Why Beam Lighting Was Removed In Metroid Prime Remastered
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- Опубліковано 15 жов 2024
- Jack Mathews details why the light environmental effects were removed from MPR.
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The more of these I watch, the more respect I have for what the OG Prime team was able to do with the Gamecube hardware.
But basically what they say is that the Gamecube hardware was better for handling this stuff, and at the time the things they left out weren't something gamers would notice.
So It's harder to work on the switch, and anything they have to leave out now goes noticed.
Still, respect for all devs that have to work so hard to still be criticized for things out of their control.
I remember arguing on forums how Prime looked better than Halo CE and Splinter Cell. 20+ years later, I still stand by my point, as it aged miles better than both.
@@pascalg.-berardi9242 I mean, better that Halo CE for sure on pretty much every level other than the fact that it pioneered normal mapping on console games. Splinter Cell on the other hand I'd be more tempted to say had better visuals even if the 'graphics' weren't as impressive on a technical level. It as pinnacle graphically as you could get at the time. Just the cloth physics on curtains alone is still impressive, to say nothing of the water or dynamic lights.
I was looking at some of the RTX Remix footage that people have been putting out only to be surprised that the lighting is still pretty dang close to the original.
I prefer Prime as a game, but no need to throw my boy Sam Fisher under the bus here.
That said, I love to talk graphics of PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era games.
@@ivanaviNieblaI think the problem today is that gamers just whine and cry about everything because they don't understand what actual limitations are. I appreciate what developers can do, even when limitations are involved. Most gamers are just whiney saps.
Better art design? Yes. In terms of tech i would say no. In this particular example vertex lighting was an old & standard way to simulate lighting. Both xbox game you mention had per pixel lighting, which was more accurate & realistic. Also both games used bump maps heavily which as you saw in the video was very taxing for GC hardware.
I felt something was really off in the dark areas, because I kept shooting to get more light to avoid switching visors but it wasn't working so I thought maybe I was just misremembering and could never do that. Glad to know I'm not crazy, and definitely sucks it's gone but I understand the reasoning behind removing it.
Woah dude, memory unlocked. I completely forgot about doing this!
I remember shooting at a wall so the glare would cause Samus's reflection to show up in the visor. Was wondering why that didn't seem to work anymore
@KosteonLink That DOES still work though
They made it more subtle and realistic imo. But there is one dark area in particular that just sucks all light out to force players to use the thermal visor which was weird but the rest of the game visually is so damn good I can look past it
@@KosteonLinkit actually occurs in this game more than the original. The one time its missing is when you take down an arreal pirate and it comes spinning towards you and explodes illuminating her face. Its also incredible how much more her face is when you get those shots. Particularly in battles
This also explains why the Switch tends to stutter rendering certain lighting effects even in games that aren’t that graphically intense. I feel like we tend to think of hardware in terms of a “more powerful” piece of hardware just being able to do everything better than a “less powerful” one, but really there are always different compromises being made.
The way the GPU handles drawing is completely different
Instead of drawing the entire screen in layers ike desktop GPUs do(first characters, then lighting for all characters, then UI, etc), it draws a small square fully with all it will have in one go.
So the more it has to draw on that small square, the longer it spends on just that
So now it has to draw the character in that square, the first shader, the other shader, the light shader, the UI, etc.
All before going to the next square
The lack of lighting effects from the sirens above the patients' heads in the Switch version of Two Point Hospital was disappointing.
As someone who has negative programing experience, this was an incredible explanation to understand a difference that many won't notice, but makes a huge difference looking at side-by-side comparisons
I noticed it among other things I'm sad they didn't add it
As someone who does have programming experience, their explanation on the different types of rendering methods (spec vs PBR) was dead on. It was so good, it practically defines the information text books would be using.
@@GrimBirthdayyeah. The hell was the deal with the burst shooting when you hold shoot
I think most people who played the original game noticed immediately. I certainly did.
It really sucks that they couldn't keep the dynamic lights, but I enjoyed the discussion on why they made that decision. It's not like they didn't want it in, but rather, a sacrifice that needed to be made in order to improve other aspects of the game.
Well, they could've had a bigger budget.
@@Tiger74147 the term "budget" as he used it refers to budgeting gpu power/usage. Not a monetary budget. So they could've gone back and sacrificed visuals to accomplish it, but they chose not to.
@@Tiger74147 With completely different hardware, sure.
@@JustinLesamiz so if nontendo didn't go with 3 gen old hardware at the time of making the damn thing.
The lighting is still there. Just muted. Shots have to be closer to the wall. Shoot along a wall and you will see it follows. Minus the electric beam I believe. But to be honest Ill take that loss for the highly improved lighting overall and the incredible boost in water physics
The dynamic lights are a HUGE part of the prime experience.. especially in the later levels where the game forces you to use night vision.
