Motorstorm 2

[2real4tv]

Some info on making of trailer:
http://forums.3dtotal.com/showthread.php?t=57874

 

[deepbrown]

http://tv.multiplayer.it/2416/motorstorm-pacific-rift-filmato-1-playstation-day

some gameplay.

Walkthrough of the engine can be found on PSN

 

[patsu]

They have improved the lighting. Too bad the video does not show some of the promised new features (e.g., more AI driver actions, monster truck, destructible vegetations). When is MS2 due ?

 

[DJ12]

There is something on gametrailers from PSN day that shows monster trucks and the vegetation.

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/33734.html

 

[patsu]

Thanks ! MS1 is a lot of fun. In MS2, the stubborn foliage and water buoyancy + friction will be welcomed depth. I like it when devs introduce elements that improve gameplay and visuals at the same time. It seems that all the major set pieces are destructible now. In MS1, some of the larger pieces (like houses) are immutable. In this trailer, it shows a monster truck tear down a hut.

 

[betan]

The trees look boring and spritey to me, but rest of the areas including water looks very nice but interaction is as bad as any other game.
Glad they have water cooling. In the first one, I was hoping long jumps would cool the engine faster to add a strategy element, but it wasn't there. :|
Now I wish M2 to use foliage resistance to add interesting coop mechanics.

 

[patsu]

The trees look boring and spritey to me

Indeed ! But MS1 hardly has any real ones. If the game's 40% done now, I hope the vegetation gets some facelift and more variety later. It's supposed to be a tropical island afterall.

but rest of the areas including water looks very nice but interaction is as bad as any other game.
Glad they have water cooling. In the first one, I was hoping long jumps would cool the engine faster to add a strategy element, but it wasn't there. :|
Now I wish M2 to use foliage resistance to add interesting coop mechanics.

Ha ! I was expecting people to complain about water foam and splashing not realistic enough. For MP, they should have a level to experiment with co-opetition like LittleBigPlanet. e.g., Have the players co-op to cross a deep river for example, then race forward again.

 

[betan]

Indeed ! But MS1 hardly has any real ones. If the game's 40% done now, I hope the vegetation gets some facelift and more variety later. It's supposed to be a tropical island afterall.

I have been complaining about the choice of jungle after the first trailer since it's difficult to render.
Hope they can bring it up next to the rest.

Ha ! I was expecting people to complain about water foam and splashing not realistic enough.

To be fair I don't recall any splash effect, only circular ripple waves.

 

[patsu]

I have been complaining about the choice of jungle after the first trailer since it's difficult to render.
Hope they can bring it up next to the rest.

Yes, I was a little disappointed they left the desert. I love the open space and the dusty, muddy MS1 experience. I was (still am) a little concerned with the limited space in a jungled island. deepbrown's trailer alleviate much of these feelings, but the inherent technical challenge is steep. I am not sure if they can produce a satisfactory gaming experience yet.

To be fair I don't recall any splash effect, only circular ripple waves.

Argh ! Well, the water "powdering" effect as I called it can be found in the second trailer. Look for the proverbial waterfalls, and some truckies, buggies charging into the water.

In any case, I have always admired the MotorStorm team's enthusiasm and fearlessness (Jungles... are you mad ?!). My wallet is waiting for them as long as:
(i) They have split screen
(ii) The levels are still wide and varied (as shown in deepbrown's trailer)
(iii) The AI drivers and other human players can taunt me in more ways
(iv) The additional gameplay from foliage and water allow me to enjoy the game more

 

[Rangers]

Looks worse than the original imo.

 

[Neb]

Looks worse than the original imo.

Wouldnt say worse but barely any better and IMO very average looking at best. The water ripples, bland vegetation detail and average lighting isn't helping. LEt's hope the "40% done" means improvments in atleast the lighting. Though they are trying to do a "Crysis" there and 20 (was it 20 cars?) isnt something to sneeze at!

 

[patsu]

The tech demo video definitely looks worse, but I don't think it's meant to look good. It's there to demo the new concepts.

This MS2 video here: http://www.gamersyde.com/stream_7075_en.html
may be more representative of the final look. Not too shabby so far but not everything new is in, and it's too small to conclude anything yet.

 

[cthellis42]

You mean a 40% complete pre-alpha might not look quite as polished as their earlier completed game? Heaven forfend!

That only thing I'm missing right now is more of the "falling off a cliff" and "checking some poor schmuck off a cliff," because they're not yet showing those maps, and M1 was filled with a lot more of them, and almost no other game has it. ^_^

 

[patsu]

That only thing I'm missing right now is more of the "falling off a cliff" and "checking some poor schmuck off a cliff," because they're not yet showing those maps, and M1 was filled with a lot more of them, and almost no other game has it. ^_^

Whelp, I think one of the above trailers have the "Oops, I forgot how many feet there is to a meter" cliff jump.

EDIT: I pity Sony guys because if they show target renders, they may be labelled as liars. If they show current development status, they will be called out for looking worse. It should not surprise people that we will see increasingly better looking PS3 games (or for that matter, 360 games) throughout this year and next.

