This information comes from Shin’en’s Jett Rocket “making of” blog…
“The Wii is quite fast in combining many textures in realtime. We use that ability to create our shaders (or materials) from many ‘layers’ on top of each other like in a graphics application. As some layers only have low frequency information we use much lower resolution textures to save some space here. How those layers are combined can be adjusted in many ways, even in real-time to some degree. Some textures for the layers are also created in real-time. We use that feature of our engine quite a lot to achieve special effects like reflections, refractions and various lighting effects.”
Shin’en is really unbelievable at getting the most out of hardware. They’ve done a tremendous job with the GBA, DS, and now WiiWare. I wish more developers could follow in their footsteps!
