Manmademan
Member
Windows CE had really limited adoption among dreamcast titles. Most of them used a much simpler operating system included on the discs themselves instead.
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Emotion Engine was really powerful ?
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Windows CE had really limited adoption among dreamcast titles. Most of them used a much simpler operating system included on the discs themselves instead.
Final Fantasy X looked better
Yeah, it blows my mind no one notices this. FFX looked considerably better than MGS2 a year before it was out. And that's not even mentioning the no-contest between the art direction in both games.
Pretty sure MGS2 ran at 60fps and FFX at 30fps, though.
So there's some accounting for that difference.
Eh. I appreciate the vibrancy and responsiveness of 60fps, but that's not worth giving it the edge, I don't think.
To Far Away Times
Member
GCN had a really great hardware design from that era. Low cost of components, powerful, runs so cool it didn't even have a CPU fan...
Xbox had a ton of power.
And the dreamcast had much sharper video output. Though the PS2 did excel in most hardware aspects compared to the DC though...
Xbox had a ton of power.
And the dreamcast had much sharper video output. Though the PS2 did excel in most hardware aspects compared to the DC though...
Melchiah
Member
JordanN
Banned
The Japanese PS2 games we saw back then are now the equivalent to what we see on the PSP,3DS,Wii,Vita,Mobile. Very ho hum.
I'm referring to the lower budget efforts and not stuff by Squenix or Capcom (they were on PS3/360 last gen). And well, if they did figure it out, I imagine it was because they had to. PS2 sales couldn't be ignored.
chemicals
Member
i'm in this camp.. Bought a DC and played it for a few years before ps2 came out.. But once it came out, i had both consoles hooked up using s-video and had 1 switch set up to go between the 2 consoles (i had a fucking Sony Wega 32 inch flat screen. Weighed a damn ton, but the picture STILL can't be beat) Madden ate NFL2K's lunch all day long. Same for Gran Turismo 3. Nothing on DC could come near it graphically (although Sega GT was one of my favorite racing sims ever)
but i was a gaming freak back then and also bought gamecube (with graphics even a little better than ps2) and xbox (which totally clowned the competition with graphics)... But i still say PS2 was the best console for the money unless you were an absolute HALO freak.. And my friends were. I still prefer ps2 for the games alone.. Some of the best shit ever. Rpg's son.
Melchiah
Member
I'm not sure I'm reading that right, but are you saying they weren't anything extraordinary, or aren't anymore by today's standards? If so, I have to disagree with both. For the latter, I played SH3 on my 60GB PS3 few years ago, and was amazed how well it held up.
For the record, SH2, MGS2, and FFX came in the end of 2001, very early on PS2's life, when the sales were around 20 million units. It certainly didn't take them long to make the hardware sing.
SH2 is still environmentally breathtaking.
The work done on that game is mindblowing.I don't think any game managed to look like it again.
So dreary in a very unique way.
Melchiah
Member
I couldn't agree more. The visual style and atmosphere has never been duplicated, not even by SH3. SH2 was the game of the generation for me in many ways, which was kinda unfortunate as it came so early on.
Because fewer of them were developing across both PS2 and Xbox than Western developers?
In trying to develop across both platforms, it would often be the PS2 version that was gimped for a lot of titles. You needed to architect your game in a particular way to get the most out of the PS2 hardware which was incompatible with how you'd get the most of of the Xbox hardware, so doing things in a "standard" way in a multiplatform development would often result in good performance on Xbox but only adequate performance on PS2.
Ken Masters
Banned
Fascinating
Wolf Akela
Member
I remember reading somewhere it lent itself really well to particle effects, like in VP2.
XANDER CAGE
Member
Many of the Japanese PS2 games, particularly Silent Hill 3, look good even today.
SH3 looks incredible but that emulator-sourced (or is it PC/HD edition version sourced?) gif helps considerably.
ZombiePlatypus
Member
I love Kutaragi's eccentric approach. I wish we could have seen what the PS4 would have been like under his vision. Might have been convoluted and aloof, but no doubt it would have also probably been something amazing. (At the very least, I'm sure it would have at least had full BC outta the box. Way to go on that front, Sony.)
Warm Machine
Member
It was an infuriating machine to work on. You could render way more than you can store in memory which meant your framerate was always pretty good. The lack of VRAM though was terrible. We had to use so many 16color textures at 64x64 as did most devs. Wish it had Dreamcast VRAM and compressed textures.
Dreamcast had better textures for sure, PS2 never had amazing textures. It's amazing what devs were able to do on that machine. I'm glad PS4 is straightforward, Ken went off the rails with PS2 and PS3.
I disagree. While FFX did indeed look amazing for its time, the real-time cutscenes were REALL Y awkward and its animation wasn't nearly as good as MGS2
They weren't that awkward and while MGS had better animation, I still don't think that's worth writing home about with those character models and that art.
For a lot of the bigger companies, coding on the PS3 wasn't actually a problem either.