Basically, with deferred rendering + PBR, dynamic lights are expensive. Without deferred + PBR (Gamecube version), vertex lighting can be used and is essentially free. This is true for many modern games. Even on much more powerful hardware, developers opt to bake lights into normal maps instead of doing it dynamically because of how complex shaders have become.
This...still feels like a bizarre step backwards.
Like somewhere along the way we sacrificed something neat for the sake of a little extra definition that doesn't meaningfully improve anything.
@@Pyre well, yeah. You want higher graphics fidelity without ray tracing, you have to things in ways that have weird constraints. But, y’know, ray tracing is gonna fix all that. You can have an infinite amount of dynamic lights and the only constraint is the number of bounces you can afford.
@@Pyre This
Worth saying though that deferred actually does handle many lights very well. It just handles very large lights very poorly, and as the video explained, they needed large lights to get the effect they needed.
For example deferred bypasses that 4 light limit he talked about earlier in the video.
Honestly, and this is my opinion rather than fact, it's not that the shaders have become complex. It's that they require too much. On paper, it's all simple, and should run on a smartphone, but the number of things you need to hook up or plug in, just for one script in the whole thing to work and nothing else, is absolutely absurd and makes what should be effectively plug and play a nightmare. It's why I swore off doing 'pretty' games and went for stylized or pixel/2d.
I really miss the lighting, it adds so much
Atmosphere is everything. It doesn't matter that the game was pixely on the gamecube because the environments were so tied together... it felt REAL despite the visible seams in the textures.
It really sucks because seeing it side by side makes a huge difference, and I know no small part of the praise for the game actually came from that incredibly immersive lighting.
@@trequor Honestly my favorite way to play Prime remains to be playing it in the modified Dolphin emulator "PrimeHack" which allows for modern pc controls in Prime, then using additional mods to make it look better via HD textures among other graphic improvements and mods that make the game feel more like a PC game (replacing console button sprites with keys/mice buttons, far smaller crosshair ect.)
It plays incredibly well and still retains what made the original Prime's atmosphere great while removing all the pixelated textures.
Yea
If you have an OG copy you should revisit it.
Man videos like this are so cool, so much work and passion goes into a game and sometimes you don't even think about how or why certain artistic choices are made when making a game so hearing a developer talk about their experience while creating a game is pretty cool.
Hopefully they'll add it in for re releases on future consoles
this is amazing, i was wondering this ever since Remastered released, and you were able to find AND ask the right person, and they were totally willing to share and infodump, love it! keep it up! Subscribed.
The GameCube was such an absolute beast. I've got so many fond memories from that era of Nintendo.
Personally I'm willing to forgive the sacrifice made to the dynamic lights. Considering how good everything else looks, and the significant bump in quality they gave to the models and textures, it comes out to a necessary compromise if it means maintaining 60fps. It's still the definitive version for me either way.
Same here. I just wish the hardest most religious Nintendo fans wouldn't act like their hardware is all that impressive. Got into an argument with around 4 Nintendo fans who swore that ripping out the old light tech was an artistic choice because they were convinced that technological advancements mean we can only move forward in all aspects of gaming with each console generation. Like, they were so devoted to shilling for their lord and savior, Nintendo, that they convinced themselves that having no dynamic lighting was a feature.
@@psycholuigiman Well, now you can just post this video instead. It explains it very well
@@psycholuigiman I think a part of that may be because the most religious Nintendo fans _only_ play on Nintendo hardware, so they might lack perspective of how much better their hardware could perform. I've legitimately heard of people who never played Skyrim until it hit the Switch because they never branched out beyond Nintendo consoles.
@@MrPoeGhost Skyrim launch on 11/11/2011 was magical. Switch version vanilla is not bad but every other system has mods.
@@MrPoeGhost Makes sense. I would think that somebody with only one point of reference wouldn't act like they're so smart when they're actually kinda dumb, but it is what it is.
Thank you so much for this talk. I never understood why the awesome dynamic lighting disappeared. Now I do.
It looks like dynamic lighting exists at 1:46 when the shots are really close to the ice wall there. Maybe someone can make a yuzu or ryujinx mod that increases its area of influence?
It is working as the original. But because of increased polygon count, the area of effect is automatically smaller.
I think increasing the range is an option, but it'd look weird for sure. Keep in mind that those vertex lights don't account for normal mapping and specular mapping. Since those are calculated afterwards in the per-pixel.
The lack of the lighting was really noticeable unfortunately, I wish they could have kept it given those dark areas were really lit up by the gunfire which was both cool looking but helpful in combat. I know they have visors to help but it's not always the most fun thing to be looking at screens lit like that for extended period of times.
That said, I have sensitive eyes so maybe that's just a me-thing. But the Xray scope after a while could really irritate my eyes and certain scenes with the thermal visor.
That said the remaster is still worth it and was surprising just how nice the game was touched up.
Super interesting, but still super sad about that sacrifice. I wish some wizardry becomes possible one day...
