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.
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.
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.
IGN: Are you going to use the tilt function or HD IP camera in any way?
Eggebrecht: The motion controller is not only about tilt and Lair will open your eyes about it. It detects tilt, yaw, and roll with extreme precision. But it also detects accelerations in space, and in the combination of the two it's a full-blown and very complex motion control system. All of Lair is built around the controller.
[...]
One unique element that made it all come together was the motion control. You virtually hold the reigns of the beast purely with motion control in ways you might expect -- but we also break new ground by utilizing our radically new gesture recognition system: If you pull on the reigns, the dragon does a 180 turn, if you punch it in a direction, you dash towards your enemies, if you dodge with the controller, the dragon on-screen dodges. If you latch onto certain objects in the game, you can tear them apart by wildly shaking the controller.
)für die PS3 entwickelt. Abgesehen davon, dass es ein richtig gutes früh verfügbares PS3-Spiel wird, macht Factor 5 Präsident Julian Eggebrecht interessante Aussagen über PS3-Themen.
.gif ":) :)")
.gif "%) %)")
