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[malingenie]

I just wanted to post here and congratulate you and the team, Joel. It is gorgeous and captures the essence of high fantasy very well. I've been slowly playing the game with the GF (A non gamer, although I'm changing that little by little) and she loves playing the brutish warrior. It's a perfect game for co-op. Excellent work and I hope you are successful with this and all other endeavors.

 

[JoelFB]

Thanks.

Thanks for the update. Joel, do you have a NNID you're happy to give out so we can follow?

I'll probably not share my truly personal account, but I have another account registered as JoelFB. The bad news is that it's on one of our first retail Wii Us here at the office so I'm not sure if I'll be actually using it... Either way I'm not going to be around that much in the next few months, it's vacation time for me once I get all the loose ends tied up. We did register "Frozenbyte" as a company account though, I think we'll try to use that for certain purposes.

 

[DragonSworne]

I just bought the game over the weekend and I'm loving it so far.

Can't wait for the patch.

 

[AzaK]

Thanks.


I'll probably not share my truly personal account, but I have another account registered as JoelFB. The bad news is that it's on one of our first retail Wii Us here at the office so I'm not sure if I'll be actually using it... Either way I'm not going to be around that much in the next few months, it's vacation time for me once I get all the loose ends tied up. We did register "Frozenbyte" as a company account though, I think we'll try to use that for certain purposes.

No problem, I understand. Can't wait for it to turn up on the NZ shop and hope it does well for you guys.

 

[shibbs]

We have some controller-related updates/fixes coming in the update (1-2 weeks)

Does this update include pro controller support too?

 

[Oblivion]

Uh...sorry, I know the article's very positive on the Wii-U and all, but are those images in the op labeled correctly? Cause the Wii-U shot looks pretty bad (look at the dragon thing's mouth).

 

[Linkup]

Uh...sorry, but I know the article's very positive on the Wii-U and all, but are those images in the op labeled correctly? Cause the Wii-U shot looks pretty bad (look at the dragon thing's mouth).

Dev noted it and other changes, I don't think anyone would know unless they saw it side to side as it looks like a snake still. I think the texture mapping is off, mesh is probably fine.

 

[StreetsAhead]

- Joel, Frozenbyte team, developers of Trine 2: Director's Cut

Good on you, Joel. I love hearing directly from devs about their games. I know it's unlikely, but I'd love a Japanese release of Trine 2 on the eshop. Our eshop here is barren of non-retail games. I didn't think it at first, but this game seems right up my alley.

 

[tolkir]

With the path, will I be able to know how many xp bottles and enemies there are in the new level?

I want to complete 100% the game

 

[JoelFB]

Does this update include pro controller support too?

Yes it does.

With the path, will I be able to know how many xp bottles and enemies there are in the new level? I want to complete 100% the game

Gah, we weren't aware of this bug. We're looking into it... Can't promise it will be fixed in the update, we'll try but if it's tricky then it has to wait for the next one. Sorry!

Current update release plan is next week. Lots of things still to do but hopefully we get it wrapped up in the next few days and are able to make that happen.

Other things: The dragon issues we continue to look into, it probably won't get fixed in this update either. Japanese release we'll know more about early next year.

Thanks.

 

[tolkir]

Yes it does.


Gah, we weren't aware of this bug. We're looking into it... Can't promise it will be fixed in the update, we'll try but if it's tricky then it has to wait for the next one. Sorry!

Current update release plan is next week. Lots of things still to do but hopefully we get it wrapped up in the next few days and are able to make that happen.

Other things: The dragon issues we continue to look into, it probably won't get fixed in this update either. Japanese release we'll know more about early next year.

Thanks.

No problem. At least, if you know, tell me how many are each one.

 

[JoelFB]

No problem. At least, if you know, tell me how many are each one.

There should be 75 level exp and 25 monster exp. It seems like we found the bug too and it will most likely be fixed in the update too.

Edit: I believe you might be missing the 'secret' area, it has 15 exp... Hint: When you first encounter lava, spend some time with the big machine and see where it goes...

