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Wii game art limitations

simon-s
simon-s
polycounter lvl 7
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simon-s polycounter lvl 7
Hi All,

I am currently in an game art team that is moving from DS titles to Wii and I wondered if anyone could give me any information on the technical limtations of Wii game art?

Firstly, what are the optimal texture sizes and poly counts for a Wii game character ( bearing in mind there could be up to 8 characters displayed on screen at one time) ?

Secondly does anyone know how many in view polys the Wii can cope with? I have heard the Wii is similar to the game cube in that repspect, but some actual figures would really help me.

Lastly, can the Wii cope with normal maps?

You help would be greatly appreciated :)

Thanks,

simon
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  • Minos
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    Minos polycounter lvl 16
    This might come in handy =)

    http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=57900
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  • warby
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    warby polycounter lvl 18
    i heard from a wii developer it can handle 150k at 30fps don't ask me for my source though ^^
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  • thinkinmonkey
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    thinkinmonkey polycounter lvl 15
    I know Wii cannot handle normalmap by hardware as a PC normally does.
    Anyway, there's an engine for Wii that has all the Triple A stuff, I don't know the name, but if you go to gametrailers you'll find it and have a look to The Conduit game as well that has normal map, I suppose software emulated.

    You can give a look here: http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=120115&highlight=metroid+level
    and maybe you could ask to that artist who worked on levels of Metroid.
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  • warby
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    warby polycounter lvl 18
    woah that metroid prime 3 stuff is pimp =)
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  • fade1
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    fade1 polycounter lvl 14
    simon-s wrote: »
    Firstly, what are the optimal texture sizes and poly counts for a Wii game character ( bearing in mind there could be up to 8 characters displayed on screen at one time) ?
    depends on the type of game and size of your chars. i'd say around 1500. 8 skinned characters cost quite some performance. too many bones could make your framrate drop pretty fast. i'd go for 512*512. if you ain't getting too close, you probably are ok wit 256*256. but texturespace is not that limited, so i'd go higher and cut it down if needed.
    simon-s wrote: »
    Secondly does anyone know how many in view polys the Wii can cope with? I have heard the Wii is similar to the game cube in that repspect, but some actual figures would really help me.
    this is hard to say, as many factors count for your frame rate. i think around 50k vertices is no problem for a engine i know. ;) your scenes shouldn't exceed 100k vertices by too much. i don't know what happens if you stream your environments though...
    simon-s wrote: »
    Lastly, can the Wii cope with normal maps?
    just world space normals or emboss. of course you need an engine too support all the features...
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  • simon-s
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    simon-s polycounter lvl 7
    Quote: depends on the type of game and size of your chars. i'd say around 1500.

    Thanks guys, some really handy info there...

    When you talk of 1500 polys, does that mean quads or tris or does it not matter?

    Thanks again,
    Simon
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  • fade1
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    fade1 polycounter lvl 14
    i'd say 1500 or maybe 2000 tris. if you have a game like mario, you have him with around 5000 tris, but there are usually not very many other skinned charaters on screen. it's always hard to give general numbers, as many factors influence your performance. number of bones, size of your scene, shaders, shadow or not, physics, etc., etc.
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  • Neox
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    Neox godlike master sticky
    hmmm i'vew been working on a wii project with 10 characters on screen, it was a chariot racing game so you had 2 horses per team on screen which where at around 1000 tris, 1 fighter per team and 1 driver per team, the driver had also around 1000 tris and the fightes around 850 and a chariot er team, every piece of them had a 256 textursheet, so it was like one big 512 per team. in the beginning they had more tris and texturespace and with one chariot that was no problem , so 5 charas worked quite good) but when the second team (again 2 horses, 2 guys and the chariot and splitscreen) came into screen the framerate dropped quite a bit, so we removed every unneded bone and dropped the polycount quite a lot as the splitscreen is way smaller it didn't really make a difference optically... dunno how huge the env was because i didn't work on that, but i remember some tiling textures, a blend texture for the whole landscape and a 1k lightmap for everything, might be wrong though ^^
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  • Alec3d
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    Alec3d
    Conduit looks pretty impressive for the wii, can anyone guess what polycount an FPS like that would have?
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  • fade1
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    fade1 polycounter lvl 14
    Alec3d wrote: »
    Conduit looks pretty impressive for the wii, can anyone guess what polycount an FPS like that would have?

    for what in specific? the whole game ;) , a room, a char, a prop? on screen i don't think they will exceed 50k vertices often....notice that you will never see all of them, as stuff gets culled not directly at screen bounderies. ;)
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