‘Nintendo Harness Their Hardware Like Nobody Else’

[curl-6]

lilbroex said:

curl-6 said:

Jett Rocket used bumpmapping too, on things like the dimpled sand in the beach levels. As for shadows, Mario Galaxy 2's were pretty glitchy in the case of the dragon battle you pointed out. And there were plenty of places where SMG2 could've benefitted from refractive surfaces but didn't, like with ice and metal.

JR's water effects are better than Galaxy 2's also, and where most enemies in SMG2 had just a rim shader, JR's nearly always had specular and environment maps.

I didn't say bumpmapping. Normal Mapping and bump mapping are two different things. Normal mapping is far more taxing on hardware than bump mapping and far more detailed.

Shin'en detailed everything they did with Jett Rocket.

http://jettrocket.wordpress.com/

Nowhere does it say they used bump mapping  nor was is demonstrated anywhere. The only texture effect they used was EMBM which is a native effect to the Wii's TEV that doesn't require much resources on the GPU. Normal mapping is far more complex resource intensive.

How do you know that's even normal mapping on the dragon? It could have been done with embossing or EMBM. 

And just because Shin'en don't mention bump/normal mapping in that document, doesn't mean it's not the game. They don't really talk much about their material effects at all there, it's more about the lighting, framerate, and other such things.

 

@famousringo: I know, but I'm enjoying this discussion.