Chap said:
Graphics else, sounds like JD type of rendering, untextured polys in the background..to acheive that "large" world feel..
*remembers what ERP said just days ago*...
I wonder Chap, what criteria exactly do you use before you construde something as fact? If you read it on a fan newssite? If you've heard it more then twice by two different people? If you've saw it on TV?
:?
A bit of real facts - NDD's GDC presentation on J&D technology goes into great detail about their LOD system (and just about everything else) and they never manage to mention the non-textured LOD that has become something of a B3D fact from what I can see.
Which isn't to say it couldn't have been used - but going by official word, there is no indication to point it has.
I mention this partially because while the idea may sound awfully cool to a lot of people here it's far from being as trivial and in my experience with very large view distances (6km+) you will always have a ton of geometry that "must" remain textured no matter how far off in the distance you see it.
In fact, I can't really think of many examples where this would work decently at all, and those where it would are usually better off simply fading off into transparency and not drawing at all after certain distance (something which J&D DOES do, and quite a lot in fact).
Anyway, the Killzone interview refers to having "multiple" texture layers up close and fading them off as you move away - which is closer to what many XBox games commonly do (eg. Halo), to improve perceived texture detail.
Marc said:
Ironically, the game with best textures on PS2 right now (SH3) DOES use full front buffer and can be played in progressive scan. Same goes for Burnout 2, for example.
That's because the notion that FrameBuffer size imposes limits on your texture storage is BS. (at least IMO
).
Saving 500kb on half frame buffers and using that for non-transient texture doesn't exactly mean much when your main mem texture pool is around 20mb.
Granted however, if you designed the application around critically relying on having that few hundredkb of extra static texture space, then you couldn't have an easy time changing back later on.
Squeak said:
Why should a front buffer for interlace display ever have full resolution?
Because most games can't maintain 60fps constantly enough for this to work. Minor framerate fluctuations become a whole lot more obvious when your resolution halves when they happen.
But you're right, as long as you maintain 60hz, the quality doesn't change on any interlaced display.