As a GB Metroid Prime player, one thing I loved and that I questioned its possibility for a 2003 game, was the beautiful beam lighting at the tip of the gun. Sometimes it goes transparent and the colors fade into other colors plus it had these beautiful thinly textured astigmatism rays around the light beams, especially the power beam. I miss that in the new one for sure.
This peeved me so much while playing. Thank you for this breakdown!
This makes me feel less bad about owning both versions now. Because now I can still enjoy both dynamic lights AND environmental effects.
So happy to know about this, talked a lot about it with my friends and to know a more technical answer is a delight, now I really want to know why Phendrana Drifts looks so "Empty", a lot less fog and particles in general
Fog and particles are usually created via alpha textures (i.e., layers of translucent sprites). These wreak havoc on modern rendering pipelines, causing large areas of the screen to be rendered multiple times, which usually results in immense slowdown.
It's why you see a lot of Switch games elect to use a stipple effect when things are supposed to be transparent, such as in Bayonetta 3.
Im no expert but this can be answered easily, just by looking at the way other games behave. You mention fog which is a transparent/semi transparent effect that overlays geometry. These type of efects consume memory fill rate which the Switch its very limited at.
Its quite amazing how much this affects games more than other hw components on the switch. For example, people with modded Switchs have proved that a bump in memory speeds yields more significant performance gains than cpu or gpu overclocks in the new zelda game. When one would expect the game to be more cpu limited due to the heavy use of physics.
@@Refreshment01 Not that I would ever mod my Switch, but how does one mod a Switch to increase memory speeds and the like to increase performance?
@@TheRealRidley12 Its only possible in the original batch of Switches with the old tegra SOC. Well at least until now or that i know.
@@TheRealRidley12 Picofly modchip
I imagine that on the switch, they went with baked lighting on the environments. As so, the meshes are marked as static and receive no new lighting information as they would have lightmaps applied. The dynamic lighting from the beam shots would have been awesome but its literally one of the best looking games on the switch as a result.
Despite retaining many of the original detail as it isnt a full remake its really up there with the best looking switch games lm3, mario odyssey, xenoblade, the witcher 3, crisis core reunion, sniper elite, crisis games, etc
Baked lightmaps and dynamic lights aren't mutually exclusive. You can very easily just calculate a sphere of a given size around the light source, and then use that to generate a glow effect that temporarily adds to the static light data. It doesn't matter if it doesn't look realistic, it's still better than nothing.
It honestly baffles me that Nintendo would approve the removal of a genuine gameplay function like that. However minor, removing beam lighting negatively impacts the gameplay experience due to the reduced visibility. Especially so, given that the Switch is a handheld device. Playing the game outside on an even moderately bright day is not possible because the game's darker environments are effectively impossible to see.
It's an otherwise perfect remaster, too, which makes it sting even more.
@@alfo2804 There really weren’t any rooms that you should have needed beam lighting for. The only dark rooms in the beginning have passive creatures who emit light. You don’t have to shoot them. You would have the thermal visor which you are meant to use for any dark rooms later on.
I can’t imagine the percentage of people who care about playing Metroid Prime outside in broad daylight is very high. Compared to the vast majority of people who would rather have the better performance and graphics.
Vertex lighting is incredibly cheap and applicable to virtually everything. Baked lighting wouldn't really have limited them, since it's a simple material transform function similar to a Photoshop blending mode.
The explanation he gives doesn't even really apply here, that's the old and "correct" way of doing it, but instead of simulating light, you can just take information from a Z depth buffer, and then do a screenspace transform that modifies the diffuse colors. It would have been just as effective (though not exactly physically based).
The simple answer for why it's missing is that they just didnt do it.
@Nami Away Yeah, this seems like another case of a developer being blinded by their own knowledge and experience, and failing to consider any alternative solutions.
Same as that other former Prime dev who claimed that Metroid Prime Trilogy would be impossible on the Switch because the tech in the Joy-Cons is different than the tech in the Wii Remote.
Tl;dw: in order to light everything, you have to render everything; but Switch normally doesn't render anything that's behind anything else opaque. Thus, dynamic lighting from fast-moving shots would conflict with the mobile hardware's optimization and result in massive slowdown.
Wonder why BoTW could do it also with deferred lighting and on Switch
Unless that's the reason why it's also 30fps
@@TechBlade9000 ding. and saying it's 30fps is awfully generous...
@@TechBlade9000 BoTW is a different engine with different constraints as well.
Not everything works equally across different game engines.
I wish they could have brought it back for docked mode, even though that would make the experience unequal between the two modes. Not seeing the area around you light up when you charge your beam is kinda a bummer when you compare it to how good everything else in the game looks
It still could've dropped the framerate even in docked.
A toggle-able feature would be nice for *potential* future hardware though.
The switch currently as great as it is, is getting old
They should have given more graphical options. Like allow me to get the lighting back but drop the FPS to 30.
It's the same GPU either way.
Docking the switch just connects it to the charger and hdmi. There's nothing in the dock.
The lighting is unfortunate, but it's a small price to pay for Metroid Prime to continue to be the best looking game on the console it releases on.
