Nytt "Lair" intervju (Update! Gameplay-video!)

[ShredLord]

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/733/733921p1.html

Fantastiske greier.

"IGN: For the past few generations, Factor 5 has been leaned towards exclusive games -- namely on Nintendo systems -- is the announcement of Lair an indication that you'll be a PS3-exclusive developer?

 

Eggebrecht: First of all, we never have been manufacturer-exclusive. We did games for the SNES, Genesis, PlayStation, N64, GameCube, and many others. It's just that we prefer to pick one platform for any given game. We don't like ports that compromise features.

 

From the technology perspective we are multi-platform as we always have been. We have updated the DivX toolset for the PS3, the Wii, and the Xbox 360 for example. And we do have extremely strong engines on the systems. I think Lair proves how much you can get out of the PS3 even with a first-gen title if you hand-tailor your engine to the platform and take full advantage of Cell, RSX and of course the motion-sensitive controller. "

 

IGN: For the past few generations, Factor 5 has been leaned towards exclusive games -- namely on Nintendo systems -- is the announcement of Lair an indication that you'll be a PS3-exclusive developer?

 

Eggebrecht: First of all, we never have been manufacturer-exclusive. We did games for the SNES, Genesis, PlayStation, N64, GameCube, and many others. It's just that we prefer to pick one platform for any given game. We don't like ports that compromise features.

 

From the technology perspective we are multi-platform as we always have been. We have updated the DivX toolset for the PS3, the Wii, and the Xbox 360 for example. And we do have extremely strong engines on the systems. I think Lair proves how much you can get out of the PS3 even with a first-gen title if you hand-tailor your engine to the platform and take full advantage of Cell, RSX and of course the motion-sensitive controller. It's amazing to work on the most powerful real-time hardware platform ever created without having to worry about porting to other systems. "

 

"IGN: Was Lair a project that stemmed internally or did Sony come to you with this idea to produce for them?

 

Eggebrecht: Lair is completely our creation. Sony doesn't go around and ask for developers to work on properties -- they want you to have the vision and then will work with you to realize your vision. They are very good about giving creative freedom, while at the same time bringing in this wealth of experience that a first party can provide. We have been in contact for a long time and it just happened that the first pitch for Lair and the early days of the PS3 coincided and both sides realized that we had something here."

"IGN: That sounds pretty awesome. Is Lair strictly a flight game?

 

Eggebrecht: No, not at all. It's a game about a hero who happens to ride a dragon -- and anything you can imagine that dragon can do both in air and on the ground you can make it do!"

 

"IGN: The original teaser shown at PS Meeting said that the footage shown was "in-game." How far has the project come since then and what improvements have you made on those original visuals?

 

Eggebrecht: It was footage directly grabbed out of the engine, running in real-time on the PS3, and with game assets. In levels that have our rain engine active the dragons are still as shiny as they were in that trailer. The teaser deliberately didn't show the hero or any other bits of the world of Lair because we wanted to introduce our technology, and what is possible on the PS3 in real-time."

That demo, as nice as it looked, only used a very primitive lighting system. Nowadays we have a full atmospheric light simulation running on RSX, so if we re-did the demo it would look considerably better. And then there is of course the dragon art: The Dark Dragon looks quite different these days because it evolved visually, but the Flame Dragon is almost unchanged in the game.

 

"Can you talk a little bit about the technology behind Lair and if what we've seen in the trailers will be reflective of the final in-game product?

 

Eggebrecht: Thanks for the shader compliment, I'll hand it on to our incredible tech and art team. All kudos goes to them! As I mentioned, as proof we might have the teaser demo in the final product fully interactive, and all the models are still the same as they were back then, in fact many of them are even more detailed. If you look at the newest rev of our hero's dragon, the so-called Plains Dragon, it has even more detail then the one we used for the E3 2006 trailer. All of the models you saw there were right out of the engine. "

 

"IGN: How long have you been working on the project? And how far into the game were you before you had proper PS3 dev kits? Also, have the final specs changed anything about the game at all?

