Digital Foundry: The adoption of the MLAA form of anti-aliasing is a huge improvement for the image quality, and people are excited to see this technique appearing in more titles. So, how hard has it been to include? Did it slot nicely into LBP's post-processing step or like Santa Monica with GOW3, did you have to massage the engine to free up SPU cycles in the middle of each frame to keep latency down?
Alex Evans: We really got to ride on their shoulders there - when we got the MLAA code from Sony, it was already in a pretty usable and fast state. We dropped it in during an afternoon, I believe, and it did save us a little GPU time. As with any change, there are knock-ons, a bit of SPU rescheduling etc, but it's definitely a net win.
Digital Foundry: What is this AA technique being called among developers? Is it morphological AA, MLAA, as Intel described it, or are they calling it something else?
Alex Evans: We call it MLAA. But then again we do lots of things that we don't have names for or make up without knowing the literature, so I have no idea what others are calling it!
My favourite techniques and engines are the ones that blend techniques anyway, so as soon as you try too hard to categorise something, the value in the name tends to drop off: you know, the 'oh it's kinda SSAO but then I changed it with a dash of this and that and threw in some blur in post and some precomputed irradiance stuff with a dash of photonic voxel warp drive potatoes'. And so it goes on...
The being able to program your own controls for vehicles is brilliant. This is one of the few games where we've sat around thinking about the ideal improvements to it, and then the next version has almost everything that we want. Brilliant stuff.