Zelda: The Wind Waker – Tech and Texture Analysis

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=104415

by fmax30 • 12 years ago

332 77 12 years ago

krisgee4• 12 years ago

Fantastic! I remember reading this a couple of years ago and saying "huh, that's cool" but I make games now and it's much more interesting to read having had to write shaders and make similar sorts of compromises, I especially like the closest source shadows and semi-dynamic tassles on the spears.

On a less technical note it's amazing how going with the cell-shaded look has made the game age so well even the original non-HD gamecube game still looks great today.

bane• 12 years ago

Also interesting is that the game is having something of a resurgence. IIR it wasn't as well met when it was first released, but it's grown on the community and is really being held up today as a classic.

macspoofing3• 12 years ago

Yep. It was the wrong game for that time. Gamecube and Nintendo were fighting a "kiddie" image, and people were expecting a Ocarina of Time look especially since two years prior Nintendo showed off a great concept demo[1]. People really wanted that game.

So when Windwaker was announced it was a big let-down and had minimal cultural impact (even though it was a critical and financial success).

In fact, it seemed like the entire Gamecube era can be defined by Nintendo trying something different and kinda being punished for it due to preconceived expectations. Things like FPS Metroid instead of 3rd person Metroid. Mario Sunshine instead of Mario 64 2. Mario Kart Double Dash instead of regular Mario Kart 64 2. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat instead of proper 2D Donkey Kong Country. And of course WindWaker. It's no surprise that some of those games became cult favorites even though they didn't resonate at the time. They were good games, but wrong for the time. Sometimes it pays to give people what they want.

Nintendo is actually pretty clueless with market trends in general. Sometimes that's ok, but sometimes it hurts them greatly (e.g. sticking with the cartridge format one generation too long - which I think is THE reason why Sony owned the console market until the PS3 era. No DVD on Gamecube which did hurt their sales in the US. Ignoring online gaming until well into the Wii generation, and even then being clueless about it for many years. No answer to Xbox Live/PS Network. Missing the HD era by a generation - though they got really really lucky with the Wii _initially_). More recently, a Nintendo exec couldn't understand why people would want to watch streamed games[2]!)

---

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBtAvX4Pkyk

[2] http://www.gamespot.com/articles/e3-2014-wii-u-s-lack-of-twi...

pyre2• 12 years ago

I got it when it came out, and while I was disappointed that it wasn't basically 'Ocarina of Time' on better hardware (which was known well in advance of release), I really enjoyed the game. I'm glad that it has held up well. I'm guessing that the only things that haven't held up well are the GameCube <=> GameBoy Advance features of the game.

jafaku• 12 years ago

Kind of offtopic: As a professional of web development and operations with ~10 years of exp... Any ideas where I should start if I want to learn game development? I want to be able to create something by myself, like the Dwarf Fortress guys. Not sure if something with better graphics is even possible as a one man project.

Where else can I ask this question without being treated like a noob or a "gimme teh code plz" beggar?

krisgee4• 12 years ago

I'm almost 100% sure others will disagree but I'd say start with Unity. The most important thing is getting something small done to give you a taste of what's involved and then you can dig deeper and develop Opinions and eventually go pick a new engine/roll your own.

I definitely do not recommend trying to roll your own engine at first because you'll never get a game done.

lgieron• 12 years ago

That's what's possible as a one man project: http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/game/

AFAIK he did all the game design, coding and assets (models, textures, sounds etc.)

Eric_WVGG• 12 years ago

What kind of web development do you do? Dwarf Fortress could totes be accomplished in Angular.js

JoshTriplett3• 12 years ago

Given that you've already worked on web development, I'd recommend starting with HTML5 technologies. Don't sweat the graphics right away; many people get away with very rough graphics as long as they have a fun premise. Work on game logic, a graphics engine, that kind of thing.

