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.