Apparently the game is just 16GB and runs seamlessly on a decade old hardware with no loading screens between game areas.
How does Nintendo pull it off?
How does Nintendo pull it off?
(And Nintendo engineers can have perfect knowledge of "the constraints of the platform", because 1. they built the platform; 2. it's the only platform they ever code for, never porting to anything else; and 3. for late-in-generation titles, they have been developing for it for years already, while also doing platform-SDK support for every third-party development studio.)
Oh, and besides that, because they design each platform initially specifically to work well for the types of games they want to make. (This goes all the way back to the Famicom, which has hardware PPU registers that were specifically implemented clearly to make the launch-title port of Donkey Kong extremely easy to code.)
See the third paragraph: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229447
1 - In the product line of Nintendo consoles ever produced, the N64 by being an SGI Onyx in a box, was the exception in regards to IP before technical specifications.
2 - In 1996, when the N64 was released into the market, ALL game consoles had hardware limitations of some sort. This includes Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar, 3DO, and Playstation 1.
So, N64 wasn't an exception since it's a console with hardware limitation ?
There's no denying that there's great N64 games, but Nintendo crippled the console outside of first and second (Rare) party development. The same trend continued with the Gamecube (despite it being more powerful than the PS2, the Gamecube disc held 25% of the capacity of a PS2 DVD).
If their portables hadn't dominated the market, the mid 90s to mid 00s would've been a terrible time for the company.
Of course Nintendo is doing great now, so you could say it's all a moot point.
Has anyone tried doing the same for the N64? Seeing what would be possible for an N64 game given an emulator tweaked to allow an unlimited ROM and VRAM size budget and (effectively) zero DSP DMA delay?
Another interesting perspective is that it—a game made at the end of the Switch's life (we hope)—is only marginally prettier and more polished than BOTW—a launch title. I would still hold BOTW as one of the prettiest Switch titles, including third parties (I realise this is subjective). I'm not sure of another console where you don't make graphical progress in 6 years of it existing. I don't know why this is, or even if it's a failing, I just think it's interesting.
+1; I don't usually care much about graphics (I play ASCII roguelikes for crying out loud), but there have been several moments in BotW where I found myself soaking in the scenery because it was gorgeous.
A great example is the size of Super Mario Odyssey being 5.7GB and a save file from NBA2k18 being 5GB. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/09/super_mario_odysse...
NBA savegame: json encoded in xml, run through a base64 because < in team names was breaking saves, all packed in YAML because the new summer intern couldn’t find a parser library for anything else
I can count the triangles on a lot of geometry visibly, and the textures are so blurred it looks like you take any modern PC game and only render the lowest available level of detail of all the textures. I can count the pixels in the shadows on the floor and lighting wise the game is extremely basic (it doesn't need to be more because of the art style). most effects you see in the game are literally blurry billboarded (but granted alpha blended) sprites, including the clouds that are so important in this games visuals.
and to top it off we're in 2023 with half the people or more on 4k screens and the game doesn't even manage native 900p most of the time.
the art design of the game is just designed well around those constraints. very well. but the devs likely did nothing super special to make it run well.
>Apparently the game is just 16GB and runs seamlessly on a decade old hardware with no loading screens between game areas.
>How does Nintendo pull it off?
Because it looks like two decade old game. No one is arguing that it can be fun, but it looks awful.
Yeah, no. https://static.kinguin.net/cdn-cgi/image/f=auto/media/catego... is what a two decade old game looks like.
Zelda would make for a great game on my phone though.
It helps that the original game was utterly gorgeous, thanks to inspired art direction.
While not a deal breaker, BOTW with zero waiting 5-10s for fast travel or shrines or loading saves would have been a MUCH smoother experience.
At some point I have to wonder if the reason we have so much computing power is so we can use that computing power.
The new Zelda demonstrates something that’s been true of every console generation. They are a fixed platform and the later games are always considerably better at utilising the hardware.
Though gameplay wise I have to say I prefer it. Elden Ring has too much stuff in it(crafting, gathering, tons of cookie cutter dungeons, and too many easy boss fights) for me. Bloodborne is very stripped down and devoid of fluff. I can sort of keep the whole game in my head and I love that about a game.
They use low poly models, as far as I know there is no baked lightmap (these are pretty expensives but are mandatory in a lot of engine if you want realistic shadows on higtly detailled environment) and their shader materials probably use very simple and low resolution maps.
All these thing decrease the asset footprint by orders of magnitude.
