Lair (5 page preview) Yes another 1080p game as well as taking advantage of blu-ray :

[Monkey]

click on the link for all the info

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

check out the HD (well not 1080p )gameplay trailer

http://www.gametrailers.com/player.p...13309&type=mov

IGN: One of the biggest early misconceptions out there is that Lair is just Rogue Squadron with a dragon. Now's your chance to tell people what it really is -- go for it!

Eggebrecht: One part of Lair is the logical next step for us in flight action. Planes are limited and soulless; beasts and creatures provide a new level that we could never reach with a purely craft-based game. So in that sense there is our heritage as the creators of the accessible free-roaming flight game with the Rogue Squadron series in Lair.

But that's only the start: As a so-called Burner, one of the elite air-force in the Lair world, not only do you slip into a human hero with an epic journey and story, but the interactions between you and your enemies are all driven by the fact that they are alive. They fight, they get personal, they bleed, they scream. And all of that takes place in air and on the ground as well, so imagine riding and controlling this awesome beast and doing seamless, close-up battles everywhere you want to go in your game world. Dragons bring up all of these ideas, from the mythical fire-spewing creature to the dinosaurs straight out of earths history -- Lair is embracing all of that.

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.
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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: We've coined a term around the office known as "Pro-Pixel Leatherization Diffusion" to describe your rendering technique on dragon scales. We've also started using it when describing other games with similar effects, but you guys were first. We're giving you this term for free use on the back of your box. But anyway, regardless of what you (must) call it, 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.


We are releasing a lot of new shots of the game straight and un-scaled over the next few weeks, so you will see a lot of the technical features in those. One of the things people need to realize is that you go seamlessly from ground to air --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.

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: 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.

[Ascended_Saiyan]

Reading that article got me soooo hyped up that I feel like I just drink 10 cups of coffee! This is sick! 1080p gaming here I come!

[AV_Integrated]

Optoma HD81... Optoma HD81... Optoma HD81....

Geez, I need a raise.