Topic: Samurai Warriors... IN 3D

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((( some pictures dont work because of the limitation of the forum )))

Well i can write a book about it, to keep it short:

A develop has only so much hardware to work with. They can apply different techniques in order to enhance the graphical image quality, while maintaining a stable fps in order to keep the games smooth.

a example:

As you can see, this is a picture with all kinds of planets inside a universe. Now the simplest solution would be to make 1x 3D planet and just scale them to the right size and copy past them 40x, in order to recreate this picture.

With this planet model ( copy past + resize 40x and done):

( requires 5500 calculations a second for each planet )

Once the developer did that, he tries to run it on the 3DS and what happens?

Boom 0-1 fps max. Which means 1 picture a second is getting displayed ( game is unplayable). The huge amount of calculations that gotta be done for all those planets are enormous. Because every planet = the same amount of polygonal detail and texture. ( aka crysis 1 ).

Because the 40x 5500 calculations are 220.000 calculations to get this screen displayed each second.
Now lets say for example the 3DS can only ( with its hardware ) calculate 40.000 calculations.
This means that either the FPS is going to get hit big time ( unplayable ) or you need to drastically tune down the quality of the planets.

"example" Because 40.000 calculations is the 3DS limit, which results in 1000 calculations ( as maximum for each planet ).

now what do you need to do now as developer? make all those high quality planets low quality ( from 5.500 to 1000 ), which result in fairly horrible looking big planets upfront of the game.
Or should he just pick those 5,500 calculation planets and only throw in 7 6-7 of them. Which results in a fairly empty looking space.

This is exactly what for example the difference is between resident evil revelation and this samurai game. The samurai game chose for the first option just make everything 1000 calculations, while resident evil revelations did the second. Throw in 5-6 high detailed characters ( they solved the empty looking screen with close environments ).
that simple wasn't a option for the samurai game and they simple scaled down every enemy.

The same problem, got created for resident evil. when they started to develop merc.
The game is a wide open space + alot of zombies going on. But how did they actually managed to increase the graphical quality of the game and still maintaining speed. While a game as samurai simple didn't had more speed at its disposal.

This is because people use different kind of techniques, which eat away a lot of time and getting used to.

I will explain the LOD solution technique with the planet example.( just 1 of the many )

Instead of throwing the world full of 1000 calculation planets ( which reduces the image quality big time ) they could simple scale down calculations of further away planets and increase the ones more in front.

This will make the 3DS have no issue's rendering the scene, while maintaining high quality.

the first line op planets get these planets with 5500 calculations:

second line of planets get these 2880 calculations:

3th line of planets get these 1580 calculations:

4th line 670 calculations:

5th line of planets ( smallest ones ) 140 calculations:

Now if you got for example 40 planets.
line | amount planets | calculations
(1st)3x5.500 = 16.500
(2th)3x2.880 = 8.640
(3th)2x1.580 = 3.160
(4th)10x670 = 6.700
(5th) 22x140= 3.080
total = 38.080 calculations.

Now as you see, you just reduced the calculations from 220.000 towards 38.000. The 3DS can calculate towards 40.000. And will have no problem calculating it.

The question maintains, at the end, but the lower quality planets that are being used, are nuking down the image quality as total picture. well here you got a example:

220.000 calculation picture:

And the 38.080 calculated picture:

The far away planets simple dont need more details, because you simple cant see them.

This is actually a normal example of using it, you can even go towards a more extreme level. for example those 2 final pictures i used for the 220k and 38k solutions, where actually far more extremer.

The first one actually had a render time of 27,27ms with 2328.48 vertices.
while the second one actually had a render time of 1.29ms and 109.44 vertices.

As you can see, you can gain huge leaps on speed / quality using these techniques.

And thats exactly what resident evil merc is doing on a low level. ( reduce the futher away zombies with polygons, so they can add more towards the ones infront. And maintain speed.

Conclusion:

Later gen games will look alot better and polished, once they start to use the hardware potentional with all kind of solutions.