Resident Evil 4 PS2 Porting Problems 93
An anonymous reader writes "Gamesarefun is reporting that Capcom is having serious difficulty in porting Resident Evil 4, to Sony's PlayStation 2. The numbers behind the graphical differences are interesting, since Capcom sites a few specifics. Apparently the original model for Leon Kennedy in the GameCube version has had to be scaled down from 10,000 polygons to 5000 for the PS2 version, which is equal to both the poly count for Naked Snake in Metal Gear Solid 3 as well as the poly count of the typical villager in the GameCube version of RE4."
PS2 that underpowered (Score:3, Interesting)
So I can't figure out... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:PS2 that underpowered (Score:5, Interesting)
Bullshit. (Score:2, Interesting)
(In all seriousness though, in light of the fact that the PS2 version was obviously not planned at first, the engine's probably optimized out the ass for the Gamecube's hardware, making porting a royal bitch.)
I believe it (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a real shame the GameCube didn't become the world's #1 console. It's a better system than the original PS2 in almost every way... design, aesthetics, graphical capabilities, fan noise, build quality... The only thing it lacks is breadth of software.
When I have the choice, I mostly prefer to play the GameCube versions of games. Generally they're superior, though there have been some exceptions. For Splinter Cell, I decided to go with the PS2, because it had an entire extra level, and that was worth a tradeoff in graphic quality. But ultimately, there are just so many great PS2 games that aren't available for GameCube, and so few GameCube-only "must have" games, that if I had to pick only one system, it would be the PS2. (I'd miss the Metroid games terribly, though.)
Anyone know of a good games review site that specializes in comparing the same game on different consoles? It seems to me that there are a lot of people with more than one console, who would find it very useful to know which platform to pick for multi-platform games.
I suspect the DS vs PSP battle will go the same way, only more so because of Nintendo's blinkered focus on kiddy games on the GBA. Already, the PSP has more titles I want to play than my GameBoy Advance has titles I want to play. I haven't yet seen anything that makes me want a DS, since Metroid's just a demo.
Re:This just in! (Score:3, Interesting)
Nintendo did this with some success with the N64 and Majora's Mask. Made the game look a lot better with a memory upgrade in.
How many people would pay $50 to upgrade their PS2 to 128 megs of memory if it meant that newer games loaded faster and looked better?
Re:This just in! (Score:3, Interesting)
Consoles demand fast memory, and that stuff ain't cheap. If you add $20 to the cost of each console, and you plan to sell 50 million of them, you just took a billion dollars off your bottom line!
You either have to eat that loss (ouch), or increase your prices, which costs you market share.
At some point there is a sweet spot between packing the console with more memory, and ensuring you get the market share you want. I'm guessing that Sony, Nintendo, and the rest run those numbers and it turns out that the sweet-spot is quite a bit less memory than the average PC owner is used to.
It's not about sheer hardware power. (Score:3, Interesting)
Load Times. The Cube is so fast reading and writing all it's media, that sometimes you'll blink and miss a load screen. Some games (like Donkey Konga) save every two minutes or so, but you never even see a save screen. The practical upshot is Metroid Prime's ability to stream the next area as you approach the door, resulting in no load times at all - which RE4 apparently imitates. Compare this to, for example, Simpsons Road Rage for the PS2, where you often have to wait 45 seconds to retry a 20 second time trial. Obviously, this is also a problem with the game software - you should never have to reload the entire game environment to replay a single level. But it still takes 45 seconds to load! That's about 5 seconds more than it takes my computer to boot up.
Full-Screen Antialiasing. The Cube has it, the PS2 doesn't. This means when I pop in a simple-looking "kiddy game" like Wind Waker, what I see on the screen are smooth edges. Even if the characters had only a few polys, the whole thing would look smooth because of the antialiasing. Compare this to Shadow Hearts for the PS2. Everything looks like it was bluescreened together - jagged edges everywhere. I'm sure game developers could write a bit of code to simulate antialiasing on the PS2, but on the Cube they don't have to - it makes the graphics smooth for you. This, by the way, is one of the reasons it's so damn hard to pick the zombies out of the background in a Resident Evil game.
Also, Resident Evil 0 (and also the original I think) used a 1-second full screen video loop as the background for every room in the game. This allowed all of the poly-pushing power to be put into the character models and other movable objects. This is possible on the Cube because it has a powerful 2-D engine native to the system. (I would guess that this particular technique isn't too hard to do on the Cube, because Baten Kaitos uses it also.) Guess what? The PS2 doesn't have this. It's not that it can't be done on the PS2, it's that, as a developer, you'd most likely end up having to write the graphics modules for it yourself.
I don't know much about memory buffers and poly- or texture-pushing capacities, and I'm not really sure if these differences have anything to do with the hardware itself. They could very well be optimisations in the Cube's compiler, or flaws in the PS2's OS. I do have both systems though, and just from playing both of them (a lot!) I know that there are some areas where the Cube just takes the cake. It's not too far fetched to say that RE4 exemplifies them.