 

[tolkir]

There should be 75 level exp and 25 monster exp. It seems like we found the bug too and it will most likely be fixed in the update too.

Edit: I believe you might be missing the 'secret' area, it has 15 exp... Hint: When you first encounter lava, spend some time with the big machine and see where it goes...

Hahahaha, great reference in the secret area. Finally, I have all level exp.
Thanks for the awesome game and good luck for the next project.

Spoiler

I will post the secret in Miiverse.

 

[gamingeek]

There should be 75 level exp and 25 monster exp. It seems like we found the bug too and it will most likely be fixed in the update too.

Edit: I believe you might be missing the 'secret' area, it has 15 exp... Hint: When you first encounter lava, spend some time with the big machine and see where it goes...

Dear Joel.

I've noticed on many Wii U games there is colour loss on the U pad screen compared to the main screen. Can you ask your tech team why and if there is any solution to it? When you output the image to the u pad screen can you alter the colour levels to jam up the saturation or something like that?

On Trine 2 for instance are you mirroring the main screen with the same colour levels etc? Is there a way to up colour on the u pad screen? Some games look okay on the u pad screen like Mighty Switch Force for instance.

 

[:Motorbass]

The game is truly great. I also played with my nongamer GF and she loves it.

 

[Berg]

Bought this game on a whim, and am glad I did. The puzzles are really good, they take me forever ( once i get them, im like "DDUUHH"). Graphics are really immersive. and the story setting and narration give me the feeling I get when I play a zelda adventure.
I recommend it.

 

[Ydahs]

Still waiting on the Aussie release, hopefully it's right around the corner.

Dear Joel.

I've noticed on many Wii U games there is colour loss on the U pad screen compared to the main screen. Can you ask your tech team why and if there is any solution to it? When you output the image to the u pad screen can you alter the colour levels to jam up the saturation or something like that?

On Trine 2 for instance are you mirroring the main screen with the same colour levels etc? Is there a way to up colour on the u pad screen? Some games look okay on the u pad screen like Mighty Switch Force for instance.

The issue here is that the tv image looks slightly (or considerably) different from television to television because each is configured differently and each has a different panel which makes a huge difference.

Chances are, the gamepad's image is more representative of what the developers intended because it's probably configured to a colour standard that's often used in design studios to ensure consistency amongst many types of displays. Consumer TVs unfortunately do not have such a standard, as out of the box their image temperature is normally set to cool and there's a ton of post processing effects which will considerably alters (ruins!) the image being fed to the TV.

 

[radioheadrule83]

Hey Joel, do you and your colleagues use Miiverse at all? Would be cool to follow you guys
We've got a thread for industry miiverse people here: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=502157

Great work on the game by the way! You deserve every success

 

[gamingeek]

Still waiting on the Aussie release, hopefully it's right around the corner.


The issue here is that the tv image looks slightly (or considerably) different from television to television because each is configured differently and each has a different panel which makes a huge difference.

Chances are, the gamepad's image is more representative of what the developers intended because it's probably configured to a colour standard that's often used in design studios to ensure consistency amongst many types of displays. Consumer TVs unfortunately do not have such a standard, as out of the box their image temperature is normally set to cool and there's a ton of post processing effects which will considerably alters (ruins!) the image being fed to the TV.

From what I have read on Polygon and Digital Foundry, they say the colour loss is because of the Miracast wireless tech, compression. Some data is lost or something because otherwise streaming 480p wirelessly would need 74mbps which is way too fast for wireless lan.

I have tried U out on multiple tvs and the gamepad has come off worse on all 3.

 

[lunchwithyuzo]

Evidently Trine 2 is the best selling tame in the US eShop, even ahead of NSMBU now. Congrats Joel!

 

[JoelFB]

Ah sorry guys, didn't notice the new replies.

I've noticed on many Wii U games there is colour loss on the U pad screen compared to the main screen. Can you ask your tech team why and if there is any solution to it? When you output the image to the u pad screen can you alter the colour levels to jam up the saturation or something like that? On Trine 2 for instance are you mirroring the main screen with the same colour levels etc? Is there a way to up colour on the u pad screen? Some games look okay on the u pad screen like Mighty Switch Force for instance.

