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+--- Thread: Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help (/showthread.php?tid=708)
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - The Former DMiller - 20th May 2003
If you have any questions for the developers of the Italian Job or Soul Calibur 2 post them here before Friday. Italian Job questions would help more since not as many people would submit questions about that game compared to SC2. Thanks.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - OB1 - 20th May 2003
Hey that's cool. I have a few q's.
For The Italian Job folks:
1) Is Jason Statham (who's in the upcoming movie) going to be playable in the game?
2) Will there be a free-roam mode in the game?
3) Would you say this game is more like GTA or Driver?
For the SC2 folks:
1) Is online play a possibility for any of the console versions?
2) Will Namco release a Soul Calibur joystick for the Gamecube?
I'll think of some more later.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - lazyfatbum - 20th May 2003
I have some too.
Italian Job Questions:
1.) You're making a game based on a remake of a classic film, and that game will probably suck ass, much like the remake. So my question is, what other games do you (Climax/Eidos) have planned for Gamecube?
2.) I am more than willing to bet that the version of the game we will get will look like shit and will probably be a port of the game released on the PSX with slight detail enhancements. Am I right?
3.) Will there be a Nude Code?
4.) Do you honestly think this game has a chance against games like Driver and GTA Series? If so, then why?
5.) The graphics for The Italian Job look extremely bad. This is obviously because of your programers lack of talent and/or ability. Why dont you hire better programers? Or maybe, give the game more time so the programers dont have to ruch it?
6.) It's not just the graphics or the seemingly boring and repitive gameplay or the uninspired play modes or the lack of any originality what so ever, i'm just looking for one good reason to buy this game.
7.) How much did the full production of this game cost?
Questions about SC2:
1.) Thanks for including Link!
2.) Thanks for leaving out the other 30+ options, arenas and characters that are included in the other versions! FAG.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - Laser Link - 20th May 2003
Okay, I am sure Derek will include those questions.
Quote:The graphics for The Italian Job look extremely bad. This is obviously because of your programers lack of talent and/or ability. Why dont you hire better programers? Or maybe, give the game more time so the programers dont have to ruch it?
Don't blame the programmers. It's the artists' fault!
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - OB1 - 20th May 2003
Why do you say the game looks bad? I can't find any screenshots of it.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - Dark Jaguar - 20th May 2003
From what I understand from reviews of all the Japanese releases of Soul Caliber, lazy, everything in the other two versions (save the 2 other console exclusive characters, which they would have included, but then Link would be on XBox and PS2) is on the GCN version. The only difference aside from that is that the XBox, being more powerful, supports some better sound and HDTV options.
Did ya read a list of other changes somewhere? I need a linky.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - OB1 - 20th May 2003
*tells DJ about the whole "lazy making up stuff" thing*
And The Italian Job doesn't look bad. It doesn't look great, but not bad by any definition of the word. You can find screens here: http://gamerankings.com/htmlpagesscreens/25481.asp?screenid=7
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - Dark Jaguar - 20th May 2003
Those cars look terrible, but that's not bad programming. That's bad modelling. The models look like boxes. Get new artists, like LL said.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - OB1 - 20th May 2003
That's how the real car looks, DJ. It's a damn box.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - The Former DMiller - 20th May 2003
Haha, Eidos and Namco wouldn't talk to us again if I submitted lazy's questions, however valid they are. :)
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - lazyfatbum - 21st May 2003
From what I understand from reviews of all the Japanese releases of Soul Caliber, lazy, everything in the other two versions (save the 2 other console exclusive characters, which they would have included, but then Link would be on XBox and PS2) is on the GCN version. The only difference aside from that is that the XBox, being more powerful, supports some better sound and HDTV options.
1.) The Gamecube has a better video adapter and more video RAM than the XBox. Also, the Gamecube is able to conserve more space than the XBox DVD disks by only drawing the polygons we can see, the others are kept in RAM to be spit out when they're needed. In effect, the Gamecube disks hold just as much if not more than an XBox disk except when it comes to Pre-rendered, full screen scenes (CGI cut scenes) and high res full screen FMV which the XBox can do in it's sleep.
2.) The X-Box produces the same amount of high-quality stereo samples as the GC but the XBox has an extra 64 channels of extremely low quality mono samples to play with. These Samples are often so bad that they aren't used except for white noise channels or menu screen sounds (blips and bloops).
