So considering the fact the actual game engine doesn't push the hardware at all, from what I am understanding from your comments, would pushing back the release date a year have helped in polishing the product or were the choices made so early on it was too costly and difficult to make changes. The reason I am asking is now trying to understand the cutting corners purpose. I would assume since development they've had firsthand results from other first and second party development teams on how to properly use techniques yet seemingly dismissed it. 

Considering your background would interaction between different animals in the wild dynamically have caused a too heavy burden on the engine or hardware? Sheesh, now I have so many questions.. 

I appreciate your patience with me. 

It also goes without saying I anxiously await your Zelda breakdown now.

That's fucking awesome.

Sounds like Monolith Soft had different priorities and didn't give the engine as much attention as they should have. It's pretty funny to see you say this game isn't pushing the Wii U at all. If I understand correctly then this game could have maintained its scale and run more smoothly with some more time spent on it.

Pretty nice analysis. Although I do recognize the low res textures and polys, I still think that the landscapes are very appealing, and the game will still be a great one! :)

Now now, you claimed Nintendo did the exact opposite not so long ago because of their inexperience with HD gaming.

the issue is simply they got the game to a certain state, on the SDK hardware, then when it came to stabalizing framerates they cut out portions of the world data, nixed rendering features and effects and left low lod versions of models in place, even for cutscenes.

As apposed to delaying the game and optimizing the engine properly.

As for interaction, the ai routines for such behaviours arent all that intricate and wouldnt need to play out without the player close enough to actually see them, or looking in their direction, so it wouldnt have cost much overall.

To look at things on a deeper level, one of the issues with the engine at the time I assisted was that a lot of redundancy and wasted processing was being used for effects that could not only be accomplished with shaders, but improved, during a normal good optimization phase of development things like this would be ironed out. for example if you have a texture that drops its bump map and displacement map at a certain lod level you have two possible approaches, first is to duplicate the shader for that material and remove these effects, but at the cost of the extra shader data in memory, OR, plug in the distance from pawn data to a variable in the shader to tell it when to trigger the use of specific components, and indeed how to add and remove these.

You could set it up to, for example, face in the bump map, specular and displacement data within 100 meters of the camera pawn, or fade it out when beyond 100 meters, unloading the effect from the shader, which in turn reduces the footprint for that materials memory use, along with a well optimized engine to handle feeding distances, volumentric densities and, depending on the type of game, physics properties to shader logic, but also a solid memory management interface so properly handle loaded and unloaded data, you could greatly decrease the overall memory footprint of a open world scene.

This sort of optimization was not done for XCX, to reach framerate targets content was instead cut and effects removed, rather than build on the engine to better support more optimized rendering processes.

Hmm. Not sure about this tech analysis. It's based on youtube videos, and if the OP was willing to do analysis based on that, I'm not sure of how his/her full analysis would be like.

And all this for an open world Wii U game. The game looks competent enough for the hardware it's running on and what it has to do, ie, run 4 characters in an open world environment with a reasonable view distance, while also being able to display 4 mechs with what i think is 3-4 monsters on screen at a time(maybe dependent on size) with spell effects going off while V-synced(I think I saw some tearing on streams but it wasn't bad iirc, and I'm not sure if it was the stream itself) in a 400 square km play area while seamlessly moving through each without loading (sans fast travel and home base load I think) with having to contend with the player moving at fast speeds and contend with verticality as well, which may limit certain tricks that could be used in these types of games. All on what I assume was a modest budget.

It falls pretty much in line with what I would expect from a 360 open world game with more ram to spare. Reading the OP, I see nothing actually out of the ordinary for an open world game of this type on that type of hardware.


If people think this is,as you put it, "he performance of this title is below par by the hardwares own standards.", I really have to wonder just what do people think the Wii U can really do, or are people holding out hope for some sort of hidden power somewhere, somehow. But then again, I've seen the same with PS4 and XBO, so maybe people just have massive expectations, which may not be entirely warranted, from consoles this gen.

So in brief, the graphical abilities of the WII U are not utilized to their optimum with XCX. This is only relevant to the graphics though, as the gameplay will not be impacted. There may be time left for these imperfections to be ironed out? You seem to know what you're talking about. I feel like, unless someone is a hardcore graphics nerd, the stuff you have listed shouldn't effect their enjoyment of the game and in it's current state, I would be happy with it.

Theres a difference between not being ready for HD because of the associated costs and common development practices, and not being ready for HD because you arent willing to put in the effort to accomodate new/faster technological approaches.

Nintendos primary issue coming into the 8th generation was the underestimation of development time, the other issue is, while most studios draw up high end assets for texture and model data, even in nintendo first party studios like monolithsoft, Nintendo themselves made good use of model complexity but skimped immensely on texture data.

It's one of Nintendo's somewhat niche characteristics.

Let me lay down a little groundwork for you.

I've several years experience programming shaders and developing game engines to accomodate them, from VEX through OSL, PSSL, GLSL, HLSL to GPGPU, across multiple platforms, PC, iOS, Android, PS3, 360, PS4, XBO, WiiU and more.

Portions of the WiiU SDK contain functions and shader logic designed by me.

Don't let my over-simplification of terminology when explaining things in the OP fool you, I have a pretty good grasp of the WiiU's capabilities.