LAIR Thread - * Rules: post #469

[ihamoitc2005]

Magic

I can't believe a bunch of grown men are arguing over what a dragon could or couldn't do if they were real.

:|

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws

Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following three "laws" of prediction:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

 

[archangelmorph]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws

Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following three "laws" of prediction:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

So PS3 is magic??

Or Lair's dragon's are advanced technology??

Or I'm confused.. ???

/joke

 

[dnavas]

Au contraire, mon ami! The developers have stated numerous times they're going for realism. They want these animals to feel like physical animals with a physical presence.

I think it'd be neat to have better physics, so long as it helps the gameplay.
If less forward motion --> faster wings, that's to the detriment of the visuals ("I can't see anything but wings!"). However, if less forward motion --> falling, then I could attack another dragon, attempting to rip it from the skies by squatting on it and rotating my wings out to brake while trying to severe his wings from his body....

Are there shots of damaged dragon wings? Asymmetric flapping (I suspect real birds trim the stronger side, but...)?

If there is such a large shock wave against the water, is there a similar shock wave in the air? How does that change how you attack ships?

:shrug:

"Real" physics is barely in use on TV, nevermind games. If it looks cooler for spaceships to bank in space, then they bank -- just go with it....

-Dave

 

[ihamoitc2005]

"Real" physics is barely in use on TV, nevermind games. If it looks cooler for spaceships to bank in space, then they bank -- just go with it....

-Dave

Banking space ship is good for passenger comfort so they feel force on their bottom instead of sides.

But, I think maybe we analyze physics of Lair so much because it has so much ambition. I have not seen one game with so much ambition to show things. Amazing.

 

[zed]

Au contraire, mon ami! The developers have stated numerous times they're going for realism

but the whole premise of dragons flying is not physically possible to start with (whether filled with hydrogen or not) dragons which can carry 80+kilos humans to boot. look at the closest thing to a dragon, that dinosaur glider (petr....)

I can't believe a bunch of grown men are arguing over what a dragon could or couldn't do if they were real.

yes 13yr old nerd boys is bad enuf, but me in my 30s is not a good sign, but hey ill argue anything.

though if i was a developer ild be rubbing my hands with glee (as certain ppl have to always find things to complain about ) better this than framerate, drawdistance etc

 

[Sankari]

A powerful enough explosion can all-but-vaporize the container of the explosives. Didn't anyone see that episode of Mythbusters where they destroyed a cement-mixer truck??

I did, it was hilarious watching that truck simply disappear. IMO its kinda stupid people are crying over ships exploding and disappearing, I mean come on, is there nothing else to nitpick these days?

As for the dragon floating, I'm sure they will try to fix it but if I'm not completely wrong I did see the dragon stop and still wave his wings in one of the videos about the lighthouse(?). But it doesn't happen everytime so its a problem but as long as the game is fun, I doubt I'll be crying "OH NO! The dragon can float without waving his wings! I should have never bought this game."

 

[Shifty Geezer]

As for the dragon floating, I'm sure they will try to fix it but if I'm not completely wrong I did see the dragon stop and still wave his wings in one of the videos about the lighthouse(?). But it doesn't happen everytime so its a problem but as long as the game is fun, I doubt I'll be crying "OH NO! The dragon can float without waving his wings! I should have never bought this game."

There's very few graphical glitches, or story plots, that will make a person regret buying a game or movie or book. They all have faults one way or another. Lack of faults helps give a better impression though; a better experience. No-one's going to lament buying a good racer if the shadows on the cars are pixelated, but if the shadows are realistic, they'll value the racer more highly.

As creatives will tell you, you know when you've done something well when people don't notice. They come away thinking 'that was awesome' without necessarily being able to say why, because the sound, visuals, story, acting, etc. all came together so well it was more a life experience than a movie, or more a window on a universe than a game.

 

[ManuVlad3.0]

Again: alpha build, guys. We will have to wait until the game release to comment about bugs or graphical glitches.

 

[Crossbar]

A July release seems pretty unrealistic to me judging from the hickups. There seems to be a lot of trimming left. Julian said they had recenetly gone through hell to fit the game within the 512 MB memory. They probably had to make some compromises that they need to smooth out now.

My thoughts are with the programmers that will be more or less constantly working overtime the coming months to get it up to snuff. They are my heroes! :smile:

The game seemsbe "epic" in the true sense of the word and that means a lot of work need to go into the production, I just hope they will be able to keep an even and high quality throughout the game.