If you like JavaScript as a language, use that; if you don't, then either try a language that compiles to JavaScript via emscripten or similar, or try a language that works with Chrome Native Client.

PhasmaFelis• 12 years ago

For advice and support on getting started with game design, The Independent Gaming Source forums (http://forums.tigsource.com/) are the best resource I know of.

otikik2• 12 years ago

http://love2d.org - see you there.

NDizzle• 12 years ago

I just started playing this for the first time last night. I'm playing the Wii U HD edition. It looks amazing, and one of the first things that stood out to me was the red cloth on the spears.

I spent about 5 minutes in a barrel last night just watching the guards swoosh around their spears. My guess was that was added for the Wii U edition - but apparently I'm way wrong.

Incredible looking game!

DoggettCK• 12 years ago

I envy you right now, getting to play it for the first time. Wind Waker is on my list of games I play once a year, up there with Grim Fandango and Mega Man 2.

WWLink2• 12 years ago

Yeah those look cool, and nope those were in the gamecube version too.

fwiw you can usually pick those spears up after you beat the guards lol

dsuth2• 12 years ago

It always did look amazing. To be honest every new Zelda since has seemed like a downgrade in terms of graphics and animation. Just wait till you get to swaying platforms over lava lakes!

thegeomaster2• 12 years ago

It seems to me that the artistic portion of Wind Waker was given a little more attention than the technical one. The lack of instancing/batching when rendering grass or the lack of efficient culling outside, for instance, surely doesn't match the care with which the artists designed the lighting or splatted sea materials.

Still, great analysis.

Narishma5• 12 years ago

The lack of instancing is because there's no need for it. Consoles in general have low-level graphics APIs that let you make tons of drawcalls without the performance issues you get on PC.

glhaynes3• 12 years ago

Anybody got a quick explanation for why desktop APIs have such trouble with lots of drawcalls? What is it that Mantle, Metal, etc. do differently that saves so much time?

(And how much of that is a problem with just OpenGL vs. how much does it apply to DirectX as well?)

glhaynes3• 12 years ago

I'm not sure -- the game runs with a good frame rate in nearly all places (IIRC), so it doesn't seem like they needed the power that'd be freed up by better culling. Maybe they just didn't (prematurely?) optimize there and instead spent their time on some of the other little details from this post?

JoshTriplett3• 12 years ago

Exactly. PC games optimize like crazy because every optimization offers the chance to run on lower-end systems and sell a few more copies. Console games have a defined target, and as long as they run well on that target, they're done; optimizations only matter if the game doesn't hit the desired framerate on the one and only target device.

thegeomaster2• 12 years ago

I'd say it's a two-edged sword because if they can get more objects in a scene if they cull better, then the artists could've made even better and richer environments. It's all about striking a balance between not spending too much time to optimize in order to give the artists more freedom and giving the artists freedom but not enough time for them to use it.

otikik2• 12 years ago

I am glad it was done this way and not the other way around.

sjtrny• 12 years ago

At some point in the execution culling has to happen. It will always happen on the GPU so adding your own CPU based culling will lead to double checking and lower performance in most cases. It only makes sense to do your own culling if your GPU doesn't do it or if you have some spatial partition system which can cull in bulk.

to3m• 12 years ago

I only ever worked on the Wii, but on that system CPU-based (coarse-ish) culling seemed to be usually the right tradeoff. The GPU was mostly OK, but its vertex throughput always seemed rather poor, particularly if you supplied lots of vertex attributes. The CPU on the other hand was pretty fast, with short pipelines and low-latency RAM. (I was always under the impression that the Wii was at heart just a Gamecube with a higher clock speed and some extra RAM, so I figure the same principles would apply.)

While working on this game, I got some code that a colleague wrote for another product to pre-generate all the GPU commands offline, so things could be drawn with 0% CPU overhead. But once I'd merged it all in and got it working, the thing was actually slower! No good sending them all to the GPU and letting it deal with them, it turned out. It was faster to have the CPU carefully check each state setting and not bother the GPU with the redundant ones.

