The Tech of the Colossus

Via a Cathode Tan post, a gloriously in-depth look at the technology behind the PS2 title Shadow of the Colossus. From that article: "In games such as DOOM3 on the PC, the model used for generating the shadow volume is almost equivalent to the character itself. But with SOTC, in order to speed this up, we made use of a simpler model with much fewer polygons in. The main character generally consists of 3,000 polygons, but the colossus can be around 18,000 polygons, depending on the type. But the model used for shadow generation will contain a substantially lower amount than this. For example, the simple model seen by the player will probably only use 1/40th of what the original model contained."

Re:SoC

[gEvil (beta)]

SoC is a great game but I have to ask why they used the PS2.

Oh, I know the answer to this one! It's because the game was made by Sony. I think it's highly unlikely that they'd spend their resources developing a GameCube or xBox game. Although this game would've been awesome on either of those two platforms. I got through 9 or 10 of the colossi before getting my nice new 32" LCD HDTV. This game is just painful to look at on that screen now because all the flaws and uglies are so apparent.

Re:This was via...

[ianpatt]

The entire thing is just an English translation of the original article at Game Watch: http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20051207/ 3dwa.htm [impress.co.jp]. Posted there last year, actually.

Re:Playstation 2 at it's best

[Anonymous Coward]

Texture quality. The PS2 has always had a deplorably pathetic amount of video RAM, and it shows - especially in big games like SoC where the same tiny aliased texture is reused and remapped all over the place. The PS2 has had a lot of really, really fun games that were just painful to look at because of this, and since Sony actually has competition this time around, they've been forced to give developers enough VRAM to make games a hell of a lot less ugly.

Have you ever developed games for the PS2? I'm guessing that you haven't.

Although it only has 2MB of VRAM, it has a very high bandwidth bus for uploading things to that VRAM - the idea is that you setup huge DMA chains to repeatedly fill and refill the VRAM when drawing a frame (while the main processor is off doing setting up the DMA chains for the next frame), and this double buffering can be very very effective.

While 2MB of VRAM on a PC video card isn't very much, the PS2 is a fundamentally different architecture and the same metrics do not apply.

You seem to be talking from the perspective of someone who does not understand what they are talking about.