A Glimpse of Next-Gen

quote:Originally posted by Red 5

I can pretty much state for fact that it isn't in-game, it's been made specifically as a trailer and it's fairly common knowledge now that all PS3 WIP shown at E3 this year was pre-rendered.

There's a big misconception about a few of the titles showed at e3 which I'm familiar with, and is only partly true. All of it is still taken from the hardware itself, just not in real-time.

I can only vouch for a small number of demos, this racer not being one of them, but truth of the matter is that the alpha dev platforms are only a fraction of the power capable of the final units. So developing early demos means you can't run anything at real-time. To get around this, developers are producing content with playback estimation. All the footage is in game, but it just isn't being rendered at real time, but input has been pre-recorded (be it someone sitting down and playing a game running at 5fps, or if it's scripted) and then replayed at full frames, with each frame being recorded, and then played back at the expected frame rate. So,

'pre-rendered' no; 'pre-recorded' yes, but it's not a cinematic output from a rendering package like max or maya.

Yeah I know of 1 or 2 xbox 360 trailers that were put together this way for E3, but I didn't think any of the really good looking PS3 stuff was actually taken from alpha kits, other than obvious stuff like GT5 which was running GT4 (PS2) content.

quote:Originally posted by Red 5

I can pretty much state for fact that it isn't in-game, it's been made specifically as a trailer and it's fairly common knowledge now that all PS3 WIP shown at E3 this year was pre-rendered.

Like Troy said... I can't see why some people believe they're not real-time. I'm using "Unreal3 tech" everyday here at work... its just commonplace and almost outdated - that is, as far as the dev side of things go. It's just that 'soft-shadows' and 'PixelShader3' (and other buzz-words) havn't been absorbed into the general gaming public, that they see something like KillZone2 and start claiming its pre-rendered.

The tech is there and its doable...

The KZone2 vid was obviously heavily scripted (and is that a problem?)... but if you check the tools that UE3 has like the Matinee editor (as an example of the control developers have over real-time events) then there's no reason to kick up a fuss about whether its real-time... it is, and I can't wait! :P

Ok I'll concede... you're probably right with the Unreal engine stuff, but I still have serious doubts about that Motor-Storm video, if that's running in-game physics and graphics/animations (even at a low framerate) then they're way ahead of anything else I know of.

i read an interview with a sony exec (forget the link sorry) where he was asked "were the videos running on ps3 hardware". answer: "no, but they were rendered 'to spec'" which to me says "we predict the ps3 will be able to do this, so render all your videos with these limitations".

so as far as i know they wre neither reall time nor captured from real time fottage. 'rendered to spec' sounds good, but i refuse to believe anything until i see real time fottage (and i consider pre-captured fottage the same as real time).
sure the tech may be approaching what's in thoses videos, but there was realtime hair simulation, full motion blur, smoke, dust, and all sorts of other intense particles. sorry, you cant pass that off as real time and expect me to believe it. film still struggels to calculate and render that kind of stuff. dont get me wrong, i'm ready to believe it, and bloody hell i want to - it would be awsome - but a fancy pre-rendered video will not convince me. show me it running in realtime.

in the end it's all marketing anyway. they did the same with the PS2: "it's a super computer!" please... and now the ps3 is "super computer like", what will the PS4 be?
nothing backs this up better than the Final Fantasy Tech Demo. it was a re-render of the opening from FF7 using FF Advent Children art. they used the popularity of FF7 to create hype, then showed a render and called i a tech demo. how does that make sense? what technology is it demonstrating? sony's advanced marketing system?

ok, i might sound like i'm having a great big bitch at sony here, but that's not really the point. i'm having a bitch at marketing in general. it's just a personal hate i have. the purpose is to manipulate people into buying something on hype appeal alone. i guess my hate of it has grown since the PS1. before then i always bought games based on reviews, oppinions, and mostly my own renting them first. after the PS1 so many new gamers were brought in by the marketing and hype that shit products could be passed off as best sellers. the growth is great for the industry, and ofcourse there have been countless great games to come of it, but look at what it's lead to:

E3 2005: it's "wow wow wow, look at our system and pretty pictures and awsome hype and marketing techniques"
it's not "check out our games, don't they offer new and exciting gameplay experiences?"

no sureprises then that i'm am totally indifferent about all three next gen consoles. why? becuse i am yet to see and play any games. i dont care about how good your renders look, or how much you talk up your specs, or your ability to create video web blogs from anywhere in the word, or how many people you can pay to cheer at your annoucnements, or it's ability to play movies, or how much coverage you can get on MTV.

all i care about is the quality of your games, after all that's what i'll be using it for.

how can i not be excited about the new consoles? easy. i'm not excited about the new consoles becuase at the moment they are too intermingled with and/or based on talk. what i am excited about are possibilities.

/end bitch

quote:Originally posted by LiveWire

realtime hair simulation, full motion blur, smoke, dust, and all sorts of other intense particles. sorry, you cant pass that off as real time

realtime hair: http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_nalu_home.html

Motion Blur, DOF and other 'camera lens' effects are just postprocess pixel shaders, runs on current hardware: http://www.ati.com/developer/ShaderX2_MotionBlurUsingGeometryAndShading…

smoke & dust are particle effects (and can look excellent if you compose the effect with numerous particle shooters)... how is that hard to believe? The windshield mud effect on that car game can run (slowly) on current harware. Using surface painting with octree textures, blood/water/mud can run down a surface gaining speed, water droplets sticking togther thus falling faster... So, when the effect is confined to a flat windscreen - whats the problem?

HDR with ToneMapping is old (refering to that PS3 London square demo).

Anyway - I'm guessing this 'disbelief' crowd will be around until the consoles come out, so there's no point with "Yes it is, No it isn't" anymore [:)] Research the areas if you're in doubt - don't just look and disbelieve.

quote:Originally posted by LiveWire
all i care about is the quality of your games.

I really don't think the PS3 conference was about quality gameplay (as thats pertinent to each devloper and their game - not the hardware driving it). It seemed more geared toward the developers and the possibilities this new hardware will open for them. Gameplay specific videos are up to the 3rd party developers and wasn't the focus.

quote:Originally posted by Red5
if that's running in-game physics and graphics/animations (even at a low framerate) then they're way ahead of anything else I know of.

Download the Novodex SDK and play with the samples... thousands of objects colliding at interactive framerates. So, replace box's with high quality models and use a machine more powerful than current PC's, then yeh - sure, lots of cool physics! PPU's are on the horizon as well.

Cant agree more with Matt here - seriously look into it and youll find the answers yourself. Your also forgetting and restricting your thoughts as to what really could be taking place, I bid you all take one look at the graphical and gameplay technology that is still being produced for the playstation 2 - for those of you who do know what its like to dev for - im sure you will appreciate what people like square are managing to do with its somewhat restrictive capabilities.

There are smart guys squeezing every ounce of power out of these consoles - they arent silly. I urge you to seek interviews with any of the square programmers or even artists and listen to them talk about how they approach a game project.

There purpose is to work and push themselves to the point where they simply cannot give anymore. This definatey doesnt mean working longer and harder - but it means sitting down and thinking, working smarter and exhausting every possible way to overcome the restrictions in smarter manners. Thats what these guys are the masters of.

I think what the 'disbelief' population is doing is limiting their thoughts to how they might think this stuff is being done correctly, and not the ways that something resulting in a result similar enough to pass as 'realtime hair simulation' could be done - once again this is the area that these guys are masters of.

Whilst the footage could very well be rendered straight from a 3d package. I still hold no doubt whatsoever of the capability of these machines.... not any more at least.. [:o)]

My suggestion to you Livewire is to embrace the marvel that is marketing - learn of its effects on your product and the target market, absorb all you can about the marketing of your product and then one day - make an attempt at marketing yourself. If you have broad enough shoulders, thick enough skin and a moral threshold strong enough to endure possibly the most prickly topic in the history of mankind, turn your pet peeve into a personal mission and taste what its like to market any product whos core is solely based upon visual stimulation.

