Topic: Wind Waker is SOOOOOO Blurry!!!!!!

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

Indeed.  I don't use anything less than S-video and the dither patterns/lines come up plain-as-day.

To see an EXTREME case of dithering patterns, (in Windows) set your display to 256 colors, then open up MS Paint and checkout the colors you're allowed to paint with.  Many of them are made up by dot patterns of colors.

In gentle cases, dithering causes the color banding seen in fog/smoke effects and lots of other areas in WW and Metroid Prime.  The vertical lines in WW seem to be a strange dither pattern [side-effect] caused by EAD's method of calculating in-between color tones.

Whenever more colors are being processed than the current palette allows, dither may occur, as shown by 256 color modes.   Many GIF picture files are full of dots as a result of dithering, to downscale the color depth.

S-Video produces clean interlaced fields, so only a vertical shimmer is present as a result of alternating upper/lower interlace scanlines.  Composite/RCA cables produces a horizontal shimmer ON TOP OF the vertical shimmer, causing a noticeable "dancing dot" noise phenomenon on images, thus blurring/degrading detail further probably making the WW dithering not noticeable amongst all the other noise on-screen.  S-video doesn't create this type of noise at all.  

[Hostile Creation]

You people bitch way too much about the stupidest stuff.  Oz joker, i the intro, when the camera zoomed around Outset, I said, Wow, that's blurry.  Right after that, I didn't notice it for the rest of the game.  If it's that blurry, either you need to get your eyes checked or your TV is really messed up.  I have a terrible television and the game looks fine.

Cubed, I've gone back to not liking you at all.  If you did anything other than complain, you'd be okay, but Christ, you whine so damn much.

[Bloodworth]

I never had a problem with the depth-of-field blur, but I have noticed the dithering or whatever it is.  I don't know why games have issues like this, but I remember Final Fantasy III (VI) on SNES having a similar problem with a straight line down the middle in which the color was slightly darker.  

This thread's had the potential to turn into a flame war several times, but I think it's doing ok.  I'll keep my eye on it though.

[AngusPodgorny]

Quote
Originally posted by: Oz_joker

But Nintendo has gone out of it's way to include Progressive scan support in it's games,  so surely these vertical lines aren't a result of poor Pro-Scan support - Nintendo must have been aware of their presence in the game.

I've played MANY games on my television, cell-shaded and non-cell-shaded, but this is the only game that seems to suffer from this problem. Very strange.

I didn't mean to imply that the lines were caused by running the game in p-scan mode.  I believe the lines are there in either mode.

Another example of the p-scan problems I'm talking about:  When you go to the Forsaken Forstress initially, it's dark and foggy.  Running the game in interlaced mode, it looks like it's supposed to look (foggy).  Running the game in p-scan mode, the fog manifests itself as a strange translucent pattern of squares.  It's hard to explain; maybe I can get a screen cap.

-Angus

[TheYoungerPlumber]

Quote
Running the game in p-scan mode, the fog manifests itself as a strange translucent pattern of squares. It's hard to explain; maybe I can get a screen cap.

YES, and a screen cap would not due this issue justice (if you could get it at all).  The dithering effect in Wind Waker’s fog (and elsewhere) is also found in Eternal Darkness.  Why does this exist, and why only in progressive scan mode?  Simple: think back to Super Smash Bros Melee and its deflicker filter, which averages pixels to make things softer.  Well just about every GameCube game leaves that filter on for interlaced mode and off for progressive mode.  However, the fog in WW and ED is created in such a way as to rely on this averaging of pixels to make their fog look natural!  I'm not sure why the fog was done this way--perhaps leaving it to the deflicker removes extra overhead.  I for one was bugged the hell out by the pixilated fog the first time I played both ED and WW in progressive scan.  Hopefully Nintendo will fix this problem in future games.

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

TYP, thanks for pointing that out.  I've never gotten a good look at GC games in p-scan.

And there currently isn't any consumer-level capture hardware that will record from a component connection.  If there was, capturing off 60fps NTSC games would be SO MUCH less painful.