[PC-Engine]

Originally Posted by jvd

heh , the interaction and the movements in the face from the demo are much greater than those in the game .

Sorry but no . I've seen the old man from silent hill and the i wouldn't put him close

Agreed, still shots don't tell the whole story. The SH old man looks good because of texturing/art direction not because it's complex in terms of facial animation.

[Laa-Yosh]

I'm in a hurry so just quick stuff.
The KZ presentation is exactly 2 minutes long, don't try to sell it as 1 minute.
Axis is not big, they've had like 10 people working on this one.
Production is quite linear, you have to lock down as much as you can during script, storyboard, then animatic stage.
I know plenty of details but can't get into it for reasons already explained.
GI is hideously expensive. You can't compare it with HDR cause they're different things.
COD's animation is far worse, jerky and jumpy transitions.
SH old man has far less detail in geometry and textures, just better quality of art assets.
How can you make any assumptions about CG tech related stuff? Can I then start to say that going to the Mars shouldn't be any bigger problem than going to the Moon cause it seems like that to me?

Why Sony did an animation instead of development? The results clearly show that it was worth every cent. And they wouldn't have anything remotely comparable from the current devkits in such short time. BTW, Guerilla is working on the game.

Faf: I respect your opinion, but I honestly haven't seen anything as detailed as these KZ characters in a game before. They're between 0.5 and 1 million polygons... and if the hardware could push such detail, why do we see normal mapping in almost every nextgen console game showcased so far?

[passby]

To achieve the zen of completeness, this thread needs Deadmeat.








I thought this topic was declared off-limits to the board.

[mckmas8808]

SH old man has far less detail in geometry and textures, just better quality of art assets.

Does it really matter which has more geometry than the other. Nobody is going to play the game and say wow the geometry on the old man is not as high as the old man from the tech demos. Nobody is like that (I should say almost nobody). The point is it looks better.

Agreed, still shots don't tell the whole story. The SH old man looks good because of texturing/art direction not because it's complex in terms of facial animation.

Oh so it seems to me whatever you can say to escape the fact that the PS2 surpassed those demos your going to say it. Lets me put it this way.

If PS2 games looked like those tech demos, the graphics would probably get a 7 or 8. Taking everything into account in the tech demos (I mean everything that you can physically see) Games like God of War, MGS3, Fight Night 2, GT3 and 4, Need for Speed 2, and soon to be RE4 crush those tech demos to pieces.

If God of War or Fight Night 2 was presented as a tech demo in 1999 people back then would have said that they were fake. As a matter a fact some people even said that about MGS2 when it was first shown to the masses. So just face it PS2 games tremendously surpass the tech demos.
________
Vapir air one

[jvd]

THe problem is they don't look the same .

sigh here is an example .


The sh old man look like yoda from eps 5 the empire strikes back with all his limited facial expresions . While the old man demo looks like yoda from eps 4 where he has many many more facial expresions and looks much more realistic . Now graphicly the two would look just as good in a still but when its in motion there is no comparison .

Remember the old man demo was to show off the emotion engine . Not the picture engine .





btw paserby yes it was but others still want to discuss it and keep draging up threads about it so i decided to let it go on in here at least its controlled and i don't have to run around looking for where its starting up

[rabidrabbit]

So, have you people reached to the conclusion that all the other PS2 demos, except for the "old-man-animated-highpoly-head-floating-in-space"-demo were reached or surpassed in actual PS2 games?

Can we now get back to the topic of Killzone PS3 demo


I would have thought Mr Wibble's very very sane post earlier (which i find worth quoting here, because I don't think ebnough people read it the first time) would have ended this ridiculous "debate"... but no

Originally Posted by MrWibble

It seems to me that the main problem here is that people can't comprehend the difference between a tech-demo, concept art, and reality.

Tech-demos exist to show the power of the hardware. They concentrate as much as possible of the available computational effort at a single effect to provide a targetted demonstration of what a machine is capable of. Clearly you can't then assume that the same level of quality will exist when that effect is used on 100 characters at the same time within a complex enviroment and a game running AI and Physics... If the machine had enough power to do all that at the same time then it would use that to make the tech-demo look *even better*.

