SantaMonicaChris (Christer Ericson, Director of Technology at Santa Monica Studio, led the tech and engine development.)
Graphically there's been HUGE changes since the demo! What you see in the demo is close to a year old. Since then, on the code side, including motion blur, godrays, reflective/refractive surfaces, and improved anti-aliasing, improved the lighting, the depth-of-field code, fixed some problems with the texture streaming to ensure hires textures are correctly streamed in at all times.
We added additional features to the shader system to allow the artists to create even more impressive looking materials. to the shader code. We greatly overhauled the shadows. We also spent a lot of time optimizing the code.
In short, the demo is a pretty poor representation of the final game at this point. We badly wanted to release an updated demo that properly reflected the much improved state the game is in now, but we just ran out of time.
We, Naughty Dog, Guerilla, and other first party teams all openly talk to each other about how we/they approach various production issues or deal with technological challenges on our individual titles. All teams do benefit from technology developed at the central technology teams of WWS (Sony World Wide Studios). One of those central tech teams is co-located at Naughty Dog but isn't actually part of the Naughty Dog game team, which often seems to be a source of confusion on forums.
Our engine is a hybrid between a "deferred" and a "forward" rendering engine. There's no inherent value in being fully the one or the other; there are benefits and drawbacks to both
Hmm, not sure if you are being serious here or just being sarcastic. But just in case you are serious...there's nothing mathematically special about the U2 train level, the original Xbox can handle the math on it.
Seems like it was complicated to them...didn't the devs state that it took a year+ to do?
That's probably how Splinter Cell 2 had a level that was a moving train, if I recall correctly.
Isn't the worst case scenario that you have one or two additional matrix multiplications per moving object?
Scale - A little tidbit i'll throw out there. There is a lot of chatter about how huge the Titans are for good reason. A month or so ago on Neogaf there was a screenshot the posters were calling 'The Titan Warehouse'. After seeing that, the guy that built the level Sukru Gilman decided to see how many Gaia's would fit inside: Answer - 8. That is pretty ridiculous. There are no matte paintings, what you will play is actually that massive...
I was wondering if the giant plot hole at the end of GOW2 is explained in GOW3. Since Kratos can go back in time all the way back to the war between the Titans and the Olympians, and all he wants is to stop the nightmares from killing his wife and child, why doesn't he go back in time where he killed them and stop himself, or even go back and stop making a deal with the gods altogether? Is it because all he thinks is "RAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGEEEEE" and not very smart? I know most stories with time travel have huge plot holes, but they're usually explained with "you can't change the past, or you can't change your destiny"
Maybe because he wan't to punish his "own" father? If you remember GoW 2 you would know that Zeus has killed kratos in the very beginning of the game, and he use the time travel to go back and defeat Zeus....It's not only for the nightmare, it's for the betrayal of the olympus.I was wondering if the giant plot hole at the end of GOW2 is explained in GOW3. Since Kratos can go back in time all the way back to the war between the Titans and the Olympians, and all he wants is to stop the nightmares from killing his wife and child, why doesn't he go back in time where he killed them and stop himself, or even go back and stop making a deal with the gods altogether? Is it because all he thinks is "RAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGEEEEE" and not very smart? I know most stories with time travel have huge plot holes, but they're usually explained with "you can't change the past, or you can't change your destiny"
Apologies if this has already been answered, but is the following footage realtime or pre-recorded using the game engine then played back to mask loading times etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKV8_NogSUY
I believe its realtime. It IS GOW afterall.
I think so. The rest is real time i think (when poseidon jump down from the olympus). It's an unbelievable sequence, very epic, imho the best so far.I don't know if the first three minutes are realtime, i think it's in-engine but pre-recorded.
Q: hi to all
I have a doubt with the final version of the game.
it has dynamic shadows? in the demo, in the cave when you have the head of the god, the shadows of the enemies are always the same.
did you improve that? or not
Go back and play the demo, the Helios Head is casting reatime shadows. Its not the most obvious case, but the grunt shadows do move. If you move the head around with the right stick you will be able to tell. If you check out the first 10 minute video of the game. You will see some pretty sick examples of dynamic shadows as Gaia is moving her arm around.
Dynamic Shadow quality is one of the graphic features we spent the most time on, it was priority number 1 for me. I talk about this on a previous post on this thread. I promise, we did everything in our power to make sure there is no pixelization on the shadows. You guys are gonna dig!
Cinematics:
Some are wondering why all cinematics don't run in realtime, instead are videos captured from the engine. First off, all cinematics are ingame art!
The only reason we would render out a video is memory. Take the Initial Gaia level. To show the first cinematic of the Titan falling would take up so much memory, we wouldn't be able to have the Gaia level loaded. By rendering off a video, we only need to make sure there is 20-30mb of space available to load the entire cinematic. What that means to the gamer - you never have a load screen, ever - the entire experience is seamless and uninterupted.
Apologies if this has already been answered, but is the following footage realtime or pre-recorded using the game engine then played back to mask loading times etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKV8_NogSUY
God of War IIII featurette going up tomorrow. Believe the hype - the game is brilliant, the tech sets new standards for this console gen.