 

[homy]

To whoever said the debris from the boat disappeared right away then please watch this new video
http://uk.media.ps3.ign.com/media/76...61/vids_1.html

It didn't. It actually fell down on the water and disappear, very clear. It showed at minute 1:07.
Maybe you guys watched the videos where the camera turned away after the explosion and it gave you the impression that the debris disappeared in thin air.

This is the most impressive game of all time. Watch this video and give your thoughts.

 

[pakotlar]

To whoever said the debris from the boat disappeared right away then please watch this new video
http://uk.media.ps3.ign.com/media/76...61/vids_1.html

It didn't. It actually fell down on the water and disappear, very clear. It showed at minute 1:07.
Maybe you guys watched the videos where the camera turned away after the explosion and it gave you the impression that the debris disappeared in thin air.

This is the most impressive game of all time. Watch this video and give your thoughts.

the most impressive 404 of all time...

 

[homy]

the most impressive 404 of all time...

Sorry it works now
http://uk.media.ps3.ign.com/media/761/761161/vids_1.html

 

[CEO]

I can't believe a bunch of grown men are arguing over what a dragon could or couldn't do if they were real.

:|

What? You mean like them having laser rays coming out of the eyes & shit?
Wait... those were sharks...

 

[Gradthrawn]

Well now, what do you know. They're not floating they're falling. IGN video interview.

...what you've probably also seen is the grapple, fighting mode. Were, basically, you grapple onto the other dragon, both of you fall out of the sky, while you do a very traditional fighting game in mid air...

http://media.video.ign.com/ev/sv.ht...erview_041607_flvlowwide.flv&object_ID=761161

 

[macabre]

New detailed interview here.

Thanks to VG Aficionado at xbd`s forum for finding this.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Key excerpts according to Yours Truly...

In a game like Lair, if you've got a couple of thousand soldiers running around and hundreds of dragons, one of the big issues you have is a ton of collision checks, which other games simply don't have. It's always been a big issue, and the SPUs are perfect for number-crunching like that.

Surely this is more a memory problem than number cruncher? Most of those collision tests should just be proximity.

We've got a lot of things, including army AI. If you have primitive AI for the distant armies, you can easily run that on the SPUs. As the army comes closer and these guys need to get more intelligent, you move the more intelligent army AI code onto the PPU.

AI on the PPU. In HS, is all AI on the SPE's, or does close combat use the PPU?

JE: We're releasing in July. The state of the game we're in right now is alpha. Alpha means that we've got all of the levels in final memory, which was our biggest push. Now that all of the features are in, we start optimizing, tweaking, and bug fixing.

You were saying that if the game is really successful, there will probably be a sequel. How do you measure the success of a game like this, given that we're still in a part of the PlayStation 3's lifecycle where not many consoles have been sold?
JE: In the end, you have to see it in an absolute way. It has to break even. If it breaks even, I think for a new IP that's almost the best thing that can happen. The best thing that can happen is that you've got such a huge installed base that you basically go gangbusters in terms of profit. But quite frankly, for Lair, I would be happy if it breaks even, because that would be something huge already.

Right now (in the bridge level) you've got like ten guys on the front lines fighting, while everyone else is just waiting in the background going, "Yeah!"...
JE: That's the inherent problem. It's not so much the problem of displaying all of these guys, it's how you then interact. You immediately get punished if you start whacking your own guys too much. That's why we kept it separate. It's a tricky design issue.
... It's a tricky case, because you're this monster, a tank in the middle of a bunch of guys, so you would probably kill too many of your own.

The only other stand out info for me was mention of Turrican and download titles. I dare say, for the way Eggbricht talks, he'll mess the franchise up. A decent 2.5D Turrican would be a nice blast, whereas a whole new game called Turrican might go anywhere. Although the idea of the beam weapon and bouncers versus multiple shot in an FPS could be cool. Has anyone ever taken the weapon variety from the old 2D shooter days into 3D? All the shooters I've seen just have assault rifle, pistol, shotgun, sniper rifle, missile, and a couple of other general beam weapons.

 

["Nerve-Damage"]

Nice interview.....

Can you tell me more about the progressive mesh? I noticed that things were being generated on the fly, and mountains were just kind of popping up. It's cool in a way, but it probably shouldn't happen.

JE: In the end it comes down to tweaking, and we're probably going to tweak the progressive mesh until the last day. Somebody who is running on a 1080p system and who is really accustomed to look for stuff like that will probably see a little bit of growth here and there. Then again, at least we can do something like that. Without progressive mesh, I don't think that the thing would have been possible, quite frankly.

Keep tweaking!

Are those mountains generated differently each time? What is important about progressive mesh?

