NDS: Nanostray

Well i am impressed. These guys are good however.

DarthWufei said:
I feel sorry for the guy who has to answer all those emails. :( Be more considerate!

I know. People here are relentless.
 
Deg said:
Well i am impressed. These guys are good however.



I know. People here are relentless.

There is nothing wrong with asking to clarify news. We have to publish this news and it helps if you can clear up confusion before it's posted. Trust me, we are all grateful for his answers.
 
Deg said:
Well i am impressed. These guys are good however.



I know. People here are relentless.

:eyerolls

Wow 3 or 4 questions. Do you know how many emails companies, in industries other than videos games, get in a day? The questions asked were smart, to the point, and helped with purchasing decisions.
 
I figure these screens are getting a lot of attention here because it's the one of the first 3rd party NDS screens we've seen, yes?

Aside from Atlus' Caduceus, I mean.
 
explodet said:
I figure these screens are getting a lot of attention here because it's the one of the first 3rd party NDS screens we've seen, yes?

Aside from Atlus' Caduceus, I mean.
EA showed off the DS version of Urbz already. There were the 6 3rd paty E3 games also (Egg Monster Heroes, Sonic, Bomberman, Gundam Seed, Pac-Pix and Pac'n Roll).
 
Now we can wonder about the uses of the second screen, yes?

I'm thinking it'll be like the cockpit of the ship you're flying, and have buttons and whatnots
to change maybe firing rates and weapons and arc of fire. Maybe something like that.

It could also give you a different viewpoint of the action, similar to that old Playstay game (Philosoma, I think), since the game is in full 3D and all.
 
JasoNsider said:
There is nothing wrong with asking to clarify news. We have to publish this news and it helps if you can clear up confusion before it's posted. Trust me, we are all grateful for his answers.

Well yeah if you're covering the game its a good idea to :) I assumed it was just alot of fussy posters coonverging on the email address and overloading the person :p
 
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I don't think we're overloading them. It's just myself and Society that have mailed him thus far in this thread.

Should I ask if there is now texture perspective correction in the hardware now? Is that what it's called, or mip-mapping?
 
JasoNsider said:
Color me insanely impressed, guys. I did a little digging after Dark's comments (thanks dark, you made a good point) and asked to clarify.
Hah, neat! Nice job, Jason.

I would like to see those shots at a more native DS resolution, of course, but going by what we can make out they look very nice.

Could Drinky Crow's main reason for putting the system down (FIRST GENERATION 3D VOMIT BARF) be obsolete already?!?!
 
JasoNsider said:
I don't think we're overloading them. It's just myself and Society that have mailed him thus far in this thread.

Should I ask if there is now texture perspective correction in the hardware now? Is that what it's called, or mip-mapping?

Actually, ask about the sound hardware in the NDS, since Shin'en is providing music tools for NDS developers, they should be able to give you a very knowledgable answer. It'd be nice do know what the NDS is capable of in this regard.
 
Society said:
:eyerolls

Wow 3 or 4 questions. Do you know how many emails companies, in industries other than videos games, get in a day? The questions asked were smart, to the point, and helped with purchasing decisions.

I wasnt that serious :p and yes they were very helpful :)
 
I asked for information about the sound engine and DS rendering quality. No response yet. Either he's done answering questions for now, or is writing up a lengthy response.
 
I wonder if Shin'en is the company developing Moonlight Fables, too. That's the other NDS game that Majesco is publishing (with an announced name, anyway)
 
Looks better than I expected from DS (nanostray, not the Urbz :P). I thought at first the water and background stuff might be prerendered 2d backdrops, but if it animates, with reflections etc. then that's quite impressive. There certainly are some shadows in there anyway. Looks great.
 
Lost Weekend said:
I wonder if Shin'en is the company developing Moonlight Fables, too. That's the other NDS game that Majesco is publishing (with an announced name, anyway)
Probably not given their size... I think one game at a time is all they can really handle.
 
True that. Maybe if we can find out all these small studio's websites, we can get alot more NDS game info. It seems like they're far more willing to show than the publishers and the big N are. Right now, anyway :)
 
Lost Weekend said:
Haha! See.

As it's been said time and time again by people more knowledgeable than me in such areas, with the NDS's natural graphical feature set and considering its screen size and native resolution, it should have no problem pumping out great looking games. Basicly, Nintendo knew exactly what they were doing with the hardware :)

Nobody said that the games were going to look like crap.

The DS has faster RAM (I am sure this is true in terms of latency: it is tough to do worse than the N64 which wasted) and actually if you really count it has a bit more RAM (if you exclude the expansion pack).

The great advantage of the DS is the cart though, mainly its size.

1 Gbit is a lot for a console the level of a N64: more space allows you to be a bit more creative in certain things and save computations by preparing tons of pre-created data structures (big CLUTs and so on) especially since random accesses and streaming from the cartridge will be quite probably "not slow".
 
