Factor 5 on Lair and PS3 vs. 360 Tech

[Zilla Man]

Last Word, you must be slipping. :rolleyes:

I dug up this article that contains some great tid bits on Lair but more importantly on the PS3 vs 360 in technical but laymans terms.

Condensed Version:

Lair Dev: PS3's Cell is “Limitless”

http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5241&Itemid=2

Full Version:

http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2007/04/qa_with_factor_5_chief_julian_eggebrecht.html

Some Highlights:

Eggebrecht, whose company is responsible for 2001's acclaimed Rouge Squadron II for GameCube, also said that developers who want to port an Xbox 360 game to PS3 are in for a “bad surprise” if they didn’t have multi-core development in mind in the early stages of game development."

This sounds like what happened to Splinter Cell and other PS/360 multiplats. As much as the Xbots would like to think that PS3 versions are weaker because the 360 is superior, it's because they coded for the 360 and then tried to port it over to the PS3. The same thing happened with Metal Gear on the Xbox last generation: superior hardware, problem filled port.

"You’ll have a hard time if you port without having a PS 3 game in mind when you created the 360 version. That is where a lot of complaints are coming from. They created the 360 engine with a unified memory architecture in mind, with the embedded frame buffer with its advantages and disadvantages, and not thinking too much in early stages about multicore. If you try to get that over to the PS 3, you’re in for a bad surprise. The PS 3 is all about streamlining about the two different memory pools. They are separate. You don’t have to do tiling because you don’t have an embedded frame buffer. All of these advantages of the PS 3 turn into disadvantages if you don’t start making your game on the PS 3. Hence the griping. If you create first on the PS 3, it is pretty easy to port it to the 360. A lot of companies coming on board now will probably start on the PS 3 and move to the 360. The lucky thing for us is we didn’t have to think about the 360 at all."

More interesting observations on PS3 capabilities:

Q:Launch titles always make some compromises.

A: Yes. Lair basically is the only game out there which gives you a 20,000 feet view as well as the one meter level view at pretty much the same detail level. Lair is also the only game which does all of its light in real time, and the atmospheric calculations. That gives us the day and nights cycle, the fluid dynamic simulations in the water. That wouldn’t have been possible half a year ago. We needed more time for that. You need the SPUs for that. Extensive streaming. Ted Price mentioned in an interview that Ratchet is now the first one where they start to stream. I can understand why they didn’t do it for Resistance. With Lair, you have to do it or you cannot manage the detail level and the expectations for the detail level and at the same time move around this world.

Q: Some of the games all look good to me. This looks great. Is there a big difference you can see between this and Gears of War?

A: "In Gears of War there is no way you could actually go above the city and then basically go seamlessly from air to ground. Unreal Engine in the end just provides for corridor and corridor being more a metaphor here in terms of design. Our engine is always designed in a huge world bubble and that can be 32 kilometers by 32 kilometers. You can go anywhere at extreme speeds. Unreal Engine is dependent on the fact that you go relatively slowly through your world. With us, you can go through the world fast or slowly. If you are in night mode, or you are on the ground, you get all of the detail that Unreal Engine provides. But there is no way you can get the macro."

There's more stuff in the full length interview. My point is that Lair is the first of many games designed from the ground up for the PS3 specificly to take advantage of it's architecture. These games are where you'll be seeing the differences in A.I. and game performance that simply can't be done on the 360 or at least not without a lot of compromise.

But even the multiplat developers are starting to take advantage of the SPU. In a recent issue of GamePro (the one with Mario on the cover) developer Criterion has said that the PS3 version of Burnout 5 will have more spectacular crashes and better A.I. than the 360 version because of what the SPU's can do.

Of course it all comes down to the games being fun to play. But I'm predicting that we'll be hearing more stories like this the further we get into the PS3's lifespan. Just further proof that MS sees this generation 's console war as a sprint while Sony sees it as a marathon.

