A bit more from XB2

[pc999]

here

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/r/?page=http://www.computerandvideogames.com/news/news_story.php(que)id=105001

Edit:
There is things about XNA very interestings

"I've seen demos of terrain and worlds, with no textures in them whatsoever and no geometry - it's just a program that's creating a scene for you,"

 

[PC-Engine]

Procedural techniques?

 

[Farid]

"I've seen demos of terrain and worlds, with no textures in them whatsoever and no geometry - it's just a program that's creating a scene for you,"

No geometry? It's J.Allard himself that is saying that... Except if they have a new kind of rasterizer (is that the term in english?), or if they use a software renderer, geometry will always be a part of the rendering. But i guess he was meaning "no hand created geometry".

Anyway there's a lot of "hype" here:

he explained his notion of 'procedural synthesis':

"Art is the highest cost component of game development, and so much of the art is really repetitive and really intensive, and then doesn't come out to be very realistic. You know, bricks in a wall - very repeated textures.

"Let's go write the brick program and run the brick program to make a room full of bricks, lose the art expense and gain a more realistic looking room, because now we can focus on having the bricks there in a really realistic way. I get really excited about that kind of stuff."

It's easier to do a repetitive brick texture (with its normals maps, etc...) than doing a procedural routine that can create "realistic enough" brick textures. IMHO.
Procedural techniques are aimed for things more complex then bricks and others "man crafted" things, say lava, animal skins, etc...
It's also a good tech for saving bandwidth, if the machine could create thoses textures "on-fly", of course.