Sony @ GDC: Phil Harrison's Keynote

The videos show the rubber duck demo, the fish demo and a playable U3 demo, where the guy shoots some barrels to illustrate the physics engine.
 
function said:
What they've shown is a feature of a game. It isn't obvious to anyone whether or not the 360 could do this level of work.

Perhaps because we haven't seen it yet..? Which is kind of my point. If we have a 360 racer indulging in the kind of detail described of Motorstorm, as one example, the OP I was responding to might have had a better point.

His point was that what Sony had shown wasn't any better than what MS had shown to date. Judging by descriptions of the likes of Motorstorm, I'd disagree.

function said:
To do this they *need* you to believe that the magic Cell can open up incredible new depths of immersion that nothing else can, and that even though you can't see the difference in graphics (because maybe MS got the better GPU) it's there working its magic.

You don't think, for example, tyres cutting a track through mud and splattering around on vehicles brings visual appeal? Or things being destroyed realistically?

Sony's differentiating strength, IMO, will be Cell, and that should manifest itself in a number of ways, certainly visual also. And by the sounds of some of the stuff yesterday, Sony is bringing that out in some of their first party games at least. But note my point again about what's being done on PS3 now vs what might be done on 360 in the future, and the evolution of software on both platforms.

On a different note, there is some audio from the conference up here:

http://www.playsyde.com/leech_2359_en.html

It's not the whole thing, apparently, but most of it.
 
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Titanio said:
His point was that what Sony had shown wasn't any better than what MS had shown to date. Judging by descriptions of the likes of Motorstorm, I'd disagree.

Depends on what you want to believe.

Next up was Motorstorm and just like Warhawk was no where near the E3 target render. The car models and physics were decent although the texturing and the environment was PS2 level of quality. The real star of the demonstration was the deformable terrain which worked quite well with the physics of the cars. The demo also had HDR, post processing effects, and occlusion.

http://www.gaming-age.com/news/2006/3/22-53

Let's wait for E3 I say...
 
Nesh said:
how good is the quality?Is it cam footage?

Video quality is good, but it's really not interesting... most of the time is used up by the UT demo, where you can't even see anything except some guy roaming around a dark room shooting a couple or red barrells around...

I'd leave it...
 
That vid's a waste of time. Rubber duck is Rubber Duck, save for an enormous duck at the end. There's some fish, looked realistic, but kinda like a screensaver. Nice to know PS3 will be able to illustrate David Attenborough's next Nautical Wildlife film in realtime, but that's not why most people are interested in the machine. There's a mirrory head. It looked like a sphere mapping demo. It may have been realtime raytraced with a million levels of recursion and whatnot for all I know, but it looked just like a spheremapped head. And UT was simplistic, not smooth, and very, very dark. Snore.
 
pipo said:
Depends on what you want to believe.

http://www.gaming-age.com/news/2006/3/22-53

Let's wait for E3 I say...

The very same guy said later on GAF that in terms of "effects and post-processing" etc. he thought it was above and beyond what he'd seen on 360, actually, and that the mud physics etc. was "mind-blowingly cool". Which jives with what I'm saying here, and the other descriptions we've had of the physical interaction from Gamespot and others (which is what I'm specifically addressing).
 
Titanio said:
The very same guy said later on GAF that in terms of "effects and post-processing" etc. he thought it was above and beyond what he'd seen on 360, actually, and that the mud physics etc. was "mind-blowingly cool". Which jives with what I'm saying here, and the other descriptions we've had of the physical interaction from Gamespot and others (which is what I'm specifically addressing).

Oh, I agree it sounds cool, I just can't equate that to the limits of Cell/Xenos at this time.

I'm very much looking froward to E3 and HI-DEF movie clips. My net connection will certainly take a battering that week.
 
function said:
Oh, I agree it sounds cool, I just can't equate that to the limits of Cell/Xenos at this time.

Neither am I, FWIW.

Anyway, of interest today might be the Lair session:

http://www.cmpevents.com/GD06/a.asp?option=C&V=11&SessID=2824

FrankenDragon Flies Again! Creating Playstation 3 Art for Lair

Speaker: Matthias Worch (Factor 5)
Date/Time: Thursday (March 23, 2006) 9:00am — 10:00am
Track: Game Design
Format: 60-minute Sponsored Session
Experience Level: All

Session Description
A big part of the industry now knows what it means to create "next-generation content", but many lessons that come with the new workflow are still learned the hard way. In this presentation, Matthias Worch from Factor 5 looks at the highly detailed creatures and environments of Lair, Factor 5's upcoming Playstation 3 title, and how Factor 5 used SOFTIMAGE|XSI v.5.0 to solve various problems that cropped up during development.

