NEW Lair Screens Plus Interview!

[Acert93]

This game looks like shit. This isn't flamebait; it's an honest opinion. PS3 should be able to do way more than this. It looks like a mess right now. The only thing I see that is nice are the mountains in the background (real-time tesselation?) and the water, both of which are very pretty.

The PS3 can do way more than this.

Factor5 is feeling the same sort of reaction certain games (GRAW, FM2, Madden, etc) have received after showing stunning art/technicals and then produce realtime footage that falls flat.

Based on the 2005 footage that was said to be realtime (both the shot from the PDF and later shown on screen of a highly detailed dragon; likewise the footage of hundreds of dragons on screen with excellent shadowing and detail) this is a big drop off. The art is basically the same, so the fault cannot be found with art.

There is still time for this title to improve and Factor5 has a good history of technical excellence (not necessarily gaming excellence, although the GCN Starwars game is ok enough imo) so we will see. With all the bullshots you really just need to see a game being played by a real person on a real console to see what will be realized in the finished product, but Lair definately has a lot of work to do.

 

[dangerose]

Animations and polygon count seems to be the biggest downgrade. Lair looks like your next DW cloning attempt with golden showering HDR goodness!

 

[Eagle-Vision]

you forgot how the E3 trailer looked like? i still remember how the dragon swooped down and clawed the crowd up and throwing up fires of hell. that is a HUGE disparity F5 have to cover.

That was never intended to be a target render if that's what your thinking

Based on the 2005 footage that was said to be realtime (both the shot from the PDF and later shown on screen of a highly detailed dragon; likewise the footage of hundreds of dragons on screen with excellent shadowing and detail) this is a big drop off. The art is basically the same, so the fault cannot be found with art.

The dragons look the same than in the scene with hundreds of dragons, the shading and lighting is different simply because the environment has way different characteristics. I'm not seeing the downgrade.

 

[ultragpu]

a cool Lair poster.
http://i12.tinypic.com/2dtztw0.jpg

 

[mckmas8808]

a cool Lair poster.
http://i12.tinypic.com/2dtztw0.jpg

Damn that looks nice.

 

[patsu]

I have a November copy of EGM on my hands. While Eggebrecht sounds a little too salesy to me, there are some Lair gameplay info.

* The goal of the demo level is: Lead your army to victory. There are indeed catapults to take out besides other dragons and soldiers. Other levels will feature mini-bosses, larger battles and "really, really, really big bosses". [I think they are talking about Oprah]

* Dragon controls using SIXAXIS seems easy and expressive. You'll not fly into a wall because your dragon will dodge obstacles on its own.

* You never fight on foot (Thank God). Player can earn dragon riding skills by shooting down certain enemies, doing the moves cleverly and fighting combinations correctly.

* The world is 32km by 32km, with details every 2 meters (Rogue Leaders was 16km by 16km with details every 16 meters).

* Eggebrecht talked about how great 7.1 uncompressed audio is.

* Leaderboard, archievements, downloadable content is planned.

I hope they add dragon "bombs" to the game... err... may be after they addressed whatever drove you guys mad in this thread.

EDIT: spelling.

 

[London Geezer]

* The world is 32km by 32km, with details every 2 meters (Rogue Leaders were 16km by 16km with details every 16 meters).

I didn't get that... What "details" are every 2 meters?

* Eggebecht talked about how great 7.1 uncompressed audio is.

Yay for the next checkbox feature 3 people will get benefit from!!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I didn't get that... What "details" are every 2 meters?

A new texel

 

[patsu]

I didn't get that... What "details" are every 2 meters?

Oh no you don't. I'm not going to get sucked into all these complains about Lair when it's not completed yet. Get your rulers out when the game is released.

Yay for the next checkbox feature 3 people will get benefit from!!

Yay ! Who're the other 2 ?

 

[London Geezer]

Oh no you don't. I'm not going to get sucked into all these complains about Lair when it's not completed yet. Get your rulers out when the game is released.

??? I'm serious? What does that mean, that there are detail every 2 meters??

 

[patsu]

??? I'm serious? What does that mean, that there are detail every 2 meters??

zzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZ [Fighting Oprah with Celestial Brush in nightmare]

 

[Eagle-Vision]

??? I'm serious? What does that mean, that there are detail every 2 meters??

Actually, I didn't get it either

 

[London Geezer]

Thank you!

Does it mean the "bumps" on terrain are basically 2m big? Or that there is a tree every 2m where there are trees?

Don't get it.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

A unique hand-crafted rock or tree appears every 2m. Using the inbuilt photo mode it's possible to fly around the scenery and actually photograph each individual detail, and then review them at your own leisure just to prove the fact that there really is detail on that scale. This was only made possible by BluRay. On a DVD there'd have to duplicate every rock and tree at least a dozen times over the 32 km square area. Can you imagine what the repetition would look like then! Of course to make up for that, they've reduced their texture resolutions so the repetitions on the stones are obvious...but at least we have details every 2 metres in the terrain!

(As you can probably tell, I dunno what they mean by that either.)

 

[London Geezer]

You got it wrong. It's not thanks to Bluray. It's thanks to Bluetooth technology that this is possible on Playstation3. Without Bluetooth, there would only be a detail every 64m. Bluetooth makes the game 16X faster so you can have one every 2m. And that's just by using 1 Bluetooth device such as the controller! When 7 controllers are connected, the game gets 7x faster than that.

 

[Rolf N]

The terrain mesh is a regular grid. The distance between vertex pairs is 2 virtual meters.

 

[Arwin]

The terrain mesh is a regular grid. The distance between vertex pairs is 2 virtual meters.

Thank god, there are at least semi-sane people on this board. I was starting to get worried!

 

[London Geezer]

Thank god, there are at least semi-sane people on this board. I was starting to get worried!

I agree... There are some really strange people around here...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The terrain mesh is a regular grid. The distance between vertex pairs is 2 virtual meters.

If so, that sounds quite rubbish to me. If you get close to the ground you'll see nasty pointy terrain. Or you'll only get soft gradients. In a game like this I'd have thought you'd want an adaptive mesh with LOD and displacement mapping, unless you intended to keep the player from flying close in. But I thought you could land when you wanted.

 

[Angelcurio]

You got it wrong. It's not thanks to Bluray. It's thanks to Bluetooth technology that this is possible on Playstation3. Without Bluetooth, there would only be a detail every 64m. Bluetooth makes the game 16X faster so you can have one every 2m. And that's just by using 1 Bluetooth device such as the controller! When 7 controllers are connected, the game gets 7x faster than that.

Ok, my sarcasm metter just broke after reading this post.