[ilnadmy]

Great interview with some good insights. The PS3 always has been more future-proof than the 360, but I didn't know much about the internal dynamics of the two systems, so this explains some of that stuff in layman's terms. Good stuff.

[Ocelot]

Yet another great read Zilla. As it stands these day's I'm really not too impressed with my PS3 right now. I have no doubt the PS3 will deliver, thus making a worth while investment down the road...but now is just not the time. I remember articals bashing the PS2 and the good 'ol Dreamcast being said to have the better versions of games over the PS2 counterpart. But if you look at what PS2 can dish out now? (GoW, R&C, SoTC) Dreamcast would chug.

The PS3 and it's Cell really seem to be future-proof so long as it can hold up against this aggressive competition. Games like Drakes Fortune, R&C look promising. Lair while looking incredible graphically just doesn't hold my interest like Bioshock and Assassins Creed do. I would like to hear more about upcoming titles from the East...say a few cool RPGs. Sony I know you have some tricks up your sleeve.

[Gadfly2317]

How do games like this fair in Japan? 'cause this week, the Ps3 only sold 300 more units than the Ps2 did, and both were 1/6th the sales of the supply constrained Wii. With DS still leading the pack.

There's no way around it, Sony's getting destroyed, and we're looking to games like Lair to turn it around, but will it really?

[DrunkenThumbmaster]

"In Gears of War there is no way you could actually go above the city and then basically go seamlessly from air to ground. Unreal Engine in the end just provides for corridor and corridor being more a metaphor here in terms of design. Our engine is always designed in a huge world bubble and that can be 32 kilometers by 32 kilometers. You can go anywhere at extreme speeds. Unreal Engine is dependent on the fact that you go relatively slowly through your world. With us, you can go through the world fast or slowly. If you are in night mode, or you are on the ground, you get all of the detail that Unreal Engine provides. But there is no way you can get the macro."

Complete and total Bullshi+. The comments about UE3 the engine focus heavily on open world enviromnets. Gears of War was a game design decision. Any way Untreal tournament will prove this statement wrong. And from here on out you can't believe anything this dev says about other hardware with such blanket statements about the competition like this.

[Dancer O_o]

"In Gears of War there is no way you could actually go above the city and then basically go seamlessly from air to ground. Unreal Engine in the end just provides for corridor and corridor being more a metaphor here in terms of design. Our engine is always designed in a huge world bubble and that can be 32 kilometers by 32 kilometers. You can go anywhere at extreme speeds. Unreal Engine is dependent on the fact that you go relatively slowly through your world. With us, you can go through the world fast or slowly. If you are in night mode, or you are on the ground, you get all of the detail that Unreal Engine provides. But there is no way you can get the macro."

Complete and total Bullshi+. The comments about UE3 the engine focus heavily on open world enviromnets. Gears of War was a game design decision. Any way Untreal tournament will prove this statement wrong. And from here on out you can't believe anything this dev says about other hardware with such blanket statements about the competition like this.

Agreed, I thought it was crap when I read it too. Gears of War didn't seem as if it was so super taxing on the hardware that flying around in the environment would be impossible to pull off at some point. I've also heard that the Unreal Engine that pushes Gears was designed with outdoor and indoor environments equally in mind. Unreal since 2004 has at times had mechs and flying vehicles in them already so I can't understand how that moron came to these obsurd conclusions to begin with.

[theWacoKid]

Agreed, I thought it was crap when I read it too. Gears of War didn't seem as if it was so super taxing on the hardware that flying around in the environment would be impossible to pull off at some point. I've also heard that the Unreal Engine that pushes Gears was designed with outdoor and indoor environments equally in mind. Unreal since 2004 has at times had mechs and flying vehicles in them already so I can't understand how that moron came to these obsurd conclusions to begin with.