Hmm. You mean the Wii U GamePad screen looks worse to you than the TV? For most people it's the other way around, the GamePad has fantastic output... I'm not sure on the tech side, I don't think we at least do anything special, we should be just mirroring it.

However in the case of Trine 2, we'll have the update out very soon (this week I hope) and that will change the colors drastically, affecting both. (Basically it fixes the washed out gamma output, which hasn't seem to have bothered that many players after all, but should in any case look better to most eyes.)

As suggested above I might look into the TV settings and see if it's using any special modes to boost colors or something (for example 'Dynamic' could look more colorful than THX/Standard etc). That's the only thing I can think of, the GamePad should be able to produce pretty good colors... But yeah your explanation of wireless compression would also make sense. We have no real info on that, sorry.

Hey Joel, do you and your colleagues use Miiverse at all? Would be cool to follow you guys
We've got a thread for industry miiverse people here: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=502157

Yeah we use "Frozenbyte" to interact on Miiverse. I have JoelFB but it's on the same console so not used much.

Thanks guys.

 

[gamingeek]

Ah sorry guys, didn't notice the new replies.


Hmm. You mean the Wii U GamePad screen looks worse to you than the TV? For most people it's the other way around, the GamePad has fantastic output... I'm not sure on the tech side, I don't think we at least do anything special, we should be just mirroring it.

However in the case of Trine 2, we'll have the update out very soon (this week I hope) and that will change the colors drastically, affecting both. (Basically it fixes the washed out gamma output, which hasn't seem to have bothered that many players after all, but should in any case look better to most eyes.)

As suggested above I might look into the TV settings and see if it's using any special modes to boost colors or something (for example 'Dynamic' could look more colorful than THX/Standard etc). That's the only thing I can think of, the GamePad should be able to produce pretty good colors... But yeah your explanation of wireless compression would also make sense. We have no real info on that, sorry.


Yeah we use "Frozenbyte" to interact on Miiverse. I have JoelFB but it's on the same console so not used much.

Thanks guys.

Yeah I've tried out several different HDTVs and noticed the difference on all of them. The colours on the Wii U pad screen are just far too muted in comparison to the tv picture across many games.

Trine 2's colours on the tv look pretty damn fantastic to me, on the gamepad screen they are muted and sometimes it is harder to identify critical objects needed to get past a puzzle.

I just wanted to know if developers could jam up the saturation on the u pad screen feed to compensate and better match the tv picture?

I don't really understand why Miracast would give signal loss which would dull colours. I am not a tech guy but I would have thought a small bit of code info regulates colours. I want to know if the U pad screen is capable of better colours, is it the wireless compression dulling things? And can it be mitigated somehow?

Here is the Digital Foundry article which has the Polygon article on Miracast linked.

Compression is essential owing to the sheer volume of data. A raw 24-bit RGB stream with 854x480 resolution at 60FPS would require a 72MB/s transfer rate - way too high for WiFi. As we noted in our original Wii U review, colour space on the transmitted image has been downscaled significantly, reducing base image bandwidth to 36MB/s. Employing compression technology such as h.264 could reduce that by a factor of ten with little discernible loss of quality. The direct connection may even open the door to the less computationally intensive MJPEG compression: it's often deployed for applications where latency is a key issue and the 802.11n wireless standard should be able to sustain bandwidth for a 480p screen running at 60Hz.

 

[Angelus Errare]

About as similar to a Call of Duty experience.

The huge understatement is primarily with the huge battle sequence which can drop in the teens.

The transparency effects from Anubis' attacks also lead to massive framedrops on PS2.

We totally played different versions of ZOE2

 

[Capell]

However in the case of Trine 2, we'll have the update out very soon (this week I hope) and that will change the colors drastically, affecting both. (Basically it fixes the washed out gamma output, which hasn't seem to have bothered that many players after all, but should in any case look better to most eyes.)

I'd like to see some comparison shots after the update has arrived.

With the voice chat implementation I might go for another playthrough anyway.

