Topic: Resident Evil 4 heading to Playstation 2

[KDR_11k]

Keep in mind, this wasn't Mikami's doing, it was the decision of the suits. Suits and devs never get along and I'd guess this makes it even worse.

[Flames_of_chaos]

Well I wonder how the devs will be able to make RE4 handle on the PS2, if you look at GTA:SA the PS2 had a hard time keeping up with that because the trees vanished and re-appeared alot  in cutscenes.

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

Simple.  Take out all trees, or take out all their branches.  While we're at it, take out Leon to give the impression of an FPS.

[Flames_of_chaos]

Umm yeah that used to be true when there were rumors of a RE4 on the PS2 back when the PS2 was like 1 year old. I think it was called Resident Evil 4: Umbrella Rising and it was a FPSish game.

[VideoGamer]

i have no clue to why capcom would want re4 to be for ps2 i mean come on technically it is either ps2 or xbox that always gets the games when comes resident evil 4 the most phenomenal game i have ever seen in my years of gaming but come on halo xbox grand theft auto san andreas ps2 now comes resident evil 4 g-cube @ps2 come on

[KDR_11k]

From what I could make of that garbage you wrote you're sayingthe XB and PS2 already have enough great games? Well, shareholders don't give a flying f#ck about customers, goodwill, honour, humanity and business as long as they get their money. They are the fifth spawn of the devil and try to suck any goodness out of the system and maximize profits. The shareholders decided that they don't care about the feelings of Cube owners or even Mikami himself and want RE4, as well as any other above mediocre title ever made by Capcom, ported to the PS2. Capcom's executives are aware of the issues that making Sony a monopoly would cause but their shareholders don't care because by the time Sony exerts its totalitarian powers they will already have sold their shares.

[Procession]

Hey, it's just a shame the port is coming so late in the game (no pun intended). Otherwise it could have gone a long way towards illustrating just how pitiful the PS2 is in contrast to the Gamecube in terms of technical capabilities. There could have even been a positive effect for the Cube.  

[Gamefreak]

There's no way they could get it ported and running at over 1 FPS anytime around around now. The port has many things going against it:
1) It's for a system that's hard to program for and is technically inferior to the GCN in all areas, especially the ability to render complex special effects and texture maps, which even the Xbox can't do as well as the GCN.
2) The RE4 engine and graphical assets were built from the ground up and optimized for GCN.
3) The RE4 team, including Mikami, has nothing to do with the port. It's being handled by lesser people.

So yeah. This isn't Viewtiful Joe where you could port it to the Dreamcast or your Granny's PC without much hassle. We're talking about a game with very detailed models and environments, the best fire effects in gaming history (including the Source engine and CryTek engine), tons of other effects, and a lighting engine that rivals id's DOOM 3 engine (and looks more impressive I might add, the shadowing may not be as intricately detailed but the sheer awe of watching lightning clash in at night in rainstorm above a crowd of torch carrying dudes [night, rain, fire, lightning...Ganon battle anyone?] is more impressive IMO than watching the dim light of a flashlight cast random shadows in a small corridor)... This a something the PS2 can definately not handle at a solid 30 FPS, or even be capable of displaying some of the effects in the game.. Especially not with the aforementioned developmental hurdles. And the only way PS2 can render character models with this many polygons is to cut off environment detail and zoom in on the characters and action (ie Metal Gear Solid). Of course, Gran Turismo 4 proves that with lots of love and effort you can squeeze almost anything out of the little system... yeah but 4 years of love, effort, and talented and crazy PS2 developers is something this port doesn't have.

[KDR_11k]

BS. Downscale the textures, reduce the model polycounts and maybe a few bones, simplify special effects, done. Well, okay, the engines draw functions would need a rewrite but OOP makes this really easy. Lowering your game's ressource footprint is a lot easier than increasing it.

BTW, and a lighting engine that rivals id's DOOM 3 engine Do you have any idea what the Doom 3 engine does? Stuff like unified lighting? The result may not look as good as RE4 but that's because D3 is so advanced it can't reach its full potential on modern PCs yet (and there's always the difference between technology and usage, you can make awesome stuff with the quake engine provided you use it right). D3 and RE4 or HL2 use completely different approaches that cannot be compared and technologically D3 is a new generation compared to the other two.