3.) Last I heard about SC2 is that the XBox version is that it's getting 3 or more exclusive characters and exclusive modes of play. Mind you this might be the case because of the XBox's HDD which gives the devs more options to play with but I doubt it. It would be nice to know that all 3 versions are equally swell (But all I care about is Link anyway :D)
OB1/ When I post rumors, opinions or facts on any game, system or company never once have I had to make anything up about them. The industry is fucked up enough as it is without me having to spin yarns for it.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - lazyfatbum - 21st May 2003
LL/ Sorry. :) You're right about the artists, but for now i'll just assume the programing is equally as horrid. I'll also assume that the artists made better models than that and had to dummy them down because of the programers inability to program coherantly for the GC and are simply shoving a square peg in to a round hole. I mean you know how much you'll make a year as a good programer... guess what's the first thing to consider when cutting costs on a movie-franchise game that's just trying to make a sell based on (hopeful) popularity of the movie? :D oh hey, why for not le you reply to moi? le wtf?
DMiller/ Ask those questions or i'll devour our six year old daughter with my COMPLETELY EXPOSED NAKED PENIS. Seriously, dress them up so they're not so harsh and ask them, they're valid, as you said. plz?/ thx ^_^
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - Dark Jaguar - 21st May 2003
You seem to misunderstand the system's ability to save resources (not space on the disk) via only drawing what is determined as visible. Actually, that's an ability the N64 had, so the idea that of these new systems only the GCN also has that ability is somewhat odd. It might be the case, but wow would that be a terrible design flaw if the others weren't capable of it. The disk space isn't saved at all doing this. The models still have to be all there on the disks. Not all angles of a model have to be stored, just the model. Determining what that looks like from every angle is the machine's job. If something is NEVER visible from one angle, that side tends to be unmodelled (as no clipping codes can attest to). Perhaps I misunderstood you though.
Oh, I wasn't referring to the actual sound quality on-system. I was referring to how XBox can output true 5.1 surround sound, whereas the GCN has to use Dolby Digital 2, which is apparently a bit inferior (to be honest I'm no audiophile, so I likely wouldn't be able to tell a difference, so that doesn't matter to me, and there's also that I have a mono speaker for all my sound output anyway :D). For that matter, when I was talking about visuals, I wasn't really mentioning any special effects in game. I was talking about the higher HDTV display modes that the XBox supports. It has support for outing higher FPS Progressive Scan, and I think higher resolution, than the GCN, but not by much. Both of them totally outclass the PS2 though (except PS2 can also do true 5.1 sound).
I'm afraid someone lied to you about Soul Calibur, unless they are changing it for the US release (the bastards). Every system has a single unique character. Link for GCN, some Tekken guy for PS2 that uses bracelets, and Spawn the guy with scabs that never heal for XBox. One new character a fuss is made over for some reason is Necrid, but he's on all versions just like the rest. Aside from that it seems they all have the same levels, modes, and so on, and the differences are none up until you use the controller. Apparently the PS2 is the best to use, followed by GCN, then XBox, in average opinion anyway. Had XBox got more exclusive stuff than any other version, I would certainly have chosen that one. That doesn't seem to be the case, so I just picked the one with my fave exclusive character, that being GCN version with Link. I think after this they should release an updated arcade version with all exclusive characters in it, so we could see them all pitted against each other.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - OB1 - 21st May 2003
That's Dolby Pro Logic II.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - Dark Jaguar - 21st May 2003
Eh, whichever. Either way I don't have the right decoder :D.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - OB1 - 21st May 2003
The Gamecube games I've played in PLII sound just as good as the X-Box games I've played in DD 5.1. DD 5.1 is better, but none of the X-Box games I've played sounded as good as DD can get.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - Nintendarse - 21st May 2003
DMiller:
-What is your opinion of a recent movie-to-video game product that rhymes with "Center the Play Sticks?"
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - Laser Link - 21st May 2003
Hahahahaha! Arsey, I read on Insider a few weeks ago that it was a bit lackluster and not all that much fun. But they didn't have the final version of the game yet, and wouldn't get it until the game was in stores. But supposedly bullet time was pretty sweet.