Tech demos also exist because it's a lot easier to write an example of a single effect on a bit of prototype hardware, than it is to write a whole representative game-segment... especially when you only have a small team of engineers, limited art resources, and almost no time at all.

So anyone looking at the PS2 tech-demos (which to the best of my knowledge were all running on actual hardware, even if some of them were just streaming pre-transformed data at a GS) and expecting to see the same quality in every aspect of every game made since, is going to be disappointed. From an average-joe with no technical knowledge and only a tenuous grasp on logic I guess that's understandable, if a little naive. For people who hang around a technically oriented board like this, you should know better. Shame on you.

The PS2 tech-demos were on actual hardware, therefore they are quite emphatically not BS. They also probably were *all* supassed in terms of utilisation of the PS2 hardware at some point in the PS2's lifespan, it's just that the power was spread across an entire game and not focussed on a single face or character.

To go from "here's a tech-demo of a face", through "faces in games don't look like that", to "Sony are full of s**t" requires a level of ignorance and denial that makes me despair.

Concept-art meanwhile exists to give an *impression* of what something is supposed to look like when it's finished. It exists because if you showed stuff how it looks for 90% of the development, especially before hardware is finished, it'd look rubbish - and imagination doesn't cut much ice in marketing. Concept art gives you something to aim for in development, and something to show externally to demonstrate what you think a product will look like.

The reality is that if the hardware was complete enough to run games like KZ2, and those games were advanced enough in development to be demoed in realtime like that, then the console would be releasing a lot more promptly than "next spring". Either that or everything is going to get another 6-months to a year of polishing and thus is not representative of the final product - which means they'd probably want to tart it up even more to give a more accurate view on what it will look like.

The fact it, any concept-art is just a guess at what will be acheivable. That doesn't make Sony, or anyone else who produces such (which is, to be fair, pretty much every company in the industry) "liars".

What's important is how such demos and concepts are presented and what is said about them. It strikes me that most of the "BS" that is said comes not from Sony, but from the press that prints unfounded stories and rumour, or misquotes from a badly translated interview, or "exclusive source" that turns out to be some idiot in the QA dept. who met a journo down the pub and fancied a free pint.

There are several "facts" being presented both here, and even in some supposedly professional publications which I know, from personal experience, to be total fabrications with no basis in reality. Yet no doubt 5 years down the line we'll be here debating the "lies" Sony told about PS3 and why it never met them, even though these were constructed by 3rd parties and never actually stated by Sony themselves.

It doesn't help when concept-art is released and websites or magazines publish it with "screen-shot" in big letters, though even the most idiotic of editor ought to know that the PSP or PS2 doesn't run in high-def/print resolutions with full AA...

Some unscrupulous (or plain stupid) marketing departments might try to pass rendered concept stuff off as screen-shots. But on the whole I expect they just release some media packs with a bunch of art in, and editors just kind of make stuff up as they go along, because quite frankly an amazing screen-shot sells just as many copies of a magazine or gets just as many hits on their site as it will sell games...

It was pretty clear to me from watching the conference that the demos which were real-time were stated as such, and the handling of controllers and so-forth was made obvious so as to prove the point. Everything else was clearly running off video and probably pre-rendered (as opposed to recorded). It was said that these were visions of what the game companies thought they could produce on the platform. There are probably a variety of different ways in which companies approached that.

Some are no-doubt rendered entirely in art-packages, using features which may or may not be possible to emulate in hardware at decent speed. Some are probably prototypes running on PC, perhaps in real-time, perhaps at a slower frame-rate and frame-grabbed. Perhaps a few are running on prototype hardware already but not fast enough or reliably enough to show live. All just represent the aspirations of development teams who have been given specifications of a bit of hardware and asked what they could do with it. And they were presented just so.

If KZ2 had been realtime, you can expect that they would have shouted about it. Instead it was a segment of video in a sequence to show what some popular games might look like in their next-gen incarnations. Does this mean we'll never anything that good on hardware? No. It simply means that at this stage they haven't yet acheived it, but are working towards it.