JE: Progressive mesh is not only the mountains. Every single thing you can see on screen is running through the SPUs' progressive mesh code. On the landscape, it's basically using more traditional techniques. It is progressive mesh, but we've had landscape generation since the GameCube days. We never had a CPU which was strong enough to do it for the whole world, though. It's really cool.

The big thing on the landscape is the detail level. I don't think any landscape has been done with that level of detail. Back in the day for the GameCube landscapes, the typical approach was to tediously hand-texture everything on the landscape. What the RSX does in Lair is we give the graphics chip a pixel-shader program which is actually a rule set. That makes texturing of landscapes an extremely quick thing.

Very cool...

 

[DUALDISASTER]

slightly off topic but i went to e.b. today and the clerk said the game has been pushed to august. as if we didn't know. take your time guys!

 

[patsu]

New detailed interview here.

Thanks to VG Aficionado at xbd`s forum for finding this.

Well... thanks to both of you

The interview has more details on Lair's progressive mesh. Meanwhile I have my wary eyes on their gameplay (because I intend to buy this game).

As I've also noticed with the Wii, sometimes it's a little difficult to know the limits of how far you can turn, for example, in a game with motion controls.

JE: In Lair, we're mapping the level of the controller exactly to the dragon. Basically, if you lean the maximum 90 degrees, the dragon will turn that much. The angle matches perfectly.

We found that very important, because that came after focus testing after TGS. We were watching people fly, and they were having some fun, but they were having more problems than later on, when we made sure that [the controller matched on-screen movement]. Humans seem to have a pretty keen sense for what the angle of something is, and are able to correlate that subconsciously to what's on-screen. It helped a lot.

Did you have to hand-animate the dragons? I saw videos of the mocap that was done for the humans, down at SCEA San Diego – it was really nice.

JE: The dragons obviously have to be hand-animated. There aren't any dragons to motion capture!

You could’ve used a lion or something!

JE: The interesting thing about the dragons is that most of the time they're actually biped. They're kind of dinosaurish. The sole reason for that is that you want to have the front arms able to do something.

We had an early prototype where the dragons were completely four-legged on the ground. It made it way too hard to control. Just spinning on the spot was impossible, so it turned very much into horse-like or tank-like gameplay. That's actually why we raised them up a little and went with more T-rex-like proportions.

So, [in Lair], why are all these guys on the ground when there are all of these dragons in the sky that can tear them to pieces?

JE: That's not true! They have kites on many levels loaded with explosives, so if a dragon approaches too closely, the thing blows up and harms you quite badly. They're not completely exposed.

Bring it ! I'm going to be the baddest dragon out there.

It's interesting how design scope kind of explodes when you get these worlds so much bigger. When you're getting close to realism, it calls all of your old tropes into question.

JE: But it actually helps the gameplay so much in ways you didn't imagine. You're kind of afraid of it in the beginning, because you're saying, "Oh boy, the old tricks won't work. I don't know what the player is going to do." But embrace it, because in the end, as we've seen in Lair, those levels are the best ones.

There's quite a few plate-spinning levels where you have sandbox-like gameplay, and they are by far the best. They're so cool.

I like the spirit. Let's see the goods in July/August.

 

[Nesh]

In that particular interview I liked the things he said about Cell. It could raise some pretty high standards

How far do you think there is to go, graphically, on PS3?

JE: It's huge. I think (PS3 GPU) RSX isn't a big secret. What's really interesting is that we're starting these days in the optimization process for Lair to use Cell to do certain things on the graphics side, which you normally wouldn't expect.

I think there is a huge room for growth. RSX, as well as the GPU in the 360, are known quantities. Around the middle of the cycle, most people will have figured out what you can do with them. But then you suddenly have the connection between Cell and the SPUs and RSX, and you can do a lot more with that, graphically.


How are you splitting stuff up to the SPUs? What sorts of things are you finding you're able to stick in there?

JE: We initially started out by saying, "Wow, we're going to do physics," and everybody should do that at least. But it very quickly became a matter of "oh, let's put this on the SPUs, and now let's put this on there." We've got the fluid dynamics, all of the physics including ragdoll, and all of the collisions.

In a game like Lair, if you've got a couple of thousand soldiers running around and hundreds of dragons, one of the big issues you have is a ton of collision checks, which other games simply don't have. It's always been a big issue, and the SPUs are perfect for number-crunching like that. Other things which you can do nicely on the SPUs is to prepare tasks for the RSX, which normally you'd have to do with the CPU, because the GPU really can't do it at that moment.

We've got a lot of things, including army AI. If you have primitive AI for the distant armies, you can easily run that on the SPUs. As the army comes closer and these guys need to get more intelligent, you move the more intelligent army AI code onto the PPU.