Besides, better depth perception wouldn't add anything to the game.
Actually depth perception is really critical in this game. Trials 2 SE (our 2007 released Trials series game) had multiple selectable camera modes ("2d" style, Trials HD-style 3d camera, third person camera, cinematic cameras, etc). Once you learned the game using one of these camera modes, it was really hard to play in other camera modes, just because you did see the track in slightly different angle and perspective (jumps became slightly too short or long). It's very hard to quickly scan the proportions of different obstacles and pits and angles of slopes if the camera isn't really consistent, since it's hard to have proper depth perception just by looking a fast moving 2d image. In Trials HD development, we tried to put many fancy looking camera sequences in the tracks, but most of them were removed later on, because the game play just becomes too hard with changing camera, but without proper 3d depth perception. I have to say that Trials style precision sensitive 2.5D game really benefits from it. It's to much easier to see the track properly when you can sense the 3d world better.
sebbbi: the graphics are looking really nice and I'm impressed with the shadows! They make some high-end PC games look bad in comparison
There's a couple places where geometry (and associated shadows) are visible sort of popping in, most noticably on that 60fps video you linked on some of the track segments, but I assume that's required LOD stuff?
When the camera pans to be horizontal you can definitely see some temporal aliasing, but I can appreciate that there's not really a great way to do MSAA or similar efficiently on the 360 right now. Still, I enjoy that your shadows are less aliased than the primary rays
The Gamescom/PAX build is pretty old, and lots of content is missing and unfinalized... among them lot of object LODs. Many objects pop in/out sooner than they will in the final game. Shadow LOD selection also had a bug in that build (visible and shadow mesh rendering should of course always use the same LOD state, or you get ugly flickering and self shadowing acne like you see in those vids).
MSAA is viable on current consoles, but not quite for 60 fps game targeting the current graphics quality standards. I would personally love to have more fine gained tiled deferred like Black Rock used in Split Second (4x4 tiles), so we could separate tiles containing aliased edges from the tiles not requiring antialiasing. This would make MSAA much more viable in a deferred renderer. Coarse grained 4x4 tile based shadow map sampling would also speed up things nicely, since you would only need to do pixel precision EVSM lookups for the pixels in tiles that contain shadow edges (other tiles would be either 100% lit or skip the light completely, neither requiring any shadow map sampling). But generating all the shadow masks, edge masks, etc for the 4x4 tiling is unfortunately (slightly) too much additional work to do in 16 ms (all our lights are dynamic, and we have lots of them). But next gen could bring us back to MSAA, since compute shaders (and the extra performance) make more fine grained tile based deferred rendering more viable.
Hey, so did I hear right: motorcross MP local 4 way and online + multiplayer with the ghosts on normal tracks? Or just ghosts? Because playing live against a friend and just seeing their ghosts... muwaha AWESOME! I am set to get 2 copies of this game.
We have both local and global multiplayer with four lane tracks (4 players). And also we have online multiplayer (up to 4 players) on any single player track (you see other players as ghost bikes). The single player mode also has leaderboard based ghosts.
Please release tonight--if you don't there will be no reason to get BF3 and FM4 next month :| I save all year for those 2 only for Trials to take up all free gaming time. Ohhh the irony.
Sorry, too much things to finalize. It's not going to be out tomorrow
