NEW Lair Screens Plus Interview!
- Thread starter Bad_Boy
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I was sceptical of this game in terms of gameplay, but I'm getting more confident about it.
Anyway, I thought that the latest 1up show had a pretty good interview - the guys asked some quite intelligent questions, also regarding technical merit, and the demonstrations he gave showed off the game much better (like flying under the bridge's pillars etc.)
Very interesting I thought was that he mentioned that if you waited ten minutes, you'd see the sun come up and notice that everything was already being globally illuminated. That is very impressive.
He also mentioned again that while he's not nearly sure that Factor 5 were a major influence in this matter, they already asked Nintendo for tilt/motion sensing when they were still programming for the GameCube, and asked again when they attended a special controller meeting with Sony. Here they specifically also asked for the accellerometers. When they were developing, they always had motion sensing in mind, but did work with a backup solution for a while, when things weren't quite certain yet.
One of the best questions asked I think were the ones on why Lair is doing so well with 1080p where other games don't manage yet, and in which way their game made use of the specific PS3 features and strengths.
For 1080p, he said, the main problem is fillrate - the RSX is plenty capable of handling everything else at this resolution. Their solution to the fillrate problem is implementing clever mathematics that determine what does and doesn't need to be drawn. They are doing quite well in that respect, and he predicts that you'll see most PS3 games go 1080p.
For the other, he indicated the global illumination, the AI for 3000 soldiers on the bridge, the water, the progressive LOD among others as examples of where Cell is helping them out to achieve more.
He also feels that where the first version of Rogue Squadron for GameCube managed to hit about 80% of the performance capacity of the GC, and the subsequent version pretty much maxed it out, Lair at its time of release will probably use about 50% of PS3's power, and the rest of the 50% will probably be gradually unlocked over the next 5-7 years. He praises Sony's devices of being able to store a lot of 'hidden power' in their consoles that developers can tap into for a long time which adds to the console's excellent lifespan.
Note that this is the other side of where he says that the PS3 isn't an easy device to work with, especially if you want to max it out, but that the challenges and potential this offers a developer is what makes Factor 5 really enjoy developing for it.
It has pros and cons there.
Anyway, it was a good interview, and the 1up episode was very good all-round. I did find it quite amusing though that while they end with praising Microsoft for being 'reliable' and showing existing 360 owners to have a decent amount of stuff to look forward to, the episode ends up showing off the PS3 a lot more than the 360. But that could be my own bias - maybe I just personally saw more stuff there that I enjoyed.
And still, with all that technology mumbo jumgo, they don't have a clue of how to use it to make things look good.
I think that with the Star Wars games for GC, they had it easy because the art was pretty much already done for them, it just needed to be put into a manageable format for a game. Plus they had none of these new effects to abuse, like HDR - which in Liar's case makes things look worse cause it's so over the top.
SOcean2forever
Newcomer
To view the interview with Julian Eggebrecht in higher resolution (the looks better in higher resolution anyway), download it here:
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3154113
It shows someone tinkering with the dragon (going over and under the bridge, zooming into the water and whatnot)
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3154113
It shows someone tinkering with the dragon (going over and under the bridge, zooming into the water and whatnot)
They should do something with the colors and HDR. My eyes hurtContinued...
I'm a lot less picky about screenshots than most of you here. I like them so far but agree that they need to tone down the shine.
There seems to be a lot of activities going on in one of the videos (water, flags, fire, webbed wings, soldiers, etc. etc. due to the large draw distance). The motion sensing control is responsive too ? (Since I don't remember seeing complains about it). At 1080p, we may notice some artifacts easier, but we should also be able to see some of the far away details too (e.g., birds' eye view of soldiers fighting below while in-flight).
I would be happy if the final version fixes the bugs and just focuses on fun gameplay.