It was clear to me from the specifications listed and the tech-demos running on (presumably unfinished) hardware, that Sony are well on the road to delivering a very powerful console. Some of of the numbers are no-doubt creatively arrived at, but no more so than for their competitors.

Mostly what they've done so far is to make public their *intentions*. Sometimes they might suggest something which is beyond what they will finally deliver. I don't think that the inability to accurately predict the future consitutes lying, I think it's just an unfortunate tendancy to want to disclose intended features before they're quite ready, which sometimes isn't going to pan out how they expect. To be fair I think Sony are probably *less* guilty of this than some other people I could mention.

They set lofty goals, they try very very hard to mee them, and they generally only go public when they're pretty sure what they're going to be able to actually build. On both PS2 and PSP they actually upped the spec before release.

Any you can't criticise a company for hype either. It was a PR conference to promote a new product they have coming out, which faces stiff competition from an already announced competitor. Of course they're going to hype it up a bit. If you don't understand the concepts of marketing then you really aren't going to survive in the modern world... also, I have this bridge for sale that might interest you...

In short, if you think concept art directly translates to final product, you might be a little naive. But if you think a tech-demo running on actual hardware in some way constitutes a lie... then you're an idiot.

[Deepak]

Who is Tim Sweeney?

[jvd]

what mr wibble leaves out is that phil harrison (sp? ) has already said to the press that this is what killzone will look like.dispite the fact that the developer is saying its a representation .

Now phil said this on live tv there really isn't much to missread there .

Now he could have said this is what we are hopeing or this is what we think might be possible. But he plainly said this is what we are getting (just see the sony fans quoting it 90 times in a thread)

[rabidrabbit]

Wow, jvd. This "console war" really has brought out the worst in you.
I don't remember you "discussing" basically much else in the console forum, other than "Sony lied this and that and they should not be trusted because they Killzone is prerendered etc etc etc ad infinitum..."
It's starting to sound like a broken record.

Instead of fuelling these useless neverending quarrellings, shouldn't you be modding the board? Locking and editing the very similar posts you make?
This board it's really gone downhill since E3... and don't tell me it's all for the Sony fans to blame.

Really!! This whole "Who's lying most" debate and acting like some MIchael Moore of consoleworld, speaking of "PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW THE TRUTH!!!!!" is just IDIOTIC!!! AND PURE FANBOYISM!!!!!! not to mention lacking totally a touch to real world (too much smoke and mirrors in the recent weeks ? ).

[one]

Originally Posted by Deepak

Who is Tim Sweeney?

I'm wondering about him too
Kinda depressing you have to listen to the same discussion for 4 months more until TGS or another 1 year until the PS3 launch...

[jvd]

Rabidrabbit . You don't seem to follow much here . For awhile the killzone is real time threads from certian members were poping up all over the place or in other threads even after i locked the main source. Now short of banning each and every person who continues to post it in a new thread once the old one is locked I let it stay here .

[TekkenMaster]

I don't know how people can say that the oldman tech demo is more superior than the scene of the oldman from silent hill. Whether its because of the art direction, the texturing or whatever - visually the silent hill one is much better looking and you can't refute that.

Some of you will say:

LOL, but tekkenmaster you can't compare screenshots

Yeah, true, but I aint a myopic quibbler and ain't prerendered screenshots suppose to look better than real time? Thats like a double-wammo to all those who think the tech demo is better.


Some people try to argue over technical details claiming the oldman tech demo has more polygons and more facial interactions and thus is superior. Well slap me silly and ram a voodoo 3dfx card up my ass - because all I see in the tech demo is a head over a black ground whereas in the silent hill screenshot i see a bearded cowboy in an armani overcoat and a johnny cash tie standing in front of a hilton hotel - take away all those accessories and that guy can be the tech demo man granpa.

[PC-Engine]

standing in front of a hilton hotel

Actually he's standing in front of a 2D texture.

Also if you look at the stats on the head demo, it's not even using 100% of the hardware.

[rabidrabbit]

Originally Posted by PC-Engine

Actually he's standing in front of a 2D texture.