Quote:Also, the Gamecube is able to conserve more space than the XBox DVD disks by only drawing the polygons we can see, the others are kept in RAM to be spit out when they're needed.Hidden surface removal is a necessity for any 3D system. It's really the only way to do it. You can't just draw all the polys because then the picture would be incredibly screwed up. You would never have a correct picture unless you just happened to draw the ones closest to the screen last. If two polygons overlap, you have to find which is close to the screen and draw that one, and there are some suh-weet yet simple algorithms to pull it off. The techniques have been around since the 70s, and even OpenGL (the old goat) uses it. So I can't imagine that the XBox doesn't have some form of it.
And don't worry, I was only joking about it being the artist's fault. They can only make models good enough if the programmer's engine is good enough. It's everyone's responsibility. And I haven't even seen any screens from the game, so don't listen to me. But it's a built in reaction- defend the geeks! :)
Derek, I really am trying to come up with some questions. It's just not working.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - A Black Falcon - 21st May 2003
I thought only some graphics cards do hidden surface removal... and I don't remember if the NVidia chip in the XBox does it. I remember that when it was put in the PowerVR chip (the PowerVR 2, remember, ran the Dreamcast) it was a new idea... and took quite a while for others to add. I don't know how many do it now... I'd imagine they do, but am not sure... but since Nintendo made it sound like a special feature it makes me less sure for the others... especially PS2...
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - The Former DMiller - 21st May 2003
Already submitted the questions, including a few of lazy's, albeit modified beyond recognition. :) Anyway, thanks for the help all.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - OB1 - 21st May 2003
LL, I posted a link to screens a few posts up.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - Laser Link - 22nd May 2003
OB1- I saw the link, but never clicked.
ABF- Hidden surface removal is not a new idea. The techniques were developed in the 70s. It is simply impossible to create a 2D image with 3D objects any other way- you must find what objects are closest to the camera and draw them and that process is called hidden surface removal or visible surface determination. It's the same thing. Now maybe the older systems used a simple technique like a z-buffer instead of something a little more complex like a depth sort algorithm, but it is still hidden surface removal. If you want to learn about it, the best way I know is to read this book. It is the standard text in computer graphics, and is actually pretty easy to read.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - lazyfatbum - 22nd May 2003
LL/ I wont even try to argue with you, but we were told that the XBox doesn't try to conserve resources at all. It has no built in "restraints" for the hardware so things can get very ugly when designing a high-end game, it can become a programers nightmare when they find out that tens, even hundreds of thousands of polys aren't seen but still take up space. DJ is right about the models but that takes up ver little space on a disk depending on how the system reads that data. From what we were told (taking our own discoveries aside), the XBox and GC compete on the sme level with a slight margin that varies for each system; Nothing comes close to the GC's hardware design and how it's able to draw... but no one is taking advantage of it.
DJ/ Both the XBox and GC are built for Stereo.
Surround Sound, or Digital Sound (ex: DTS coding) needs to be slapped in through software. There's no reason a GC game cant be made in Dolby Digital EX (6.1) SDDS (krappy 7.1) Spherical sound (4.1 and higher) and so on, you could even program the game to run at experimental standards like 10.10. (beautiful 3-D sound). The hardware of a system, for sound, comes down to a few cheap chips inside: Left and Right channels, ADPCM (compressed), PCM (uncompressed), and MIDI. On the GC, ALL of those formats can be sent to 3-D audio and through the seperate DSP for effects as long as the game supports it. The XBox cant do that. It simply has 64 channels that can be coded left and right or sent through the software to produce 3-D sound, the XBox DSP is a global processor which takes up HUGE amounts of system resources and is hardly used. There's no such thing as a system that can run surround sound or not, it's all in the software.
As for the visual standards, i'm looking through the hardware sheets now and I dont see any notable differences. Both systems can display the same lines of resolution and both are capable of HD Progressive Scan. Though through software, you can achieve other visual formats for both systems.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - OB1 - 22nd May 2003
Well there is the fact that the only audio cables you can use on the Gamecube are standard RCA ones. Why do you think they came up with PL II?
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - A Black Falcon - 22nd May 2003
LL, I've been following PC 3d video cards (somewhat) for a long time... and that isn't nearly as common as you seem to think. Maybe they did use simpler techniques, I'm not sure. But not what the PowerVR used in Dreamcast -- not real hidden surface removal. Most of them drew lots and lots of hidden surfaces.
And it took quite some time for the idea to spread... I just don't know when NVidia added it, really. :)
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - Dark Jaguar - 22nd May 2003
I'm learning all sorts of things. I love you guys lazy and LL!
