Topic: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Expand

Wait, thats the part you ask source on? Well, okay, man, this is probably going to be really long, there is a lot of ground that needs to be covered.

Oh, but first, when I say 'The New Kids at Monolith Soft' I am specifically referring to the Kyoto studio. The Tokyo studio is basically a large chunk of golden age squaresoft, and I usually work that in whenever I bring them up. I also tend to bring up how much of a part of chrono trigger they were. It was literally the new kids at monolith soft who stopped and asked aunoma why. His veteran Zelda team, when faced with such things, every single time would go "What would god (Miyamoto) Do?" The new staff from monolithsoft, literally went, no thats dumb, there is no reason the player cant do this. They literally told Aunoma what Me and Mine have been screaming for years.... And Anouma actually listened to them.

Lets see, easiest first... Actually the delay had nothing to do with the switch, the switch vwersion was actually a literally raw version of the wii u version of botw, gotten up and running on switch with zero optimization. Didnt really take much time at all. I can provide a source to that, but its literally just going to be that now famous picture of the investors conference with the slide behind the nintendo dude literally saying what I just said.

The delay was actually caused by Aunoma being a little out of his depth with just how big a team he had working on breath of the wild, and mismanaging the team... One visit the game was doing really really good, then he went to supervise other projects, came back and so much new stuff was added that it ruined everything they had before (Outlined in an interview in edge 296, along with the vast majority of the other things in my post.) Said the lesson he learned was to remember to tell the team what they did that was good or something like that.

However I wasn't really referring to any particular delay, just the fact that the game went on media blackout after its initial reveal and that really shakey gameplay video, for over a yeah and a half, and when it re-emerged... It was breath of the wild, and looking distinctively different despite having the same art style and direction. (It had all the underpinnings of the Xenoblade streaming engine, and none of the underpinnings of the traditional Zelda Engine that were noticabole before). There was over a year and a half where there was not a single video, interview or even a picture of Zelda U. Thats what I was talking about.

Now the other one. You will never, ever ever EVER find any interview anywhere where Nintendo directly outlines these things or even talks about them. Its not the product end, its not something any PR mouthpeice will talk about. The one person who WOULD show this side of the spectrum... If he was going to get around to it... Well, Hes in a better place now.

But its more or less common knowledge for anyone familiar with software development, not even game related. There is a pretty clear trail, even evident in hex editors when you are rom hacking games through the generations... That kind of a foundation is pretty priceless, and there usually isnt much of a reason to get rid of it... To the point that I can tell you with a large amount of confidence, that despite Zelda switching engines, that evolution of the n64 codebase will still appear in many many games continuing its evolution well past the switch. In fact, it could circle back around to Zelda again. This time, was more of a marriage of convenience and efficiency, which would really be the only reason for such a scenario in my opinion. After all, Im not talking about the renderer, or the graphics engine, but the much lower language stuff. (Although the rendering engine from windwaker did go all the way through to skyward sword... but ill get to that)

Yes, Miyamoto considers the modified mario 64 engine that was the oot engine so far modified that its a different engine. Yeah Im not disputing that, thats actually the crux of what Im talking about, that these engines are the foundations for the mutations and evolutions that are built upon them. Doesnt change the fact, that the OOT engine, was built off of the mario 64 engine. Thats where it started. That one was built from scratch on that mips processor (there was nothing for them useful to build off of, the snes 65c816 was just a souped up 6502 from the nes, and their 3d engines relied on the FX chip, it was just too different. The n64 was a pretty clean slate on 3d engine software, and they had to overcome a lot of unforseen pitfalls with hardware there are some really good interviews on this over the years)

But once they established that low level code base, they had a foundation that they could build on top of, and when it came time for dolphin, that foundation transferred over. Now if you want direct evidence, you are going to have to get a n64 specific mips decompiler and a gcn specific ppc decompiler, so you can see precisely what code is in those roms. Good luck with that. I had some great fun on the mod scene of oot and ww and m64, and I never got into much more than a hex editor to do all I needed. Even with all the emulators we have, I dont think such a thing exists... would have certainly made a lot of things way easier then reverse engineering with trial and error.

But even so, we pretty much know there is a legacy code base in there. its really not something that unusual. The X86 processor in your computer right now still has all the legacy code of the 8086 from 1978. Still fully backwards compatable. And plenty of games started on the n64 ended up on the cube, with plenty of the same code intact (The biggest change was the assets like textures models and sound files). There is very little reason to believe Nintendo's internal dev teams would throw unecessary things away.

Honestly, you're probably thinking of more directly iterative stuff, things the player can see on the screen, as opposed to things every single 3d engine ever made needs to do, and still does the same way now as it did in the 90's.... Particularly since you stated very clearly iterative engines like m64 and oot were more than different enough for you.

