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."

Comments

Re:SoC

[gEvil (beta)]

SoC is a great game but I have to ask why they used the PS2.

Oh, I know the answer to this one! It's because the game was made by Sony. I think it's highly unlikely that they'd spend their resources developing a GameCube or xBox game. Although this game would've been awesome on either of those two platforms. I got through 9 or 10 of the colossi before getting my nice new 32" LCD HDTV. This game is just painful to look at on that screen now because all the flaws and uglies are so apparent.