30th May 2003, 4:56 PM
It's funny you should say that since I have the disc in my PS2 right now. 
Dude, the draw distance is bad in the game and the fog is there to hide it. But you're not getting what I'm trying to say. They intentionally made the draw distance poor because it didn't need to be great. The developers wanted the areas in the game to be very small. If you could see a monster a mile down the road would that be scary? No. Seeing a monster pop out of the fog five feet away is scary. So they pushed as many polys as they could into those small areas. That is also why the texture quality is above-average for a PS2 game.
And the environments are simple, but also detailed. The actual architecture is simple; there isn't a huge amount of polygons being pushed. But that doesn't mean that they're not detailed. You don't need to be pushing a lot of polygons in order to get detail in a scene. That's not what I was talking about.
Oh and the fog isn't entirely volumetric. Some of it appears to be, but they did add some old-fashioned flat fog over everything else. I believe that most of the fog you see is volumetric, but it's difficult to determine how much. If you want to see 100% real volumetric fog, play Rogue Leader (that one level with the green clouds and the clouds in Bespin) or Eternal Darkness (there's a bit on the ground in some areas.
Dude, the draw distance is bad in the game and the fog is there to hide it. But you're not getting what I'm trying to say. They intentionally made the draw distance poor because it didn't need to be great. The developers wanted the areas in the game to be very small. If you could see a monster a mile down the road would that be scary? No. Seeing a monster pop out of the fog five feet away is scary. So they pushed as many polys as they could into those small areas. That is also why the texture quality is above-average for a PS2 game.
And the environments are simple, but also detailed. The actual architecture is simple; there isn't a huge amount of polygons being pushed. But that doesn't mean that they're not detailed. You don't need to be pushing a lot of polygons in order to get detail in a scene. That's not what I was talking about.
Oh and the fog isn't entirely volumetric. Some of it appears to be, but they did add some old-fashioned flat fog over everything else. I believe that most of the fog you see is volumetric, but it's difficult to determine how much. If you want to see 100% real volumetric fog, play Rogue Leader (that one level with the green clouds and the clouds in Bespin) or Eternal Darkness (there's a bit on the ground in some areas.