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Shin'en, WiiWare, Platformer, Mario Galaxy visuals, Jett Rocket
- Thread starter Cow Mengde
- Start date
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
indeed. i played it because (1) it was garfield, (2) it was beautifully animated by shin'en ; ) the final boss did have me scratching my head for a minute, though : ) anyway, point being, i'd have another one on the DD services any day.Cow Mengde said:
New Nintendo Everything interview with Manfred Linzner.
Nintendo Everything: In a few sentences, can you please describe the style of gameplay in Jett Rocket?
Manfred Linzner: 3D Jumpn'Run desribes JRs gameplay best. You know, free exploration, no invisible walls, free camera control. You have a great amount of moves and you can interact with many vehicles and machines. One of the coolest things JR can do is to fly to higher grounds with his Jet Pack.
NE: How did the team manage to technically pull off such graphics, especially considering the file size limit on WiiWare?
ML: First of all we developed a custom shader system which supports all the hardware tricks you can do on the Wii. So we could realtime preview all those Wii shaders in our 3D application. That was a big help to cut down iteration time and to test as many effects as possible.
As you may know the Wii graphics hardware has no pixel shaders like the PS3 or XBOX360. Nonetheless you can achive stunning results when you wrap your mind about the special abilities of the Wii. One thing the Wii we can do very well is to combine many textures very quickly. So we designed our materials like you would create layers in Photoshop. An important addition was that many textures were realtime generated and feed back into the shaders. With this techique we were able to create stunning materials without wasting megabytes on giant static and animated textures.
On top of that we use many different techniques to allow stuff like reflective and refractive materials, softed shadows, animated ocean waves and spray, grass, heat waves, etc.
Finally the 40Mb limit on WiiWare isnt a big problem. We were used on the DS to create games in 4Mb. You just have to use different approaches then used in most retail games.
NE: When can gamers expect Jett Rocket to arrive on the Wii Shop Channel? Do you have an idea about how much the game will cost yet?
ML: We hope only very few months will go by until the release. We want to keep the costs very low, to allow anyone to play JR. However, the final release date and costs are set by Nintendo.
More
@ NE:
http://www.nintendoeverything.com/35175/
Nintendo Everything: In a few sentences, can you please describe the style of gameplay in Jett Rocket?
Manfred Linzner: 3D Jumpn'Run desribes JRs gameplay best. You know, free exploration, no invisible walls, free camera control. You have a great amount of moves and you can interact with many vehicles and machines. One of the coolest things JR can do is to fly to higher grounds with his Jet Pack.
NE: How did the team manage to technically pull off such graphics, especially considering the file size limit on WiiWare?
ML: First of all we developed a custom shader system which supports all the hardware tricks you can do on the Wii. So we could realtime preview all those Wii shaders in our 3D application. That was a big help to cut down iteration time and to test as many effects as possible.
As you may know the Wii graphics hardware has no pixel shaders like the PS3 or XBOX360. Nonetheless you can achive stunning results when you wrap your mind about the special abilities of the Wii. One thing the Wii we can do very well is to combine many textures very quickly. So we designed our materials like you would create layers in Photoshop. An important addition was that many textures were realtime generated and feed back into the shaders. With this techique we were able to create stunning materials without wasting megabytes on giant static and animated textures.
On top of that we use many different techniques to allow stuff like reflective and refractive materials, softed shadows, animated ocean waves and spray, grass, heat waves, etc.
Finally the 40Mb limit on WiiWare isnt a big problem. We were used on the DS to create games in 4Mb. You just have to use different approaches then used in most retail games.
NE: When can gamers expect Jett Rocket to arrive on the Wii Shop Channel? Do you have an idea about how much the game will cost yet?
ML: We hope only very few months will go by until the release. We want to keep the costs very low, to allow anyone to play JR. However, the final release date and costs are set by Nintendo.
More
@ NE:
http://www.nintendoeverything.com/35175/
nincompoop
Banned
Sweet, sounds like Mario Sunshine!Celine said:
The pics on the interview page aren't loading. Are any of them new?
Cow Mengde
Banned
Nope, just the stuff already posted.
Shin'en really has their graphics down... This game has some impressive visuals, as does Nanostray 2. Which I was just playing the other day... wouldn't mind work on a Nanostray 3, even if the second one wears its influences on its sleeve, it's still an awesome game.
