and distortion shader?

The game also uses a good amount of polygons especially in cut-scenes. Everything runs fast and smooth, no fps issues.

Brawl can be compared to a hack-and-slash game but within the range of some serious button smashing
But you're definitly right about the graphics. In comparison towards the previous version of this game (Super Smah Brothers Melee, GC) they made alot of changes. Not even did the developers improved the gameplay but also the visual quality. Those animated backgrounds are unique IMHO (AFAIK) ^^
Nevertheless, I'm trying to say that these graphics can be achieved when working with competent users but I don't think that it will run smooth on A7 when putting it all together in one animated background such as the many Brawl includes.

Anyway, it's an amazing game though thus you made a good choice Frank

Cheers

Frazzle

Thanks. But actually my son made this choice. I enjoy looking at this game but the genre is not my favourite. But I loved to do boxing or bowling with Wii sports. This is great fun.

yes, the pre-rendered cut-scenes are great, and anyone who has a wii should have smash bros brawl.

pre-rendered cut-scenes aren't much testament to a console's hardware capabilities, nor the engines being run on it. it's in-game graphics have been criticised in some cases for being simply an enhancement of melee's, and detail lacking in some cases.

mario galaxy, on the other hand, got great praise for its graphics (relative to the wii's capabilities, anyway), because it is well put together and has a nice style. people don't care about technical graphics as much as they care about good composition: mario's the only character (most of the time, anyway; i haven't played the whole game) who casts a real shadow (most if not all others -- excluding bosses -- are round drop-shadows if any), but no one's complaining.

julz

Yes. I agree. Let us take 2 examples:

1) There is one stage where you fight on a platform following a space ship. This huge ship turns around and flies through nice looking space backgrounds. Then it flies very close to a huge planet - covering 3/4 of the screen. After that it enters the atmosphere with glowing heat effects and then it glides over landscapes through clouds and raises later into space again. All this is only a background while fighting at a platform.

2) The stage from Metal Gear is a Sci-Fi metallic room. But you can destroy the environment. If you destroy the main wall then huge robots appear in the back, almost as big as a house, animated, walking, threatening but still only backgrounds.

This is love for details.

Ah yes, great memories already Frank ^^

I especially like the scene where the view moves up thus your character needs to jump up as well to avoid instant death. But I like it so much due to the waterfall scene, it makes the environment so much more plausible

Btw, not only do the background scenes animated the users, they interact with them as well

Thus I can state that your son made a great choice and it was worth your money (to correct myself)

Cheers and I'll stop being off-topic related now ^^

Frazzle