Also if you look at the stats on the head demo, it's not even using 100% of the hardware.

Had you played the game, you'd know that shot is just a screen of a longer sequence, and that the (dof blurred) "2D" texture is a part of 3D modelled environment. Not a very complex scene, but not just a 2D texture either

[TekkenMaster]

Also if you look at the stats on the head demo, it's not even using 100% of the hardware.

and people wonder why it look so crap.

[MrWibble]

<cries into his cornflakes to see another two pages of this rubbish cluttering up his favourite board>

Look people, I still think you're (mostly) all suffering from an inability to actually process facts and draw conclusions. This isn't exactly a new problem, but this latest little episode is quite an extreme case.

Here are some facts:

Sony have presented some real-time tech demos of PS3.
Sony have presented some pre-rendered concepts for what PS3 games might look like.
Sony have stated on several occasions that the tech-demos are realtime and the games were not.
Sony have also said that the final games should look like the concepts.

Of course I am paraphrasing rather than quoting. Mostly thats just down to laziness on my part, and the fact that I'd like to finish my breakfast sometime before lunch. However I think I've fairly extracted the meaning from what has been said.

These facts are all totally consistent, if interpreted literally. It is no surprise to me that Sony do not feel the need to make more statements and clarify what they meant, when it is abundantly clear to anyone with a rudimentary grasp of language.

Only the latter fact is really in any way contentious. The only real problem with this last fact is that the statement cannot be proven to be true or false at this point because it is a prediction, where as the rest are talking about the present. However people are using the latter fact to argue that in fact some of the demos are "realtime" and thus create a pointless circular argument based on willful ignorance of what was actually said.

Now I don't necessarily think it was a smart move on Sony's part to suggest that games will be identical to the movies, but they asked companies to do stuff that was representative, so really the onus is on the individual games companies to ensure they promise only what they can deliver - regardless of how much of the work they farm out to 3rd party studios. Some of them have quite possibly overstepped the line a bit, and some of them might even have been a little conservative. They're making educated guesses, it's bound to be a little innacurate.

However, it does *not* constitute a "lie", because until the games actually come out we won't know for sure. Even then, a comparison of two different things done in different ways to establish if they are "the same" is bound to generate disagreement anyway. Clearly there will be differences, the only question is whether these constitute a serious issue or are just minor cosmetic things that no-one will really notice.

I think I could probably predict right now exactly who on this board will fall on either side of that fence - and it will have very little to do with a qualitative and objective analysis of the results.

Now a proper debate on which nuances of the rendered stuff are or are-not possible in realtime on next-gen hardware would be an interesting thing to read/participate in, and in fact is the only sane argument we could have at this time. However as the IQ level on this board seems to have dropped to something on the same level as my increasingly soggy breakfast, I'm not exactly holding out a lot of hope here.

You are all engaging in a discussion which is the very definition of beating a dead horse.

[Dr Evil]

Originally Posted by TekkenMaster

Yeah, true, but I aint a myopic quibbler and ain't prerendered screenshots suppose to look better than real time? Thats like a double-wammo to all those who think the tech demo is better.

The old man tech demo is not prerendered!. I think it's stupid comparison anyways, and screenshots really don't do justice to that tech demo. That still photo from SH3 to me looks better than the tech demo, but that tech demo had nice facial animation, which the SH3 man don't have, I don't understand why people say that's not significant. But comparing just one head to a game environment is weird.

[PC-Engine]

Originally Posted by rabidrabbit

Had you played the game, you'd know that shot is just a screen of a longer sequence, and that the (dof blurred) "2D" texture is a part of 3D modelled environment. Not a very complex scene, but not just a 2D texture either

Well a flat sided square building with a 2D texture on the front side is not much more than a 2D texture.

[marconelly!]

what mr wibble leaves out is that phil harrison (sp? ) has already said to the press that this is what killzone will look like.dispite the fact that the developer is saying its a representation .

Now phil said this on live tv there really isn't much to missread there.