[Gamefreak]

Apparently you've misunderstood my meaning. When I say "rivals DOOM 3" I know what DOOM 3's engine does, and I've stated that it's far more technically advanced... And that's nice and all, and is a great leap in technology, but unfortunately id hasn't applied it to as good of a use as a lighting engine of that calibre deserves... What I mean is when you toss all that out and just look at the end results on your screen, RE4's scenarios look more impressive. Most people aren't going to notice the tiniest shadows and flickers in a small dark DOOM 3 hallway and be like "holy crap! those shadow physics are awesome!" but when you look at the far more artistically awe-inspiring scenes of RE4 the end result is far more impressive.

Of course, if the DOOM 3 engine was applied to RE4 the game would look even better... but it's not. I'm not comparing which lighting engine is more technically advanced, I'm arguing about which game looks more impressive. And I don't think anyone is going to argue that the fire effects in RE4 beat everything down. I mean I was impressed when I played Far Cry for the first time, those explosions and such were amazing... Half-Life 2's Source engine didn't produce any fire effects worth talking about though IMO, not even on DX9c compliant cards. But RE4's fire just looks freaking amazing, and something I didn't think the little GCN wasn't capable of producing. And something the PS2 will definately NOT be able produce with a mere port team and a few months, if ever.

And the textures in the game aren't exactly high-res anyway, downscaling them will make them look ever worse. The poly counts of course will but cut too, simplify special effects, of course. Now that right there already makes the game look that much worse. Then factor in the PS2's inability to produce as sharp or vibrant a picture, and very aliased and jaggy images, and there goes the clean look of the game. And even after all this I doubt the frame rate will be steady. Anyway I'm not sure what you're arguing about. I'm sure anyone would agree that under the conditions that the PS2 port is being subjected too (main team not involved, few months of dev time, PS2 hardware) that there's no way the game will look as good or run as well as the GCN version. And we all know that dev teams matter, look at NFS Hot Pursuit 2 on PS2 and the versions on Xbox, GCN, and PC. All three systems way more powerful than a PS2, but all of them looking pathetic compared to the PS2 version, and on top of that, running at pathetic frame rates.

[KDR_11k]

However, we are arguing technical difficulties here and for the tech the aesthetics don't matter.

We don't know much about the trickery involved in RE4 so we can't tell how well it would port to the PS2. Does it make use of the flexible rendering pipeline? Could that be faked? Sure, there will be differences but I expect the general public not to notice them (mainly because few will play both versions).

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

I like the technical approach Resi4 has towards lighting and (self)shadowing.  It seems unique compared to the Splinter Cells and Rogue Squadrons I've had the opportunity to sample; that is to say, i'm under the impression games like SC, RS, Riddick, StarFox Adv, etc. have been using techniques that've widely been available to PC games.  Doom3 is definitely lovely in this department, but the hardware demands are a few solar systems beyond GCN's specs.  I guess I'm trying to say that Resi4's light/shadow techniques scream "efficiency" to me, and with the help of "meatier" hardware it could obviously look more refined and spectacular.  Given the meatier hardware, I sometimes wonder how Resi4's potential would compare with Doom3's or the Source engine.

