Official February 20, 2013 Playstation event

[patsu]

And that is exactly why I like Alex Evan's and MM and appreciate Sony.
It's absolutely unclear if there is a market for it, though LBP moved enough units, but they'll invest money in something that's completely different.
I don't need another FPS or RTS or Racing Game, I want to see new experiences and I have a soft spot for enabling end users, so it appeals to me.

Me too ! But in this case, painting or sculpting in the air is hard. I tried.

For a simple Beat Sketcher sketch, it's manageable after 5 tries.

For a more elaborate painting, it took me 30-45 minutes to complete a simple Totoro sketch, mostly to experiment and workaround some human limitations. While Move is accurate, it's not so easy to control the strokes in mid-air. It is especially difficult to draw a vertical (or horizontal) line in free space. The strokes will almost always turn out crooked or slanted in 3D space. There is also some drift after a while (in Beat Sketcher).

If they are serious about user creation with Move, I think they will need to devote a lot of resources into the project. The mouse or tablet may be a better tool (or they drag Move on a table to draw). It's an extremely difficult challenge because most end users are not talented, impatient, and need motivation.

If they want to empower everyone, the creation process needs to be second nature (like Draw Something), or it may not work.

If they want to empower the same LBP creators, then they need to focus on the promotion and reward aspects. I would to see a follow up to the PS3 user creation tools (from inFamous 2, LBP2 to Modnation). I doubt it will happen though.

 

[Arwin]

Will all due respect, Beat Sketcher was crappy. LittleBigPlanet's painting mode was already a step up. I can't understand why noone even bothered to release something with zoom options either. The paint example that they had on the Move presentation was better than most of them combined.

The one really good painting example is ironically in Start the Party. It's just for coloring in stuff, but it is really fast, precise, and looks great too. Sony is bad at leveraging these things, seeing their potential. Kids like things they can be creative with.

 

[MarkoIt]

Uhh... what. Of course it does; that was the entire point in the technique/demo. Who the hell releases a skin demo without subsurface scattering?

Or more recent (but still a year ago now - time flies): http://www.iryoku.com/separable-sss-released and http://www.iryoku.com/open-your-eyes
Wouldn't be surprised if the Sony demo was based on the same tech. Neat demo no doubt, but I've mostly seen it before. That said, I sometimes forget that gamers don't always follow the research like I do

I can see that the Quantum Dreams demo has it, but the 8800GTX one.. it's not really evident. The lighting seems pretty flat. It seems just a really high poly model, with a high quality texture applied to it and normal mapping/ bump mapping for skin-impurity.

Edit: No, i checked. It has a pretty complex skin shader. On the video you can see better:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoC8i3m84Nk

The QD Demo is far more impressive to me, which should be expected since it's done with almost 7 times the computational capabilities and 7 years later.

 

[pjbliverpool]

http://www.guru3d.com/files_details/nvidia_demo_human_head.html

NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 Ultra demo "Human Head" delivers a startling leap forward in realism for real-time characters. A new sum-of-Guassians formulation of subsurface scattering within a multi-layered skin model coupled with the blazing shading performance of GeForce 8800 Ultra enables rendering of realistic human skin at a level never before seen in real-time.
Minimum System Requirements: GeForce 8800 Ultra, Windows XP, ForceWare Drivers 97.44 or higher, 512MB system memory, 256MB video memory.

To evaluate the complex skin shader and HDR lighting, "Human Head" computes 17 offscreen textures every frame totaling over 40 Million pixels, each shaded with lengthy pixel shaders. That's more than 1.2 billion pixels every second! 4096 x 4096 color and normal textures provide photo-realistic detail even at extremely close ranges. All this shading and texture processing requires both a level of shader performance and memory bandwidth unavailable until now thanks to GeForce 8800 Ultra.

The presets at the lower left allow quick access to a variety of lighting rigs and the menu controls allow complete control of light positions. The Shader FX menu allows control of the translucency of the skin (the "waxy" slider) as well as controls for chrome skin (or even a mix of skin and chrome). The number keys "1" through "5" show some of subsurface scattering textures that are computing each frame when evaluating the skin shader. "0" restores normal rendering.