OK, so some people had a quote of him saying how some of the trailer footage was pre-rendered, others say he said Killzone will look just like that. Where is the quote of him saying it will look just like that? I remember there was a quote of someone saying it will play just like that, or something to that degree. Also, note that one of the Sony people answered the question about Killzone by talking about the I-8 game, saying how Ted (Price, of Insomniac) told him the footage was real time gameplay (which it was)

but that tech demo had nice facial animation, which the SH3 man don't have,

I'd have to watch it again, but SH3 guy defintiely had facial animation too (not just lips flapping) but I don't remember how much better/worse it was compared to the demo.

Well a flat sided square building with a 2D texture on the front side is not much more than a 2D texture.

He's actually inside the building, and there's lots more things in that scene aside from that wall behind him. The blur on the wall is DOF effect, not some low-res texture, btw.

[PC-Engine]

All the SH3 characters have very simple facial animations according to the videos I've seen. They do not compare to the head demo.

[notAFanB]

Originally Posted by PC-Engine

All the SH3 characters have very simple facial animations according to the videos I've seen. They do not compare to the head demo.

Bit better than simple ( you have mouth, cheek, eye manuipulation) from my memory but certainly short of "I'll tweak my nostril hair" head demo. HOWEVER I thnk the fact that the cutscenes for the most part is not an black abyss can account for this lack of complexity somewhat.

The head Demo is in no way misleading an an technical demonstration ion this respect.

[MechanizedDeath]

Some of the forum oldies seem to be rankled by a lot of these admittedly f-nboyish debates. I've been reading this board since the black forum, but I was only a lurker for years. So I don't want to be the reason for this board's demise. I'll let this be my last post on the topic, and try to revert back to lurking more and posting less.

Originally Posted by PC-Engine

All the SH3 characters have very simple facial animations according to the videos I've seen. They do not compare to the head demo.

You don't even own the game. Just stop digging yourself into a deeper hole. You couldn't even properly ID that scene, what makes you think you can provide a reasonable comparison?

Originally Posted by notAFanB

Bit better than simple ( you have mouth, cheek, eye manuipulation) from my memory but certainly short of "I'll tweak my nostril hair" head demo. HOWEVER I thnk the fact that the cutscenes for the most part is not an black abyss can account for this lack of complexity somewhat.

The head Demo is in no way misleading an an technical demonstration ion this respect.

Yeah, that demo was specifically to demostrate facial animation. And if anyone can get those videos to work, I think the animations involved some smiling and furrowing of the brow. An impressive demo at the time, but all the pics suggest it was pushing no more than 6Mpps (4.6MVerts/sec). The lighting wasn't that complex, and I'm not sure if it's anything een approaching maxxing out the hw, or beyond anything we've seen in this gen. Just that no game actually focused so heavily on animating a single face, so a direct comparison is hard. We have only cutscenes, and animators tended to skip animation of the cheeks and other facial muscles.

It all seems on the level to me. Not to mention all demos had aliasing, and the supposedly phenomenal FF8 scene had obvious clipping and worse lighting than most TTT stages (look how solid TTT models look compared to the FF8 ones...that's down to lighting). But that's the end of it for me. I like discussing this stuff with people who have a better technical grasp of this topic, but I know what E3 does at other forums I frequent, and don't want to see this place devolve into a shouting match. So, I'm gonna try and disappear back into the shadows again. At least until RSX details start popping up. Watch that happen in the next hour or so. PEACE.

[Phil]

Excellent contributions by especially MrWibble and MechanizedDeath.

To those that are still bringing up SH3 and the face demo by Square [PC-Engine]; this has already been addressed:

I'll requote MrWibble's excellent post back on page 4, one that many I think have either missed out or already forgotten <sigh>

Originally Posted by MrWibble

Tech-demos exist to show the power of the hardware. They concentrate as much as possible of the available computational effort at a single effect to provide a targetted demonstration of what a machine is capable of. Clearly you can't then assume that the same level of quality will exist when that effect is used on 100 characters at the same time within a complex enviroment and a game running AI and Physics... If the machine had enough power to do all that at the same time then it would use that to make the tech-demo look *even better*.

