You're welcome and I do care about developers that put a lot of hard work and integrity into their games. I hope you and Tato make a lot of money off your games. Good luck !
Really appreciated! Hopefully FM will sell good enough to make more games (more often) now that our F.O.G framework is finished! Though I'm pretty confident everything's gonna be alright!
I just had a stroke of brilliance! If you really want to know how well FM will do, here are six simple steps to resolve your question: 1) Ask me my device UDID 2) Upload the FM IPA to Dropbox 3) Wait a week or two while I enjoy the game and tease everyone else on TA 4) ...still teasing and playing... 5) Receive my big thumbs up and assurances that the game will break all known game sales records! 6) As "Honorary Chief Beta Tester For FM", I recieve 20% of Phsycoz's stock, plus benefits and healthcare! ... Why are you reading this? Go back to your game-cave and finish the game so we can get our grubby paws on it! First game you need to play once FM is out is The Walking Dead
It's sounds like your describing relief/displacement mapping. In any case I'm still not sure this would be much better, complex shaders really kill mobile devices an many cases it's better to increase vertex detail as it can handle that better. Even simple bump maps are rarely used in mobile games.
While you guys are talking all profesionally, I just read and nod my head in agreement because I dont understand a WORD you guys are saying
Don't really know where your going with this conversation. Whether ps2 supports this or that effect has got nothing to do whether it really worth while trying to implement relief mapping on an ios device. You initially said that geotextures would help speed up performance now your saying that only optimised games would have enough power to use them. Mc4 only supports bumps on a few objects and not any of the environments and the scenes have no realtime lights at all unlike forgotten memories. FM is the only game on ios that supports omni directional shadows maps which is a hell of a lot more intensive than any effect mc4 is doing. Now you expecting him to add relief mapping to because of what a ps2 can handle?? Think you need to understand these terms a bit more. Do you actually mean relief mapping/displacement mapping/parallax mapping or something else. It would help if you had a citation or articule or web link to what you actually mean.
No modern combat does not bump map everything at best maybe the guns but that's about it, it's all unlit flat shaders with ligthmapping, no realtime normals or bump maps. Also mc environments aren't that big they just make you feel they are big, the actuall playable areas are small probably not much bigger than FM external environments. (that's not to say its not clever). Environment size is irrelevant it's complexity that counts directional shadows on planes are also very easy todo unity supports it out of the box where as omni directional shadows that can cast on any surface is very intensive and with volumetric shadows. Not had time to really look into geotexturing as splinter cell call it as its basically never really explained in any academic papers just one vid from uni soft, it's never been used again and was only used at all as the ps2 could not handle complex shaders like displacement mapping.
Im not saying onmi shadows aren't possible on iOS I just said FM use them. You say the area is very important, it's not I could have a 10k dessert render easily but one room run like a dog, it's only about the complexity of the scene and area or size is not relevant. The distant buildings in mc4 are just a few polygons they might as well be just textures. Now your making me reinstall mc4 . You carnt keep comparing ps2 aaa games. It's totally different hardware and even though they(scattered memories) had 10times the buget of FM the still did not have displacement maps in. This all got very confusing, you originally asked if Tato was going to use geotextures as it would speed things up. Well geotexturing is not documented anywhere and was only ever used to fudge the ps2 hardware into doing something it carnt. Also it would not speed up the texture mapping as its complx shader and I dont think he uses much normal mapping anyway. What was better ask is whether he's is going to use parallax mapping at all. The answer is probably not as it's to intensive but maybe on the wiiu or at least bump mapping. Better cross your fingers there is bump or normal mapping in mc4. Ok had a look at mc4 and I believe that all those things you think are normal maps are just cleverly made high res textures. With clever shading on the textures you can make it look like they are normal mapped, I could not see any surface which looked truly normal mapped, if your going to the expense todo it you want it to really pop out like doom. A good texture map and simple vertex lighting can still give a great effect. I may post a shot of the gun from the woods 2 tomorrow and you can see what can be done without normal maps.
