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The Tech of the Colossus
Via a Cathode Tan post, a gloriously in-depth look at the technology behind the PS2 title Shadow of the Colossus. From that article: "In games such as DOOM3 on the PC, the model used for generating the shadow volume is almost equivalent to the character itself. But with SOTC, in order to speed this up, we made use of a simpler model with much fewer polygons in. The main character generally consists of 3,000 polygons, but the colossus can be around 18,000 polygons, depending on the type. But the model used for shadow generation will contain a substantially lower amount than this. For example, the simple model seen by the player will probably only use 1/40th of what the original model contained."
It's hard to count the polys in a model when all you see is a washed out screen.
I see this in lots of games these days.
It's a very neat effect. But I find it distracting, and my eyes are constantly trying to focus, and I end up getting a headache after a while.
So Shadow of the Colossus is only 1/40th as complex as the real thing?
... From the subject I was anticipating something about either the Colossus computer or the Colossus of Rhodes.
Or even something about this
SoC is a great game but I have to ask why they used the PS2. When you look at resident evil 4 on the cube, you're almost drooling at how great it looks, then you play SoC and go "well.. that's nice.. but the hero runs like a retard and it's really muddy and blocky". The screenshots in the article really do seem selected to avoid showing this, but a couple show you how bad it is (http://www.dyingduck.com/sotc/3dwa03.jpg for example).
It's a great game and I'm not trying to put it down, but it's the type of game which the PS2 just can't do justice to, so instead all the blur effects mentioned are covering it up. On the cube or Xbox it might not of sold as well, but it would of been ten times better looking, which is basicly the big selling point of the game.
I like muppets.
While developers are finding things like this *still* that will optimize the code on a 5 year old system, tell me why I need to rush out and buy a PS3 right away? I keep hearing that the cell is hard to develop for. This same thing happened between PS1 -> PS2. A lot of the "fluff" games in the PS2 launch were not as good as some of the titles being released for the PS1, and I think we'll see a mirror of that between PS2 -> PS3
mmmmm tastes like chicken...
I really hope more techniques like this one are applied in more games... I wonder how Prince of Persia would look with this stuff.
It's a good thing that developers keep developing for older hardware and game consoles as it allows for optimizations that can be passed onto newer hardware for visuals that could not of been achieved before. If software developers were to keep relying on the hardware to improve to get better visuals, then people would have to spend 1000s each year just to see a game that looks moderately better. While playing SOTC I was amazed at the way they did the lighting and how the landscape was so vast and looks so real. It is a real treat to read how they actually achieved such awesome graphics.
As mention on the post, that I found this at Pixel Kill: http://www.pixelkill.com/2006/03/05/shadow-of-the- colossus.html
People will likely disagree with me on this, but I'm convinced that these kinds of games are completely wasted being developed for a console. They really belong on a PC instead of being hindered by the limitations of consoles.
As for the light bloom, blurs and other effects, while producing a neat result, especially in stills I tend to find distracting during gameplay. I've seen several games with these kinds of effects and the majority tend to overdo it. It's like I have cataracts or something. Someone with good eyesight doesn't see the world that way. I realize they're going for a cinematic feel, but at least don't overdo it.
I think Guild Wars, for example, has a nice glow that adds to the visuals without overdoing it. Then again, some of the problems here may be due to the low resolution of the PS2.
As for motion blurs, I've never liked them especially in driving games. If the world starts blurring around you because you're driving too fast then you probably shouldn't be racing at all. Imagine if the world turned to a haze for Formula 1 or WRC drivers.
Despite that, I'm impressed by how much they reveal about the game. It's an interesting read.
I think SotC would have been a real letdown on any other console. The effects, which are nothing short of amazing, may have been used to cover up the lack of a huge poly-count in some cases, but they're really what gives the world in SotC it's beauty. The main character, I agree, does look kinda crappy. The horse isn't too bad. But the world looks absolutely amazing, and so do the Colossi.
The PS2 doesn't have the raw power of the Xbox or the Cube, but it is capable of some really amazing visual effects. It's really a shame that most developers haven't taken full advantage of it. OTOH, there's still some great games coming out on that ancient thing.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Maybe I've been playing Civ 4 too much, but after reading this title I immediately thought of Bronze working.
I clicked on this in the "Older Articles" sidebar, expecting it to be some sort of new archeological info on The Colossus of Rhodes.
/bummer
//Slashies!
///Wait...where am I?
The Humblest Mollusk on the Net
Around the time of the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube Developers started getting lazy. Why? Because instead of using all this power to craete incredibly new experiences, they split it half and half between "Shiny visuals" and "Room to be lazy". Look at the Xbox 360. Sure it has some amazing visuals, but nothing much better than last year's good PCs. While this is often the case with consoles, 3 3.2 Gigahertz cores and the "Latest" ATI chipsets should be providing better performance than this! Sometimes I prefer older games because I can appreciate the love and care that was put into each model, and I myself "an" modelling for games like Quake 2 was desperately trying to move corners around so they didn't poke out and make the model look silly. But it was great to achieve this. Now they just make big fully textured roundy meshes with pretty much even polygon distrubution. No more clever techniques. Everything is built off the latest inefficent graphics kits, though I suppose that falls on people like Microsoft as you can't expect most developers to write that kind of stuff. Developers NEED to learn to be more efficent and conservative with their console's power if they want to bring it out. PC Developers are the worst though, absolutely by far. So many wasted resources. Has anyone played Ultimate Spider-man on PC? Ridiculous. Looks worse than the PS2 version, and at half the framerate, on PCs only a couple of years old. I am glad that the developers of this title realise this. There are a handful of amazing looking games, mostly because the development teams focuses their efforts on more efficent techniques instead of cheesy effects.
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