Gears might be pretty, but that engine isn't suited for a lot of action. The framerate falters frequently and when you man a turret, it really dips. I was quite disappointed that the game was basically just man to locust combat. One cheezy vehicle section and that was it.

From my reading Gears pushed the 360 hardware very hard and without the 512megs of memory, wouldn't have been possible.

[Dancer O_o]

Gears might be pretty, but that engine isn't suited for a lot of action. The framerate falters frequently and when you man a turret, it really dips. I was quite disappointed that the game was basically just man to locust combat. One cheezy vehicle section and that was it.

From my reading Gears pushed the 360 hardware very hard and without the 512megs of memory, wouldn't have been possible.

I think the engine has to be suited to a lot of action if it is an Unreal Engine, the 360 may just not be able to handle much more than a few bots at a time though.

From all the commercials and stuff about Gears I'm surprised so many people expected vehicles and such to be in the game. From the commercials I got pretty much what I expected of the game. The one surprising thing to me about the game was how useless the token black guy was in the game, infact he was more a hinderance than helpful.

[thelastword]

In Gears of War there is no way you could actually go above the city and then basically go seamlessly from air to ground.

Wow! just effin Wow! He said in Gears of War. The comparison was against Lair, hell, that's the question that was posed to him. Do you command any aerial vehicle in Gears? NO, Can you go seamlessly from air to ground in Gears? NO. He was talking about Gears the game against Lair the game, my goodness. Is UE3 a game, No. Then please tell me how wrong and moronic the guy is? Really...please effin tell me.

[Mochan]

Gears of War didn't seem as if it was so super taxing on the hardware that flying around in the environment would be impossible to pull off at some point.

Have you seen the flying scenes in Vegas? Where you are in a helicopter overlooking the city? Or why not even the heli scenes in Gear? Those weren't exactly at lightning fast framerates, and those were in a controlled panning view. You can't pull of speed in transition in free flight open gameplay, and it's not even going to have any semblance of the already chugging framerate Gears has as is.

It's true that UT2K4 already had flying and at fast paces, but if you see the kind of performance Gears is pushing on the 360 I don't think you can get the same speed you got in UT2K4 on Radeon 9800-class (or GF 6600 class) GPUs -- you needed some pretty advanced hardware to really get UT2K4 going flying around at 60fps, you know. It wasn't something you could easily do with GF5000-class GPUs.

While the UE3 engine can probably handle better, it needs better hardware to do so -- I don't think the 360 can handle it right now without some major optimizations to the engine. Or if it can, it will be with some graphical compromises. Certainly you can't do so with Gears-level visuals.

UT3 for the 360 will probably need some major optimizations, or scale down the detail while going in flight mode to achieve that kind of speed. I don't know if they'll have to do the same with the PS3 version. But from what I saw of the 360 handling Gears, they have a lot of work to do.

[DrunkenThumbmaster]

Wow! just effin Wow! He said in Gears of War. The comparison was against Lair, hell, that's the question that was posed to him. Do you command any aerial vehicle in Gears? NO, Can you go seamlessly from air to ground in Gears? NO. He was talking about Gears the game against Lair the game, my goodness. Is UE3 a game, No. Then please tell me how wrong and moronic the guy is? Really...please effin tell me.


You dumb Fvck! He says very clearly that Unreal Engine depends on you moving slowly from one point to the other. He is commenting directly on the Engine. UT3 says otherwise with it's fast movement in full 3d planes. I'm not even going to get into the disscussion of performance of UT3 until it's out some people here are jumping the gun on that.

Secondly Lair doesn't have near the detail that Gears has.

And while it's true that Gears needed all 512 megs of memory that's not the only indicater of how much it's pushing the Hardware. I wonder how much it's actually using the CPU I mean you have 3 cores running at 3.2 ghz I doubt if it's being fully utilize by anything. It seems most 360 games are GPU intensive.

And pleas with the exaggeration Gears framerate doesn't chug and at which turret are you talking about that the framrate drops?

