Whats achievable and whats not....

Nah, anticipation though their addiction inducing posts, will likely bring more temporary satisfaction.

Sadly I am beginning to suffer from Hypesyndrome. The games just cant deliver more than my imagination.

And the way that they give just enough info to peak my interest continues to feed my insatiable desire to know just a little more.

I feel dirty.

 

Ah man I feel just like you really. It's kind of sad. I sit here and wait and wait and wait. DeanoC saying that the game will look better (this to me is obvious) is simply killing me. How can it look better? What will look better? I just can't understand that myself SirTendeth. I'm really starting to wonder when will this game will be released. Will it be a 2007 game? Launch title game? Launch window?

And damnit how can it look better? What can they do? Please can somebody answer our question? London-Boy, Shifty, Laa-Yosh somebody!!

 

Does anyone know of where I could find a real ingame, not in engine, screenshot from a PS3 game?

And can anyone think of a good graphical showcase game on the 360 other than PGR 3? That is an ingame Screenshot.

I couldn't find any Gears shots that were true gamplay...

Good luck and good hunting.

P.S.

DeanoC and ERP, along with anyother developers of next gen games, feel free to post a true gameplay screenshot if you want

 

There's an order of magnitude of difference between a hundred thousand and a million.

Dragons in the distance had LOD to reduce their poly count.

It's not as simple as that.
The main elements in KZ's visuals are the following...
* Lots of geometry - most of this will be replaced with normal mapping in the game, like jeep tires, folds of clothing, weapon detail etc.
* Global illumination lighting - there are techniques like spherical harmonics to create similar results, but it won't look as good though
* Ambient occlusion - this technique creates the effect of bounced lighting blocked off by objects. Ie. the inner sides of the legs on characters get darker and darker as the other leg is moving closer, blocking out the light reflected from the sky and the ground. It requires massive raytracing, unavailable in realtime; although there's a lot of research to fake it - but still without convincing results.
* Complex shaders - there are tricky things in UE3 like a very nice skin shader, so we can expect similar, but lower quality implementations in every game.
* Volumetric smoke - probably based on voxels, I'm not that familiar with Lightwave's possibilities. Nevertheless, the smoke casts shadows on itself according to the lighting and it's continuous puffs instead of texture mapped particles. You can do a lot with the latter too (we're using that approach as well) but it just won't look good enough for the kind of thick smoke that's in the KZ video.
* High quality antialiasing - both on the geometry and the textures, to get a jaggie-free look. Consoles are still limited to 16-32 sample anisotropic filtering, 2x-4x geometry AA, and developers will have to learn a lot about shader antialiasing...
* Digital compositing - KZ has been rendered in many separate layers (background, ground, buidings, characters, smoe etc.) which were than put together in a sotware package that's similar to Photoshop, but with animation. Both the individual layers and the resulting composite are heavily modified by filters, color correction, transformations and so on, to enhance the imagery. Elements are finetuned to better fit together, and stuff like DOF, fake shadows and so on can be created as well. One can replicate these effects on both the GPUs and CPUs of the consoles, so we may expect games to take advantage of image processing as well.

As you can see, it's about quite a lot more than simple 'effects', even if a good range of the techniques can be implemented in realtime. But even if all the elements could be mached almost perfectly by their realtime counterparts, you'd still lack the carefully planned direction, the finetuned animation and camera motion and timing in the trailer, which are just as important in its effect as the looks of it...

 

this thread just made my day 10x better
kudos to DeanoC + ERP as many have already said.

 

If square does a FF7 remake with turn based battles, we may see tons of cut scene like real-time graphics and animations with a good bit of interactivity. I personally like that system for this very reason, the combat sequences looked great.

 

That right there is why its going to be achievable The cell has been demonstrating these past few months how it can handle calculations of all kinds, geometry included. If devs dont rush there products and take there time, I see a lot of time was invloved with the Motostorm video, its things like that that make gaming innovating. The crashes and the actual non ejections due to your man was still strapped in his seat belt and whatnots that we look for and dont see in games today.

 

I was truly impressed with the visual quality and the level of details you have incorporated; not to mention the artistic aura that emanates from the game.
By the way, thank you for the clarifications...

 

I think the proofs in the pudding and we'll just have to wait and see when the games launch. I dont think there's going to be a huge difference in the launch games and the best we have this gen imo

 

I've had the same sneaking suspision.

The next generation should see the advent of true Malableworlds... where there is more interaction between the cpu and the gpu allowing for unexpected and many interesting things that even the developers didn't expect... which hopefully will make things easier on the developers.... or will it? mabye one day, we can all fractaly generate a world from a few lines of code.

 

I don't know what you've seen, but neither Cell nor PS3 has demonstrated anything near the quality/detail of the KZ or Motorstorm videos...

 

Warhawk is plenty achievable, and will likely surpass what was shown, since they've already shown game-play that is on par with the trailer (which was supposedly real-time).

...sure.

Oh, wow.
You're the greatest DeanoC!