You mean like the game I'm actually working on?tepples wrote:Super FX homebrew on Super NES.
Sounds reasonable. Interesting that this hypothetical "FastROM mode" is in a completely different league from what everyone actually used... Does cartridge DMA stall any of the chips, and if so, which ones?lidnariq wrote:As far as I can tell, it should be trivial to get ≈16MB/sec out of the cartridge interface. Getting all the way up to the 25MHz might start being a tricky engineering problem. But one can certainly get SQI-capable NOR flash now that's capable of 104MHz, so the external engineering challenges should be doable...
I'm not sure how one would go about estimating the required data rate. One might have to do experiments with an actual implementation to see what combination of geometry, number of layers and update speed for each layer produces an acceptable result while leaving enough time for near-field rendering...
Let's see... If WDC and Naboo really did better than 180,000 textured polygons per second, that's over 9000 per scene at 20 fps. More than twice what you might see in a reasonably well-made game late in the system's life. If that's the case, whatever geometry you can fit into the near field can be more or less standard for later games, and if each backdrop layer runs at half the rate of the previous one, each one can have just as many visible polygons as the near field ad infinitum, or at least until the cost of compositing all the backdrops at 20 fps exceeds the cost of rendering the most distant one at 20/(2^n) fps. This is probably more draw distance than necessary even for BotW, and almost certainly exceeds the available RAM by a large fraction. Going to just Gouraud shading instead of texturing for more distant terrain exacerbates this by jacking up the potential poly count, though of course you could still use it with lower-fidelity geometry to buy performance for more detailed near-field work.
I guess the questions are:
1) how many bytes per triangle in a typical N64 mesh?
2) how many triangles would a Zelda-like game use in an environment that peaked at 4500 visible polygons per scene?
3) how much RAM can plausibly be dedicated to mesh data in a game like this?
Given estimates of those things, it should be possible to determine whether streaming geometry for distant scenery is potentially feasible.
Everybody does that. Foliage is hard. Even on PS4, developers don't model individual leaves. In this case the grass seems to have gotten higher priority. There are some pretty lush fields in this game. Some of them have a bunch of trees, which cast realistic shadows on the grass... just like everything else...Espozo wrote:The leaves on the trees are just large, randomly intersecting planes
There have been a couple of performance patches. It's apparently much better now. (It seems the Great Plateau was the worst area for framedrops for some reason, despite being nowhere near the most graphically impressive...) They probably did a quick port of the Wii U version; I imagine the game is fighting the architecture to some degree.it experienced framerate drops at 30fps, 900p
But I don't really have a problem with it myself; I'm used to games having to take shortcuts. I think it's really impressive for a Wii U game, and the art style is great. I particularly like the reflections on surfaces like water and mud. Though I admit it does kinda bug me that the shadows disappear in the distance...
Go ahead and tell me this is ugly:
Or this:
It's cel shading, and I'm not sure the image compression is doing it justice. It's part of the art style. One of the reasons people compare it to a Ghibli film.tokumaru wrote:That shading on Link(?) is atrocious.
That's frankly silly. Xenoblade just looks like a Gamecube game with a large draw distance. The ground cover is noninteractive billboarding, and the lighting is extremely primitive. Never mind that it's not even HD...calima wrote:Xenoblade looks better than that, and it was an open-world game on the Wii.
Have you actually seen any of BotW in motion, with the dynamic lighting and weather? Have you seen what a tree looks like with the sun behind it? Or the grass for that matter? Have you seen the grass react to being stepped on, or cut, or set on fire? And IIRC the haze and possibly even the light rays seem to be volumetric according to Digital Foundry...
Slight digression: I can't stand modern games that look nearly photorealistic but have no interactivity or dynamism. I remember a Godzilla game I watched a short video of - the water of Tokyo Bay looked realistic, but it didn't react to Godzilla's presence at all except for a pasted-on splash effect that wouldn't have been out of place on the N64. A game like Horizon Zero Dawn looks great if you just stand there and look at stuff, but somebody compared it with Zelda in a couple of videos, and the comparison is rather stark (and surprisingly direct - these games have a lot in common it seems):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVPXKdSEGNQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEGWtyJAkO0
...
Nobody has really commented on my backdrop rendering idea yet. Does it seem like the sort of thing that might work? Has it been tried before?