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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Gameblog: Seasons of Heaven coming exclusively to Nintendo Switch, first screens

Werix357 on 11 December 2016
Pavolink said:
Werix357 said:

Just read that some people from Nintendo Japan played Seasons of Heaven last year and were quite impressed with it so they wanted it on the NX Switch.

http://www.gameblog.fr/blogs/danstonuwiiu/p_120323_quand-jeux-s-ecrit-j-e-u-et-leaks

So, Nintendo already played?

Yeah according to the french blogger who writes for the site that posted the screen shots.



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teigaga on 11 December 2016

Looks great but I'm very suspicious of indie games which announce with nothing more than some pretty stills of environments. There are hundreds of vapourware projects like this.

Random but does anyone remember the much hyped Wii exclusive sadness that never saw the light of day?

Graphically it looks like Nintendo haven't gimped out out the GPU in order for price/battery but also the resolution appears quite low (fine with me). Exclusive games should have no problem wowing in the graphical departments.



Mbolibombo on 11 December 2016
deskpro2k3 said:
dont fall for the hype

What hype? There is no hype, at least not yet. It looks beautiful, and that's all we know.

 



teigaga on 11 December 2016
kljesta64 said:

Nuvendil said:

Well, with regards to Zelda, three things to keep in mind are 1) Zelda is cross gen, 2) Zelda appears to have a far more expansive seamless world, and 3) we don't know how many systems and such are at play in Seasons of Heaven but we know Zelda has a lot going on.  If Zelda runs in 1080p at a locked 3fps - dropping to 720p in handheld - with other image quality improvements like AA and sharper textures over the Wii U version, it would be nothing to sneeze at.  Not saying this game isn't more impressive in several ways, just that 1) it ought to be since it isn't crossgen and 2) Zelda isn't a weak showing.

i doubt we'll see anything more but a few more frames on the switch version. similar to what happend with twilight princess .. wii had the power but shigeru didnt allowed it for some fucked up reason.

Well on one hand It looked like it would have required work for very little difference, the game wasn't built on scalability. They would of had to create new assets to make use of the Wii specs and even then the difference was never going to be that noticable with a port considering only 50% difference in power. There should be a much bigger gulf between Wii U and Switch specs and Zelda U looks very scalable in terms of effects, lighting, foliage, draw distances etc.



theRepublic on 11 December 2016

We need gameplay info before this is anything to be excited about.



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Soundwave on 11 December 2016
teigaga said:
kljesta64 said:

i doubt we'll see anything more but a few more frames on the switch version. similar to what happend with twilight princess .. wii had the power but shigeru didnt allowed it for some fucked up reason.

Well on one hand It looked like it would have required work for very little difference, the game wasn't built on scalability. They would of had to create new assets to make use of the Wii specs and even then the difference was never going to be that noticable with a port considering only 50% difference in power. There should be a much bigger gulf between Wii U and Switch specs and Zelda U looks very scalable in terms of effects, lighting, foliage, draw distances etc.

Switch version of Zelda will likely run at 1080P native, there's your graphics boost right there. 

I don't think Nintendo wants to open the door to things like graphical updates otherwise, the game is taking forever already to come out, changing the graphics at this point would just add another delay. 



bonzobanana on 11 December 2016
curl-6 said:
bonzobanana said:

It still has the same function as a large buffer because its data bus to the main cpu and gpu is slow compared to the other memory . The gamecube discs were quite small at about 1.2GB but wii has 8GB dvd discs with a dual layer on some discs and the absense of a hard drive means caching the optical drive is very important. I'm pretty sure when I read articles about development on wii it was exactly the same use just upgraded due to a optical disc 7 times larger but much slower seek times. Nintendo seemed obsessed with making the gamecube discs almost seem as fast as loading from cartridges and pretty much did the same again with wii. It is noticably faster and less pauses than ps2 and dreamcast games only beaten by the xbox thanks to its built in hard drive. However even the xbox is slower if its a new game that hasn't been stored in one of 3 700mb caches set aside for the last 3 games played.

With regards additional processing of the wii remote I believe it causes additional input lag above that of the wireless input lag and requires tracking of motion to respond to games. I.e. if your playing a tennis game for example it takes additional measurements regarding the swing of your arm and presents a sequence of values to the program to be calculated. It tracks your motion in 3 dimensional space and Nintendo even went beyond this to increase the sampling rate and accuracy of movement with the wii remote plus to improve the feature. It's pretty much the same as kinect except it uses electrical data from sensors rather than processed video data but it still has to be processed and so additional cpu work is required. Of course how much additional processing is debatable but I don't think there is any debate that additional processing is required.