 

[patsu]

Will all due respect, Beat Sketcher was crappy. LittleBigPlanet's painting mode was already a step up. I can't understand why noone even bothered to release something with zoom options either. The paint example that they had on the Move presentation was better than most of them combined.

The one really good painting example is ironically in Start the Party. It's just for coloring in stuff, but it is really fast, precise, and looks great too. Sony is bad at leveraging these things, seeing their potential. Kids like things they can be creative with.

Beat Sketcher free form painting works pretty well. Same for Start the Party. The problem is the player's skills. We are not trained to draw in the air, and there are no helper tools to visualize and anchor a line in 3D space (Perhaps a 3D visor will help ? ;-)).

Yes, Sony should continue to improve the tools, beyond tech demoes. I don't mind a mouse or pad implementation. Best tool for the job and all that.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

They will all affect appearance and I would say take some horsepower maybe. Plus having to have all the mapping to shade it properly, a lot of geometry and work right?

Musculature for the face is not simulated even in high end VFX work, it's a far more artistic approach. The best method for facial animation so far is to manually sculpt blendshapes. That is trivial to do if there's enough memory, the majority of the effort goes into creating all the shapes.

Weta (and by now mostly everyone else too) uses an approach where bad looking combinations of the various elementary expressions are fixed by automatically applying a corrective blendshape on top (additive mixing) and on their characters for Avatar and Hobbit, the total number from a relatively small set of 50-150 base shapes goes up to several thousands.

Games will not have the budget or the available memory to go all this way, but there will be a convergence in my opinion. And it doesn't have to look as good as Avatar on this generation anyway

 

[rockaman]

Blend shapes? Sounds interesting

That's really cool. Is this the same when game studios do capturing of real animations with all those silly balls and track suits? At least for faces I mean.

I guess they approximate it onto a face using those blend shapes? Sounds like an ultra complicated Skyrim character editor

 

[dagamer]

Musculature for the face is not simulated even in high end VFX work, it's a far more artistic approach. The best method for facial animation so far is to manually sculpt blendshapes. That is trivial to do if there's enough memory, the majority of the effort goes into creating all the shapes.

Weta (and by now mostly everyone else too) uses an approach where bad looking combinations of the various elementary expressions are fixed by automatically applying a corrective blendshape on top (additive mixing) and on their characters for Avatar and Hobbit, the total number from a relatively small set of 50-150 base shapes goes up to several thousands.

Games will not have the budget or the available memory to go all this way, but there will be a convergence in my opinion. And it doesn't have to look as good as Avatar on this generation anyway

Havent you heard? Avatar is the new Toy Story (CG visuals that'll take frever to do in realtime)

 

[Kaotik]

So, nVidias PhysX is listed as (one of the) physics solution(s) for PS4 - any bets wether it's just "CPU PhysX" or has Sony or AMD finally gotten the permission to port it for OpenCL?

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Is this the same when game studios do capturing of real animations with all those silly balls and track suits? At least for faces I mean.

That's called motion capture, and when they are using both the markers on the body, and a video camera in front of the actor's face, then it's also called performance capture (as they record all the important aspects from the actor - body movement, facial expressions and voice).

I guess they approximate it onto a face using those blend shapes?

No, blend shapes are a possible method to make a deformation system for a face (or anything). Just as bones and skinning are another possible approach for deformations; although using just blend shapes for body movement would be highly inefficient, if not impossible at all.

Using the mocap data to drive these deformation setups is called remapping. But it is usually possible, and even required, to also animate stuff manually, either to fix the mocap data or to create stuff from scratch.

 

[Arwin]

So, nVidias PhysX is listed as (one of the) physics solution(s) for PS4 - any bets wether it's just "CPU PhysX" or has Sony or AMD finally gotten the permission to port it for OpenCL?

There were several PS3 and 360 games using PhysX and even on Vita I think I've seen one or two (not sure). My bet is that they simply support it fully on consoles as they're not competing there for a PC GPU slot.

