The "General Games Chat" forum, which includes Retro Game Reviews, has been archived and is now read-only. You cannot post here or create a new thread or review on this forum.
Listen carefully to what's being said.
I'm saying nothing, but I am crossing my fingers.
The full interview can be found here: [URL]http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/748/748475/vids_1.html[/URL]
When you're talking about animation and getting actors to move to a variable specific point in real-time you're talking inverse kinematics blended with animation.
Inverse kinematics works by finding the final point you want to go to then recusively moving each joint towards it in turn to the extent of it's physical constraints. But to avoind this looing extremely robotic frame by frame it needs to be blended with a preconfigured animation and then you need to layer different animations for different things.
Maybe next generation.
I think that this generation will be about swinging the controller as a virtual sword handle, but I would say that! ;-)
On the other hand, the PS2 opened up several new doors that we couldn't even imagine when we all had PS1s. The in game animations etc. were SO much more impressive. Let's have a look at MGS1 and then MGS2. MGS1 was, pretty much, move and hide. With some shooting and strangling in there as well. There wasn't much in the way of in game animations. Now look at MGS2, where Snake has different animations for walking, sneaking up on enemies, tapping on walls and the rest of it. Raiden';s hair and Snake's bandana also waved around acording to the PHYSICS Konami had created in the game.
The PS2 has also started to introduce much more interactive environments. Very few are fully destructable, but that's because the PS2 doesn't have the power to handle all the extra info.
But look at the PS3, it has SO much more power, it is surely fully possible for them to create fully destructable environments, and we'll be seeing much more fluent in-game animations. With a new console, MGS4 could be to MGS3 what MGS2 was to the original; a MASSIVE step forward.
While I think Bonus is probably right, I don't think it's impossible to make gameplay like that and I reckon we WILL see gameplay like that, if not at launch, than a few years into the era of the next-gen consoles.
The major thing which will have to be different is the animation of both Snake and the characters from Killzone.
As soon as you are out of the cut-scene you're going to have animations which follow a cause and effect system based on user input. You're going to have a limited number of actions you can carry out and things wont be so tightly integrated in a final game. Ther emight not be any reason for the actual graphics and lighting to be any different, but it wont be possible for the animation to be the way it is in those videos.
You'll have to start to see repeated sequences etc. etc. once the charcters become interactive and they'll have to be done in a way which doesn't just feel like you're controlling a character on rails. Examples are just daft things like the players feet and how assured they look on them.
To get that done in a real-time interactive game you're going in for a world of pain with Inverse Kinematics and blended animations.
For Icarus's sake, it's going to need lots and lots of power and I'm not entirely sure that the next-gen systems are going to have that sort of power especially not this early in the development of multi-threaded engines.
I just watched the trailer. It's quite obviously not actual gameplay, but still mighty impressive.
I wouldn't be surprised if the actual game (MGS4) does look like that. Why? MGS games are basically a series of set-pieces, and - good as they have been - they're not exactly taxing.
If the demo at TGS could be interacted with, then you're practically three-quarters of the way there, aren't you?
What we need to remember is that the PS3 (and the 360 before anyone accuses me of bias) are supposed to be - hopefully - making things possible which haven't been up to now. It could just be possible that games will be this good when we're playing them.
> Exactly the same as the MGS video, scripted and made to look really
> nice but no way will the final game look or play anything like that
> video.
I did, away down there in my first post in this thread and it was questioned so I explained ;-).
The actual content of the video itself isn't interactive in any way other than the fact that they can pause the scripts controlling the pre-written animation at any time and move the camera around.
The animations you saw there would be difficult to emulate into a control system. Just stupid things like the way the characters put their hands out to their other team members would need a phenominal amount of inverse kinematics to get it to look that good in a game situation when another model falls over and their arm isn't necessarily at an exact point. But in a cut-scene you can animate the actor to fall over and have an arm at a specified point and have another actors fingers and had reach exactly to where it is without having to calculate the positions against joint restrictions in real-time.
This is just a tech-demo and any final game will look and play nothing like that because there are no gameplay mechanics involved there whatsoever.
It just shows what the PS3 might be able to do with real-time cut-scenes (which I've never said isn't impressive) and not what gameplay is going to look like.