Uncharted : Drake's Fortune*

[scooby_dooby]

photos and video of Uncharted:

http://ruliweb.empas.com/data/rulinews/read.htm?num=15820


HD version of Uncharted video:

http://ruliwebfile.empas.com/mpeg3/scek/ruliweb_unc_cam_ps3hd.wmv

SD version of the vidéo

http://ruliwebfile.empas.com/mpeg3/scek/ruliweb_unc_cam_ps3sd.wmv

The cut-scenes look awesome, and I love the entire premise for this game. Graphics are also stunning.

The gunplay and cover system however, look very rough around the edges. But maybe the guy playing is just horrible. The hand to hand stuff looks great.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The guy playing is clearly horrible (at the game. Might be a really nice person in RL!). Pointing up first of all, and not reacting to the fact he was turning the wrong way. His (or her) aiming sucked, and their reactions to the action were diabolical. The NPC did most of the fighting!

 

[scooby_dooby]

Ya, but it did seem a little sketchy when popping in and out of 'aim' mode, too much like Dead Rising which drove me nuts, press the button to aim, and all of a sudden you're looking in the completely wrong direction.

 

[AlNom]

I can't recall exactly what happened in DR, but was it just the game switching between invert and non-invert That's what it looked like when I saw the aiming go wonky in the video here.

btw, the people working on their cinematics are da bomb. The facial articulation is just fantastic.

 

[djskribbles]

i think you're right. i always play with inverted y-axis and when i tried the R&C demo (that doesn't allow you to invert) i was very uncoordinated as well.

as for the aiming when you go into 'aim mode' it seems like it points you to where the camera is facing rather than where Drake is facing. (edit: which makes sense because where the camera is facing is typically where you're facing, not necessarily where Drake is facing)

as for the cutscenes... amazing! voice acting, animations etc. are one of the best i've seen!

 

[deepbrown]

The cut-scenes look awesome, and I love the entire premise for this game. Graphics are also stunning.

The gunplay and cover system however, look very rough around the edges. But maybe the guy playing is just horrible. The hand to hand stuff looks great.

It's definitely the guy. I have it on good authority by people who have played it that the controls are fine, if not great...with the ability to go in and out of shooting, to cover, to hand to hand combat, to platforming and puzzling.

 

[macabre]

The quality of the cut-scenes is not really surprising if you look at Naughty dogs staff list. There is quite a lot of ex-Hollywood talent in there.
I have high hopes for the story. The way it`s being told is already brilliant.

 

[deepbrown]

http://palgn.com.au/article.php?id=9225&rss=1&title=Naughty+Dog+Interview+Part+One

Very interesting Interview with Evan

 

[Arwin]

Great stuff ...

Of course, being the big Sony PS3 FB that I am, I couldn't help but lift out this part:

Primarily the whole experience is enabled by the use of the hard drive. If we did not have the hard drive then we could not present the game in the seamless load free way that we are. After you start until you turn the console off and go eat your lunch and come back there is not going to be another load time and you can play the game from start to finish. That was really key to us something that we established with Jak and Daxter and it keeps you immersed in the experience. As soon as you hit those load screens, as soon as you have to take that break, you may put the controller down, you may do something else we really just want to engross you in this experience. So, the hard drive really helped with that. The other thing that we've got going for us is the Blu Ray. We filled that thing up to 24 plus gigs, it was right at the end where we were literally running out of place where we were having to start pulling some stuff out, we ended up fortunately finding this unused cache of audio lines we were able to pull out to save some space so we could get everything in that we wanted to get in. I'm not going to stand here and say it would have been impossible to do on DVD but it would have been a different game, it really would have. It could have looked worse, we would have had to make concessions in terms of our compression. We would have had to spend a lot more developer resources focusing on how to get it on the disk when we could have been creating the game, making it more fun, making it more beautiful. So I'm really happy just to have that. We're still on single layer and this is our first game out of the gates. So I highly suspect that on our future games we'll even go to a double layer and we're going to even start putting more than 24-25 gigs into a single game.

