Posted by Gremlin [24.8.18.225 - c-24-8-18-225.client.comcast.net] on 05 April 2004 at 19.36.13 ZuluTime:

In Reply to: Outbreak environments and stuff. posted by Jurassosaurus on 05 April 2004 at 17.43.23 ZuluTime:

From what I was gathering from the screenshots of the game, along with its reviews, the game is indeed fully 3D. One, usually, sure-fire way to check is to see if the camera ever pans about while you run around. I say usually since Capcom decided to show off their technical prowess by having the prerendered environments in RE0 do that too.

That's what I was thinking at first--that sort of sidescrolling effect in the main goody room where you end up hiding everything you're not using just then. But, having played it a bit more now [I've beat the first scenario a few times; I'm in no hurry to move on to the second one yet], it's pretty obviously 3D after all. Although the character sprites are aliased above the scenery, so they're still doing something to keep things rendering quickly.

Still, from what I've seen from the game (which I haven't had a chance to play...yet.) the environments look like prettier versions of Code Veronica. Given the allowed amount of environment interaction with the characters, I'd almost say that this would necessitate full 3D.

I'm not sure how much that matters to this. Regardless which character you play, the scenes always play from the same angles. It probably could be a 2D game, for all it matters. The only time you really get that it's 3D is when the camera dollies back to keep your character in the frame.

On those words, one of the zombies in the cyclic Outbreak demo over on the television just teleported across the screen. Literally. I'm hoping it was just the disc catching on something. Which is possible. My PS2 is getting pretty old. And I think it's got about half a cat in it.

Certainly possible. I'm on my second PS2 right now (note to potential PS2 buyers: Avoid the 3001 PS2 models at all costs. 3001R and 39001 are fine, but these early models are so fricking buggy).

The click of death. We went through that when the PS2 was first released. I think mine's a third generation machine. It slows down sometimes, but has yet to really break.

It might just be the game itself though. Outbreak apparently has some really nasty load times to it, along with some weird graphical quirks.

The load times are long and frequent. In a way, that works out nicely, since it gives you a sort of break to crack your vertebrae between onslaughts; of course, the downtime is nice and random--sometimes a loading screen will take thirty seconds, and, the next time, maybe five. I almost wouldn't mind a simple little Hit X to Continue option after the cutscenes and loading screens.

On the bright side, and as an incentive to get the HDD, one can decrease the load times substantially.

The bigger incentive is probably the potential for additional scenarios being released online. Although, there's also the potential for filling the entire 40GB drive with them. Based on the filesizes of the warezed DVDs, it looks like they've got this much smashed down into just over three gigabytes.

From IGN PS2 (yeah, I know. IGN again!):

Plagued with loading times both online and off, Resident Evil Outbreak boasts 12-17 second load times in almost every transition. What's worse is that these transitions happen with great frequency: sometimes within only a few seconds within each other. Meaning that segments involving a character entering a room, watching a 15-second cut scene, and exiting to the next room takes as long as one minute to experience. That's a poor trade-off for 20 seconds of activity. It's really pretty bothersome. Of course, you can use the newly-released HDD to help out with those load times (an approximate 40% improvement)...

Forty percent? I guess they're not quite copying the whole disc to the drive, as I'd figured.

Speaking of graphical quirks (bold emphasis mine):

Additionally, Outbreak does suffer from a couple of interesting graphical glitches (zombies will pop in and out of doors) and there's no collision detection by human characters when walking through portals or climbing ladders together (making for some very interesting clipping experiments that can create spontaneous three-headed people). On the whole, though, there are a lot more positives than there are negatives.

The main characters phase through each other. That's not the case with the zombies, though. A few minutes ago, I was coming out of the locker room above the pub, and three of the bastards ran right into me, knocking me back into the locker room, and adding a couple of loading screens. I emptied a magazine into those dickweeds when I got back out.
     And the zombies can, in fact, follow you into rooms; they've learned to open doors now.

Now that would make for an interesting screen capture.

This happened to me, actually. Amazingly, I got the other two morons to follow me across the forklift bridge and into the stairwell; when the camera switched over to the new angle, there were three of us all crawling through in the same physical space. Not that I had time to pull the RGBs out and slam them into a computer just then....

About captures, though: I unlocked a few of the videos [every time you play the game, whether you survive or not, you get a few 'points' (not unlike the points you get in the minigame after Nemesis) to spend in the store--on costumes, video files of the cutscenes, and even the soundtrack], including the Explosion. Which, if you haven't played the game yet, is the neatest thing from the first scenario: the cops [well, three of them...then two...then one snivelling little 'tard asking no one in particular what he should do next] have set up a baracade against no less than ten thousand zombies, who break through, eat them, and limp far too quickly over to you. On the bright side, the cops had nearly finished setting up a bomb, which you can [and, actually, must] finish constructing and detonate, leading to a cutscene explosion far better looking than the warhead from the end of Nemesis. I was hoping to find that video online, but it's not there yet. Since I can play it back whenever I like now, I'll probably send it through a captureboard and get it uploaded sometime today. It's really very neat.