Then and only then - you might find a reason for such practises.

the latest GDCTV Tim Sweeney demoing the new unreal 3 engine and some of the new tools and interface. i'm beginnig to believe all this hype a little more after watching this since i'm prepared to believe Sweeney when he talks about his engine in a simple matter-of-fact way about next gen and Unreal 3.

if nothing else modding will be awsome

[url]http://www.pqhp.com/cmp/gdctv/[/url]

*Drool*

http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/gearsofwar/screens.html?page=3
http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/gearsofwar/screens.html?page=1

Thats what its all about [:D] more more more!!!

i've seen a video of this game in action. aside from the mind boggoling visuals though, if it wern't for the 3rd person view it would be the most cliched, rehashed FPS (invading aliens/monsters, maries, big guns, etc). at least with the 3rd person gameplay it looks like it might be a fesh experience, meaning you can enjoy the game as well as the visuals!

(sorry for being so cynical, the visuals do look great![:D])

its actually a pretty reasonable sounding game (although it is cliched it takes ideas from a variety of sources rather than just the FPS genre). Its set during WW3 with battles between the human factions still continuing, when a evil force of some race comes out of the earth and begins slaughtering everybody, forcing the warring humans to unite (huzzah). The enemy is far stronger than the humans so its not typical FPS gameplay, its based more around duck and cover combat (with the player automatically crouching behind objects they approach). At night its impossible to fight the enemy so players must attempt to get directly to cover.

Thats as much as i know about it, obviously there are a lot of borrowed ideas but it seems as though Epic may come up with a nice game structure and of course its one of the most impressive examples of what the next generation will be capable of.

Some really awesome [url="http://www.johnwallin.net/site/main.html"]concept artists[/url] working on Gears of War. These [url="http://www.worthplaying.com/article.php?sid=26614&mode=thread&order=0"]digital paintings[/url] are great. ([url="http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/8678/Gears-of-War-High-Resolution-Artwork/"]Try here as well[/url])

great concept art, john wallin did one of d'artiste books and was very good. I really like the style of setting they're going for, its not too science fiction looking which is great. although i can't imagine how much work has and will go into the detiling of all the levels and characters.

Roughly 3 - 4 artists and 6 - 8 weeks of time per character from concept to completion - add 2 weeks for some of the bigger creatures. The levels ive noticed theres not much tile repitition anywhere - so you can bet that its also a mammoth effort.

there is noticeable repetition, but looks like they're being very smart about it. Noticeable areas have had secondary perturbance multiplied into them at double scale; not 100% sure, but looks like they've also been rotating ground textures co-tileable on x and y and masking localised details into it. Quite a smart way to keep texture memory down and still getting good coverage with nicely detailed local areas.

"The levels ive noticed theres not much tile repitition anywhere"

This is actualy very simple and there's a few shader methods to get around it... you can 'texture bomb' numerous small tiles to create infinte variations - you could also paint blend maps for each large object (terrain, big buildings) which also breaks up the tiling. Then, if you had collections of texture bombing that are interpolated over a blend map - then you will never get a tile, only 'recycled features' which in themselves would be randomly scattered. And it's little to no extra effort from the texture painting side of things.

Okay then Mr 'im doing this every day its no big surprise [:P]'

I just mean purely from the perspective of - there arent too many fps / 3rd person games out in fact theres probably none where you can fly by a long wall section and see no repeated tile patterns. Ground is probably the easiest to cover up, but say underground sewers or bricked wall patterns etc.

Some more details on PGR3 textures..

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/07/15/pgr3_textures/

Hey guys, check out some more PS3 videos at IGN.

http://ps3.ign.com/

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/635/635527p1.html
Koei's New PS3 Game
Koei shows a new game running off actual PS3 hardware.