 

[Kittonwy]

Wouldnt say worse but barely any better and IMO very average looking at best. The water ripples, bland vegetation detail and average lighting isn't helping. LEt's hope the "40% done" means improvments in atleast the lighting. Though they are trying to do a "Crysis" there and 20 (was it 20 cars?) isnt something to sneeze at!

Are we talking about the same REACTIVE and gameplay relevant vegetation and water and the same use of tone-mapping they had in the first game?

 

[ultragpu]

are we seriously looking at the same shots? check out the gamersyde 720p screenies, the lighting and vegetation do look great. the geometry count here are also increased alot thanks to all foliages. ok, the water needs more attention perhaps but so far it definetly looked better than the original. and remember how the first showing of MS1 looked compared to the release stage? yeah, if history repeats.

 

[Gitaroo]

they are doing a 4 players split screen, maybe they need to hold back in the streaming a bit?

 

[patsu]

We will know in due time how these guys fare and what techniques they employ to solve split screen issues. For some reason, your post reminded me of the B3D interview with Scott Kirkland last year:

B3D: Will the next project out of Evolution continue to build upon the Motorstorm engine, or is the present expectation that work for a new title will commence with a clean slate from the engine side?

Scott Kirkland: During the development of MotorStorm our team learned a great deal about PlayStation3 exploitation and production process refinement. While much of this knowledge fed directly into our systems, some items had to be put on hold due to their more radical nature. As we progress, these areas will be subjected to some serious re-factoring to provide increased performance both at runtime and during development.

SPU usage is a good example. The progressive development of corresponding debugging and profiling tools made thorough exploitation of this powerful resource quite challenging for the less technically biased members of the team. In the aftermath of MotorStorm, with mature tools at our disposal, we’ve been developing mechanisms to make the PPU and SPU’s power and parallelism far more accessible to our entire team, re-thinking data organization and algorithms in the process. MotorStorm only uses between 15 and 20 percent of available SPU resource, so we’re aiming to achieve a 5 fold increase in SPU performance, which should allow us to do some awesome stuff!

B3D: Cell's ability to assist RSX in rendering operations has been a topic of much debate and speculation of late. Was Cell used in Motorstorm to perform any lighting, vertex, or other transform work?

Scott Kirkland: We don’t use the Cell’s SPUs in this way at the moment. All of our lighting and transformation work is done in the RSX’s pixel and vertex shaders.

Our SPU exploiting systems consist of:

i) Havok physics.
ii) Determination of object visibility.
iii) Concatenation of hierarchies.
iv) Billboard object culling and vertex buffer creation.
v) Updating of particles and vertex buffer creation.
vi) Updating of vehicle dynamics.
vii) Updating of vehicle suspension constraints.
viii) Audio (MultiStream).
ix) Video decoding.

B3D: Were Evolution's thoughts that the application of Cell towards such tasks might go too far in removing SPEs from being available for work on AI, physics, and other gameplay-related code?

Scott Kirkland: Cell’s SPUs provide a huge amount of processing power. Early adopters tended to bias usage towards either RSX or PPU support (we fall into the latter category). I’m confident that over the coming months, exploitation of this resource will become far more balanced.

B3D: Further to that, do you believe that as the generation progresses, cooperative rendering techniques will become a larger part of what grows to define baseline PS3 rendering methods, or are your thoughts that such efforts will play out more or less in niche areas?

Scott Kirkland: If by “cooperative renderingâ€￾ you’re referring to SPUs supporting the RSX, I strongly believe that this approach will become far more widespread. In addition to reducing the vertex load on the RSX through the use of culling and vertex pre-processing, this approach also provides an efficient mechanism to introduce procedural geometry.

Historically, CPUs have provided course grain scene culling using view frustums, occlusion planes, portal visibility and BSP-trees with GPUs left to perform fine grain rejection using guard band clipping, occlusion and backface culling. While such features improve fragment performance, they don’t reduce vertex processing overhead.

The leap in performance provided by Cell gives us the bandwidth to significantly reduce RSX time spent processing vertices that don’t contribute to the final scene. The favoured approach is to use SPUs to generate minimal scene/instance specific index and vertex buffers from compressed data.

Wonder if the procedural geometry reference is in fact the interactive vegetation feature.

 

[RenegadeRocks]

I hope they can bring the visuals to the level of MS 1, by the time of release.I know its got Split screen now, but Motorstorm looked almost real.This one is looking like a game. C'mon, maybe reduce it to 2 player split screen and more visuals.Anyway, I won't be able to see anyhting in 4 tiny splitscreens. Make it 2 and more visual quality!

 

[deepbrown]

Looks worse than the original imo.

It looks way better than the originals Pre-Alpha....MS1 looked like balls then.

Fora technical forum I'm really suprised at people complaining about a 40% done game - especially when Evolution is a studio that does all their graphics polish towards the last 20% (unlike GG)....you guys are odd.