Devs like High Voltage talked about how Wii's larger RAM allowed them to render more elements per scene compared to Gamecube. It was not just a buffer. Let's be realistic here; no console is going to reserve over 70% of its memory for caching, that's absurd. And totally unnecessary; with the amount of data Wii games have, a DVD drive and no HDD is just fine. Feeding 88MB of RAM is quick and easy. It's once you get up to PS3/360/Wii U levels of RAM that optical drive speed becomes a bottleneck.

And you're overestimating the complexity of the Wiimote. Its beauty was in its simplicity. It did not actually track movements in 3D space it all, it used simple gyros and accelerometers to register angle and movement, which give feedback no more complex than an analogue stick.

I don't think you've grasped how it works. It's caching so the data can be quickly loaded into main memory. It's fully utilised but the whole point is its not waiting to be pulled in from the optical drive. The fact its in the GDDR3 memory means it can be quickly moved to the main 24MB of very fast memory with the wide databuse's to cpu and gpu. Your making it sound like the cpu and gpu works directly with the data held in GDDR3 memory as if it can bypass needing to use the main 24MB of memory which I'm pretty sure it can't. Have you seen the GDDR3 chip on the wii motherboard its completely away from the main gpu and cpu and only has a slow databus.

When I said tracks movement in 3D space I guess that would be better as calculates movement in 3D space which is what the my explanation previous to that explained. I totally disagree with your point about no more complex than an analogue stick and I think you would too if you actually took time to read what you wrote. A game has to be purposely developed for motion controls you can't just add a motion controller to any game that has joypad input.



Lonely_Dolphin on 11 December 2016

But when do we get to see gameplay?



curl-6 on 11 December 2016
bonzobanana said:
curl-6 said:

Devs like High Voltage talked about how Wii's larger RAM allowed them to render more elements per scene compared to Gamecube. It was not just a buffer. Let's be realistic here; no console is going to reserve over 70% of its memory for caching, that's absurd. And totally unnecessary; with the amount of data Wii games have, a DVD drive and no HDD is just fine. Feeding 88MB of RAM is quick and easy. It's once you get up to PS3/360/Wii U levels of RAM that optical drive speed becomes a bottleneck.

And you're overestimating the complexity of the Wiimote. Its beauty was in its simplicity. It did not actually track movements in 3D space it all, it used simple gyros and accelerometers to register angle and movement, which give feedback no more complex than an analogue stick.

I don't think you've grasped how it works. It's caching so the data can be quickly loaded into main memory. It's fully utilised but the whole point is its not waiting to be pulled in from the optical drive. The fact its in the GDDR3 memory means it can be quickly moved to the main 24MB of very fast memory with the wide databuse's to cpu and gpu. Your making it sound like the cpu and gpu works directly with the data held in GDDR3 memory as if it can bypass needing to use the main 24MB of memory which I'm pretty sure it can't. Have you seen the GDDR3 chip on the wii motherboard its completely away from the main gpu and cpu and only has a slow databus.

When I said tracks movement in 3D space I guess that would be better as calculates movement in 3D space which is what the my explanation previous to that explained. I totally disagree with your point about no more complex than an analogue stick and I think you would too if you actually took time to read what you wrote. A game has to be purposely developed for motion controls you can't just add a motion controller to any game that has joypad input.

You're making it sound like Wii only had 24MB of RAM available to games though, with the rest serving to merely spool data from the disc, and just that isn't true. Developers from High Voltage to Factor 5 to Climax all attested to Wii being able to do more than GC thanks to its memory improvements.

HVS: "Interestingly, many things we are doing on the Wii would technically have been possible on the GameCube. However, we are able to render many more visual effect elements per scene on the Wii due to its higher CPU / GPU processing speeds and increased memory."

https://www.engadget.com/2008/06/16/wii-fanboy-interviews-high-voltage-on-the-conduit/

Factor 5:

"RG: And with much more memory...

JE: Yeah, exactly, and the memory! That is a very good point. Aside from the shaders, our main limitation which we always found on the GameCube was the memory: the memory was a struggle the whole time; it was a very hard struggle. That was actually our biggest struggle. When we got the Wii specifications we were excited because we said "wow, this is actually the amount of memory which we needed"

RG: The memory problem you had before

JE: Yes, exactly, that would've been our "dream memory". (laughs)"

http://www.nintengen.com/2007/09/wii-can-do-lot-more-graphically-factor.html

And there is nothing complex about the Wiimote. It has a gyro in it. When you tilt it, the gyro's tilt is registered, just like the tilt of an analogue stick. The accelerometers provide similarly basic feedback. It's incredibly simple and requires no advanced processing whatsoever.



Meelow on 12 December 2016

I think the game looks great, excited to see the trailer!