[PS3] LittleBigPlanet Impressions

Nothing is wrong with LBP's graphics imo. They better focus on netcode, heavily.

I don't think that's really necessary at this point. The Netcode in LBP was extremely good for what it had to do. It was far more demanding than something as simple as a shooter.

No more momentum based jumping & landing....please !

You realize that every big platformer since Mario on the NES had momentum based jumping and landing, right? Running faster allows you to jump further. There was nothing wrong with the jumping in LBP.
 
I don't think that's really necessary at this point. The Netcode in LBP was extremely good for what it had to do. It was far more demanding than something as simple as a shooter.

If it's more demanding, then they should tailor the netcode further to its needs. Otherwise 4P LBP2 will be very laggy.
 
You realize that every big platformer since Mario on the NES had momentum based jumping and landing, right? Running faster allows you to jump further. There was nothing wrong with the jumping in LBP.
What I wanted to say was that they should do away with momentum that's done 100% through the game's physics engine. It was one of the main reason for the odd difficulty that LBP had, If you don't agree then you are just ignoring the obvious :smile:
 
I agree they should tweak the SackBoy's momentum/physics somehow. Sometimes the space SackBoy lands on is too small to accommodate the momentum.

However, some of the user generated levels have mechanics (puzzles) that rely on it. e.g., climb/swing *upwards* an inverse slope, or fling up and down on a vertical pendulum to gather momentum and then jump.

Perhaps they should let the level designer decide or adjust ?
 
You realize that every big platformer since Mario on the NES had momentum based jumping and landing, right? Running faster allows you to jump further. There was nothing wrong with the jumping in LBP.
It's practically broken off moving platforms due to inertia producing unpredictable results, requiring players to attempt the same jump over and over and trusting as much to luck that this time it'll work. The fix would be to have Sackboy apply inertia to objects still, but adjust the gravitational effect, so that when a floor is dropping beneath a dropping Sackboy, they can still jump the expected one-large-block amount.
 
OMG! I'm in love all over again!

Mee too - I just saw the top down racers, beyond awesome. :) The being able to program your own controls for vehicles is brilliant. This is one of the few games where we've sat around thinking about the ideal improvements to it, and then the next version has almost everything that we want. Brilliant stuff.

OMG! I'm in love all over again!

My first reaction on Eurogamer exactly :D
 
Digital Media Learning Competition winners announced:
http://dmlcompetition.net/year_3/winners.php?comp=gc

The third Digital Media and Learning Competition, administered by HASTAC and supported by the MacArthur Foundation, is pleased to announce the award-winning projects. From a field of approximately 800 applications, ten projects won Learning Lab Designer awards ranging from $30,000 to $200,000; in the Game Changers category, nine projects received awards ranging from $5,000 to $50,000. HASTAC and the MacArthur Foundation wish to thank all who applied for making the Competition an overwhelming success.

The above link contains all the winners (LBP and Spores).


One of the winners lists all the LBP winners here:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=396537
 
This is a seriously awesome interview! Alex is very frank about his thinking processes, and they very much match my own. Some important discoveries at the Irradiance Slice technique did not get used in LBP! He's included some of the lighting ideas from that. Comparing LBP screens to LBP2's, you can see the marked difference that irradiance slices really makes, and it is truly stunning. Then there's MLAA, just dropped in from the GOW3 code. There's also a level designer who created a Pop-It interface in game; that's a huge amount of UI that can be created by creators! :oops:

Interesting about the thermometer too. That suggests that where it may be nearing the limit, you could actually start throwing in more content as long as it's different, as the thermometer only shows the worst-case variable. Thus lots of bots may make it look like you can't add more objects or materials, but quite possibly you could.
 
I like these parts:

In terms of the graphics engine, transparency was the most requested feature - and that motivated the switch back from deferred to forward rendering. The engine is still a very compact piece of code - probably because it's really just Anton (and previously me) working on it - I love the fact it still fits in a couple of source files and a few SPU jobs! All of the material shaders in LBP are procedurally generated with a few parameters, so it's a testament to the artists that they get so much from so little.

Constraints are good - and as an engine coder, if you give people too many 'knobs' they end up spending their whole lives tweaking them. Instead, we've got a constrained system and a demanding art department who really know how to milk it.

Digital Foundry: The adoption of the MLAA form of anti-aliasing is a huge improvement for the image quality, and people are excited to see this technique appearing in more titles. So, how hard has it been to include? Did it slot nicely into LBP's post-processing step or like Santa Monica with GOW3, did you have to massage the engine to free up SPU cycles in the middle of each frame to keep latency down?

Alex Evans: We really got to ride on their shoulders there - when we got the MLAA code from Sony, it was already in a pretty usable and fast state. We dropped it in during an afternoon, I believe, and it did save us a little GPU time. As with any change, there are knock-ons, a bit of SPU rescheduling etc, but it's definitely a net win.

Digital Foundry: What is this AA technique being called among developers? Is it morphological AA, MLAA, as Intel described it, or are they calling it something else?

Alex Evans: We call it MLAA. But then again we do lots of things that we don't have names for or make up without knowing the literature, so I have no idea what others are calling it!

My favourite techniques and engines are the ones that blend techniques anyway, so as soon as you try too hard to categorise something, the value in the name tends to drop off: you know, the 'oh it's kinda SSAO but then I changed it with a dash of this and that and threw in some blur in post and some precomputed irradiance stuff with a dash of photonic voxel warp drive potatoes'. And so it goes on...

Digital Foundry: Prior to release, LBP was described as allowing creation within gameplay, and you famously described a situation where there's a chasm to cross and a player could dial in a tank he had built earlier. This would have been a landmark departure from existing user-created content, but sadly this never made it into LBP proper, with instead a discrete editor. What were the reasons for this? Will LBP2 feature in-game creation, if not creating geometry at least allowing components to be assembled in situ?

Alex Evans: It's not something we've specifically tackled for LBP2 (yet), but one of the QA guys here has actually rebuilt a working Pop-It using the direct control devices in LBP2. In other words, he managed to make a create-in-gameplay mode, from scratch, using direct control and emitters. The possibilities of meta-game creation like that are quite mind-boggling...
 
Everyone will have your own personal webpage on LBP2:
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/06/16/more-littlebigplanet-2-community-features-lbp-me-functionality/

According to Evans, the days of hunting for levels randomly distributed across the face of a planet will be gone -- player creations will now appear in a simple list, which players will be able to filter using a number of metrics (genre, keyword, etc.).

More exciting than that was the explanation of the functions offered by LBP.me, the web portal which will give players their own personal websites, which will automatically update with that player's creations, recently played levels and top scores. If you're looking at one of these pages in a browser, you can set the game to automatically queue up the level next time you play -- or, alternatively, you could just print out a QR barcode assigned to each level, place it in front of your PlayStation Eye, and watch as it loads up the appropriate creation.
 
My favourite part in that tech interview is where they talk about keeping their code small and simple, making sure things work in a uniform way, rather than having corner case optimizations, even if things are a little slower.
 
Here's a nice small stage demo of LBP showing a crazy 3D Rez homage level. It's not just that the level (created by one of the users who makes great LBP1 levels) is amazing however - what's even cooler is that he goes into create mode to show some of how it's done. And that's ... :oops:

http://e3.gamespot.com/video/6266342/?hd=1

Do we need an LBP 2 thread, by the way?
 
Here's a nice small stage demo of LBP showing a crazy 3D Rez homage level. It's not just that the level (created by one of the users who makes great LBP1 levels) is amazing however - what's even cooler is that he goes into create mode to show some of how it's done. And that's ... :oops:

OMG!!! :oops:
 
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