Yeah keep telling yourself that
@@dysonwitwer6430 I mean, it doesn't really affect anything. It's just a very minor annoyance.
@@calvinbrinenestoris2357 im talking about the whole game. The art style is totally different
@@dysonwitwer6430 looks great. Now we have two great versions of prime. The original and the remaster.
@@dysonwitwer6430 Oh.
I mean, what were they gonna do, just take the original and upscale it? That's what most Switch remasters do and everyone HATES it.
Granted, the original Prime looked amazing, but this version looks so much better that when I look at the original Prime again I mostly see the visual flaws.
Nice video. The reviews all pointed out the lack of dynamic lights and its nice to actually understand why they were not included
I don't even develop games and I can think of multiple cheap methods to implement lighting effects. Devs used to be very creative. The hardware was often so limited that making a good looking game was impossible without coming up with creative methods to make it seem like you get past those limits. One of the developers of Sonic 3D has a UA-cam channel and he goes in-depth in how many impossible things were achieved on limited hardware. Try and look up just how they managed to get the CG intro for Sonic 3D to work on the Genesis hardware, it's amazing. With the stuff I've read and heard about over the years for how creativity can often make up for the lack of power, I'm not convinced that these lighting effects had to go. Especially not when he pretty much just explained that the Switch hardware wasn't powerful enough to brute force it, but did not mention anything about potential alternative methods.
been wondering about this, very informative!
The lights could be basic without shadow casting.. Maybe someday with a patch.. The laser lights would make the game even better!
That's what he's talking about, and it would still be way too heavy to run at 60fps.
Both the original and remastered versions use light maps, with things like shadows and light bounce calculated ahead of time. Actual shadows are only cast from specific sources for specific objects, like when you see Samus in cutscenes.
@@3dmarth Maybe on Switch2.. Metroid Prime Remastered looks nice, but it can be a little static.
Instead of sacrifice they could have had a toggle option and let the players decide
I JUST HAVE TO WONDER
will they be implemented in a patch for switch2?
Glad this popped into my recommended. Channel looks great! Great video! Subscribed.
"You could probably have a *box* and it couldn't handle that many lights." This is accurate. Polygons are *really* cheap on modern hardware, and there are shader tricks you can use to make them even cheaper if you really need to. *Draw calls* are expensive, and most modern engines use a lot of tricks to minimize the number of draw calls.
ELI5: a computer can draw one thing with 5,000 polygons a lot faster than it can draw 5 things with 1,000 polygons each.
I work on a dev team and imagining our lead programmer explaining this while cussing every 5 words with a chuckle and then finishing with "It's just not ****ing possible, okay?", made my day.
Sounds like the lead has a lack professionalism.
@@_ch1pset Swearing is how some people communicate. Learn to listen to what people are saying instead of focusing on how they say it.
@@HeroC14 the context you provided seems aggressive and defensive. I'm not saying there's no room for swearing in the workplace, but when it's directed at people, it's a problem. And if your lead talks this way to everyone all the time, they are the problem. Of course you could be leaving out context that doesn't make this hypothetical sound condescending.
@@_ch1pset Nah, I think you're filling in blanks to create a false argument. Stop being a prude.
@@_ch1pset bruh projecting 😆 🤣
If only we had a proper next gen hardware
this is my favorite environment, where slightly more technical things are discussed, the idiots I had to deal with to explain this thing made me nauseous, in the end I sent them to fuXX off. I hope that in the future this game can get some upgrades from Switch 2.
The Tegra 1 in the Switch is the same GPU that was in my 1st Gen Surface...from 2012...what Retro Studios was able to do with ancient mobile hardware in spite of everything is remarkable
I could have waited for a Metroid Prime remaster for a next gen switch to have that dynamic lighting. Maybe then, they wouldn't need to sacrifice it. Aw well, still looks beautiful and it's the attention to detail that brings a smile to my face in video games that others may not care or see.
Good explanation. There still is a few, limited lights in the remaster though. However, comparing the action of the original, it is clear something is missing. Here is hoping for a patch when the next console launches ;)
Just imagine how good the remaster could have looked if it wasn’t bound by the Switch’s sub par hardware. Kind of a shame imo
This is the case for every game Nintendo has released in the last 20+ years.
Wait, this guy worked on Shadow of the Colossus (PS4) too?! I’d like to shake his hand!
TL;DR: the Switch hardware is actually less powerful for its time than the Gamecube was for its time
That's not hard to see. The Switch's hardware was very outdated the day it was released.
Love watching this, always interesting hearing about the tricks used to work around limitations. Shadow if the Colossus was another interesting case with their "Fake HDR" solution.
I kind of like how even back in that era devs were like "Man, this is archiac". 2002 game. Which to me in 2023 looks fantastic on my Samsung flat screen hooked in by composite cables btw, it's held up extremely well.
And I mean on a Gamecube, original hardware.