In Uncharted, Drake has got more than 3500 animations and the difference is we're now taking the cell processor and we're taking say two dozen of those animations, like we've got his running animations, flinching animations, reloading animations, rolling animations, just dozens of animations all at once being layered on top of each other and then the cell processor recreates on the fly the single frame of animation that you need to be able to play the game at that moment and the fact we can just dump more and more work on that processor and its SPUs just means we can free up our CPU to do more general purpose tasks.

And all those initial animations have been done with motion capture this time.

 

[deepbrown]

Part two http://palgn.com.au/article.php?title=Naughty+Dog+Interview+Part+Two&id=9226

 

[DieH@rd]

also, this is interesting:

PALGN: So if you had to make an estimation how much % of the power of the PlayStation 3 do you think you used?

EW: Okay well it's not going to be an exact science but it's interesting that you bring the question up because we just recently before I came here as we were wrapping up production, we did do some profiling of the performance of the PlayStation 3. As far as the Cell processor and the SPU's are concerned we were only using about 1/3 to 1/2 of the SPU's at one time and so there is still quite a bit more we can do, I was also comparing where we're at at the end of development for Uncharted compared to where we were at the end of development for Jak and Daxter and we've been able to do so much more with the PlayStation 3 and there's still so much more on top potential. I really am excited about what we'll be able to do 2-3 games down the road, I mean just looking back on the difference between Jak I and Jak III is amazing.

 

[Arwin]

Part two http://palgn.com.au/article.php?title=Naughty+Dog+Interview+Part+Two&id=9226

As a coder, this bit impressed me seriously:

PALGN: Was it tough to make the transition from developing for the PlayStation 2 to the PlayStation 3?

EW: It was extraordinarily difficult and I will be perfectly blunt and honest. It was really really hard and I think a lot of that can be attributed to the fact that on the PlayStation 2 we... I'm not trying to make any commentary on the difficulty of development for the PlayStation 3 and I shouldn't be confused with that at all. On the PlayStation 2 we were programming in our own unique language that we had developed at Naughty Dog, it's called GOAL, Game Object Assembly Lisp. It was all lisp based and the entire rest of the industry is working in C++, nobody I knew was completely, off the wall doing this thing in Lisp. It was started with Andy Gavin who was an MIT graduate, I'm probably showing too much of my geek cred, MIT and Lisp are closely linked and that's where it all started from. So we've been working in that language all through the PlayStation One and the PlayStation Two, now coming to the PlayStation Three we realised these projects are getting so much more complex and they just require so much more effort that we realised across Sony that we'd have to start sharing code. If we develop something we're going to have to make sure that Santa Monica can borrow it if they want too or Insomniac or vice versa, things should be interchangable. So we realised we'd have to put this behind us and adopt C++ like everyone. That meant when we started on the PlayStation 3 we had no code, if we wanted to print text on the screen we had to write a font renderer, these are the things you take for granted, so we had to start from square one and so it was a long process of building up. We were so used to working with this language GOAL which was very flexible and the whole purpose of it was so you could have your game running, you could compile your code and you could update your game right away without restarting the system, it's a really good environment and I miss it, you can tell. So then we went to no code, so we had to build up slowly but i'm really really happy with the team and everybody pulled together and we ended up accomplishing something we can all be proud of.

 

[deepbrown]

 

[ultragpu]

games like this makes me proud being a ps3 owner.

 

[phat]

That ruliweb video is the first full cut-scene I've seen, and I really like the dialogue. (The other trailers I've seen were so flash-edited that you don't get a sense of the interplay between the characters--more a series of punchlines.)

 

[betan]

(The other trailers I've seen were so flash-edited that you don't get a sense of the interplay between the characters--more a series of punchlines.)

Here is another such trailer:
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2007/10/31/happy-halloween-from-naughty-dog-new-uncharted-trailer/

poor splash effects are still there, but great lighting and environments.

 

[deepbrown]

http://i4.tinypic.com/4ys5j88.gif

wow at the animation

 

[macabre]

My Samsung will kill me if I don`t let it display this game...

 

[deepbrown]

OK it's confirmed. Best animation in a game. No hyperbole. It is now fact.

 

[XeRo]

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/831/831852p1.html

4 lvls in demo? How about give us the entire game instead? :smile: