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[Lazy8s]

dark10x:

no real lighting. Yep, that's a DC game.

Proper shadow casting for thirty or more simultaneous characters, multiple shadows at times from the player character, and a dynamically lit environment from time of day progression is impressive considering there a city full of NPCs being persistently tracked with seamless adherence to a set of daily routines and good pathfinding all in the background.

 

[iapetus]

Some of these characters look like they belong in Sudeki.

Damn you. You've ruined the game for me now.

 

[border]

Proper shadow casting for thirty or more simultaneous characters

Did Shenmue ever actually put 30+ characters on-screen....aside from that one bit with the training dojo that everybody made a big deal out of? (see below)

Whaddaya know...shitty looking shadows on 2 guys and circle shadows on the rest.

there a city full of NPCs being persistently tracked with seamless adherence to a set of daily routine

Isn't that just a fancy way of saying everything is scripted? It is impressive that they bothered to write all the scripts for each NPC, but I don't see how it's any triumph of the hardware.

 

[Red Blaster]

dark10x:

Proper shadow casting for thirty or more simultaneous characters, multiple shadows at times from the player character, and a dynamically lit environment from time of day progression is impressive considering there a city full of NPCs being persistently tracked with seamless adherence to a set of daily routines and good pathfinding all in the background.

Yeah, they also had some sweet stealth camo, as they'd only appear about 10 feet in front of me.

 

[teiresias]

Yeah, they also had some sweet stealth camo, as they'd only appear about 10 feet in front of me.

:lol :lol :lol

 

[GamerShu]

ima huge PSO fan, but i think this is going to bomb badly...too late for release IMHO

 

[dark10x]

Yeah, they also had some sweet stealth camo, as they'd only appear about 10 feet in front of me.

Ha ha, yeah, they were good at that.

At least that dude in the blue shirt is in view...or is he? There is no shadow! He must have been pasted in!!!

Loved that monk scene. It was very cinematic! What, with the slow motion and all. I mean, sure, the characters were low poly and most of them didn't have shadows, but damn, that was hot shit.

 

[Lazy8s]

border:

Did Shenmue ever actually put 30+ characters on-screen....aside from that one bit with the training dojo that everybody made a big deal out of? (see below)

Several scenes are set up with that many characters: the ambush at Beverly Hills Wharf, the Mall, the hidden Tiger Gate Kung Fu dojo in the Thousand White Building on the 6th floor. In Shenmue II, thirty or more different NPCs, up to around fifty for the engine according to Yu Suzuki, can be gathered at any time in the open map just by blocking a major doorway, pulling up the menu to prevent the daytime from expiring, and waiting until enough characters have formed a line outside for passage.

Whaddaya know...shitty looking shadows on 2 guys and circle shadows on the rest.

Yeah, that place has some issues, including slow-motion type slowdown while walking through. Other of the scenarios display it all just fine, though.

Isn't that just a fancy way of saying everything is scripted? It is impressive that they bothered to write all the scripts for each NPC, but I don't see how it's any triumph of the hardware.

The game logic has to adjust NPC schedules seamlessly based upon player interaction (and weather in some cases) and then keep it tracked for the whole world at all times. Delaying an NPC from a scheduled task by talking to/blocking them long enough will cause them to change to the next time-permiting task instead of magically warping around the world to get back on schedule, even when they're in a different section of the world than the player.

 

[dark10x]

Everybody always talks as if the DC could have gone much further over time. Obviously, things would have improved. However, with all of the current machines, we saw plenty of games really show off the hardware early on before others were able to follow. PS2 had stuff like ICO, Silent Hill 2, MGS2, GT3, ZOE, The Bouncer, and a number of others. They demonstrated that PS2 was able to handle higher poly models than anything before along with a number of new techniques used for lighting and effects. XBOX had stuff like Halo, DOA3, Wreckless, and several others very early on. They showed that XBOX was able to handle high poly models with lots of shaders and great image quality. GC had stuff like RS2 and, within a year, Prime and Starfox Adventures. They all featured high framerates, tons of geometric detail, and nifty effects. PS2's biggest flaw early on was image quality, but that has been overcome and most games have very good image quality (though still rouger than the other three consoles in most cases).

Point is, DC lived well beyond those time periods (ie - beyond 1.5 years). I think stuff like Sonic Adventure 2 shows where DC was going (great usage of stencial shadows on characters, for example, along with a great framerate and high-res textures...and very low poly models and limited effects). I don't think developers were suddenly going to start cranking out games with much higher geometry counts or any of the effects that were common in the other three. The OCCASIONAL game might come along and do something similar. The sunlight in Sega Extreme Sports was nice (though ULTRA common on PS2 and the like), but the rest of the game was REALLLLLY low poly and the framerate was the pits. Same deal with PS2 and bumpmapping. We've seen a couple examples of perpixel style effects on the PS2, but those are really rare and hardly something most would consider the hardware capable of doing.

I think the DC would have improved over time, and I would have enjoyed seeing that happen, but I don't think it would have gone nearly as far as people seem to believe. Overcoming image quality problems is very different than overcoming fillrate limitations.

It's funny that Lazy had the balls to bring up Shenmue, as it has some of the worst IQ on DC (which I admit, typically demonstrates fantastic image quality) and is closer to a rough PS2 game in that regard. The busy texture work with very little shading and lack of mipmapping leads to some extreme shimmering that would make the PS2 jealous...

 

[iapetus]

The game logic has to adjust NPC schedules seamlessly based upon player interaction (and weather in some cases) and then keep it tracked for the whole world at all times. Delaying an NPC from a scheduled task by talking to/blocking them long enough will cause them to change to the next time-permiting task instead of magically warping around the world to get back on schedule, even when they're in a different section of the world than the player.

Translation: Yes, it's all scripted.

 

[border]

Delaying an NPC from a scheduled task by talking to/blocking them long enough will cause them to change to the next time-permiting task instead of magically warping around the world to get back on schedule, even when they're in a different section of the world than the player.

Well we're still just talking about scripting here.

And there's not much to keep track of, if changes in the script can only be brought about by a player intentionally trying to break the scripting. The game doesn't have to keep track of every NPC in the game simultaneously because the whole world is broken up by load times. I'd imagine it just loads up a new set of NPCs everytime you hit a new area....then it looks at the clock and puts people where they are scripted to be. I still see it as depth of game design rather than hardware strength.

The sunlight in Sega Extreme Sports was nice (though ULTRA common on PS2 and the like), but the rest of the game was REALLLLLY low poly and the framerate was the pits.

Is there any kind of name for the bizarre "morphing" pop-up that that game had? I've never seen it anywhere else -- it's like being on acid while you're hang-gliding.

 

[Lazy8s]

dark10x:

along with a number of new techniques used for lighting

It didn't do any different techniques for lighting than DC. DC did the same kind of vertex work, stencil shadows and self-shadowing, multitexture effects, and even had a fixed function dot product pixel shader for bump mapping.

The sunlight in Sega Extreme Sports was nice (though ULTRA common on PS2 and the like), but the rest of the game was REALLLLLY low poly and the framerate was the pits.

This correlation is nonsensical as has been explained before.

Same deal with PS2 and bumpmapping.

Has the PS2 ever performed dot product bump mapping in game like the DC did with the otherwise awful Tomb Raider port?

 

[Tellaerin]

sucks about the circle shadows...

Looks hot, but really, why do we still have circle shadows in this day and age?

Jesus. They'd be better off not having shadows at all.

It's funny how quick people are to mock when somebody complains about other piss-poor special effects in games (like the crappy-looking clumps of straw... er, sparks in the Xbox version of Burnout 3), yet a bunch of people pissing and moaning about circle shadows passes unremarked. If it's OK to bitch about circle shadows, I don't want to hear a fucking word about how wrong it is to care about collision sparks in a game that's based on things hitting each other.

This looks pretty sweet to me. Definitely going to be picking it up. The only thing I don't like is that there still doesn't seem to be an option to play the online dungeon-crawl mode offline. I doubt I'd play through the 'story mode' more than once, but running around killing things in hopes of phat lewt drops is something that never gets old, and I'm not the type that needs to be running around with other people to enjoy the experience, either. (In fact, that's what keeps me coming back to PSO GC for another fix every couple of months.) I know the online game stores characters server-side, but at least give us the option to create a character on a memory card and go dungeon-hacking solo, even if it means that character can't ever be used in online play.

 

[Lazy8s]

iapetus:

Translation: Yes, it's all scripted.

No, NPC task scheduling is self-adjusting so that out-of-synch characters will still continue their days naturally.

border:

And there's not much to keep track of, if changes in the script can only be brought about by a player intentionally trying to break the scripting.