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - The Former DMiller - 22nd May 2003
Yeah, I've never gotten this in-depth into hardware stuff. Really interesting discussion.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - Laser Link - 22nd May 2003
Z-Buffer is pretty close to actually drawing everything. It checks every single polygon's location on the screen to see if anything has been drawn there yet. If not, it draws the polygon and keeps trakc of how close it is to the screen. If another polygon has already been drawn there, then it compares which is closer to the screen. If the old one is closer, that it doesn't draw the new one. But if the new polygon is closer, then it draws the new one over the old one. So either way it has to run through every polygon and will draw a lot of them, so that sounds kind of like what you are talking about lazy. The depth-sort technique actually sorts the polygons into furthest to closest order, then uses that to draw. So it's a little better. It could also be that there are new techniques that have been developed and are now widely used or that Nintendo being the super geniuses that they are developed their own way of finding what to draw.
ABF- I thought you said before that it was a new idea, so I was disagreeing with that. Implementation, however, is an entirely different matter. I have no idea what algorithms are used in what graphics cards or how long they have been in use for standard machines. I'm a college student, we only learn theory! :) As an example, they've had ray tracing algorithms since the 60's, but it STILL is not something you can do in a real time environment, and probably won't be for another 5-10 years.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - OB1 - 22nd May 2003
Ray-tracing? I've seen that used in games before, or at least that's what they called it. Rare said that PD used ray-tracing, as you can see in the main lobby in the main menu area place.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - A Black Falcon - 22nd May 2003
Ah, I was talking about implemintation...
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - Laser Link - 22nd May 2003
I remember when Rare said that. It was the first time I ever heard of ray tracing too. But I later heard it wasn't real ray-tracing, and there is no way it could be. I just took it on faith at the time, but now I know a lot more about it. Even on modern SGI super graphics machines you can't do real time ray tracing for lighting and shadows. See, Rare probably had one or two lasers that they had reflecting off surfaces, and they called that ray tracing, which I guess it is. I never played PD, but is that something like what they did?
Real ray tracing is where they fire a "ray" from the viewpoint of the camera through the "screen" and track where that ray goes. When it hits an object, it may split or redirect or do whatever sort of function it is emulating (say, light reflecting off mirrors). Then it has to track all the rays that come out of that collision and see where they go, and if you have a lot of objects you can see this is going to get extremely large very fast. And that is just for one pixel. Finding intersections is not an easy process either. My book gives the example of a 1024 by 1024 image of 100 polygons (obviously an incredibly small amount of polygons). This would require 100 million intersection calculations. Now imagine if you are doing this on a 12 million polygon image, like GameCube or XBox can supposedly do! Of course the screen resolution is going to be smaller, but it's not going to make a real noticeable difference in the number of calculations- the number of polys is the big problem, not the number of pixels.
It uses all this data to find how light is reflecting from light sources off the objects and make realistic shadows, and the effect is amazing! It's just really, really slow. They use it for prerendered movies and stuff like that. According to my professor just about every PHD dissertation from the 80s was about ray tracing, including his. They were all trying to find techniques to speed the process up by reducing the number of intersection calculations, and they found some rela good ones. But it's still not enough yet.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - OB1 - 22nd May 2003
You never played PD??!!
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - lazyfatbum - 23rd May 2003
The ray tracing they use in PD isn't real-time, it's just textures created to give the look of bounced light (multiple surface shine) It's nice looking, but it's no ray tracing. If we could do that, shit I couldn't even imagine it. Ray tracing can make any model look real.
If Mario Sunshine had real time ray tracing, every single drop of water would produce a translucent shadow perfectly proportional to its distance to the ground and its angle. Every single drop would produce it's own reflective light source from the sun based on angle and that reflected light could bounce and penetrate an infinite amount of world-objects, every puddle on the ground from Mario's cannon would create shards of light on the walls around it that would dance and alter themselves constantly, never being the same design twice, the same goes for whatever is visually reflected or refracted in the water but the 'smart light' might just bounce in to camera and blast the scene with light. :D It's all theory, no one really knows what it'll do in RT3D but i'm dying to find out :D
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - Dark Jaguar - 23rd May 2003
Oh wow the very thought of that makes me drool...
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - The Former DMiller - 6th June 2003
The Italian Job interview is up. You can check it out here.
Sould Calibur 2 And The Italian Job Interview Help - OB1 - 6th June 2003
Hmm, I might rent it since I love those free-roam driving games.
What happened to that Acclaim interview??