Tech demos also exist because it's a lot easier to write an example of a single effect on a bit of prototype hardware, than it is to write a whole representative game-segment... especially when you only have a small team of engineers, limited art resources, and almost no time at all.

So anyone looking at the PS2 tech-demos (which to the best of my knowledge were all running on actual hardware, even if some of them were just streaming pre-transformed data at a GS) and expecting to see the same quality in every aspect of every game made since, is going to be disappointed. From an average-joe with no technical knowledge and only a tenuous grasp on logic I guess that's understandable, if a little naive. For people who hang around a technically oriented board like this, you should know better. Shame on you.

The PS2 tech-demos were on actual hardware, therefore they are quite emphatically not BS. They also probably were *all* supassed in terms of utilisation of the PS2 hardware at some point in the PS2's lifespan, it's just that the power was spread across an entire game and not focussed on a single face or character.

To go from "here's a tech-demo of a face", through "faces in games don't look like that", to "Sony are full of s**t" requires a level of ignorance and denial that makes me despair.

Tech-demos = not representative of what you'll get in a game, yet it can very well be that they are surpassed as developers manage to get more out of the hardware as libraries and efficiancy go up. SH3 does a very good job in that it has an incredible detail on character(s) [the old man] - yet, it only proves that games as a whole have moved beyond the complexity that were found in early PS2 tech demos.

[Acert93]

Originally Posted by marconelly!

OK, so some people had a quote of him saying how some of the trailer footage was pre-rendered, others say he said Killzone will look just like that. Where is the quote of him saying it will look just like that? I remember there was a quote of someone saying it will play just like that, or something to that degree. Also, note that one of the Sony people answered the question about Killzone by talking about the I-8 game, saying how Ted (Price, of Insomniac) told him the footage was real time gameplay (which it was)

Next Gen PR Thread

You will have to read down the thread since I have not had time to add them all. But if you read the Questions being asked and look at the answers they are "leading". i.e.: Phil says the games were rendered to spec and only scratching the surface and then:

Q: "So I'll be playing that in my living room?"

A: "Absolutely."

See, Harrison could mean "that"=KZ2, not the graphics, even though that is the topic and what the questioner was asking. ALL PR guys are like that (not just Sony's). Anyhow, a Sony rep did tell Gamespot that KZ WAS realtime.

Either way you dice this this KZ footage has been excellent PR for Sony. KZ won the Gametrailers top E3 video for example. I expect every large game mag to cover it. And I think it could possibly dent early adopters--they are the ones who watch E3, read the mags, and stay up on stuff. If Sony has convinced them the PS3 will do KZ in realtime and then they see what the Xbox 360 turned out at E3 (not much honestly) then they may just wait.

The odd thing is MS has since shown that they had some good stuff laying around. Huxely, better PD0 footage, some really killer Kameo stuff, etc... And they had some top titles like GOW, GR3, PGR3, Elder Scrolls, etc... that were just excellent (for whatever they were!)

MS's E3 showing is totally confusing. Not that E3 really matters, but as an enthusiest I like seeing stuff! As far as I can tell E3 can be summed up in three games: Zelda, BF2, and Spore. And none of those are from MS or Sony :?

[PC-Engine]

You don't even own the game. Just stop digging yourself into a deeper hole. You couldn't even properly ID that scene, what makes you think you can provide a reasonable comparison?

Why would facial animations look different on video than when viewing the game from a tv?

Yeah, that demo was specifically to demostrate facial animation. And if anyone can get those videos to work, I think the animations involved some smiling and furrowing of the brow. An impressive demo at the time, but all the pics suggest it was pushing no more than 6Mpps (4.6MVerts/sec). The lighting wasn't that complex, and I'm not sure if it's anything een approaching maxxing out the hw, or beyond anything we've seen in this gen. Just that no game actually focused so heavily on animating a single face, so a direct comparison is hard. We have only cutscenes, and animators tended to skip animation of the cheeks and other facial muscles.

Actually it was a little more than that. I remember some developer said the skin was a separate layer stretched over another layer giving it a multitexturing effect. This was brought up way back when it was being compared to the Shenmue head demos.