[thelastword]

You dumb Fvck! He says very clearly that Unreal Engine depends on you moving slowly from one point to the other. He is commenting directly on the Engine. UT3 says otherwise with it's fast movement in full 3d planes. I'm not even going to get into the disscussion of performance of UT3 until it's out some people here are jumping the gun on that.
You're really effin useless aren't you. Moving slowly from one point to the other, I mean whatever can it be.....dumbassmaster, I'm thinking Gears of mother-effing War, how about you? Are you still thinking UE3 or how your dumbass likes to put it UT3. Why would anyone make such a blanket statement about an engine? "Moving slowly from one point to the other", for the love of all dumb people everywhere...please get an effin clue. UT3 is using UE3 for crying out loud and you know what you move at lightning speeds, from one point to the other.

Eggebrecht was just touching on how more encompassing his game/engine was overall. Can you effin transition from air to ground and vice versa in a huge effin world with a tonne of chaos in Gears? NO, End of effin Story.


Secondly Lair doesn't have near the detail that Gears has.

BS, Rohn and his colleagues have more detail than any of the chars in Gears, his armor actually looks authentic unlike the 2D bitmap armor on Marcus et al. The dragon and the seasnakes (that we have seen) have more detail than any creature in Gears and their animations are leagues ahead as well.

As I've said to you before, Dev Walkthrough 3 at gametrailers, silences any type of crapola as it relates to detail, playing the game at 1080p 30fps in pristine detail will take things beyond.


And while it's true that Gears needed all 512 megs of memory that's not the only indicater of how much it's pushing the Hardware. I wonder how much it's actually using the CPU I mean you have 3 cores running at 3.2 ghz I doubt if it's being fully utilize by anything. It seems most 360 games are GPU intensive.
Wow! always wondering what could be or what could have been. Clearly, you're simply a deludenoid in your own dreamland, optimistically thinking of that untapped 360 CPU power. You have no facts, you're just here dreaming that Gears didn't make extensive use of the 3 cores, it's sad really. The real test will be UT3 using UE3 let's see how the 360 handles that, call it the progression point from Gears, if you will.


And pleas with the exaggeration Gears framerate doesn't chug and at which turret are you talking about that the framrate drops?Wow! no framerate drops in Gears? I guess it could run at 60 fps easily couldn't it? Just bump that CPU POWER, right? right?

[DrunkenThumbmaster]

You're really effin useless aren't you. Moving slowly from one point to the other, I mean whatever can it be.....dumbassmaster, I'm thinking Gears of mother-effing War, how about you? Are you still thinking UE3 or how your dumbass likes to put it UT3. Why would anyone make such a blanket statement about an engine? "Moving slowly from one point to the other", for the love of all dumb people everywhere...please get an effin clue. UT3 is using UE3 for crying out loud and you know what you move at lightning speeds, from one point to the other.


"Unreal Engine in the end just provides for corridor and corridor being more a metaphor here in terms of design"

You stupid Fvck. Right there he is talking about Unreal Engine not Gears of War but the Engine you idiot.


Eggebrecht was just touching on how more encompassing his game/engine was overall. Can you effin transition from air to ground and vice versa in a huge effin world with a tonne of chaos in Gears? NO, End of effin Story.

Can you run from cover to cover in Lair is there multiplayer? Can you use a scope to zoom in on an enemy using depth of field and see the incredible detail in each and every drop of evey frame rendered? No they are two different games focusing on two different types of game play you stupid retarded 2 year old.


BS, Rohn and his colleagues have more detail than any of the chars in Gears, his armor actually looks authentic unlike the 2D bitmap armor on Marcus et al. The dragon and the seasnakes (that we have seen) have more detail than any creature in Gears and their animations are leagues ahead as well.

2d bitmap? Ok your delusions are taking hold again. This is so idiotic it doesn't deserve a rebuttal.


