FantasyGhost
10-14-2006, 04:00 AM
About Cell:
thanks to Cell we are running every single object in the game through a real-time LOD method called progressive mesh, something that makes the incredible detail was well as loads of objects on screen possible. We also have a unique and extremely flexible shading and light system, all real-time and of course all in HDR. Every light and shadow in the scene is real-time generated, thus making it possible to change the time of day dynamically while the level progresses. Nothing is pre-baked as many other games do it.
We are also quite proud of our landscape engine, which allows us the seamless transitions from high altitudes all the way to the ground. We have levels the size of the Bay Area in Lair in which you can land in any spot and have dirt and gravel detail right in front of you and all of the texturing on the landscape is done based on erosion shaders which are running in real-time on RSX. So artists can get these huge areas together in relatively short-time-frames.
Another area that is really cool on Cell is the real-time dynamics. We simulate hundreds of cloth and physics objects in the scene at any given moment, the enemies and heroes of course all are running ragdoll and physics-driven animations. The single hero dragon you ride is more complex than all objects in our prior games combined, down to little details like the flutter of the wings being dynamically driven.
On top of all that, there is a real-time fluid dynamics simulation running on Cell for really complex ocean wave and water dynamics. We built our whole engine, including the physics part, on our own, without using any middleware. That way we have much more control over every aspect and can cater every detail to the PS3s and the games´ needs.
In terms of shaders I could go on for a while -- you'll find everything that is possible right now and a few cool new ones. Our fire is not made out of pre-baked textures but is a real-time simulation running on RSX, we have advanced parallax shaders, volumetric clouds, fog, and smoke, real-time rain, wetness, lava, fur, and much, much more.
About 1080p:
IGN: What are your thoughts on 1080p? You're rendering some stuff out at that resolution now, do you think it's necessary for games to be standardized as 1080p and is it doable?
Eggebrecht: First of all, we are not only rendering some part of Lair in 1080p. The whole game is in 1080p native, from front-end to all in-game bits.
We absolutely love 1080p because of the detail that you can see. When we went up from 720 to 1080 I was blown away how much more of the artwork was visible. We started out being true 720p proponents, but since switching over to true 1080p via HDMI a few months ago I can't go back.
Lair is not upscaling or cheating to get to 1080p, we are natively running at the full 1920x1080 progressive resolution. Earlier this year we were quite skeptical if that would be possible, but the final kits really were a revelation in terms of power. Sony delivered what they promised and after a bit of tweaking we had the game up-and running. One thing that did help us was that our engine always was heavily reliant on data streaming, so the larger frame buffer memory never was an issue. By now half of our staff has 1080p monitors, and believe me, the 720 guys are jealous.
Can LAIR be done on 360?
IGN: Quick Fanboy wars question -- Could Lair be done under its current spec on the Xbox 360? If so, why go with the PlayStation 3 "only" instead of going cross-platform?
Eggebrecht: Lair in its current form couldn't be done on 360. We are using large amounts of Cell's SPUs for all of our geometry, landscape, simulations, animations, even troop AI. When we create a game, we absolutely focus on the platform it is designed around. Would we do one for 360, it would be a different game and a different engine -- most crucially perhaps though: Lair is an entirely different game without the motion control and gesture recognition since it was designed around it.
Blu-ray is critical for LAIR:
IGN: What advantage does Blu-ray afford you now? Everyone talks about how great the extra storage space is but are you actually using it for Lair?
Eggebrecht: The single level at TGS alone takes up 4 Gigabytes of data. We are using every ounce of that due to streaming of our textures. Sure you could chop them all down to tiny sizes and we would fit, but then again, it would not be the same game. In addition to all the textures and geometry, we also do have video on the disc, and all of that is in native 1080p resolution. Thanks to Blu-Ray we don't need to worry about that and can still fit the whole game on a single disk.