Hopefully cameras will be allowed at this one, and maybe they'll even show a bit of new footage (?)..and, of course, talk about the tech.

Edge said:
Those videos are at www.1up.com also. Here is the link.

These are the same demos linked earlier - they're just a limited selection from Sony's booth, unfortunately, they don't show the various games displayed at the conference yesterday :(
 
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Titanio said:
Perhaps because we haven't seen it yet..? Which is kind of my point. If we have a 360 racer indulging in the kind of detail described of Motorstorm, as one example, the OP I was responding to might have had a better point.

His point was that what Sony had shown wasn't any better than what MS had shown to date. Judging by descriptions of the likes of Motorstorm, I'd disagree..

Dont you think the reason why Sony is pushing this in Motorstorm is to try and differentiate the hardware from the 360? Just becuase it hasnt been done on another platform doesnt mean it can't or won't. Personally i think the gameplay implications of what theyre doing in motorstorm are being drastically overstated.

Youre going to get a procession of devs coming up and showing physics stuff and saying 'this is possible becuase of the cell'. I don't know what else you would be expecting them to say. I wouldnt take it as any more than the marketing at this point.
 
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expletive said:
Dont you think the reason why Sony is pushing this in Motorstorm is to try and differentiate the hardware from the 360? Just becuase it hasnt been done on another platform doesnt mean it can't or won't. Personally i think the gameplay implications of what theyre doing in motorstorm are being drastically overstated.

Of course, and yet, there are countless of topics of discussions of the past 3 years discussing the potential benefits and strength of CELL - to assume that the physics aspect that is being supposedly pushed has somewhat to do with CELLs benefit and strength isn't exactly far-fetched is it?

At the end of the day, everyone will believe what they want to - and that contrary to all evidence. I think it's really up to you to believe what you want to. Fact is, these architectures (Xbox360/PS3) are quite different and naturally will feature different limits, different strengths, even different weaknesses that will force developers to use different approaches. Everything in engineering gives a trade-off and I expect the design-choices of talented developers on PS3 to lean on the physics part since its one of its key strengths.
 
expletive said:
Dont you think the reason why Sony is pushing this in Motorstorm is to try and differentiate the hardware from the 360? Just becuase it hasnt been done on another platform doesnt mean it can't or won't.

I made the point to say that myself.

The original post I was responding to was that PS3 had not differentiated itself versus what we have seen to date on 360. I disagreed with that, and I'm highlighting the example of Motorstorm and its described environmental interaction. As it is described, it sounds fairly unprecedented on any platform. What they're doing there can probably be tied back to CPU activity. My extended point is that if we're seeing more sophisticated usage of the CPU in PS3, earlier, despite it being harder to work with, it might say something about its potential relative to other systems. Motorstorm isn't the only example - looking at the descriptions of various things shown yesterday, Sony's exclusive developments at least seem to be often trending toward deep behavioural simulation (physical and AI) and an attention to the small details. Now, I don't know everything that's in development for 360 right now, but it's a valid point looking at what we've seen to date which is what the OP I was responding to was referring to.
 
Phil said:
Of course, and yet, there are countless of topics of discussions of the past 3 years discussing the potential benefits and strength of CELL - to assume that the physics aspect that is being supposedly pushed has somewhat to do with CELLs benefit and strength isn't exactly far-fetched is it?

At the end of the day, everyone will believe what they want to - and that contrary to all evidence. I think it's really up to you to believe what you want to. Fact is, these architectures (Xbox360/PS3) are quite different and naturally will feature different limits, different strengths, even different weaknesses that will force developers to use different approaches. Everything in engineering gives a trade-off and I expect the design-choices of talented developers on PS3 to lean on the physics part since its one of its key strengths.

I agree 100% here. I guess the point i was making is that we really don't know whether or not these demos exceeded what is possible on a 360 or PC etc. The fact that developers are standing at the front of a room during a Sony keynote telling us 'its becuase of the cell' doesnt make it any more true in my opinion.

For whatever reason, we havent seen developers displaying demos on the 360 where physics is such a critical talking point. It could be becuase the 360 cant do physics. It could be because they dont feel its an important enough element in gameplay to go beyond what we're already getting from Havok or whatnot. I honestly dont know.

However, I thinks its way too early to make any evaluations on hardware, the relative prowess of each console in any given area, and how any of this will affect the actual gameplay experience.
 
it's curious that nobody seen motostorm but they used their interpretation of what they have not seen to judge the hardware.
this is sick
 
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