 

[AzaK]

Yeah I've tried out several different HDTVs and noticed the difference on all of them. The colours on the Wii U pad screen are just far too muted in comparison to the tv picture across many games.

Trine 2's colours on the tv look pretty damn fantastic to me, on the gamepad screen they are muted and sometimes it is harder to identify critical objects needed to get past a puzzle.

I just wanted to know if developers could jam up the saturation on the u pad screen feed to compensate and better match the tv picture?

I don't really understand why Miracast would give signal loss which would dull colours. I am not a tech guy but I would have thought a small bit of code info regulates colours. I want to know if the U pad screen is capable of better colours, is it the wireless compression dulling things? And can it be mitigated somehow?

Here is the Digital Foundry article which has the Polygon article on Miracast linked.

Compression is essential owing to the sheer volume of data. A raw 24-bit RGB stream with 854x480 resolution at 60FPS would require a 72MB/s transfer rate - way too high for WiFi. As we noted in our original Wii U review, colour space on the transmitted image has been downscaled significantly, reducing base image bandwidth to 36MB/s. Employing compression technology such as h.264 could reduce that by a factor of ten with little discernible loss of quality. The direct connection may even open the door to the less computationally intensive MJPEG compression: it's often deployed for applications where latency is a key issue and the 802.11n wireless standard should be able to sustain bandwidth for a 480p screen running at 60Hz.

I just assumed the issue was really to do with the screen's not being that great. Purples seem to be affected a lot (Or maybe it's just more noticeable). In NintendoLand (I think, maybe it' NSMBU) there's a purple heavy end of level screen or something and on the gamepad it's almost desaturated.

If it was an issue with the actual compression then it you'd think it could be compensated for upon decompression which is why I think it's the screen.

Overall though, when playing it doesn't bother me.

 

[Thraktor]

I just assumed the issue was really to do with the screen's not being that great. Purples seem to be affected a lot (Or maybe it's just more noticeable). In NintendoLand (I think, maybe it' NSMBU) there's a purple heavy end of level screen or something and on the gamepad it's almost desaturated.

If it was an issue with the actual compression then it you'd think it could be compensated for upon decompression which is why I think it's the screen.

Overall though, when playing it doesn't bother me.

To be honest I think it's mainly TVs that are the issue. The majority of TVs have very high default contrast/saturation levels as it helps them "stand out" on shop floors. I've been playing on a properly calibrated Pioneer plasma and the gamepad's colours are actually pretty close.

 

[Pimpbaa]

GPU Physx only works for effects that do not affect objects that are controlled by the CPU (like the player), games like Trine2 (which use Physx) have to do it on the CPU if they want the effects to interact with the world.

Considering the Physx in the games that support gpu acceleration have most or all Physx effects that are affectedable by the player(like the 2 Batman games or Borderlands 2), I really don't think this is true. I can't ever remember any effects in physx games that the player couldn't interact with.

 

[The Boat]

I actually think the colors look better on the gamepad than on my monitor. I'm not too confident about my monitor's calibration but still.

 

[gamingeek]

I actually think the colors look better on the gamepad than on my monitor. I'm not too confident about my monitor's calibration but still.

You may have a monitor that doesn't cope well with Wii U's limited range HDMI output then.

Anyway I turned my TV to standard settings and then the colour difference wasn't as bad, although the U pad screen still had worse colour representation. I think with my tvs I like a vivid, colourful picture so usually set it to a dynamic like picture and the U pad screen comes off even worse compared to that.

Maybe developers could let you alter the picture settings for the u pad output to your liking if Nintendo don't add a picture calibration feature?

Anyway I beat Trine 2 and moved onto the goblin menace expansion. Wow, it's graphically on another level to the regular game. It can look seriously amazing. The texture quality is superb, everything is crisper more detailed and more vivid than the main game and the main game already looks significantly better on u. I can't imagine it looking much better on a high end PC (not talking resolution or framerate). When Frozenbyte said the Goblin Menace required considerably more power than 360 or ps3, and that it would have to have a small downscale if ported to them I expected a barely noticeable jump, not this. I'd be interested to see what Digital Foundry think about that portion of the Directors cut.