As I've said to you before, Dev Walkthrough 3 at gametrailers, silences any type of crapola as it relates to detail, playing the game at 1080p 30fps in pristine detail will take things beyond.

No you Sony marketing bot the release version of the game with objectiive reviews of the final product will do that. Look at you, all it takes is some marketing and dev walkthrough and you drink the whole glass of milk.


Wow! always wondering what could be or what could have been. Clearly, you're simply a deludenoid in your own dreamland, optimistically thinking of that untapped 360 CPU power. You have no facts, you're just here dreaming that Gears didn't make extensive use of the 3 cores, it's sad really. The real test will be UT3 using UE3 let's see how the 360 handles that, call it the progression point from Gears, if you will.

Facts? You want facts? You don't believe in facts. I made a blanket statement about the Cpu I didn't claim it was true. As you claimed no developers are using the cell and if a game doesn't run right they arent using it. I made a query I don't know one way or the other you don't either.


Wow! no framerate drops in Gears? I guess it could run at 60 fps easily couldn't it? Just bump that CPU POWER, right? right?

First I doubt if you ever played Gears. And there is rare instant of framerates rare but the game stays at 30 fps. Just like lair.

[thelastword]

"Unreal Engine in the end just provides for corridor and corridor being more a metaphor here in terms of design"

You stupid Fvck. Right there he is talking about Unreal Engine not Gears of War but the Engine you idiot.
He's talking about Gears of War using UNREAL ENGINE3 you tool, I mean what would make him allude to "UE just provides for cooridor to cooridor" ? What? Could it be Gears of War? Mannnnn.. you're dhumbmaster.



Can you run from cover to cover in Lair is there multiplayer? Can you use a scope to zoom in on an enemy using depth of field and see the incredible detail in each and every drop of evey frame rendered? No they are two different games focusing on two different types of game play you stupid retarded 2 year old.
No, you can't run from cover to cover in Lair in claustraphobically assed levels no less, but you can fly at hundred of miles per hour in a 32 km squared level at any one time, all the while laying waste to hundreds of other dragons, thousands of soldiers and creatures in that space, but don't worry. I'll be sure to tell Eggebrecht to put in a level where the dragon can hone a sniper rifle for you, so you can Zoom in and sh*t. That'd solve your DOF addiction now, wouldn't it.


As it relates to differing games types, as I've said before Lair's engine ia able to scale like a champ. I think that if a cooridor shooter is made using Lairs Engine it will absolutely trump Gears technically and visually. I actually believe that this engine should be licensed.


2d bitmap? Ok your delusions are taking hold again. This is so idiotic it doesn't deserve a rebuttal. I know that the truth hurts, deal with it.


No you Sony marketing bot the release version of the game with objectiive reviews of the final product will do that. Look at you, all it takes is some marketing and dev walkthrough and you drink the whole glass of milk. Well good, what I'm seeing through compressed vids are highly impressive, it bodes very well watching and playing the game in native res.


Facts? You want facts? You don't believe in facts. I made a blanket statement about the Cpu I didn't claim it was true. As you claimed no developers are using the cell and if a game doesn't run right they arent using it. I made a query I don't know one way or the other you don't either.You did? To be honest most of your statements are blank. You optimistically assumed Gears didn't make much use of the CPU for your sake, but that's what you do, you assume alot of sh*t. Facts are effin foreign to you.


And there is rare instant of framerates rare but the game stays at 30 fps. Just like lair.Oh! Gears dips, get out of here, it effin does? only that it dips but happens to stay at 30 right? Dude I love you, put that in your effin tag, because I effin love you.

[theWacoKid]

I think the engine has to be suited to a lot of action if it is an Unreal Engine, the 360 may just not be able to handle much more than a few bots at a time though.

From all the commercials and stuff about Gears I'm surprised so many people expected vehicles and such to be in the game. From the commercials I got pretty much what I expected of the game. The one surprising thing to me about the game was how useless the token black guy was in the game, infact he was more a hinderance than helpful.