I could be wrong be I'm fairly sure there's a mistake here. While Breath of the Wild is admittedly 30, it can handle dozens of dynamic points lights. My understanding is that you only have to use a buffer if you want your light to be shadow casting, which would be unnecessary for the beam.
Side note, I think the real reason they don't have beam lights is that 100% of the environment lighting is completely baked, which makes it more or less impossible to light dynamically, correctly.
I can see why Metroid prime and the remaster were so good and run so well. The team clearly has a good understanding of hardware and what it’s capabilities are and how to best utilize those capabilities.
The remake laid a perfect foundation, super grateful for it. The fans will eventually figure out how to put it back in somehow with this new engine.
we're more likely to see a raytracing mod for the game than to see the original dynamic lights come back
@@ElysaraCh I highly doubt we'll see raytracing in this until fans decompile it in 20 years and make a PC port. I actually think it's more likely that modders figure out how to implement at least the dynamic light beams before we get ray tracing.
@@Torbulous i mean obviously it'll be on an eventual pc port or in a more advanced emulator than we have now. that's what i meant. nobody's putting raytracing on it any time SOON.
@@ElysaraCh oh! I just wouldn't be surprised if we actually did get the dynamic light effect back in some sort of mod for the emulators in the next 2 years or something. Or maybe not, idk. It would be cool at least.
I hope for a Switch 2 version with a better lighting system. It’s the remaster’s main weakness
Genuine question if anyone knows -- couldn't they have just done a vertex lighting for only those specific lights? And couldn't they have modified the falloff so the light spheres didn't have to touch so much of the world? I just wonder if there's some cheap alternate way they could have achieved *some* kind of dynamic lighting even if it was pared back in quality
Yes, they COULD have. and No, it would not have been cheap to do. If they tried it, they would NOT half-ass it. And that would take time and money, which they did not have an excess of.
It’s telling that the Switch doesn’t have the raw horsepower to replicate an effect that was not only possible but basically free on a console 16 years older. I’d expect the PS5 to be able software render a PS2 game, for example. It’s incredible that they manage to do anything interesting with such anemic hardware, let alone a game like Tears of the Kingdom; the Switch really is just running a high end smartphone chip from 6 years ago at the end of the day.
Wrong. It's telling you that it could not do per pixel lighting passes within the confines of the Switch's graphical engine. However the Switch is way more powerful than the GameCube. As the dev explains here, there's a difference between a vertex shader effect (It could be called 'free' but it's not really.) and a per pixel shader effect (The most expensive way). A vertex shader effect is performing per vertex point on lighting (So it only affects the triangles of geometry). And as he also told, the new lighting system needs to be interpolated within the final pixel shader mainly because back then, the environment shader didn't use bump maps, and no specular maps. (He does refer to a matcap, a 'dumb spherical image that would move around' to make it seem like an object has lighting.) But if you were to use the same old vertex light technique on the new remastered version, along with a shader that'd be using both normal mapping and specular mapping
This is why we need a Switch with better hardware and its due since before Switch OLED.
Wouldn't have this problem if Nintendo would build proper consoles. Even the GameCube was fantastic and one of my favorites but it could've been so much more.
If only OLED switch actually had better hardware 😢
But the thing is, they do emit light--the "bubble" is just way smaller. If you look closely they do light up nearby walls very slightly.
This is a real shame. I genuinely think the lighting is a non-negotiable element of the atmosphere of the Prime series. Maybe the most important one. I don’t care about washed out unreal engine realism I want the cool retro futurism shine and lighting a nearly pitch black hallway with my female doomguy death beams
Honestly everyone makes “really really good” environments these days. The tools are just too advanced for you not to. The real spark of intrigue and immersion is cool, stylish dynamic effects.
Which is still in prime remastered, just 1 feature out of the 100s are gone for the lighting
@@VentA_7 You can't light up dark areas by shooting beams anymore, though? Which is what he's talking about?
@@BulborbStan yea, this is 1 lighting feature which is gone. There were many that were kept and/or improved, the beam projectiles creating light is 1 of the few that are gone.
To equate this 1 feature’s removal as the stylish dynamic effecting being gone, is silly, because they still exist, in dozens and dozens of different ways across the new lighting engine of this game. The comment treats this like the removal of the beams lighting up the area is the removal of everything for the lighting engine
It's not even a drop in the bucket in the sea of ways in which Prime is so immersive. Immersion is primarily a product of game behavior and gameplay engagement before it is anything visual beyond form/function incoherencies. The human brain responds far more strongly to gameplay than to visuals.
Agreed these replies be mad we dont worship the remaster cause a thing we enjoyed is gone. Deal its a no sell to me no matter how much fuckin brow beating is administered.
i would love to know why the fusion suit was cut in metroid prime remastered since its also in the wii version we dont need to link metroid fusion to metroid prime with a gameboy advance.
Still kinda hoping that the next console allows for some sort of update that adds them back and raises the resolution to a full 1080p
i haven't tried this in any game engine, but why not try and use decals that project a fake glow onto everything around the beams?
