Eight Days trailer

[Rythonn]

Will be for the PS3.

http://www.wimp.com/eightdays/

[Szlia]

Isn't that gas station the setting used for the tech demo last E3? Anyway, seeing the movements of the character here and things like Assassin's Creed, there seem to be a significant step ahead in character animation in these games.

[Kasonic]

I'm very optimistic about the PS3, but that's too much for me to believe. Those animations are fucking amazing and the graphics are unbelievable. Give me a version I can play before I make any judgments.

[Zefah]

While I understand the PS3 is amazing and all, but all of these demos are just too unreal to be real time stuff. They just look fucking amazing. The only thing on the Xbox360 that has given me this feeling is Gears of War, but that game looks too amazing to be real too (has anything real-time been shown for Gears of War?).

Then again, I was a Electronics store earlier today in Shinjuku and they were playing the Metal Gear Solid 4 extended trailer in full high definition on a big ass wide screen TV. Tons of shoppers were stopping by to look at it and the reaction seemed that everyone thought the graphics were just unreal. Then again their were some points in the MGS4 video that had a really low framerate so it makes me think that it was rendered in real time.

If all of these recent PS3 games are actually showing in-game footage, then I have no doubt it will sell amazingly. I know I will be picking one up.

[zilkoril]

If the gameplay is that fluid, I'll start going to Church again.

[Szlia]

The MGS4 thing is a movie using the game engine. Kojima was on stage for a show of some sort in japan and they moved the camera and lights around and messed with the video filters etc. There is a movie of that with english subtitles floating around somewhere... like there.

[Kiksar]

I'm not sure I really understand the reaction to this and many of the PS3 demos shown. I've got no problems with believing that Eight Days trailer is mostly being rendered in real time. It's the standard fair of newer technology and it takes place in a pretty desolate environment. The majority of it is definitely scripted with control of what's on screen, probably even during the "gameplay" portions, but maybe not.

The character models are exceptionally weak and the engine doesn't seem to have anything too special about its rendering capabilities. Poorly modeled, high poly, normal mapped human models without anything more to suggest realism are getting pretty old.

Not to sound like a 360 defender (as I've actually been disappointed with it thus far), but Crytek's new engine looks more next gen than anything that's really been shown for PS3. I've always felt that sub-surface scattering and effective translucency of world objects would be a big step for "next gen" games. Crytek has shown Crysis running with these things, coupled with their particle system it seems they have the most complete next gen engine on their hands. I'm looking forward to Unreal Engine 3 because it will probably ship with more extensive tools than Crytek's engine, but visually it's been trumped.

It's also been blatantly obvious where demos like the Final Fantasy XIII one have switched between real-time and pre-rendered, yet there seems to be some amount of confusion surrounding that as well.

Basically what I'm saying at this point is that Sony hasn't been honest about much pre-launch of anything in the past, it's fairly easy to spot what's being done on their system in real time and what's solely for the show floor, and the real-time stuff seems like a very obvious next step to me. They obviously have a powerful system, but I'm so utterly unimpressed with the step forward in visual quality that it hurts. And it doesn't help that they're not pushing anything else.

[Runnen]

This demo looked very good and smooth, but I think people are misunderstanding the way the gameplay seems to work. From what I saw, it seemed as if the moments when you're not actually seeing the "ammo" and such other interface details aren't exactly in-game but are prerendered cutscenes using in-game graphics (such as the black guy tossing you another clip, or the thug falling dead, or the truck crashing into the gas station).. So yes it looks nice (though some of it looked very undetailed but it's probably not finished) but so did Resident Evil 1's scenery, because it was all prerendered.

[randomguy]

Originally Posted by zilkoril

If the gameplay is that fluid, I'll start going to Church again.

/me signs up to the congregation

[WillzZz]

Sorry guys. Few friends of mine worked on this trailer down at CafeFX. It's all prerendered. Looks great, and according to one of them:
"It was a tough project because Sony was a picky client, but it was still a great experience!"

Animating is significantly easier in Lightwave/Maya than it is in any game engine, and commercial/movie animators tend to be better artists anyways (Many good artists won't touch games, for various reasons. The biggest being the restrictions of game resolution) As usual, what I tell people is that trailers are prerendered at what is a prior assumption of what the hardware will be capable of. It might look that good, god knows they'll try.


edit: Here's a quote from my buddy:

Yeah, we started out going for hyper-photoreal, then halfway through Sony decided they wanted to get the "in-game look" as they apparently are trying to pass this off as actual gameplay ohmy.gif

I'm still really happy with the way things turned out...the car flipping in the road was mine and I'm pretty happy they kept it.

[Yukiri]

^^ If that's true, it's fairly lame of Sony to pull that. Crosshairs popping up and all is clearly intended to project the idea that what you're seeing is 'in game' footage. If it isnt...shame on them.