Well, you can't just stick in one cheezy vehicle section and just end it there. That makes no sense, I kept expecting additional vehicle sections to show up and nothing did and it just had me scratching my head, as to why they bothered at all since that section of the game sucked major ass. Drive, stop, UV the krill, rinse, repeat.

Dom was a PITA especially with the berserker, dumbass would get himself trapped and killed by the berserker more than once.

[Fivespot]

The one surprising thing to me about the game was how useless the token black guy was in the game, infact he was more a hinderance than helpful.

No way, I disagree. Cole Train was hilarious and offered some pretty funny dialog in my opinion. It gave Gears a campy kind of feel which I appreciated (similar to something like Evil Dead for example).

[DrunkenThumbmaster]

He's talking about Gears of War using UNREAL ENGINE3 you tool, I mean what would make him allude to "UE just provides for cooridor to cooridor" ? What? Could it be Gears of War? Mannnnn.. you're dhumbmaster.



No, you can't run from cover to cover in Lair in claustraphobically assed levels no less, but you can fly at hundred of miles per hour in a 32 km squared level at any one time, all the while laying waste to hundreds of other dragons, thousands of soldiers and creatures in that space, but don't worry. I'll be sure to tell Eggebrecht to put in a level where the dragon can hone a sniper rifle for you, so you can Zoom in and sh*t. That'd solve your DOF addiction now, wouldn't it.


As it relates to differing games types, as I've said before Lair's engine ia able to scale like a champ. I think that if a cooridor shooter is made using Lairs Engine it will absolutely trump Gears technically and visually. I actually believe that this engine should be licensed.

I know that the truth hurts, deal with it.

Well good, what I'm seeing through compressed vids are highly impressive, it bodes very well watching and playing the game in native res.

You did? To be honest most of your statements are blank. You optimistically assumed Gears didn't make much use of the CPU for your sake, but that's what you do, you assume alot of sh*t. Facts are effin foreign to you.

Oh! Gears dips, get out of here, it effin does? only that it dips but happens to stay at 30 right? Dude I love you, put that in your effin tag, because I effin love you.

This is getting pointless you are a fanatic with no reasoning.

My comment about the Xenon was a query it was a question. Again you are the one who blindly assumes what a developer does with there games. Talking about assumptions look at the one you made about Lair Engine being able to do a game like Gears and do it better. What's factual about that? On the other hand we know that UE3 is capable of doing more than what was shown in gears. Those are the facts.

As for the comment the lair dev said about UE3 is was initially asked about gears. Then went on to Say that the UE3 couldn't do whatever. That statement takes it away from gears and into a Engine discussion it's clear as day. But you are a fanatic so believe what you want.

[Dancer O_o]

No way, I disagree. Cole Train was hilarious and offered some pretty funny dialog in my opinion. It gave Gears a campy kind of feel which I appreciated (similar to something like Evil Dead for example).

You have mistaken what I was referring to. I agree that he added to the story a bit and was funny at times, but he was useless as a helper in the game mainly, that is what I was talking about. Not whether he added to the dialog or story, in which he does to some degree. I actually liked the blond guy in the game that was a rival of sorts.

[Dancer O_o]

Well, you can't just stick in one cheezy vehicle section and just end it there. That makes no sense, I kept expecting additional vehicle sections to show up and nothing did and it just had me scratching my head, as to why they bothered at all since that section of the game sucked major ass. Drive, stop, UV the krill, rinse, repeat.

Dom was a PITA especially with the berserker, dumbass would get himself trapped and killed by the berserker more than once.

The Berserker just cracked me up, blind as a bat, muscle bound and female, butt-ugly and was like a freight train once moving....and then dumb assed Dom would stand there like a dead moon when this thing was running riot all over the place. Sometimes the AI was sweet, at others....not so great.