Thats definitely where windwaker comes into play, and its no coincidence its been purely iterative since gamecube, With no change in basic processor, all machines have been variations on the same ibm 750 processor all the way until the switch, well, switched that., Keeping an actual basic functioning engine available, as opposed to just the framework that's underneath became a huge priority here.

But it wasn't windwaker that would start it:

"To tell you the truth, Super Mario Sunshine was developed on Nintendo's new R&D system, which integrates a 3D engine with other engines. This is a new system. When you use it, the time required for game projects is significantly reduced. So, Super Mario Sunshine was the very first game to be developed on this basic system. The second game is The Legend of Zelda." Miyamoto 2002

This is a basic description of the modern game engine. You have your base framework, into which other engines, like renderers or physics engines can be 'plugged' into. A more efficient version of what they were doing the previous gen, trying not to start completely from scratch for every game, instead modifying existing engines so completely they were like new engines. Now they made a modular base, which would have its own offshoots.

"It is now taking such a long time to come up with the basic engine for whatever game we are working for and if we can make use of an already completed engine, it is better for me as a producer. I want to make ideas come to life. As a producer and designer, I am hopeful we can make use of the Wind Waker engine for future games too." Miyamoto 2003

And oh man did he make good on that. So here there are actually some pretty good tells that these engines are basically modified versions of what came before, even if we didn't have shiggy here saying it.

1. These engines didn't use floating point for things like physics. This resulted actually in the dolphin emulator having the weirdest quirks for the longest time, until they figured it out... I think a year or two ago. Pretty recently. It was integer math, once dolphin made the switch (Heh), all the physics in WW were perfect, the replays in other games worked right, everything was fixed and way faster.

2. They don't use any culling beyond distance and frustum. This means that everything in the on screen area, is always drawn, all the time, observable yourself by turning on wireframes in dolphin. This is a pretty big one for what we are talking about. Particularly since this particular facet clashed completely with the way the Xenoblade engine handles things, which has tons of Occlusion Culling, and aggressive LOD adjustments, even right up next to the camera.... And is very specifically unique to the xenoblade games. I Mean, pretty much EVERY modern game has these things for their streaming open worlds, but you can LITERALLY identify any cropped video of a Xenoblade game, no matter how hard you try to disguise it, purely by the way it streams, culls, and changes lod, because of the way it handles culling and lod to make huge well detailed worlds... for low power consoles. Breath of the Wild SCREAMS that signature tell. Previous Zelda's, not in the slightest, they had their own signature:

So basically, in windwaker, and tp, and ss etc whatever scene you are looking at on your screen, EVERYTHING IS ALWAYS DRAWN, pots behind the wall? Drawn. Grass behind the pots? Drawn. Pig way off in the distance on the other side of the town? Drawn. You can see it all through the wireframe.

Im not sure what the reasoning behind this was, it may have just been that the gamecube was just that damn good at crunching draw calls compared to the other systems of the time. Its a signature tell. It makes for a very solid feel to the world. Everything within the frustum is already being drawn, so when you go over or around something, you never catch the engine 'catching up'. Do the same thing in dolphin with TP or Skyward sword, and you get the same results. The original reveal video, had this look and feel. Of course, its immediate drawback is that limits scene size and complexity. And it turns out, that original reveal video, wasn't really all it was cracked up to be. Oh, it was 'in engine', but there was a reason the camera never did anything but pan. Then came the aunoma and miyamoto very doctored 'gameplay video', which looked VERY rough.... Like the current iteration of the zelda engine couldnt handle that size with the scene complexity the reveal had. Then the game disappeared from media for over a year and a half. No video, no interviews, no pictures, no showings, no nothing.

Then SUddenly it bursts back onto the scene, in playable form, with all the streaming quirks of the xenoblade engine. That Xenoblade pop in, THat Xenoblade LOD change, That Xenoblade seamless world where you can walk right into a town with no loading screen, that Xenoblade teleport to any landmark with only a few second loading screen.

All signs point to Aunoma deciding to appropriate the Xenoblade engine, which already did everything he wanted for Zelda, and modifying it slightly, instead of making vast modifications to the current iteration of the once windwaker engine (Last used in TP HD)in order to be able to do what the xenoblade engine is already knocking out of the park. Best of all, they already owned the engine that already did everything they wanted. Its kind of a no brainer.

So, no, you dont have Aunoma flat out saying 'We took the Xenoblade Engine and modified it for our needs' And probably wont for years looking back at history. But the evidence for the argument is very, very strong, and any arguments against, are very very weak.