There seems to be a lot of activities going on in one of the videos (water, flags, fire, webbed wings, soldiers, etc. etc. due to the large draw distance). The motion sensing control is responsive too ? (Since I don't remember seeing complains about it). At 1080p, we may notice some artifacts easier, but we should also be able to see some of the far away details too (e.g., birds' eye view of soldiers fighting below while in-flight).
I would be happy if the final version fixes the bugs and just focuses on fun gameplay.
which they had done already twice before with the original rogue squadron for the n64 and the PC. still, what factor5 did with the cube's launch-time RS2:RL was nothing short of impressive for the terms they did it.
have i mentioned before that it usually takes more than one attempt for any developer to make a truly good game, be that from even the best raw material?
IOW, don't expect miracles from factor5's first attempt on the ps3 - after all lair is not their 3rd dragons title, and the platform takes taming on its own too. heck, from those shots they've been demostrating they're still not sure where to spend their mesh resources to get good looks for their dragons.
again, possibly their first large-scale commercial attempt with those technques.
who's producing the title, btw?
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mckmas8808
Legend
Can somebody break down what the Lair dev was saying about CELL doing all the work and just letting the RSX chip display everything. How is that possible?
HDR images always look bad when displayed on a display not capable of displaying with high dynamic range. Most PC monitor displays have a contrast ratio of around 300:1. When HDR images are displayed on these, or 24 bit colour jpegs, the bright and dark zones and various colours saturate on or off, and you get a horrible looking image with HDR bloom like you see on the Lair photos.
This is a fault of displays, not HDR. An HDR image displayed on an HDR display looks fantastic - vibrant and realistic, particularly for daylight exterior scenes, and interior scenes with point lighting or shadows, where you do get a high range of brightness. An image displayed on an LDR display is actually very flat and artificial, but not quite as bad as an HDR image displayed on an LDR display.
I think there should be some sort of LDR setting on HDR games to match the display capability. The output could have the exposure setting adjusted continually to cope with the brightness much like your eye would open and close your iris in response to brightness, and some sort of brightness correction could be applied on top of that to create an artificial input to output brightness curve to suit the display in order to prevent saturation.
TVs are generally better than computer monitors for dynamic range - when I watch a movie on my PC, it looks flat, compared to the more vibrant and real looking image I get playing on on a conventional STV. In this respect the IQ is better on the TV despite being a much lower resolution - maybe part of the reason to get an HDTV rather than play the game on a monitor.
Most good HDTVs have a high contrast ratio >3000:1, but the higher the better. Still the human eye is capable of handling contrast ratios of 10000000:1 so anything less than this can't match reality and requires some sort of artificial compensation.
HDTVs are getting better contrast ratios and brightness.
http://www.brightsidetech.com/products/dr37p.php
however 200,000:1 contrast ratio and 3000 cd/m2 brightness is still nowhere near what you get looking out of a Window.
Maybe, but for now they can at least avoid cheap monitors and HDTVs with low contrast ratios and look forward to the day in the not too distant future when all displays give that type of brightness and contrast ratio. The fact that brightside's HDR TV is here means the technology is here now, and will come down in price.
Are these framebuffer grabs or off a screen? Because they look like the latter. It's really bad visually, in having black terrain and sea and orange/yellow highlight to access. The contrast is insanely high.
There's quite a lot of texture repetition too.
I don't see how this post is any better. If you want to criticize his post, pm him. And the game does look awful imo.
It looks ugly to me too. But I think thats what London Boy was thinking too
I'd also say that Lair's problem isn't a lack of tone mapping - it is the substandard lighting and shaders. A purely artistic issue, which - I hope - will be solved with some more development time...
mckmas8808
Legend
I can be sure entirely, but I'd say no it's not.
mckmas8808
Legend
So why does it give off that same see through look that the PS3 E3 2005 Nvidia demo did? Remember that flying mermaid lady with those long armed monsters?
No games are using SSS, because it takes far too much processing power to perform the necessary raytracing. What we've seen so far on skin and other shaders are various fake effects, and I'm quite sure that Lair is using something like this as well.
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