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May 13th, 2008 @ 16:48
On Gamersyde. There’s only four but they look “sweet”. Go see.
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May 13th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Very nice. In an “I can’t tell this apart from about half a dozen other games” kind of a way. Curse my untrained eye!
May 13th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Well, it is UE3.
May 13th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
BOH! THIS MY KINDA SHIT!
May 13th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
looks sweet, still stuck in that little square though
May 13th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
OH MY WORD!!!
I suppose if you like things like Okami or some other cartoony super saturated to the point of almost making your eyes bleed stuff, then this might look a bit boring.
Not to me though.
The sharpness of those screens is amazing!!
WOW!
May 13th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
I was wondering about the sharpness meself.
Almost “TOO” Sharp if you know what I mean?
May 13th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Aye, there’s a good chance they’re heavily touched up.
May 13th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Looks gorgeous, but I’m still amazed they chose a sequence like this for the first demonstration of the game.
What’s surprising isn’t that in 2008 designers are still making levels where you’re stuck on the back of a moving vehicle, but the fact that Epic are using that level to showcase the game. I dunno, maybe they know the Gears target audience better than I realise, but the video certainly didn’t convince me that they’ve made much progress.
May 13th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Artistic direction aside, no HUD = not in game shot. Furthermore the resolution of those images (1280×734) is very unlikely to be the actual game resolution.
So, whether they were doctored after being captured or not, they’re clearly ’staged’ captures.
Every game does this - so I don’t wish to make it look as though I’m some Epic hater.
Generally speaking, if you can’t see a HUD or if the screenshot isn’t “playable” (such a race game with cars coming OUT of the screen instead of into it) then it’s not a proper gameplay screenshot.
Common sense.
May 13th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
If you watch the gameplay trailer, the similarities with this level and what we’ve seen of Killzone 2 so far are very close.
My thoughts are that MS and Epic decided to go for something that people could directly compare with KZ2 and say “Gears does it better!”
I don’t know if that was the right strategy though. I think a lot of people wanted to see something new.
May 13th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
@G1GAHURTZ : the geeky tech stuff behind KZ2 is insanely impressive.
I got right into the first Gears multiplayer I was playing it almost nightly till I got my PS3, this is the only reason I’ve kept my 360 and I’m glad I did because it looks to be shaping up well.
By the way these have been touched up for sure
May 13th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Yeah, they’re definitely not in-game shots. It would be impressive if the final version got even some way close to that though.
I think that I also must have put about 40-50 hours into Gears MP myself, so I’m looking forward to this one. It has a lot to do to impress me though, because since then I’ve put over 300 hours into COD4 MP!
May 13th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
The game is definitely shaping up the gametrailers footage looks just the same. I doubt the 360 version will look this good. There will no doubt be a PC version after that will look closer to this.
May 13th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
Why are people hung up on space, they are on a Derrick, which is not a personnel or transport platform. Therefore there is not a lot of real estate on them. It looks awesome, finally full AA and HDR!
May 13th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
@Daniel Plainview : the geeky tech stuff behind KZ2 is insanely impressive.
I agree for the most part KZ2 is cool, but insanely impressive is going overboard. It is a pretty cool example of post processing effects by way of Deferred Rendering. But this kind of processing has it’s cons especially real-time shadowing, lights and transparencies.
That is why they pre-bake a lot of stuff if you look at the tech presentations that are available from guerilla. They layer effects on top of geometry to simulate real-time effects. Again cool, yes, revolutionary or inovative…no.
For the most part it is done to work around the restrictions of the hardware and in allow for heavy post processing , giving it the feel of a movie but at a cost..
May 13th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Erm, pre-baking lightmaps is simply more efficient than runtime processing. Achieving a similar effect by more efficient means is simply good development discipline. If benefits performance for the rest of your render process irrespective of the host platform.
This goes double if 99.9% of your audience is never ever going to spot any meaningful difference.
May 13th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Shatner, I agree with you for the most part, it is a good techinque. But here we are in the HD era. These multi-core systems should be able to handle real time rendering of lights, geometry, shader and post-rendering effects. But I can see the case where for artistic effects or for other custom engine designs DR may be needed.
Here is a god article on it: http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/19/
May 13th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
mortiferus, it doesn’t matter how much power a machine has. If you are inefficient you’re wasting that power. Multi-core processing means nothing unless you’ve got a broad graphics pipeline to shunt data back and forth. If you don’t need to render full scene dynamic lighting across your environments when pre-baked lightmaps do the job just as effectivey and for a fraction of the processing cost then you don’t do it.
Real time shadowing, CML lighting, prop lighting can all be added to smaller components to complement the scene. But why on earth would you need to process dynamic lighting for all the parts of your environment that will never move or cast a different shadow? Doing it simply because you believe there’s power to spare is incredibly short sighted.
Thanks for the link but, as a game producer, I’m pretty sure I know what I’m talking about.
May 13th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Shatner
As a programmer (Open GL) myself, I do not find it questionable to add static objects or materials to a project by any means of output necessary in order to balance in game performance. To the contrary it is a mandate and a reality, not everything can be or even should be rendered in real time. My post might have been a little misleading about that and I apologize.
There are many instances (No pun intended) where non real-time rendered nodes are necessary but… maximizing what you do in real time is what cutting edge development is all about. Pushing the silicon and the software to the limit while delivering a balanced well running game engine is what all developers strive for.
Compromise is something we all deal with, number of objects, geometry, FOV, shader ops, texture passes,scripting errors, pipelines. dev kits bugs and poor documentation etc… but we need to start pushing the hardware more, and start to jettison last gen methodology and practices and start delivering cutting-edge real time simulations of not just graphics but physics and AI too.
Only a few folks in the industry are reaching a happy medium here… very few.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:06 am
I’d say only a few folks in the industry are in a position to do so because, due to the needs of a commercial market, idealistic programming methodology must come second to doing what must be done to make a product ship on time and on budget.
Idealism is fine for those that can afford it. Those are very few.