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Resident Evil 4 PS2 Porting Problems
An anonymous reader writes "Gamesarefun is reporting that Capcom is having serious difficulty in porting Resident Evil 4, to Sony's PlayStation 2. The numbers behind the graphical differences are interesting, since Capcom sites a few specifics. Apparently the original model for Leon Kennedy in the GameCube version has had to be scaled down from 10,000 polygons to 5000 for the PS2 version, which is equal to both the poly count for Naked Snake in Metal Gear Solid 3 as well as the poly count of the typical villager in the GameCube version of RE4."
Is the PS2 that underpowered or is this just a familiarity problem? Or is just optimizing for the GameCube that much different than the PS2? I'd think Capcom would have plenty of experience with the PS2 by now.
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Is this good or bad for Nintendo? On the one hand, it is good that they seem to have superior hardware, but if cross platform portability is at stake, will this drive away more producers than it attracts?
Of course the PS2 is less powerful than the Cube. The cube came out a full year or two after the PS2. The PS2 has older technology.
While I have no doubt that for many applications the PS2 is less powerful than the gamecube, this article is just guff.
"The PS2, does however, have a large Direct Memory Access bandwidth, which will allow the developers to provide a high amount of textures into the game."
Well, that sounds good! If it made sense! But didn't he just say we couldn't have a load of textures?
But wait! Some of the textures have had to be reduced from 24-bit to 8 or even "4-bit". Yes, folks, the PS2 is so back they are using 16 colour greyscale! Either that or he's talking out his ass.
His source? "Various Japanese publications." Interesting!
And, despite this uber-DMA, they are still shit out of luck apparently. He continues:
"But, if they choose to do this, the game's framerate will drop substantially, this is due to the PS2's, as stated before, limited texture memory capacity."
Sounds pretty technical, not sure if I can follow that!
Bottom line is, Capcom may or may not be having lots of troubles scaling down their engine for the PS2, but this article is not going to give you any insight whatsoever into the technical reasons for this.
That capcom didn't scale down RE4 when they annouced the PS2 port.
Now, if only they ported games from the ps2 to the GC...NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND!
Older hardware not as good as newer hardware! Crowds shocked!
On a serious note, I don't really understand why console manufacturers are so tight when it comes to memory. From my experience building personal computers, memory is usually the cheapest way to increase performance (up to a point). A fast processor will go nearly to waste if you don't have the memory to back it up.
The article, though short and not really all that noteworthy, does touch upon something confusing. Having an extremely memory bus means squat if there isn't all that much memory anyways.
No comment.
(In all seriousness though, in light of the fact that the PS2 version was obviously not planned at first, the engine's probably optimized out the ass for the Gamecube's hardware, making porting a royal bitch.)
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Try again.
Have to side with the folks on this one, really just seems like mumbo-jumbo to me.
Speaking as someone with both GameCube and PS2 systems...
It's a real shame the GameCube didn't become the world's #1 console. It's a better system than the original PS2 in almost every way... design, aesthetics, graphical capabilities, fan noise, build quality... The only thing it lacks is breadth of software.
When I have the choice, I mostly prefer to play the GameCube versions of games. Generally they're superior, though there have been some exceptions. For Splinter Cell, I decided to go with the PS2, because it had an entire extra level, and that was worth a tradeoff in graphic quality. But ultimately, there are just so many great PS2 games that aren't available for GameCube, and so few GameCube-only "must have" games, that if I had to pick only one system, it would be the PS2. (I'd miss the Metroid games terribly, though.)
Anyone know of a good games review site that specializes in comparing the same game on different consoles? It seems to me that there are a lot of people with more than one console, who would find it very useful to know which platform to pick for multi-platform games.
I suspect the DS vs PSP battle will go the same way, only more so because of Nintendo's blinkered focus on kiddy games on the GBA. Already, the PSP has more titles I want to play than my GameBoy Advance has titles I want to play. I haven't yet seen anything that makes me want a DS, since Metroid's just a demo.
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GC has a faster processor. PS2 has more processors. GC is slightly higer-res. PS2 has more universal memory. When you weigh all the pros and cons, the systems are close to a dead heat.
"[A team that wrote a game for system A] is encountering a few problems porting [their game to system B]." Of course they are. That is the norm. I'm sure there were difficulties porting Jet Grind Radio from Dreamcast to Xbox.
"In conclusion, [said game] is the perfect hardware comparison between [system A] and [system B]." Bull.
Why not port it to the Xbox? I mean, it's a bit more powerfull than the Cube, and we sure could use a survival horror game!
As someone who owns both systems, I can tell you that, even though their respective bits of hardware may be comparable, the Cube has some very distinct performance advantages. Most notably:
Load Times. The Cube is so fast reading and writing all it's media, that sometimes you'll blink and miss a load screen. Some games (like Donkey Konga) save every two minutes or so, but you never even see a save screen. The practical upshot is Metroid Prime's ability to stream the next area as you approach the door, resulting in no load times at all - which RE4 apparently imitates. Compare this to, for example, Simpsons Road Rage for the PS2, where you often have to wait 45 seconds to retry a 20 second time trial. Obviously, this is also a problem with the game software - you should never have to reload the entire game environment to replay a single level. But it still takes 45 seconds to load! That's about 5 seconds more than it takes my computer to boot up.
Full-Screen Antialiasing. The Cube has it, the PS2 doesn't. This means when I pop in a simple-looking "kiddy game" like Wind Waker, what I see on the screen are smooth edges. Even if the characters had only a few polys, the whole thing would look smooth because of the antialiasing. Compare this to Shadow Hearts for the PS2. Everything looks like it was bluescreened together - jagged edges everywhere. I'm sure game developers could write a bit of code to simulate antialiasing on the PS2, but on the Cube they don't have to - it makes the graphics smooth for you. This, by the way, is one of the reasons it's so damn hard to pick the zombies out of the background in a Resident Evil game.
Also, Resident Evil 0 (and also the original I think) used a 1-second full screen video loop as the background for every room in the game. This allowed all of the poly-pushing power to be put into the character models and other movable objects. This is possible on the Cube because it has a powerful 2-D engine native to the system. (I would guess that this particular technique isn't too hard to do on the Cube, because Baten Kaitos uses it also.) Guess what? The PS2 doesn't have this. It's not that it can't be done on the PS2, it's that, as a developer, you'd most likely end up having to write the graphics modules for it yourself.
I don't know much about memory buffers and poly- or texture-pushing capacities, and I'm not really sure if these differences have anything to do with the hardware itself. They could very well be optimisations in the Cube's compiler, or flaws in the PS2's OS. I do have both systems though, and just from playing both of them (a lot!) I know that there are some areas where the Cube just takes the cake. It's not too far fetched to say that RE4 exemplifies them.
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