This Man worked on Shadow of Colossus!?
I understand why they didn't and they COULD have but it would have required much more work and strain on the hardware to where it might affect performance to which Nintendo always prioritizes performance over graphics. Which sucks because the beam lighting from the different beams in MP was part of an amazing immersion aspect.
For me, sacrificing such amazing lighting wasn't worth it. I felt its loss in *every* section of the game, and the darker rooms felt absolutely awful without it. :(
They should have made them less dark to account for this tbh
If you listen to what this guy is saying, it's a sacrifice borne out of necessity, and if they wanted to have good framerates while also having lights then they basically would have to make the game look bad outside of that AKA little to no improvement from the Gamecube lol. So if this one feature is a dealbreaker for you, you can just....ya know....play the original?
@@bruhvenant If the Gamecube can do it, the Switch can do it. There's many ways to do lights in games, also many ways that don't require a lot of resources. You just have to be smart about it. That's the problem with modern devs. They try to brute force everything, and if they can't they give up. Quite different from back in the day where they would come up with creative methods to make the impossible possible.
@@thenonexistinghero .....bruh. This video you are under, the one you're commenting on? Was literally 6 minutes of the Lead Engineer for the original game explaining in detail why it isn't that simple lol. I'm pretty sure he knows what he's talking about.
@@bruhvenant I understood perfectly what he explained, it seems you did not. And that's why I know they didn't try to get creative with a solution. All he said was that they tried to brute force it and it had a heavy impact on performance. Considering he mentioned nothing about alternative methods, I can only assume they gave up after that.
Essentially the Switch's hardware limits what they could do, which is about what you'd expect.
I think it looks good and it's hardly a downgrade, but boy would the game look 2x better with the old lighting effects.
None of this would be necessary if the Switch wasn't running on ancient hardware.
Wow i javent seen the game since i was young and being young was spooked by the game after a bit if the intro however seeing the lights be gone is kinda a bummer. The world looks too bright without it somehow.
Thank you for this, it was highly educational.
Oh man I miss that so much.
Unfortunate, but understandable. I do personally like little interactions with the environment that the beam lighting provided, especially in dark areas. But that aside, I do agree that the compromise makes up for it with better visuals and performance. Especially the performance.
there are so quite a few dark areas that would have benefited from the beam lighting because without it it was really difficult to see anything and make out the orientation of the view.
I wonder if you could just fake it/work around that by propagating a projection that follows the beam with a falloff to intensity based on the depth buffer result related to the projectile object location. TCDU: a glorified classic flashlight mixed with some fancy lens effects and intensity falloff based on the distance of the thing behind it.
Would probably produce some strange artifacts though, but might still be better than nothing. Or, maybe that's how cheap lights are already done and poor switch couldn't even handle that. .-.
that's basically how raster lights work, and unfortunately is not a workaround. raster doesn't ACTUALLY calculate the propagation of light at all. that's the primary difference with and benefit of raytracing.
The problem is all the redraw that lights cause. No way really around it in this case.
I don't know how vertex lighting circumvented these issues, but I assume they were able to avoid the redraw with that hardware (while likely being limited to much less sophisticated effects)
The way he's talking about the Switch rendering lights... I kinda wonder what his thoughts are on the Tera Raid capture sequence in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. He'd probably say, "Alright, they put this in... where are the cutbacks in the rest of the game?" And boy, are there!
This makes me wish this was on the Wii U, as it was just a souped-up three-core Gamecube. His description of opacity also explains why Switches so often do that weird screen-door transparency.
The GPU of the Wii U was completely different to what the GameCube and Wii used, whatever techniques they used for the GC would not have worked the same on the Wii U
@@dustarma All three are ATI/AMD Radeons. Was there a major shift in architecture? Wii U can still do all thr Texture Environment stuff the Cube can.
@@Nukatha so, fun fact. the gamecube (and wii) GPUs were actually designed by a smaller company called ArtX who were bought by ATi. Wii U's GPU was an actual AMD Radeon architecture (GX2) and contains a Wii GPU (GX1) core for backward compatibility.
I'd be more willing to forgive the lack of beam lighting if the environments themselves didn't end up more difficult to navigate/see as a trade-off. Contrast looks really beautiful until you can't see where you're going in a room because of it.
Now, all we need is someone trying to justify why the thermal and x-ray visors were made to be muddier and less visibly coherent.
With the Thermal Visor, the reason it looks muddier is because it's emulating something similar to what a FLIR camera does graphically. It looks like actual thermal imaging. Same with the X-Ray Visor. And I imagine some of it has to do with the limitations, like the Dynamic Lighting trade-off
That part is genuinely cool in concept, but the fact that it kills the usability that the original implementation had is awful.
Gamecube: “Unlimited POWEEEEEERRRRR!!!”
In GameCube was going in the right direction but was way ahead of its time which is why it sold poorly. If it did sell well it would go in stronger console in the future. Maybe a paradox where we are or not.