It happens all of the time to different degrees, by stopping to talk to the shopkeeper scheduled to be on her way to a quick lunch down the street before returning to reopen her store, by standing around to look or talk and getting in the way of other pedestrians who are jamming together and being impeded from carrying out their daily routines.

The game doesn't have to keep track of every NPC in the game simultaneously because the whole world is broken up by load times.

If the scheduled walk of an NPC is delayed and then the player runs ahead of them into new load zones, the NPC's timing will still be altered when they eventually walk into the new area.

 

[iapetus]

iapetus:

No, NPC task scheduling is self-adjusting so that out-of-synch characters will still continue their days naturally.

No, it's scripted. They are going to location A between certain times. When that time ends, they go to location B regardless of whether they ever made it to location A. Their schedule does not change at all as a result of not being able to accomplish their original goal (and even if it did it could still have been scripted). There's a certain amount of pathfinding going on, which is almost certainly optimised to only take place in the comparatively small range of visible NPCs.

Honestly, you're as bad as Kevin Warwick.

 

[DECK'ARD]

I know the online game stores characters server-side, but at least give us the option to create a character on a memory card and go dungeon-hacking solo, even if it means that character can't ever be used in online play.

It wouldn't surprise me if once you finish the offline game you can then go back and play the various areas without the story elements, and continue to level-up and discover rares etc.

Unlocking a load of rares in the offline game once you finish it would also be an obvious way of giving it replay value.

 

[Mejilan]

So, I actually put myself on a kind of info blackout in regards to PSU. What exactly is it? PSO 2, PS5, or some hybrid?

 

[DECK'ARD]

So, I actually put myself on a kind of info blackout in regards to PSU. What exactly is it? PSO 2, PS5, or some hybrid?

PSO2 but with a story-driven offline mode (with proper lead characters, cut-scenes etc.) that's separate from the online game. The offline game is still an action-RPG like PSO though, not a turn-based RPG like the old games though.

http://phantasystaruniverse.com

Looking very promising so far, and there's some nice changes to the combat system.

 

[ArcadeStickMonk]

If the scheduled walk of an NPC is delayed and then the player runs ahead of them into new load zones, the NPC's timing will still be altered when they eventually walk into the new area.

prove it

 

[Mejilan]

Thank you. Time to read up. I played quite a bit of PSO I&I&III when they hit the GCN, but I recently tried to get into PSO I&II Plus... and well, it was very short lived. I could do with a mixing up.

 

[border]

Who's Kevin Warwick?

It happens all of the time to different degrees, by stopping to talk to the shopkeeper scheduled to be on her way to a quick lunch down the street before returning to reopen her store, by standing around to look or talk and getting in the way of other pedestrians who are jamming together and being impeded from carrying out their daily routines.

These delays are for a minute or two at best, though. You can't really break the routine unless you intentionally delay them for a very long period of time when they are travelling to/from a task that takes a very short period of time. And even then it's just a matter of scripting to tell the NPC to stop "going to lunch" if it is past a certain hour.

And as iapetus says, they can cheat on the pathfinding so long as the player character isn't in the immediate vicinity. I really doubt that the game is keeping track of Dock Worker #42 when Ryo is on the opposite side of town, 3-4 load zones away.

I'm also a little confused as to how you can praise the game's pathfinding, and then admit that it's possible to delay NPCs just by standing in front of them or blocking their path.

 

[iapetus]

Who's Kevin Warwick?

An AI 'expert' who has a tendency to claim he's spotted intelligence in the most banal of behaviour.

 

[Lazy8s]

iapetus:

No, it's scripted.

Again, their schedules being scripted is irrelevant to what the original argument outlined: Shenmue runs some extra logic beyond most game worlds, which are typically static, in order for its NPCs to account for the game's dynamic time and weather systems (certain elderly characters who normally spend their days at the park will stay near their houses during inclement weather, for example.)

border:

I'm also a little confused as to how you can praise the game's pathfinding, and then admit that it's possible to delay NPCs just by standing in front of them or blocking their path.

They can't be blocked without completely clogging the passage: stopping ahead of them in a narrow hallway or pinning them against cross traffic and the environment. Even when trying to walk in their way, they just walk around if there's any room. They never get permanently stuck behind objects in the environment, they can surprisingly take backward and sideward steps to accomodate other pedestrians, and most impressively, they actually form into a single file line when multiple NPCs are waiting to get into the same door (that's one way to clog the screen full of 30+ characters).