If you want to look in more detail in can look and compare a similar rendering in unity. Taking two unity exemple you can compare :
- 'chop chop' a game using a similar rendering style : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGTTHOpUQDE, if you take the pig and its environment showed in the video and go in the github repository you can see they only use one texture map : an albedo one. All the models (pig + environment) weight about 6mB of textures and 350kB of models. and are sufficient to have the full main character and an environment.
- a 'realistic PBR workflow gun asset' on asset store (choose randomly but seems nice, realistic and containing only the gun so we can see download size) : https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/props/guns/free-fps.... The workflow need 6 maps (there are 7 here but you generaly only use either a normal map or a heightmap) The pack weight 35MB. It's only the gun, you lack a full character handling it and the environment.
While I really like zelda, even with stylized graphics the game look a bit outdated for me. The cellshaded characters are fluid and pretty but the 'low resolution texture and low poly models' bother me a bit especially on environments. The artistic direction is really good but technically I can only think they are held back by the hardware.
As a game developer, I totally want to use all the resources i know i can find on the target hardware. Trust me even today they are lots of features game designer dream to put in game and cant because computing resources are still limited ^^. Do game NEEDS them to be fun ? Of course not, but COULD they be fun experiences ? I think yes :)
I absolutely am serious; a lot of games and software in general today demand far more system resources than they have any reasonable right to.
Don't give me "but the textures!" and the like either, optimize that stuff better instead. Whether it's Windows 10/11 or Call of Duty or Elite: Dangerous or Chrome or whatever strikes your fancy, software today has no business demanding the resources they do.
Lest we forget, the hardware we can buy today would have been considered supercomputers just a few years ago. You want to tell me that will choke and croak just doing mundane stuff like playing games or browsing the internet?
Business is exactly why most games dont spend an enormous budget on optimization today. It's not a requirement by the great majority of customers, it's quickly time and cost heavy, so the return on investment is pretty low.
Yes, i think even with infinite optimization budget a today triple A realistic rendering could simply not be possible on a too old computer in realtime.
I also think while it would really add value if background application like teams/slack/discord would be less resource heavy because they are open but not the main focus, when you play a high end video game it make sense to consider it's your main reason to use your computer at that time :)
If simulating and rendering a complete complex intractable realistic but imaginary world with today achievable level of detail seems mundane to you, it's far to seems like to me :)
No opinion about browsers and OS, today games are doing lot more of stuff valuable to most users than those of yesterday. I don't know enought about modern value of os and browser, exept empirically they do seems to crash a lot lot less than 20 years ago, but also syp a lot more on me :)
If you don't like that, nothing stops you from playing the older games.
They do obviously have the reasonable right to demand all the system resources that are available, because a game is usually an immersive experience that is the only important thing running on the system at that time, and the only purpose of those greatly increased system resources is to be used for gains in visual quality - there's no reason to not try and use all of that compute power of what would have been considered supercomputers just a few years ago.
The fact that you're comparing browsing the internet with playing AAA games speaks volumes. Browsers are capable of making insane amounts of optimizations because the "geometry" of a website is (mostly) completely static, there's no physics, there's no sounds, there's no AI running client side, there's no game logic, etc. This means they get to cache 90% of the view and only update the changed portions of the screen.
Contrast that with a game, which has the entire view of the 3D world changing every 16ms when the user moves their mouse, has thousands of physical interactions happening (most likely at a higher framerate), is buffering and mixing sounds in a 3D world, is animating and loading large 3D assets in real-time, is creating photo realistic lighting in real-time, is handling all game logic and AI client side, etc. It becomes clear that the two fields, while both difficult in their own ways, don't overlap very much. Of course AAA games take a super computer to run. It's doing all that in 16ms, sometimes 7ms!
Plus, if you don't care about all the visual fidelity and stuff, most games allow you to turn a ton of that off. Games have never been mundane, whether we're talking about the original tetris or the remastered version of the last of us, they are pushing the boundaries of the hardware they run on to the limit to achieve incredible immersive experiences.
Not only that! They also have increasingly helped improve the state of the art rendering in offline renderers! We're seeing the improvements that games have been able to make to achieve real-time photo realistic rendering slowly make their way to large Hollywood studios. This allows the movies we watch to have higher fidelity CG, because the artists have quicker iteration times. And it reduces the compute load required for these massive CG scenes since they are using more optimized rendering techniques. Saving money, and our environment.
Lest we forget, these "mundane" games have led to huge breakthroughs in all sorts of fields because of their willingness to push the boundaries of our machines to see what's truly possible. As opposed to 90% of the software created today which runs orders of magnitude slower than it needs to because people can't or don't know how to write efficient software.
It's just content-free ranting.