What killed most Japanese publishers with the HD transition is that their production processes couldn't handle the workload associated with making HD art assets and games of 360/PS3 scope.
Like let's take Square Enix as an example. Square Enix used Waterfall development which would mean their games weren't playable until just a few months before launch, and to let them quickly rearrange things in the past, they would simply make every art asset at 100% quality. An example would be say there's an airship that flies past you in 2 seconds, so you never get a good look at it. Instead of just making it at an acceptable level of detail, they would make it as if it were a visual centerpiece you might stand in front of for 2+ minutes, taking vastly more time to create, on the fear that they might decide 2 months before launch that they actually wanted to use it as a visual centerpiece instead.
Now, if your graphics are PS2 level, this isn't an issue. If your graphics as PS3 level, and you're suddenly doing this for 5000+ models, this is a huge issue.
It's also very hard to test out new ideas and find out potential problems with your technology if you don't actually try anything until the end of development. If your game seems fine on your initial test setup and suddenly you notice at the end of development that everything runs at 15 fps, you have to quickly butcher things in order to get ready to ship or delay for a decidedly long time.
Then they also had issues like someone would have a job title of "shoe modeler" instead of "3D modeler", so if they finished all the shoes that needed to be made for the game in six months, instead of just going on to work on something else, the corporate structure was such that they would twiddle their thumbs until someone finally reassigned their title, as otherwise there would be huge office politics issues about why they're taking over someone else's workload without being told to.
But yeah, basically the issues with Japan was not that Japanese developers couldn't handle game programming, it was that they didn't have the development model necessary to make the games the technology enabled. The move to the DS and PSP allowed a lot of developers to actually not bother changing their processes as well because their old methods still worked fine on hardware that was worse than the PS2. I imagine there's actually quite a few that still work this way since the 3DS and lower tier Vita games would still not have problems with horribly outdated models, nor would most mobile games.
Square Enix, to their credit, eventually learned how to handle production in a more sane fashion and now runs a lot of workshops for the community to try and share how they worked on their problems in order to get a more sane development model. It's helpful since it doesn't seem like advice being broadcast from abroad, but rather someone who used to be the star third-party developer in the region.
I couldn't agree more. The visual style and atmosphere has never been duplicated, not even by SH3. SH2 was the game of the generation for me in many ways, which was kinda unfortunate as it came so early on.
They very carefully created every room and corridor in that game and really implemented camera angles so well.
Yeah silent hill 3 looks very different(in its own way as well)
SH2 is crazy good on so many levels.
Tidus_Great
Banned
pretty damn powerful
look at FFX, MGS2 they still look good for 2001 games
and stuff like FF12 and MGS3 looks fantastic for ps2 hardware.
look at FFX, MGS2 they still look good for 2001 games
and stuff like FF12 and MGS3 looks fantastic for ps2 hardware.
family_guy
Member
Did they? Took forever for FFXIII to come out and they reused assets and did quick cash ins on the sequels no one asked for. We never got Versus. They couldn't be bothered to ever port Last Remnant to PS3. Versus, now XV, didn't even have a trailer at E3 this year and is probably a 2016 title. What has Square learned?
TAJ
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
I'm not aware of a single Dreamcast game that had AA.
But if you were one of those poor souls who was using Dreamcast without a VGA box then I guess the downconversion from 480p could be considered AA.
lowhighkang_LHK
Member
Can somebody give me a visual example (maybe a .gif) what fillrate actually is. People are saying PS2 did it better than PS3, that's something I have to see.
Also, any good examples of dreamcast - ps2 multiplatform games where textures were better on the dreamcast than they were on PS2.
Also, any good examples of dreamcast - ps2 multiplatform games where textures were better on the dreamcast than they were on PS2.
This is what worries me about the japanese development scene. It seems rather then fixing the problems they had with HD development most developers just retreated to DS, PSP and now smartphones. So they could keep making the games in the same fashion running from the problem.
Gamecube specs were final by the end of 1999 and the console was supposed to launch in september 2000. No games were ready and the launch was delayed by a full year.
jhmtehgamr20xx
Banned
Not sure about that. In fact I think The Order is more visually appealing than the Uncharted 4 trailer, but art style and color palettes/mood plays a lot into that, truthfully.
Also Compute doesn't seem nearly as difficult as EE and Cell were; by that measure since XBO also has Compute and 360 had no Cell, if what you're saying is true MS 1st parties wouldn't be getting stuff like FH2 and Quantum Break to look as good as they're looking. Tho XBO has its own problems, like ESRAM.
I took a class in database programming last year and this literally sounds like they took the waterfall (that's what it's called there too, but very different dev environment) method wholesale. It's a very archaic and rigid way to approach development and programming, no matter what it is you're actually making. I'm surprised SE didn't try a more flexible, modular approach early on.
That's sort of like bad habits coming back to bite you in the ass.
With FFXV they're still making a game way outside their expertise.
Something like FFXIV 2.0 has a really good handle on content production though.