Sidgoku123, Yes, there's some ways to fake normal-mapping (when lighting is static it's very easy). Due to the fact that MC4 lighting is fully static (not even one single pixel light but some vertex lights from time to time) they can bake normal map details into diffuse textures and no one will notice it (because the light sources doesn't move at all) and still miles faster than standard normal map where light direction and pixel illumination must be computed every frame. This is what MadFinger actually do, they bake all bump information into the diffuse texture (But still looks like a bumpmapped surface) and specular is aproximated in the vertex shader from the camera view (aka eye view) which is actually really fast. As for MC4, I think the best thing Gameloft have in their games are really good art assets. I mean, you can have all the nicest shaders and effect in the planet, if your art assets su*ks, your game will also s*ck graphically-wise. You'll be surprised how things get faked in the mobile space. But hey, if people find them good then it doesn't matter how developers got it right. ^^ Regarding the scene size, as ThreeCubes said, the size doesn't really matter what's really matters is the complexity of your frames (how many polygons is your GPU rendering, how many API calls is your CPU making, how many memory bandwidth you are using, how many textures are you fetching, etc). When lighting is static, everything is fine, your scene is rendered in one pass. As soon as you add shadows, your scene requires to be rendered multiple times (multiple times for each light casting shadows). And only one light casting shadows requires your scene to be rendered twice (depth pass, compare and composing pass). This is when things start to get interesting (performance-wise). In average you need 3x the amount of resources for every light casting shadows. Forgotten Memories environments are in most part indoors but they are heavy and complex. And no, even indoors they still really big to navigate. So yeah, I've personally spend a huge a mount of time, writing and re-doing (quite often from scratch) all our shaders/effects. As for geo-textures never heard about that technique but it looks like bumpmaps (or at least some sort of displacement mapping variation). If no-one adopted it that means it doesn't really worth the effort, possible reasons: hard to integrate on artists workflow, not really that fast, dunno but it doesn't really look new? Not to start a debate on game vs game but i can assure you that FM looks and it's more complex that SH Shattered Memories (graphically-tech wise). We have multiple post process (noise, desaturation, negative, flares, post-process enemies, motion-blur, anti-aliasing). Lighting wise, we have dynamic pixel lighting and shadows, complex reflective surfaces, bump, specular, skin, cloth, hair (with wind), diffraction, water, dynamic vegetation, volumetric fog, volumetric lights, soft-meshes, and most of them are combined (to create more variations), and all the bunch of shaders used particles. Just to name some... Oh yeah, Wii U version have a bit more of that (more advanced techniques) PS: Actually, The Woods 2 does actually look good, the game still in development and will improve with the time. If I ever got some time this summer (once FM is published) I would like to give ThreeCubes a hand with his game and see where things can get improved.
Tintin is a nice looking game but it's not as complicated as you think, it does not have dynamic shadows every where, only the character models have dynamic shadows and the character models carnt receive shadows. Only the static geometry can recive the shadows, All the other shadows are baked. The plane storm scene looks nice but actually it's quite basic, no plane shadows no bump maps and lots of nice bill board textures and a few particul effects. The shaders make the billboard textures move a bit in the same why I use them to move my tree leaves. Looks good but nothing that amazing.
Thanks, means a lot coming from you, It would be nice to see a few more effects in the woods chapter 3!
Look, Sidgoku, this is interesting and all...the first few times. You have not made any iOS games. You do not know what they are and are not capable of. Come back when you have done all these things that you claim are possible. Until then, can you please stop derailing threads like this?
But not on iOS Just talk about the game and not about what you think iOS devices are and aren't capable of. A passing comment or two it don't engage developers in several pages of debate. It gets tiresome for everyone and you do this a lot. We get it, you think you can do better. Ok. But please, there's no need to go on and on and on and on.
