Afrika new trailer @ TGS

*fingers crossed*

Now there's a nice thought. They can make some kind of interactive edutainment application for the kids but why buy the game when you can already see it on national geographic?

 

Ever played Beyond Good & Evil?

 

Taking a picture needn't be any different in gameplay to taking a shot. Replace your stealth-games gun with a camera and you can keep the same gameplay elements. You have to sneak up, take account of wind direction so they don't smell you, choose the path you travel to avoid exposing yourself or treading on noisy sticks, get in close enough, and grab your photos. Throw in some tracking to find your quarry, the risk of being mauled, shy rhino's who run down any photographers, I expect some good gameplay could be had. It wou'dnt be everyone's cup of tea, but it'd play something similar to Thief I guess.

I'm all in favour of alternative gaming styles. Killing people is such a cop-out, like many stories. Why go to the trouble of thinking up something new and original when the masses can be satisfied with recycling of all 'kill things' ideas? I hope this is something different (and fun, and not just a glorified screensaver). Next-gen so far has been so generic, I guess to appeal to standard hard-core early-adopter types.

 

The first thing I want to say is that I am stunned by the quality of that trailer. I have never seen CG so realistically done. My jaw dropped to the floor as I saw those baby elephants walking across!

Basically, I think this footage is meant to showcase the power of the PS3's grahical pipeline. Think about this for a moment. Have you ever seen real-time computer graphics look that good? I sure have not. Everything looked *almost* photo-realistic.

From a gameplay point of view I'm not too interested in this game. It's beautiful to look at, but I don't think I would play it for hours at a time. But from a graphical point of view it's a visual showcase.

My question is this, do you think this demo is show casing anything truly unique or could the same demo be done in real-time on a typical PC with a similiar PC graphics card?

My guess is that the CELL processor must have been working very closely with the GPU to pull off that level of graphical clarity.

 

It looked good. High poly models and great self shadowing. However it was far from photorealistic. The lighting of the animals doesn't match too well with the scenery and they looked composited. The shaders aren't really there for photorealism. It would benefit from some form of GI solution too, but that might not be possible with current resources.

I expect so, as a demo. IT depends what techniques are being used. The most impressive part for me was the animation that created realistic behaviour. If that's canned animations, any old PC could do it. If it was real-time computed, with skinning and morphong and IK and whatnot, maybe then the Cell is contributing something substantial that a PC couldn't compete with.

You have to remember that the graphics are still limited to a G70 type part. Cell on the whole isn't going to tranform that into a G80 quality part. Areas where Cell will contribute where a PC can't compete will probably be more in areas of on-the-fly computation such as animation or procedural texturing. Any collection of textured models on PS3 will likely be possible on high-end PCs too. Perhaps you may see some GI type algorithms appear. That'll be something to watch out for.

I did like the Crysis like detail in the intro BTW. That really looked sweet and rich.

 

Just found this at the same site those new GT HD screens are from!
http://smallvillestories.free.fr/images/Afrika/AfrikaVSrealite.jpg

Pretty amazing

 

Well the animations seems very good and there are many creatures on screen at distance (wonder about LOD) but the graphics are pretty standard (are we living in the same dimension?).

Dunno but see for yourself.
http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/826/826943/img_3934799.html
http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/826/826943/img_3934800.html
http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/826/826943/img_3934801.html
http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/826/826943/img_3899638.html

Just my opinion.

 

Nice! The most striking difference is that for some reason, Afrika is very green! Maybe someone forgot to tell them that ... they're working on a game called Afrika, a very dry place which doesn't look much like the Little House on the Prairie...

 

Grass looks nice but i was just looking at those as well and came to the same conclusion. Just another example that shows trailers arent 100% truthful representations of a game. Thats a shocker eh? I've noticed quite a few trailers on all consoles doing this. See some of the same people who said Oblivion now, for some amazing reason beyond me, looks "bleh" and this looks amazing to them? Must be those image modifying glasses.

 

But screenshots are more truthful (they are from the trailer btw) ?
Sorry if your post was sarcasm and I didn`t get it.

 

Many and I say many trailers/videos of console games abuse the motion-blur/depth of field effect massively and this makes it hard to really see the graphic in whole.

 

Reread my post and the 2 previous posts and you will understand, and no I was not saying Africa uses this.

 

Actually trailers are more truthful than stills because stills lack the animation. that's comparing direct feed to direct feed. Any off-screen image or trailer can't be compared to the direct version of the same.

Some of the grass look weak. Stands out like a sore thumb (such as the wilderbeast image). In the closer shots, the grass is actually very good.

I think they should lose the CG level saturation and contrast. They should do a little softening, desaturation, and add some DOF to get a more photographics look.

 

In the end it counts what you see on screen when you play the game. It`s allright , you think it looks not that hot, I`m fine with that..
My post was in reply to SugatCoat`s where he claims the trailer makes the game look better than it is, because the screenshots don`t look as good. But I fail to see the logic in it because a): the screens are directly from that trailer and b) the game will not be made of still shots.

 

Obviously you did not mange to read my whole post, I said that Africa was not using this (motion-blur or DOF). And what I refer to abuse of motion-bur or DOF can be seen in for example early Motorstorm screenshots/videos which make it hard to notice detail or early FM2 screens and many more. And yes trailers arent always representative becouse of bad quality and or small res size.

Further more animations are how an object is programmed to move and has nothing to do with shader effects as such.

But enough, we are going to far of the topic!

 

Yeah... they should experiment more with different looks to see what gives the best result. Personally I agree with your recommendations above. I really like the Afrika environment. I hope they can reuse the environment for different kind of games (and keep on improving the set, like adding weather effect later on -- if not already in the original version).

 

The concept of this game(?) leaves me utterly bewildered. But it looks nice I guess!

 

To me it would make perfect sense to include this as the default screensaver for the PS3 UI. There was a 3d aquarium that was really popular as a screensaver a few years back. This could be an expansion on that idea.