 

Eggebrecht: Lair has been in production since 2004. For a long time the team was quite small, by now we have a whole army on it. The dev-kits evolved throughout that time, but the specs really didn't. We started with Lair at exactly the same time as the PS3 specs were specified and the hardware partners were locked-in. So we knew what to expect. Cell already was far along, the NVIDIA partnership made things very clean and clear on the graphics front, and Blu-ray never was in question, either. The final decisions about the hard drive as a standard inclusion took a bit longer, but we planned on using it from day one anyways, so we were prepared."

 

"The final dev-kit delivered exactly what we expected in terms of power; there was no nasty last-minute surprise or anything. I've read the rumors of Cell being so hot that they had to downgrade clock-rate and quite frankly, I don't know who is spreading those. Cell specs didn't change, its speed didn't change, in fact the final retail unit is so quiet that when we first had Lair booting from disc on it we thought the PS3 wasn't running at all. "

 

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: 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: Tell us something about Lair that will separate it from every other PS3 game on the market... other than the fact that it has badass dragons in it.

 

Eggebrecht: We are doing our best to make Lair stand out in every respect but if I had to pick one aspect it's the controls and how they tie into your experience with the beast. It's the thing that elevates it above any game I have directed before.

 

IGN: All right then, when is Lair coming out?

 

Eggebrecht: Uh, oh. That's the million dollar question, isn't it? More information will come on that in the near future.

 

IGN: Any last words for IGN readers?

 

Eggebrecht: I think you guys will be blown away by the PS3 in every respect -- and LAIR will be one of those games that shows what this incredible hardware can do!"

Eg anbefalar alle til å tykke på linken og lese heile intervjuet, veldig djuptgåande og interessant .

 

 

EDIT:

Ny gameplayvideo frå Lair.

 

 

http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/761/761161/vids_1.html

 

 

Ligg endå ein på http://www.gametrailers.com/

Endret 22. september 2006 av ShredLord

[KayAU]

Det var litt av eit intervju, ja. Mykje skryt til både Sony og til PS3-maskinvara, og ikkje minst til spelet. Om han berre overdriv litt, bør dette spelet bli eit teknologi-monster av dimensjonar.

 

Eg fekk i alle fall skikkeleg lyst til å spele det.

 

EDIT: Kva med å sette intervju-teksten mellom eit par skjult-tekst-tags?

 

Kay

Endret 22. september 2006 av KayAU

[ShredLord]

Eg seier det omatt; spelet har DRAGAR.

[-Mr.T-]

Er ikke helt slått ut av grafikken hvert fall. Alt det skrytet av detaljer og Cell og blu-ray utnyttelse kommer liksom ikke fram på de bildene. Om det bare er bildene som er grumsete eller om det er spillet som er sånn skal ikke jeg si for sikkert.

 

Men spillet i og for seg høres jo litt kult ut, selv om det lukter selvskryt lang vei...

[ShredLord]

Meiner du verkeleg at traileren og bileta eg har lagt ut ikkje har god grafikk? Teknisk sett er jo dette styggeleg imponerande.

[ShredLord]

Fyrsteposten har no ein ny gameplayvideo. Ekstremt.

Endret 22. september 2006 av ShredLord

[-Mr.T-]

Meiner du verkeleg at traileren og bileta eg har lagt ut ikkje har god grafikk? Teknisk sett er jo dette styggeleg imponerande.

6915055[/snapback]

 

Traileren på gametrailers er jo kun en CG animasjon, så det betyr bare at spillet har bra intro eller har bra videosekvenser og sier lite om spillet i seg selv...

 

Når det gjelder gameplayvideoen så vil jeg ikke si at jeg er noe spesielt imponert.

Altså, grafikken på videoen ser hvertfall bedre ut enn på de bildene. Men soldatene som dragen tråkker rundt på virker ikke særlig "intelligente", dem trasker liksom rundt med mekaniske, synkroniserte bevegelser. Det så egentlig helt latterlig ut.

 

Sikkert kult spill men ikke akkurat "teknisk sett styggeleg imponerande".

Endret 23. september 2006 av Appleseed