Still got my GameCube Version of Prime & Echoes.
Plus the Trilogy for the Wii.
Now I just wonder when Echoes & Corruption will get a Remaster??
Amazing how even as technology advances there are things you just can't do now, that they got away with then.
So wondering, could they have gotten away with keeping the lighting at 30fps?
I realize 60 frames with no drops is considered the bare minimum target these days, but lets be honest Metroid Prime isn't a game that really requires butter fast frames.
I honestly didn't even notice, but now I'm disappointed.
this is really interesting and informative, thanks!
Super-interesting and informative vid, thank you!
why couldent they just do vert lighting again?
Did he ever talk about the Samus’ fake reflection in that one room too?
It's a hardware feature of the GameCube. You can obviously do something similar on a switch, but you'd need to render from an additional viewport which I imagine is something pretty far out of reach from a Switch if there's also complex lighting involved.
After the sales of the Remaster, they have a budget to give the same treatment to both Prime 2 and 3.
Appreciate the info.
I find this fascinating. So just wondering, would it have been at all possible for the Switch or any modern hardware to have been built with additional vertex lighting capabilities to be used alongside the modern lighting methods?
The Switch is simply not capable enough to display both the remade environmental and texture upgrades **and** vertex lighting at the same time while maintaining 60fps.
It's not as if the Switch couldn't run the GcN version of Prime 1 perfectly, vertex lights and all - but the devs figured that the more complex environments / models (and at the level they were at) were more important than retaining vertex lighting.
If the Switch wasn't as antiquated as it is, none of this would be an issue, but obviously, the Switch's hardware is very antiquated.
I'm not too tech savy, but I feel like I can just barely make sense of what this guy is saying, which is a huge credit to his explanation skills. It makes a lot of sense with some common knowledge about the Switch and its general struggle with transparency, alpha effects and so on.
In other words... the switch has limitations they had to work with and lights = frame drops, so they ditched it in favor of a better looking world. Really need that "switch pro" about now Nintendo...
simplify the depth buffer and flood fill in the direction of the shot?
Imagine this game with Ray Tracing.
I knew i wasn't insane when i noticed there was no light emitting from the beams.
This is why I'm hoping prime 4 is cross gen, the switch is too outdated at this point
The Switch was outdated the day it was released. It's only slightly better than an Xbox 360.
@@JustinLesamiz yeah specswise it's a minimal upgrade over ps3/360/wiiu, hopefully the next system is at least more like ps4/xbone
Too bad they didn't opt to give this masterwork the budget it deserves.
i believe when he's talking about budget, he's talking more about a technical budget, i.e the maximum allowances the hardware will allow without tanking performance
Whoa. I never noticed they didn’t use bump mapping. It was the big buzzword feature of the time. I guess it’s kinda like how ray tracing is the new buzzword feature.
Why would it have to be a fullscreen pass? Couldn't they use a simple lightmap to track the bullets?
A lightmap is static. Imagine storing millions of additional lightmaps for every possible position of shots in every possible location in the game...
That'd be horribly inefficient on storage space alone.
@@MLWJ1993 wrong. The most classic use of a moving lightmap/shadowmap even in the modern era is cartoony games where the character's shadow is a simple circle
@@DandyDNA Those're a fixed distance away from 1 surface, I doubt you can get it to work anywhere near acceptable for floors, walls & ceilings at the same time...
@@MLWJ1993 not saying it'd look as good as the GameCube implementation, but it's better than nothing, no?
Even though they had to ditch the beam lighting in remaster, listening Mathews explain the differences between GameCube and Switch hardware still makes it seem that Retro still understands which things work the best on whatever platform they are developing for. The original Metroid Prime was one of the best looking games on GC, and the Remaster is one of the best looking games on Switch. Even though some sacrifices had to be made, they made the game run and look as great as possible!
Talk about a disappointing truth... I was super upset when I found out that feature was scrapped, but now that I know 'why', I'm just disappointed it had to come to that. : (
Huh, this is a fairly satisfying explanation, even if I don't fully understand why dynamic lights were basically free on the GC but expensive on the Switch, but being a trade-off with other graphics and a legitimate hardware technical limitation is way more satisfying than "they just didn't bother with dynamic lighting for beam shots."
the difference is in how smart the GPUs are. GCN's is a fairly "stupid" GPU by comparison. you just feed it the scene and it draws EVERYTHING in it, basic pixels everywhere. so it's relatively cheap to light a vertex, because you're already rendering fucking everything in the viewport to begin with and each individual pixel isn't super expensive to rasterize. so adding the light calculation is just adding a few more rasterized pixels, so to speak. nbd.
the switch's GPU runs a lot more effects and processing on each pixel, so the render pipeline is significantly smarter, using a sort of deferred renderer (which is more common nowadays) to only rasterize what's visible. this is mainly how such a low power chip can even HOPE to get playable frames at anywhere near 1080p resolution.
but now that means that each pixel you have to process your lighting on is far more expensive, relatively speaking. on top of increasing the rasterization load by a lot, you're also re-processing any shaders on the pixel to blend the lighting accurately. so when you do a pass to process the light, you're now putting vastly more pressure on the GPU.
he said they could have sacrificed environment detail to get the lighting - if the lighting pass didn't have to redo a ton of shaders, it would've been cheap to implement just like the GCN. but then the environments wouldn't have been as gorgeous as they are.