Awesome trickery, indeed.

~~~~~

I'd love to see SFA's self-shadowing-upon-fur-rendering used in another Cube game.

[Gamefreak]

Well first of all DOOM 3, Crytek, and Source all use advanced DX9 effects the GCN/Xbox aren't capable of producing. Heck my DX9 Geforce 4 Ti4400 can't even do them. What RE4 really doesn't have a lot of that games Rogue Squadron, Riddick, Star Fox Adventures, and PC games use a lot of are texture techniques like bump mapping and normal mapping.
Which is really sad because Gamecube does those better than any other console. Even Xbox can only do 4 texture passes per object, half what the GCN can do. And the GCN has a faster fill rate and double (i believe) the L2 cache. Note that the GCN's ArtX graphics chip was the base for the PC Radeon 9700 Pro (ArtX's first card for ATI) which single-handedly saved ATI from getting beat down by nvidia. The Xbox definately has more raw power and more RAM than the GCN, but the GCN can produce better effects and better looking models, if it's used properly (look at Rogue Squadron 3's models and effects).
For example, run the hardware stress test from the Counter-Strike Source main menu. It goes through a little cave with lots of stuff showing off Source's features and then gives you an average frame rate. There's one scene where it shows a human soldier made up of water, showing refraction and stuff like that. Super Smash Bro. Melee had the exact same thing (indistinguishable in quality, i compared them yesterday, rotating the camera out and viewing effects through the invisible person) back in 2001. You know the much showed off rippling glass/water effect? You know, the big wall of water used for force fields and glass? Star Fox Adventures had that (huge pillars of water in that one temple). And of course the fire in RE4 trounces everything.
GCN/Xbox both suffer from very low resolution textures compared to the high end PC games though... I wonder how Far Cry Instincts will look.. The PC version was beautiful.

[KDR_11k]

(a GeForce 4 is DX8.0 (OpenGL 1.3), not DX9.0)

Shaders haven't been around in PC games back then because few write their games for top-of-the-line hardware. Shaders weren't really used until around Tron 2.0, I think.
I'm not sure how well the Cube handles dot3-bumpmapping (normalmaps) but its low texture resolution (too little RAM) doesn't work well for normalmapping.

[Gamefreak]

oh whoops yeah lol... I'm not thinking straight... I said my DX9 card can't do DX9 effects lol...that was a typo i meant DX8...
I heard GCN can do normal maps pretty well if you use the system right, for those kind of specs. That said... normal maps are hard to do on any consoles. Halo 2's look ugly as heck and look seriously unnatural... Not only that but tons of models in the game looked like an assembly of parts rather than a cohesive unit, worsening the look.
Anyway, I'm seriously getting annoyed at the blatant use of bump mapping and normal mapping in some games.. Far Cry and Half-Life seem to keep it respectable with the human models anyway... DOOM 3 is getting carried away, then things like Halo 2 and Riddick just look ridiculously synthetic...

[KDR_11k]

Halo 2 uses hand-painted normal maps as opposed to normalmaps rendered from a hipoly model (like Doom 3). Console texture memory is too small to hold the amount and size of textures required for normalmaps, though.
The problem with Doom 3 isn't the normalmaps, it's the specularity. With little or no specularity you can get stuff to look mostly right but iD apparently underestimated the strength of their spec. I've used very weak specularity on the face of my avatar and I think it doesn't look like plastic.

[Gamefreak]

Naw, but the hair looks like play dough
I've yet to see good hair...

[KDR_11k]

Guess I should paint a bumpmap to overlay, then...

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

Krystal has great hair.

[Gamefreak]

well the hard part about hair is that for true hair you needs thousands of independent strands... and then animate them properly.. ack

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

http://boards.ign.com/Resident_Evil/b5234/78554424/?9

grafix said w0t!!

[Darc Requiem]

Yeah I read a similar article at GCA Advanced. The PS2 version should be canned. I mean its going to have to be seriously watered down.

[ruby_onix]

Quote
The PS2 version should be canned. I mean its going to have to be seriously watered down.

Yeah, but it's one of the best games Capcom has made in a long time, and it's selling "poorly" on the GameCube, and Capcom has already told the videogaming public "don't buy a GameCube if you want to play this game".

Capcom screwed themselves, like only about 90% of the internet said they were doing. And it seems that the only chance they have to save themselves is by going through with the PS2-port.

Of course, it seems really obvious that the PS2 version is going to look like crap. They'll be lucky if it's just "not cutting edge". Which will kill the PS2 version. At which point, there might be some renewed interest in the superior GameCube version, but by the time this all plays out, almost nobody will care anymore.

For the amount of effort Capcom is obviously going to put into the PS2-port, it's clearly a waste of time, and will probably cost them money and drive them closer to bankruptcy, but I'm under the impression lately that they literally have nothing better that they could be doing.

It's very sad. Capcom used to be cool.

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

I hear the PS2 port will get "Making of RE4 for GameCube" featurette as an extra yay.

[Avinash_Tyagi]

I'm playing the world's sadest song on the world's smallest violin for Sony and Capcom.

First they announce that the game is going to PS2 dropping the GC's version sales down  bit, its selling ok but not great, and then they realize the game will suck on the PS2, Karma my friends, Karma.