JordanN
Banned
Maybe feature locked at that time, but there was little chance the hardware was ready to launch in 2000. Quite a ways into 2001, the GPU was downclocked by 20% from 202.5Mhz to 162Mhz. This dropped poly tranform, setup, lighting, pixel/texture fill, and memory bandwidth.
Nintendo upped the clock multiplier on the CPU to help out, but it was still a big blow.
What are you even trying to argue against?
for one there is a big difference between The Order: 1886 running at 1920 x 800 @ 30FPS vs Uncharted 4 1920 x 1080 @ 60FPS to begin with & another thing The Oder is going to be using compute also so that was pointless to say.
2nd what would the difficulty have to do with anything? I'm saying that the devs who took advantage of the PS2's VPU0 was getting prepared for the PS3's SPE's & now the devs that took advantage of the SPE's can do the same thing with the PS4's 8 ACE's.
jhmtehgamr20xx
Banned
That's what ND are aiming for; it's not actually set in stone. And besides the reveal trailer at E3 was clearly 30fps, and that's all we have to go by atm.
And aesthetically I still think The Order is the more impressive of the two (based on what we have right now). This is mainly due to artistic choices they've made. I know I'm not the only one who feels that way and that's not saying UC4 doesn't look great, either.
inpHilltr8r
Member
Everyone did that. You had to. The sound core (SPU2) was attached directly to the PS1 core (IOP). There were some games that used one of the vector units (VU0, VU1) to do DTS surround encoding, but I can't recall if any of the GTAs did that.
hardcastlemccormick
Banned
Vice City, I believe is one of the few PS2 games to support DTS 4-channel audio.
Uncle Rupee
Banned
Really powerful compared to what, Dreamcast? PS2 looks underpowered compared to Gamecube and Xbox.
efyu_lemonardo
May I have a cookie?
I think it's more about the interesting approach the hardware team took when designing the PS2. For it's time it was interesting at least.
I don't think Xbox really compares because it was pretty much designed from off the shelf parts and cost much more, even a year later.
So you're saying they were having yield issues?
The official explanation was always that they found a 3:1 clock ratio more balanced for the system overall than a 2:1 ratio.
inpHilltr8r
Member
That sounds about right. I'm a bit more awake now, so I can remember how it worked. Basically you used SPU2 to render two seperate stereo output buffers. Those buffers were then DMA'd from the IOP to main memory, where the EE could send them to one of the VUs to encode them into DTS format. This was then DMA'd back up to the IOP, which in turn, told SPU2 to send it to the optical port.
I suspect it was VU0, as getting data back out of VU1 was a pain in the arse. I think you would have had to send it to the GS, and then read it back into main memory from there. VU0 lived next to the EE (referring to the main MIPS core) and you could move data from it straight back into main memory. VU0 could also run in a co-processor mode, where it's instructions could be inlined in the main program, in a similar manner to a tradition floating point coprocessor. This meant you could do fast vector math on the main processor.
We were offered the DTS library, but declined as the resource cost, and implementation complexity was too high for the payoff. We were using VU0 as a coprocessor, so we would have had to disable that for an arbitrary slice of time to make it available for the DTS encode phase. It may well be that Rockstar North weren't using it in that mode, which would have made the integration of the library viable. I do wonder if they took a hit from all the extra bus traffic though.
Anyway, the reason the EE is so awesome, was that it had so many different coprocessors all tuned for the job they were intended for. And all* of them had big black hardware manuals detailing how they worked at a register level. This is basically a console programmers dream. That we now live a land of software APIs and drivers has taken a lot of the fun out of the process. That and patching means we might as well be pc developers now. ;p
* The one exception being the IOP, we assumed because there was some security thing hanging off of it. Probably related to disc encoding. Although in hindsight I suspect it was because they new they were going to emulate it later in life, and didn't want us writing to the metal on it. Not that we needed to. It spent most of it's time just marshalling data from one place to another, and doing very little actual work. ND did run some fairly heavy processing on it IIRC, which is why Jak X broke on the later slim PS2 models.
EE was vastly overrated. It's not that PS2 was weaker than DC, but it was totally different from it and I remember Yu Suzuki saying that he can't actually imagine porting Shenmue to PS2 because he basically would have to make a different game. The ups it had were brought down with certain cheap solutions. Overall, PS2 was a weak hardware that had to be struggled with.
Gusy
Member
Even after Hexadrive patch?
SkylineRKR
Member
I think the PS2 was a beast. It was being sold to consumers since March 2000. The GC and Xbox came out almost 2 years later. Thats quite a big gap for technological advancement, especially during that era.
Still, the Ps2 could pull off some amazing games such as Jak, Silent Hill 3, Metal Gear Solid 2/3, God of War 2 and others. A few of these games had effects even the Ps3 and 360 could not completely match.
Still, the Ps2 could pull off some amazing games such as Jak, Silent Hill 3, Metal Gear Solid 2/3, God of War 2 and others. A few of these games had effects even the Ps3 and 360 could not completely match.