@@ElysaraCh Thanks, that makes sense. I'm still almost surprised they didn't make that trade-off specifically in really dark areas, which is where you really notice the lighting from shots anyway. I'm not a developer though, so I'm sure having different rules about which lights do and don't render based on some condition is probably harder than I think it would be.
Just more proof that the GameCube was a powerful console. Here's hoping the next console Nintendo makes has some power that can at least do everything the GameCube can do.
1:52 That right there might be reason for me to keep deferring to the original version over the remaster. That an the bizarre change to the doors and scan icons...
Agreed. I'm glad it got a remake and the remake *does* look good. But why would I spend money on a game when I already have the original version that I like more? Playing the segment in Phendrana without being able to use the Wave Beam to light up dark areas just seems annoying. Sure, some people might like that for a darker atmosphere during the section, but I preferred the little extra immersion from using my weaponry to provide vision.
@@rapidrotation An important thing to note with the original Prime is that anyone who didn't already own it (and isn't just going to pirate it) would have had to:
1. Find a copy.
2. Pay the seller's asking price (the average so far peaked in 2022 in January and December, both at $40USD for CiB)
3. Own a Wii (or less likely, a GameCube).
4. Own a GameCube controller, which if they own a Wii, isn't necessarily a given. And also likely not have so much of a preference in controllers as to not refuse a third party one in the current market - as someone who runs a used game store, I've encountered this a lot. Nothing short of perfection to some people.
5. Accept the control method of Prime.
If you want to talk about Trilogy, it jumps to $100USD average for CiB, with a peak of $140 in the last 2 years. And it's only getting more expensive. PrimeHack is an option if the potential player has a PC capable of running Dolphin comfortably, IF the person in question comes across the original NTSC revision of Prime for GC (which isn't exactly a given considering discs have been swapped around within cases that have gone through a used game store that doesn't exactly match original disc to case pair but just "X game disc" to "X game case" when they keep their discs separate from cases on customer accessible walls, ie what's seen in a GameStop/Electronic Boutique manage used games), or they use Trilogy, which once again increases the price to $100USD on average currently if they want the case too.
A lot of games that have become cult classics are remastered to try to help supply-demand for games that are long out of print, and potential players may not be looking to drop that much money on a single game. It's also far more accessible. The Wii may be the third highest selling (legacy, I know the PS4 and Switch have outsold it) home console, but because it was bought largely by casual users who don't value the hardware (much like the state of the PlayStation 2), I find they're sometimes a little harder to find than you'd expect - because a large quantity of people who bought them may have basically seen them as a glorified electronic toy (or a DVD player, in the case of the PlayStation 2) and not something that's valuable 8 years after purchase. "*After all, isn't there a new thing out now that people want instead...?*"
and the transparency part is why we don't have chozo mirrors too
I did not understand.
Can't they use vertex lighting on switch ?
Somebody please explain.
The switch is too mobile to actually be considered a console, it's not a powerhouse like the GameCube, Wii, Xbox, or PlayStation. It's like taking a large smart phone phone, jury-rigging the SD slot out of it so you can add in more electronics to give it more power, engineering the shell so it can have attachable joy cons, and then setting up the battery in a way so that only the provided charger and dock (although even the dock was known to fry the damn thing) would work with it, you can only make it so powerful. The switch's selling point isn't it's graphics, it's the fact you could literally take it anywhere you go; the bathroom, the park, school, and still be able to play it without a TV.
@@Liamzilla4777 The Switch is way more powerful than the GameCube.
@@kamamuzik it has better graphics, yes, but it still had to make sacrifices to keep a smooth frame rate, which means it might not be as powerful as Nintendo led us to believe
@@Liamzilla4777 That's not the point.
Vertex lighting was used on game cube, why not on switch ?
@@kamamuzik it's only powerful enough, it can't use vertex lighting without sacrificing fps, the beam lighting effect is there, but it only exists in lit areas, which makes me think that it's not a lighting effect, it's shadow casting but the effect is reversed, instead of casting an actual shadow, it casts multiple shadows that brighten pixels instead of dimming them
would always light the tunnels with wave beam when the power to phendrana got shut off, that really threw me off lol
So basically, just hardware limitations of the switch. Trade light rendering for stable 60fps. Makes sense
So, if we want to see those lighting effects in future remasters, it will have to be on a more advanced console or just a non mobile console.
so how do we see in the pitch black rooms in the remaster before getting the thermal visor?
It's not that bad. They account for it.
The pitch black rooms aren't pitch black before getting thermal visor, even in the original.