Great value game this with the Goblin expansion, can't recommend this enough.

 

[AzaK]

As a tenuously related issue, I fired up Darksiders II last night and noticed it allows you to set the gamma for both the GamePad and the TV independently. I wonder if that is a setting developers can use in API/hardware or whether Vigil applies gamma themselves before compressing and sending to the GamePad.

 

[StevieP]

You may have a monitor that doesn't cope well with Wii U's limited range HDMI output then.

Anyway I turned my TV to standard settings and then the colour difference wasn't as bad, although the U pad screen still had worse colour representation. I think with my tvs I like a vivid, colourful picture so usually set it to a dynamic like picture and the U pad screen comes off even worse compared to that.

Maybe developers could let you alter the picture settings for the u pad output to your liking if Nintendo don't add a picture calibration feature?

Anyway I beat Trine 2 and moved onto the goblin menace expansion. Wow, it's graphically on another level to the regular game. It can look seriously amazing. The texture quality is superb, everything is crisper more detailed and more vivid than the main game and the main game already looks significantly better on u. I can't imagine it looking much better on a high end PC (not talking resolution or framerate). When Frozenbyte said the Goblin Menace required considerably more power than 360 or ps3, and that it would have to have a small downscale if ported to them I expected a barely noticeable jump, not this. I'd be interested to see what Digital Foundry think about that portion of the Directors cut.

Great value game this with the Goblin expansion, can't recommend this enough.

Screenshots? Never played this one on PC

 

[ipukespiders]

Game just went on sale, 15.99. Anyone know if the update is up yet?

 

[AzaK]

Anyway I beat Trine 2 and moved onto the goblin menace expansion. Wow, it's graphically on another level to the regular game. It can look seriously amazing. The texture quality is superb, everything is crisper more detailed and more vivid than the main game and the main game already looks significantly better on u. I can't imagine it looking much better on a high end PC (not talking resolution or framerate). When Frozenbyte said the Goblin Menace required considerably more power than 360 or ps3, and that it would have to have a small downscale if ported to them I expected a barely noticeable jump, not this. I'd be interested to see what Digital Foundry think about that portion of the Directors cut.

Great value game this with the Goblin expansion, can't recommend this enough.

STOP TEASING! Come on NZ release!

 

[gamingeek]

Stevie, just read this from reddit and eurogamer comments:

"Technically speaking, the Goblin Menace expansion is not "exclusive" to Wii U as such. It's exclusive as of right now because we haven't had enough resources to look into getting it to XBLA and PSN. The levels in the expansion are quite a bit more demanding than the original campaign, so we're not quite sure if we can squeeze them onto the older consoles properly. We probably could if we did some minor changes to the levels, but that can end up as quite a bit of work... And truth be told we're not very big fans of XBLA nor PSN at the moment, their processes are a bit too heavy to our liking and we also need to go through the XBLA/PSN publisher ATLUS, so it's all a bit more complicated. And frankly there's a big psychological factor as well - We had a very stressful time getting the game onto XBLA and PSN, and we feel like it wasn't really up to us, so we dread having to do that again..."

I posted some pics here:

http://thevgpress.com/ggweekly/ggweekly__7.html&perPage=20#comment155110

PC version I think but it looks the same on Wii u to me Scaled up on a 1080p set. Once you finish the main game and see THE END the difference is immediately apparent.

 

[gamingeek]

As a tenuously related issue, I fired up Darksiders II last night and noticed it allows you to set the gamma for both the GamePad and the TV independently. I wonder if that is a setting developers can use in API/hardware or whether Vigil applies gamma themselves before compressing and sending to the GamePad.

That's great, wish more wii u games let you do that.

 

[gamingeek]

Should mention I had no bugs or glitches on the main game, but already 2 on the goblin expansion. One time upon loading the sound kept skipping. Other time I tried to block a water spout with blocks and the framerate went to hell. As soon as I unblocked the water it went back to normal.

 

[ipukespiders]

Any word on the gamma patch?

 

[JaseC]

Any word on the gamma patch?

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=508922