(Sort-of disclaimer: Wii developers never got tools as good as the ones for the PS3 or Xbox360. In particular, there was very little visibility into the GPU's working, just some poorly-documented performance counters, and a Javascript tool that would estimate a per-vertex cycle count for a given set of vertex attributes. So it's possible I just got something wrong. And sadly I can't claim to be the sharpest tool in the box.)

baby• 12 years ago

I remember just stopping and watching the waves in awe. I'm glad I'm not the only one who was charmed by them

"this animated wave material is one of my all time favorite fx in game art"

dhfromkorea• 12 years ago

Precisely the same kind of awe I was in. Even several years from then, I still listen to the WW theme songs as part of my morning ritual. Too bad I couldn't play games like this too much lately...

doomlaser• 12 years ago

If you enjoyed this, there's also a good breakdown of the techniques used to build Shadow of the Colossus on the PS2: http://www.scribd.com/doc/170524064/The-Making-of-Shadow-of-...

It goes into detail about things like how the inverse kinematics work, and rendering layers of translucent textured polygon shells for its fur effects since programmable shaders weren't possible on the hardware.

jhack• 12 years ago

It's absolutely amazing how Team ICO was able to push 1999/2000-level hardware. Anyone who wonders why the frame rate suffers so much needs to read this document.

Cthulhu_• 12 years ago

Re: frame rate, is the PS3 / 'HD' re-release better in that respect? I haven't gotten around to getting that version yet; I can imagine it's smoother due to better hardware.

chc• 12 years ago

Thanks for that! I've always wondered how they managed everything they did in that game on the Playstation 2. It was just miles ahead of everything else on the system.

Danieru• 12 years ago

Could someone re-upload the PDF to a different site? Scribd on mobile has turned into an even worse Experts Exchange or Quora.

DanBC• 12 years ago

Please could you clarify? On Ios I had a single full screen thing that I had to cancel but I get the full PDF after that.

Excavator• 12 years ago

Here's a Google Drive version I found by searching for the title:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bx96LuRBo4jASGNmVHNaUjZRU2VD...

BonsaiDen• 12 years ago

Here's another Version: http://selmiak.bplaced.net/games/ps2/index.php?lang=eng&game...

modeless• 12 years ago

Here's the original HTML form, courtesy of the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20060304194444/http://www.dyingd...

JonnieCache2• 12 years ago

I forgot how pretty that game was. Shame it fell apart 2/3 of the way through, like so many games seem to do.

Incidentally if you like this kind of thing, and you haven't played Fez yet, then well, the rest of your sunday is sorted.

antidaily2• 12 years ago

I thought it was pretty fantastic the whole way.

JonnieCache2• 12 years ago

That ridiculous fedex quest at the end kinda took the shine off it for me. It felt really lazy.

magoghm• 12 years ago

Zelda games have a lot of interesting implementation details. You might also be interested in Twilight Princess Eyes Breakdown: http://www.benjones.us/twilight-princess-eyes-breakdown/

krisgee4• 12 years ago

http://old.troygilbert.com/2006/10/the-movement-and-attack-m...

http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/8336/how-was-coll...

2D Zelda had some neat stuff too.

kevin818• 12 years ago

Are these same kind of techniques applicable to mobile devices or is the hardware just not there yet? I've always wondered about whether console development and mobile development have converged or not yet.

wtallis• 12 years ago

Mobile devices have long-since surpassed the GameCube generation of consoles, and in some ways are past the Xbox 360/PS3 generation. Mobile devices have architecturally modern GPUs, and only lack in core count and clock speed (given the lower TDP than consoles).

Narishma5• 12 years ago

And bandwidth.

daktanis• 12 years ago

This is pretty cool as a hobbyist game dev.

Zelda: The Wind Waker – Tech and Texture Analysis

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