Gaming GTA Chinatown Wars graphics

[VmprHntrD]

Tony Hawk American Skateland I used to own and that one uses those cel shaded graphics and renders up an entire city with a long draw distance. In the town you have a few moving cars you can hang off of or bounce off for points moving around town. There are peds, but mostly it's people standing still just with a moving(breathing) animation. That ROM on that one is fairly small so there's lots of room to work with.

On the space limits of N64 vs the DS it's easy.
N64 = 64Megabyte or 512megabits (8bits=1byte)
NDS = 256Megabyte or 2gigabits

Initially I was only aware of the DS capping out at 128megabyte/1gigabit but I recall some news somewhere how a larger cart size was possible and something like Dragon Quest 9 would be a candidate for it instead of going multi-card like that early early card art showed.

Mind you if they as someone else said did bankswitching you can double that on the DS.

 

[Sarvesh50]

look at the transformers game and need for street pro street they could make a fu;lly nice gta game with full 3d and if you need memory expansion it ok i have one.

 

[Shabadage]

The big deal here isn't storage size. The main bottleneck of something like this is going to be the processing power of the DS. Or more specifically, the 3d hardware.

 

[GeekyGuy]

More examples of decent city design on DS:

Spider-Man: Battle for New YorK


Ultimate Spider-Man


Tony Hawk: American Sk8land

(Everyone should be well familiar with this one.)

Tony Hawk: Downhill Jam


These games are showing all real-time, 3D graphics -- no pre-rendered backgrounds. If GTA can look on par with any of these and do what GTA does best gameplay-wise, I'll be more than satisfied.

 

[pasc]

agreed, thats what I thought too.

 

[Frederica Bernkastel]

Well, if the cards are bigger in size, its bad news for no0bs with R4s. "0H N035 4 QU4R73R 0F MY 1337 M|cr05D!!!!"
lol.

 

[Raestloz]

The biggest problem will be the compatibility issue

 

[OrR]

What compatibility issue?

 

[pasc]

I don't get it either... btw. OrR ? You are German too ^^ ?

 

[shakirmoledina]

a lot of games seem to give problems on the DS like Band brothers but hopefully this won't
I don't like messing with games until it works, but still it's fine as long as it does actually have a fix or else we don't want the games to never work on the R4

 

[GeekyGuy]

a lot of games seem to give problems on the DS like Band brothers but hopefully this won't
I don't like messing with games until it works, but still it's fine as long as it does actually have a fix or else we don't want the games to never work on the R4

Well, that would be the least of my concerns with Chinatown Wars, because if it's good I'll buy it. My main concern is how we haven't heard or seen anything about them -- just the announcement at E3 -- and it's due out at the end of the year. Ubisoft does that a lot too, and usually when these companies don't show their games until just before release, that's a bad omen. Sure, we still have until likely November or so, but if it was something that had a decent development cycle, we should have heard about it last year. Of course, GTA IV just came out, so they probably didn't want to compete with it, but still...it'd be nice to know something about the game and see it grow before release.

 

[VmprHntrD]

I have to agree with the above, but the Leipzig show is in like a couple weeks I think, and there are others chasing just behind. E3 is a joke as most them know and few say, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was held for something more interesting or it just wasn't in a good place yet.

 

[Satangel]

Yeah, I would love to finally know how it looks like, it's been a month now, and we still know shit about the game...

 

[pasc]

Well in a interview was revealed that Nintendo would want R* to show something at Pax, so maybe we will see something then ?

 

[monaug5]

Check Moon or dementium for the type of 3d graphics that rockstar could push for.

 

[Shabadage]

Check Moon or dementium for the type of 3d graphics that rockstar could push for.

Moon is going to be fucking awesome I hope. The creators said it's going heavy on the System Shock vibes, and considering that's one of my favorite games (2 specifically) I've got high hopes for Moon.

 

[kintesh]

i thing the graphics gonna be like Transformers ds. the only game i ever play which has free roming just like any other gta. and the Transformers ds graphics are way better than i was thing.

or gta might me modified version of Transformers ds.

 

[Shabadage]

i thing the graphics gonna be like Transformers ds. the only game i ever play which has free roming just like any other gta. and the Transformers ds graphics are way better than i was thing.

or gta might me modified version of Transformers ds.

It's not going to use the Transformers engine. Different developers, and the Transformers game was kind of buggy due to the time constraints that Vicarious Visions had to get the game out in time for the movie tie in (Just look at the sky).

 

[OrR]

btw. OrR ? You are German too ^^ ?

 

[GeekyGuy]

It's not going to use the Transformers engine. Different developers, and the Transformers game was kind of buggy due to the time constraints that Vicarious Visions had to get the game out in time for the movie tie in (Just look at the sky).

Yeah, that's thing with them. Vicarious Visions (and their Alchemy engine) can make a great-looking DS game, but often they rush stuff to market, though I'm sure they have little choice in the matter. Stuff like Kung Fu Panda, you could tell used a good graphics engine, but the graphics didn't look that great overall; it was a rushed production.

But the building blocks are there. The potential is there with DS. I keep going back to both Ultimate Spider-Man and the first two Tony Hawk games (all of which were Vicarious Visions), and I like what I see. I think that sort of approach would work just fine with Chinatown Wars.