 

[Kaotik]

There were several PS3 and 360 games using PhysX and even on Vita I think I've seen one or two (not sure). My bet is that they simply support it fully on consoles as they're not competing there for a PC GPU slot.

Yeah, those use "CPU PhysX" aka not the "accelerated version", for PS4 it's either the same or OpenCL, I don't see much other options. They did mention that the APU could be used for accelerated physics too, which was the reason for the pondering if there's finally going to be OpenCL version of PhysX

 

[temesgen]

I went back and re-watched the Playstation event, my concern here is the actual games. Hopefully we'll see more at E3 but as it stands it appears developers are making games look better but innovation just wasn't there. Personally I don't want another 5 or 6 years of the same old formula, I really hope publishers and developers put a stronger focus on creativity.

And that also goes for Graphics, I hope everyone doesn't settle for ultra realistic styles.

 

[MrFox]

And that also goes for Graphics, I hope everyone doesn't settle for ultra realistic styles.

Yep, and that's why I'm really looking forward to KNACK and also whatever Media Molecule is doing.

 

[Arwin]

I went back and re-watched the Playstation event, my concern here is the actual games. Hopefully we'll see more at E3 but as it stands it appears developers are making games look better but innovation just wasn't there. Personally I don't want another 5 or 6 years of the same old formula, I really hope publishers and developers put a stronger focus on creativity.

And that also goes for Graphics, I hope everyone doesn't settle for ultra realistic styles.

As much as anything else I am looking forward to more controller innovations, especially as it looks like this time many of the controller improvements will be on both the Sony and MS boxes in some form or other and all of these will be in every box, instead of added later.

I'm really curious if Microsoft will have Move like tracking of their controller for instance and would consider it extremely like to have a touchpad (maybe with display) and sixaxis like features as well. This could mean that while FPS' will be made so that you can play them the exact same way you do know, I could imagine that you would have options to aim the gun independently of your head movements, use the controller as a pointer, etc.

I only just now discovered these UI screenshots on NeoGaf by the way:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=514473
http://i.imgur.com/txyEltk.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/xYYx6y4.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/O4DMGU8.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/lJhtBFp.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/4rq143x.png
http://i.imgur.com/w4Dix9t.jpg

Looks quite promising.

Also pretty amazing gif someone created at GAF of the old controller merging into the new:

http://i.minus.com/iAB7QvFv8wZuC.gif

 

[eastmen]

I really hope they don't touch the 360 controller. Its perfect as it is , I don't want them to make it larger by adding some type of touch screen

 

[Gerry]

I really hope they don't touch the 360 controller. Its perfect as it is , I don't want them to make it larger by adding some type of touch screen

Touchpad.

The xbox controller clearly isn't perfect as the standard d-pad is rubbish. I'm sure a new version would fix that (much like the chrome edition controller).There's certainly a bit of room available for something like a touchpad - where the back-xbox-start buttons are now - although I'm not exactly sold on how usable having a touchpad would actually be.

 

[eastmen]

Touchpad.

The xbox controller clearly isn't perfect as the standard d-pad is rubbish. I'm sure a new version would fix that (much like the chrome edition controller).There's certainly a bit of room available for something like a touchpad - where the back-xbox-start buttons are now - although I'm not exactly sold on how usable having a touchpad would actually be.

there is a new controller verison that fixed the dpad. If they do a touchpad thing like the ps4 controller I will be unimpressed and wouldn't consider it an improvement over the current xbox controller.

 

[Gerry]

there is a new controller verison that fixed the dpad. If they do a touchpad thing like the ps4 controller I will be unimpressed and wouldn't consider it an improvement over the current xbox controller.

I know. I specifically mentioned it. The chrome edition xbox controller.

I'm open-minded about the touchpad. Was there any indication in the PS4 event what the touchpad would actually be used for?

 

[Nesh]

there is a new controller verison that fixed the dpad. If they do a touchpad thing like the ps4 controller I will be unimpressed and wouldn't consider it an improvement over the current xbox controller.

I ve heard that it was still rubbish