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/635/635625p1.html
PS Meeting 2005: PS3 Tech Demos
Get a new look at Unreal, Spiderman and Sony's ducks.

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/624/624671p1.html
New Killzone 3 Art

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/635/635511p1.html
PS Meeting 2005: Genji Trailer
Game Republic shows off its first PS3 game through a trailer.

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/635/635525p1.html
PS Meeting 2005: PS3 Gundam Live
Videos of the new PS3 Gundam game being played before us.

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/635/635510p1.html
PS Meeting 2005: Updated Lair
Factor 5 shows its first PS3 game. First video footage of Lair.

Some new PGR3 videos from the Japanese Game Summit http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/741/741362/vids_1.html

[url="http://www.etoychest.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2032…"]Some wireframe screenshots of PGR3[/url]. [:)]

I highly recommed that everone head out to EBGames and pick up a copy of E3 Access 2005. Its a 4 DVD set put together by Next-Gen Videos here in Brisbane of all the footage, games and conferences from E3 2005 (and its only $30).

There is some amazing footage of the PS3 in action with some tech demos that I have not been able to find on the net including the leaf demo, satellite landscape demo, eye toy demo and assorted others.

Anyway, top watch, about 14 hrs long and well worth it to see direct video feeds on the demos rather than some dude in the audience with a crappy camera.

Check out some of these Xbox 360 titles from the Xbox Summit.

http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=6962&type=mov
http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=6961&type=mov
http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=6956&type=mov

99 Nights, Dead Rising, and Frame City Killer. 99 Nights looks fantastic! And there sure are a *LOT* of characters onscreen in all those games. [:)]

saw a preview for frame city killer the other day, i must say its got me really intruiged. I dont know jack about what gameplay will be like i suppose but its sparked my interest

Some supposedly leaked Nintendo Revolution tech demo screenshots. Awesome pixel shading and lighting action happening in the head model pictures [:D]

Ahh, you'll have to copy and paste this...

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/r/?page=http://www.computerandvide…

quote:Originally posted by Souri

Some supposedly leaked Nintendo Revolution tech demo screenshots. Awesome pixel shading and lighting action happening in the head model pictures

yeh... well, check out the first 2 gallery pages of the Brazil renderer :P

http://www.splutterfish.com/sf/gallery_index.php

Though, that 1940's car render is easily real-time now anyway. Basic flat white sky pumped up with HDR, PRT lighting to get the soft overcast shadows and that car can just have a env map reflected.

Still - pretty hard to beleive they are actually from the Revolution itself when you see them on the Brazil gallery [:D]

ahh.. proven fakes. [:)] http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=10511
[url="http://www.splutterfish.com/sf/gallery_view.php?photo_id=356&screen=2&c…"]Those headshots were from the splutterfish gallery as well[/url]..

These fake Nintendo Evolution news/controller stories are starting to get annoying. [:P]

some just arent trying, no doubt quite a few people have seen the fake of the controller thats just a wavebird which someones chucked a grid in the center, supposedly a touchpad...

got this of CG Talk:

apparently independent Playstation magazine [url]http://www.psmonline.com/[/url] has run an article about the PS3 killzone fottage shown at E3:
quote:None of the game footage was taken from software running on systems using the final PS3 graphics chip, the Reality Synthesizer (RSX). ... The most stunning demo, Killzone PS3, was from an actual game engine running on an alpha kit--at less than five frames per second. The footage was sped up to 60fps in post-production.

take it or leave it i guess.

Oooh look:

http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~alandaly/mgs41.jpg
http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~alandaly/mgs42.jpg
http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~alandaly/mgs43.jpg

Page scans from a Japanese magazine of Metal Gear Solid 4. Looks pretty nice. Not sure about that [url="http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/09/14/news_6133188.html"]old geezer being Solid Snake[/url] though [:0]

There'll be a proper trailer at the Tokyo Games Show on Friday [:)]