Idealism is fine for those that can afford it. Those are very few.

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.

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.

Here is a god article on it: http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/19/

This goes double if 99.9% of your audience is never ever going to spot any meaningful difference.

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..

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

Almost “TOO” Sharp if you know what I mean?

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!