GeekyDad
Member
Yeah, Shin'en seem to be masters of tech. Even their Garfield game for DS was prettier than most Square Enix releases. I went back to the original Nanostray about a month ago, and I'm still dazzled by how gorgeous that game looks and plays. Some slowdown, sure, but still a great shmup.
I'm looking forward to this game, but I won't get my hopes up too much. Shin'en might be masters in terms of making games look fantastic on a memory budget, but they usually play it way safe when it comes to gameplay.
I'm looking forward to this game, but I won't get my hopes up too much. Shin'en might be masters in terms of making games look fantastic on a memory budget, but they usually play it way safe when it comes to gameplay.
Cow Mengde
Banned
Nice find. The Wii can do metallic shaders pretty nicely.
Eteric Rice
Member
So basically, you have to make the shaders yourself on the Wii?
Kind of wish Nintendo had just made them and sent them with the dev kits. : / Maybe 85% of the Wii's games wouldn't look so terrible.
Kind of wish Nintendo had just made them and sent them with the dev kits. : / Maybe 85% of the Wii's games wouldn't look so terrible.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
actually i'd rather nintendo did not. i hate it when the majority of games on a given platform have the 'by the book' look. plus, there's no guarantee dev's would still bother; IIRC there's a depth-texture example in the SDK - how many games have you seen utilizing self-shadowing on the wii?Eteric Rice said:
technically, flipper/hollywood is a potent pixel shader - i'd position it somewhere between PS 1.1 and 1.4 in D3D terms. the platform's issue is with vertex shaders - it can do EMBM preparations and that's about as far as it goes. but even EMBM alone can be a powerful tool, and not just for specularities/envmaps.
anyhow, i'm glad that a really small developer like shin'en is showing how it's done. comes to show how much the rest are not trying. i'm particularly enjoying it when wiiware titles by devs like frontier, shin'en and others of that caliber take the wii looker crown almost every season.
crazy monkey
Banned
looks sweet
Sir Johnny
Neo Member
I still can't believe it. Wiiware. Holy fuck.
Eteric Rice
Member
BadSanta said:Looks really good for a Wiiware. And it seems to be pretty fun as well. Why so few devs are trying on Wii?
They want to pretend it doesn't exist because if they acknowleged it, it would mean possibly making something without guns, tits, or sports.
Basically, at this point I just think most publishers wanted it to fail. And while it still hasn't failed, and won't fail, they'll continue to ignore it anyway. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
nincompoop
Banned
Ah shit, I didn't notice the collectable item icon on the HUD at firstGrampasso said:
Hopefully it isn't a huge focus of the gameplay.
Smiles and Cries
Member
damn the visuals have so much potential... but allow us to play with a mii since the character design if far worst
Stumpokapow said:There's a platformer on Xbox Indies that runs at 720p and looks even closer to Mario Galaxy in terms of visual style (particularly the rim lighting on the character, which is probably the single most distinctive visual element of Mario Galaxy to me and is not present in the OP game) although definitely a lot more... sparse than this Shin'en game and is 35MB.
It's got 5 different worlds, although as you can see the level design is closer to the sort of pure jumpathon challenge levels you'd find in Super Mario Sunshine, the Bowser levels from Mario 64, etc.
I suspect the game will be an hour or two long, but it'll make heavy use of asset duplication, palette swaps, compression tricks, procedural music or relatively little music, etc.
I think I could almost beat that game with the demo. It was ok.
Mr. Pointy
Member
I want to see what Shin'en can do on the 3DS.
Cow Mengde
Banned
Vitet said:
I agree. I haven't really played any collect-a-tons since the N64 eras anyway. It wouldn't be a bad change of pace after being up to the neck with FPS games. A well done collect-a-ton is still very enjoyable. That said, it's all up to Shin'en now.
Damn, that looks amazing. I can't wait to see it in motion
Also, I'm part of the Nanostray Defense Force, so look out haters. :lol It was actually the second DS game I ever got (after SM64DS), so I'm quite partial to it. I played the crap out of it until my library exploded in late 2005.
Also, I'm part of the Nanostray Defense Force, so look out haters. :lol It was actually the second DS game I ever got (after SM64DS), so I'm quite partial to it. I played the crap out of it until my library exploded in late 2005.
crazy monkey
Banned
nice.wsippel said:The uncompressed sizes of the assets used in Jett Rocket:
More than 600MB compressed to 40MB. German engineering...
- 245MB Textures
- 160MB Geometry and shaders
- 140MB Music
- 73MB Sound effects
- 8MB Fonts
- 3.5MB Particles
- 500kB Script code
- 151kB Localization
stuminus3
Member
Holy crap.wsippel said:
I'll never understand why the big companies don't try harder to get guys like this working on their titles, or at least get their tech. Shin'en don't exactly have a great history (other than Nanostray 2 being one of my favorite shmups ever), but damn, their tech is amazing.
Where is this from ? Is there a new interview/article online ?wsippel said:The uncompressed sizes of the assets used in Jett Rocket:
More than 600MB compressed to 40MB. German engineering...
- 245MB Textures
- 160MB Geometry and shaders
- 140MB Music
- 73MB Sound effects
- 8MB Fonts
- 3.5MB Particles
- 500kB Script code
- 151kB Localization
However Deutschland über alles
Celine said:Where is this from ? Is there a new interview/article online ?
However Deutschland über alles
http://wiiware.nintendolife.com/news/2010/03/new_jett_rocket_shots_blast_off#comment455105
nincompoop
Banned
The comments section of this article: http://wiiware.nintendolife.com/news/2010/03/new_jett_rocket_shots_blast_offCeline said:Where is this from ? Is there a new interview/article online ?
However Deutschland über alles
durrr beaten
wsippel said:The uncompressed sizes of the assets used in Jett Rocket:
More than 600MB compressed to 40MB. German engineering...
- 245MB Textures
- 160MB Geometry and shaders
- 140MB Music
- 73MB Sound effects
- 8MB Fonts
- 3.5MB Particles
- 500kB Script code
- 151kB Localization
FFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU
Why is stuff like this always so goddamned fascinating to me?
Cow Mengde
Banned
wsippel said:The uncompressed sizes of the assets used in Jett Rocket:
More than 600MB compressed to 40MB. German engineering...
- 245MB Textures
- 160MB Geometry and shaders
- 140MB Music
- 73MB Sound effects
- 8MB Fonts
- 3.5MB Particles
- 500kB Script code
- 151kB Localization
So if anyone ever want to hire game programmers, make sure they're German.
Imagine what they could have done on N64 where they have 64MB to work with. Ogre Battle 64 was 40 MB and still blurry as hell.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
interesting. let's try to make wild quesses.
i think that the above totaling to about 45-50MB is quite plausible, german engineering or not ; )
* the cube/wii can use 8bit-per-vector-component vertex formats, Retro used that in the primes for the world geometry.
- 245MB Textures: diffuse/albedo maps dxt (s3tc) compressed, the majority in opaque dxt1 - 8:1 lossy compression. put huffman on top of that - 10:1. for the majority of EMBM perturbance effects (bumps, ripples, etc), use procedurally-generated maps. so amount of physically compressed textures could be around 25MB
- 160MB Geometry and shaders:: more than sure the volume of shaders in those are negligible. also, they most likely use Retro's approach of using low-precision vertex formats for the world geometry*. maybe also some procedurally-generated geometry? anyhow, 160MB of geometry is rather too much. let's see how big/diverse their world is. i wouldn't be surprised if their compressed geometry assets were 10-15MB.
- 140MB Music: MIDI/MOD-format music. depending on the music variety/quality, the resulting sound bank may be as little as a couple of megabytes.
- 73MB Sound effects: no clue what they count as SFX and how they reach to that 'decompressed' number. speech? - can be heavilly compressed. blasts and zaps? - procedurally generated. a compression factor of 10:1 or better here.
- 8MB Fonts: everything goes through a glyph rasterizer ala freetype, so the size of the fonts is the size of the rasterizer lib + a couple of ttf definitions. a megabyte, maybe two?
- 3.5MB Particles: again, not clear what metric they use to quantize that.
- 500kB Script code: good old huffman, can crunch human-readble texts like a champ.
- 151kB Localization: ditto.
i think that the above totaling to about 45-50MB is quite plausible, german engineering or not ; )
* the cube/wii can use 8bit-per-vector-component vertex formats, Retro used that in the primes for the world geometry.