Wii Texture information?

Wocky

Hi there everyone!

I am currently working on a Games texturing project for University. I am creating a Diffuse texture for a character specifically for the Wii.

Having searched high and low for the information I need, I have unfortunately been unable to find anything solid from a reliable source.

I'm sorry if I missed something obvious on Polycount, but I was unable to find a similar thread.

What I need to know is, what is the maximum texture size for a main character on the Wii? I'm also wondering what File Format textures tend to be in (like TGA for instance), and if Filtering (to smooth out jagged edges) is used on the Wii.

Sorry for the trouble, I appreciate your help.

Thanks very much

Neavah

I imagine that almost all the info your looking for relies on the engine your using. perhaps you should start by determining that, and go from there doing research on what works best for that engine, and games that have achieved a similar result as to what is is your going for, and take a look at what they did, and how they did it.

renderhjs

What's the trouble worth if you don't even have a programmer in your team that can tell you limitations. It really depends on the tech, people really need to learn that!! And if you don't have a tech to play with this whole pretending is useless because its not even close to a real scenario.
Just read these:
http://www.rsart.co.uk/2007/08/27/yes-but-how-many-polygons/
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=43975
similar to those threads and discussions there are obviously limitations in engines and written technology in terms of texture memory. But it really depends how the engine treats the textures what it does and for what it needs some extra memory.

If you have a engine on the wii just do some tests on your own!

timwiese

Wocky wrote: »

What I need to know is, what is the maximum texture size for a main character on the Wii? I'm also wondering what File Format textures tend to be in (like TGA for instance), and if Filtering (to smooth out jagged edges) is used on the Wii.

I imagine you aren't directly working with a Wii engine you just want to know some rough figures.

In my experience with working on Wii titles main characters tend to have textures no larger then 512x512. Of course this was very dependent on the engine I was working with. Some of the time we would end up reducing the 512x512 down to 256x256 to increase framerate.
TGA tends to be pretty standard for most game engines.
In my experience filtering was used.

But of course as others have stated the figures rely very heavily on the game engine and the scope of the scene.

Eric Chadwick

Wii textures are usually compressed (from TGA source) because the memory is very tight on the Wii. You can find some Wii texture info here.

Also here's a quickie rundown of the most popular formats...

CMPR TPL is the most common for textures without alpha. It's a lot like DXT1 compression, in fact it's a very close relative. You can have a 2-color alpha, but that generally sucks too bad to use (same as DXT1).

I8 TPL is the same as a grayscale 8bit image (256 grays).

rgb5a3 TPL is common for textures with alpha, as long as you don't mind the low # of alpha colors. It's a 16bit image (65536 colors) with two modes... 4bits each for red green and blue, and 3bits for alpha (only 8 colors for alpha!); or 5bits each for red green and blue, no alpha.

rgba8 TPL is a 32bit image, red/green/blue/alpha, uncompressed. Same quality as TGA, but rarely used because it eats up so much memory.

Not that any of this matters much, unless you're really developing for the Wii or GameCube or DS.