Whole 5 paged article with pics: http://ps3.ign.com/articles/733/733921p1.html
Thanks to VG Aficionado (http://forums.e-mpire.com)
thanks to Cell we are running every single object in the game through a real-time LOD method called progressive mesh, something that makes the incredible detail was well as loads of objects on screen possible. We also have a unique and extremely flexible shading and light system, all real-time and of course all in HDR. Every light and shadow in the scene is real-time generated, thus making it possible to change the time of day dynamically while the level progresses. Nothing is pre-baked as many other games do it.
We are also quite proud of our landscape engine, which allows us the seamless transitions from high altitudes all the way to the ground. We have levels the size of the Bay Area in Lair in which you can land in any spot and have dirt and gravel detail right in front of you and all of the texturing on the landscape is done based on erosion shaders which are running in real-time on RSX. So artists can get these huge areas together in relatively short-time-frames.
Another area that is really cool on Cell is the real-time dynamics. We simulate hundreds of cloth and physics objects in the scene at any given moment, the enemies and heroes of course all are running ragdoll and physics-driven animations. The single hero dragon you ride is more complex than all objects in our prior games combined, down to little details like the flutter of the wings being dynamically driven.
On top of all that, there is a real-time fluid dynamics simulation running on Cell for really complex ocean wave and water dynamics. We built our whole engine, including the physics part, on our own, without using any middleware. That way we have much more control over every aspect and can cater every detail to the PS3s and the games´ needs.
In terms of shaders I could go on for a while -- you'll find everything that is possible right now and a few cool new ones. Our fire is not made out of pre-baked textures but is a real-time simulation running on RSX, we have advanced parallax shaders, volumetric clouds, fog, and smoke, real-time rain, wetness, lava, fur, and much, much more.
About 1080p:
IGN: What are your thoughts on 1080p? You're rendering some stuff out at that resolution now, do you think it's necessary for games to be standardized as 1080p and is it doable?
Eggebrecht: First of all, we are not only rendering some part of Lair in 1080p. The whole game is in 1080p native, from front-end to all in-game bits.
We absolutely love 1080p because of the detail that you can see. When we went up from 720 to 1080 I was blown away how much more of the artwork was visible. We started out being true 720p proponents, but since switching over to true 1080p via HDMI a few months ago I can't go back.
Lair is not upscaling or cheating to get to 1080p, we are natively running at the full 1920x1080 progressive resolution. Earlier this year we were quite skeptical if that would be possible, but the final kits really were a revelation in terms of power. Sony delivered what they promised and after a bit of tweaking we had the game up-and running. One thing that did help us was that our engine always was heavily reliant on data streaming, so the larger frame buffer memory never was an issue. By now half of our staff has 1080p monitors, and believe me, the 720 guys are jealous.
Can LAIR be done on 360?
IGN: Quick Fanboy wars question -- Could Lair be done under its current spec on the Xbox 360? If so, why go with the PlayStation 3 "only" instead of going cross-platform?
Eggebrecht: Lair in its current form couldn't be done on 360. We are using large amounts of Cell's SPUs for all of our geometry, landscape, simulations, animations, even troop AI. When we create a game, we absolutely focus on the platform it is designed around. Would we do one for 360, it would be a different game and a different engine -- most crucially perhaps though: Lair is an entirely different game without the motion control and gesture recognition since it was designed around it.
Blu-ray is critical for LAIR:
IGN: What advantage does Blu-ray afford you now? Everyone talks about how great the extra storage space is but are you actually using it for Lair?
Eggebrecht: The single level at TGS alone takes up 4 Gigabytes of data. We are using every ounce of that due to streaming of our textures. Sure you could chop them all down to tiny sizes and we would fit, but then again, it would not be the same game. In addition to all the textures and geometry, we also do have video on the disc, and all of that is in native 1080p resolution. Thanks to Blu-Ray we don't need to worry about that and can still fit the whole game on a single disk.
Whole 5 paged article with pics: http://ps3.ign.com/articles/733/733921p1.html
Thanks to VG Aficionado (http://forums.e-mpire.com)