On a related note, it may be a while before we really see just what the PS3 is capable of. According to this article: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...M0&refer=japan

Appears Sony delayed delivering product specs/developer kits to it's third party developers, the result was either scrapped games, or games that arent taking advantage of the resources available due to simply not knowing what they are. All the secrecy around the ps3 could end up biting them in the ass.

[Kiksar]

Originally Posted by WillTR

Sorry guys. Few friends of mine worked on this trailer down at CafeFX. It's all prerendered. Looks great, and according to one of them:
"It was a tough project because Sony was a picky client, but it was still a great experience!"

Animating is significantly easier in Lightwave/Maya than it is in any game engine, and commercial/movie animators tend to be better artists anyways (Many good artists won't touch games, for various reasons. The biggest being the restrictions of game resolution) As usual, what I tell people is that trailers are prerendered at what is a prior assumption of what the hardware will be capable of. It might look that good, god knows they'll try.


edit: Here's a quote from my buddy:

Yeah, we started out going for hyper-photoreal, then halfway through Sony decided they wanted to get the "in-game look" as they apparently are trying to pass this off as actual gameplay ohmy.gif

I'm still really happy with the way things turned out...the car flipping in the road was mine and I'm pretty happy they kept it.

Not really sure if you're making stuff up or just not too sure about some of what you're talking about. Who animates in Lightwave anymore? And you don't animate in game engines. Animating in Maya, Max, Softimage, etc. and exporting those animations to your engine is the common practice. I'm not sure if you're referring to animation when you use the term "game resolution" but it's in odd context either way.

It may be that film quality animators are rare in the game industry, but four out of five of the animators I work with are from film (from Tippett, Weta, Disney, and ESC). These aren't second tier guys at those companies either, Petey is sort of a mini legend (or a hero to me, whichever you choose) at Tippett, and although I'm not a big Weta fan (don't tell him I said that), the guy from there is a great animator. So my experience may not be ordinary for the game industry, but since we do mainly do game work I'm not so sure that I agree with good animators not touching game work. Not that you dismissed the idea of some good ones working in the industry or anything.

Animators aside, we have 2D guys that have done some great stuff and 3D artists who have worked in film, so all around I've had the impression that working in both movies and games wasn't too rare. Of course general 3D art is where people who have worked in film are probably most held back, but that’s becoming less of an issue and a good artist seems to be a good artist with whatever he/she has to work with.

As far as your friend goes, does he animate, model, or what? Cool if he got to work on the trailer, CafeFX seems like a good company. And if he did, thanks to Sony again for failing their quest as masters of deception.

[WillzZz]

Lightwave has great animation tools, especially since 8 came out. Generally people will use Maya, but I know CafeFX is a LW/Maya house, so I specifically mentioned those. And exporting a lot of bone information doesn't work. Recently (I know newer enginers are much more flexible), I know that bone limits, node limits, and compatibility between software and various dx craptastic tools and file formats were a HUGE pita to work with. So, sure, animating something and exporting it to one format is fine, but whether or not it will work without writing some scripting, setting up special text files, converting textures to dds or models to .x, who knows! I wasn't going to get into it before (I doubt people care for our technical jargon), but yeah, most of what I said would probably be confusing if you knew what you were reading.

Anyways, I don't doubt for one second that every games company has some great artists, but I've seen some of the art coming out, and I know that your Weta, Disney etc guys aren't churning that stuff out, so I put 2+2 together and made an assumption. I wasn't really trying to put anyone down, I just feel that movie/tv art is better than games art, usually.

Guy I quoted did FX work on that shot, I believe, but I could ask all 3 if you're curious. Not sure if they all frequent our forums or just him.

It wasn't the most beautiful piece of art I've seen, but damn did they fake that it wasn't gameplay well. I actually saw it here first, then I went to my school forums and saw the post there and figured you guys would atleast like to know.

Not sure why you think I'd make it up but =P

[Kiksar]

Haha, I'm not sure why you'd have a reason to make it up either. The way you simplified what you were saying was just odd... and the internet is a funny place full of plenty of misinformation.

The Lightwave thing trips me out. Doesn't seem like tha animation tools could possibly trump Maya's or Softimage's (though it has been around forever, so I'm not sure where my logic is coming from) so I figured it fell in line with where Lightwave is as a modeling program thse days, which is pretty far behind.

I haven't encountered engines where bone/mesh weight data couldn't be imported, and most games have a reasonable limit to what you can use as a node count for your rig (with verts being able to be affected by more than one bone, etc.). But yeah, this probably doesn't need to be talked about here.

Tell your friend(s) the trailer looks cool, but defy Sony next time and use a better skin shader. If Crytek can do sub-surface scattering on the 360 Sony should be aiming for it too

[zilkoril]

Damn, I came pretty close to having to go to Church...