Actually a few people said the games were going to look like crap (and one of them is certainly eating crow, get it? :))

You were never one of those people, though Pana. You're actually one of the people I was refering to in the post you quoted as 'more knowledgeable than me in such areas'
 
u_neek said:
Is it tomorrow the new DS games will be revealed?
So the legend goes. I really hope we get something postable out of it -- details about the launch software would be greatly appreciated, as that's really what I'm going to be basing my DS purchase on.
 
JasoNsider said:
Color me insanely impressed, guys. I did a little digging after Dark's comments (thanks dark, you made a good point) and asked to clarify. My question was:

His answer:

Wow....

Damn, how the hell? That looks vastly superior to anything on the DS at this point. Most DS games looked like subpar N64 titles with no filtering...but this really nice.

Well, I guess the water isn't too suprising, though...I mean, a lot of N64 games (like Turok) had very nice looking water effects.
 
Should I ask if there is now texture perspective correction in the hardware now? Is that what it's called, or mip-mapping?
You should actually ask if the hardware supports bilinear texture filtering, as that was one thing that was glarringly missing from all the E3 demos, but it looks like these pictures might have it. I think mip-mapping is probably out of the question, but you could ask for that as well.
 
I broke out Mario 64 recently... I was surprised how crap it looks compared to Mario 4x4. THere aren't that many improvements but they are noticable. Check out the character models. I'd be interested to see what a fully original title looks like... ie if it would have better geometry.
 
Well, you gotta think about it this way, dark10x. Most of what we saw at E3 was either incomplete games (probably rushed to get them to the show) or tech demo's (that focused more on the touch screen than any graphical effect) And now we have our first actual game that's been in development for awhile. We are only now really seeing what the NDS can do graphicly. I though that 'Hurted Heart' game looked nice and smooth as well.
 
radioheadrule83 said:
I broke out Mario 64 recently... I was surprised how crap it looks compared to Mario 4x4. THere aren't that many improvements but they are noticable. Check out the character models. I'd be interested to see what a fully original title looks like... ie if it would have better geometry.

I disagree...

920758_20040511_screen001.jpg


I have also recently replayed Mario 64, and the character models and environments look better than 64x4. The models in 64x4 are different looking, but not necessarily better. However, that was an early demo, so we can't really judge...
 
u_neek said:
Is it tomorrow the new DS games will be revealed?

Where did you hear this? There was a list already announced the other day, unless there's a further unveiling of games to happen..(i.e. media from new games etc.).
 
If they were able to add bi-linear filtering without taxing the hardware too much (software effect) or if they add it to the GPU, well this puppy will look great.

The N64 was not a bad hardware, except the memory sub-system.

The rest was actually veyr well designed and quite powerful IMHO.

Sure the peak drawable polygon count of the N64 was higher than what the DS had in thsoe specs (120K polygons/s), but not many gasmes were able to really push the unit: fill-rate limitations would usually stop you from really making the RSP shine.

Z-buffering was not even free (I'll leave out the exact impact, but it was noticeable).
 
Lost Weekend said:
Well, you gotta think about it this way, dark10x. Most of what we saw at E3 was either incomplete games (probably rushed to get them to the show) or tech demo's (that focused more on the touch screen than any graphical effect) And now we have our first actual game that's been in development for awhile. We are only now really seeing what the NDS can do graphicly. I though that 'Hurted Heart' game looked nice and smooth as well.

I just don't understand why they decided to not include texture filtering...
 
Damn, how the hell? That looks vastly superior to anything on the DS at this point. Most DS games looked like subpar N64 titles with no filtering...but this really nice.

Well, I guess the water isn't too suprising, though...I mean, a lot of N64 games (like Turok) had very nice looking water effects.
Well, yeah, pretty much. And except for that first picture which might be some intro screen or something, water (or anything else for that matter) looks pretty much N64 class on other screens. Then again, the screens are really small - it's hard to even tell if there's really some bilinear filtering being used, much less anything else.
 
I think there is a good chance that Nintendo has updated the DS hardware to include texture filtering.

Compare these two screens and you can see for yourself.

nanostray-1.jpg

Metriod_7.jpg


I don't think they even doctored their pictures.
 
Lisa Lashes said:
Is the DS backlit or frontlit? Both screens? How about battery life?
Both screens are frontlit. The battery will reportedly last you around 10 hours (although Nintendo tends to be conservative in their estimates).
 
dark10x said:
I disagree...

920758_20040511_screen001.jpg


I have also recently replayed Mario 64, and the character models and environments look better than 64x4. The models in 64x4 are different looking, but not necessarily better. However, that was an early demo, so we can't really judge...

True as MArio 64 in the early shots did not look anywhere near the final game's quality.
 
Is the DS backlit or frontlit? Both screens? How about battery life?
I think both are backlit. At least people were saying that they do look better than GBA SP screens.

I don't think they even doctored their pictures.
They did scale them down to almost half of their original size, though - as you can see by your picture comparision.
 
human5892 said:
Both screens are frontlit. The battery will reportedly last you around 10 hours (although Nintendo tends to be conservative in their estimates).

Thanks. Are there any advantages/disadvantages by going with frontlit over backlit?
 
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