Lair

[makeitlookreal]

If it's 35% done then it will look much better as time goes by.

[frosty]

I think the screens are AWESOME! But the video is very old.

[yoshaw]

nevermind

[makeitlookreal]

"There is the GPU, which is so flexible due to the parallel Vertex and Shader units that you can implement any effect ever dreamt of in several ways."

The above quote is from the IGN article about Lair

"any effect you ever dreamt of in several ways" is a VERY big statement.

Sony needs to come forward and tell us the truth about the RSX and all the specs of the PS3!

[Applefiend]

That's marketing hype. Are our shaders unified? No, they're better! Our vertex and pixel shaders are parallel!!

It's all bollocks.

[Siraris]

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.

ONCE AND FOR ALL :D

[liver_kick]

100 bucks says Lair is going to suck in the AI department... The troops on the ground looks worse than the AI you see in Dynasty Warriors... They won't move, and they stay in the EXACT SAME formation all the time...

You're criticizing AI... based on screenshots? Ooook.

[Siraris]

in fact I was begging the PS3´s controller designer early on to include full motion-sensing capabilities. It was something I was hoping for since the N64 days. For a short while it seemed to be an option for the GameCube but apparently the cost made it impossible at the time. I was certain that with the next round of consoles for a true next-gen jump it needed to be there. Graphics and sound are very important, but without a big generational jump in controls a new console is not truly next-gen for me as a creator. So remembering that PS3 controller meeting, I promised that our project, which would become Lair, would be the perfect showcase for the functionality.

PROOF THAT IN 2004 SONY WAS ALREADY DISCUSSING MOTION SENSING AND DID NOT STEAL IT FROM NINTENDO!

[TEEDA]

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.

lol

[EvilTaru]

I just need to see the damn game in action. >_<

Stupid IGN and their recycling of old E3 Lair trailer.

Good job though everyone. ~_~

[frosty]

Gesture recognition... Eye toy? Cool!!!

[Carlos]

I saw the trailers for this game, and its underwelming for me.

Yes, the trailer is awesome, the animation is crazy, but I don't seem to know where the hype is coming from.

[Crossbar]

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.

OK, so what happened in the final kits? :)

[OmniCloud]

I saw the trailers for this game, and its underwelming for me.

Yes, the trailer is awesome, the animation is crazy, but I don't seem to know where the hype is coming fromIGN's interview has me excited for the game-it seems like the controller will be a big part of it..and the game looks really good-that's enough to hype me anyway...

[ddaryl]

I saw the trailers for this game, and its underwelming for me.

Yes, the trailer is awesome, the animation is crazy, but I don't seem to know where the hype is coming from.

Dragons, and lots of them

[Raijin]

It's the same trailer as the one diffused at last E3.

[yoshaw]

Lair video apparently ingame

http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/6202

[Siraris]

Just watched the Lair video, and it's IMPRESSIVE as hell (the gamevideos one). The screenshots on IGN must have been ancient or something because if you examine this video (although like 300x200 and compressed as hell) closely you will see how incredible this game will be when it arrives. The scale is incredible, animation is fluid and smooth, the detail looks fantastic, draw distance and the water looks FANTASTIC.

I was really depressed looking at the IGN shots, but this has really redeemed this game in my eyes. I CAN NOT WAIT to see it in 1080p on my TV :)

[frosty]

doesn't it seem to run @ 60 fps? a game with the visual fidelity of Lair at 1080p60.... and the recent SURGE of 1080p titles... something must be up with RSX to handle all that.

[LaLiLuLeLo]

It looks really good to me! downloading the 640x360 version.

[Bsack]

I think it's official. I am going to be getting a PS3, but maybe not on launch day or a few months from now, but I'm definitely getting one because I seen the videos and it looks like it has a lot of potential to be a great title. This is the best title next to Assassins Creed and Metal Gear Solid 4 that I actually liked and this game put me over the edge. Impressive.

[LaLiLuLeLo]

If Square-enix is gonna bother making any more drakengard games they should be taking some serious notes.

[makeitlookreal]

Seriously, to handle a vast high quality game like this at full 1080P is simply amazing. A 1080P framebuffer is huge and even bigger when you add antialiasing and HDR. I seriously believe that the PS3 has recieved an increase in VRAM or there is indeed something special about the RSX that makes it different from the PC part.

Something is up! And I think it's the specs.

[yoshaw]

^Keep holding the torch MILR. Chicks digg it. ;)

As for the game. OMFG! The scale of the level is genormous!! The graphics are downright mindblowing. Lighting model seems too bright at places though which I'm sure they'll manage to perfection since they're Factor5, duh!

If you guys haven't already, checkout the LAIR video at playsyde. It's freaking gorgeous! For some reason I haven't been able to watch the Sigma trailer :( help?

[EvilTaru]

Lair video apparently ingame

http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/6202

Cool, so that move can be done in-game to take out the rider and the dragon. ~_~

[Hrama]

The gamplay sure as hell was impressive. It was amazing, but the only thing was that the lighting was so increadibly bright, I'm sure it would have scorched my eyeballs had I been playing it.

[ddaryl]

Hell the lighting in that video on my screen was way to dark to make anythng out.

I'm sure we'll see some better quality vids soon

[Illmatic]

The Playsyde footage is great.

http://www.playsyde.com/news_3493_en.html

It looks amazing IMO, the dragons flight animation looks great.

[venomv]

Sounds better then ever, and I was planing on getting the game before I heard all this.

[overclocked]

nevermind, i kinda of know it would be 1080P hehe just beacuse J.E and the rest of the brilliant tech-crew. Did they go all the way up to 1080P and still have 4xAA ? :smoke:

[agentorange]

Im happy that it will not be a launch title since its 50% complete only. I hope it is launch next year so they can achieve the CGI demo last e3

[Insane Metal]

Im happy that it will not be a launch title since its 50% complete only. I hope it is launch next year so they can achieve the CGI demo last e3

Not even 50% ? Wow, I see that sonystradamus was right again... he said that the game wouldn´t be out at least next summer :wtf:

[VG Aficionado]

Actually, 35% complete. (http://forums.e-mpire.com/showthread.php?t=62207)

[Insane Metal]

Actually, 35% complete. (http://forums.e-mpire.com/showthread.php?t=62207)

Uhh... ok. So the guy is really right again ! :wtf:

Now I am sure that he´s right about oblivion too. :)

[agentorange]

its much better not to rush this game since many are dissapointed on what they saw, graphically and AI its not good yet. Next year or better yet a European launch game and visuals which is on par with the E3 cGI demo will be good

[VG Aficionado]

I always think how funny it is that agentorange always seems to know a lot of facts about some games but he never elaborates on those "facts" or post any links to them :tardbang:

Man, what a way to post blatant bullshit just to look like an idiot.

[Z]

true, honest to goodness, 1080p with no tricks? on a game this scale? this early? everything being rendered in real time? everything?!

saying this game is a techncial showcase of talent and hardware is an understatement!

[RavenFox]

Seriously, to handle a vast high quality game like this at full 1080P is simply amazing. A 1080P framebuffer is huge and even bigger when you add antialiasing and HDR. I seriously believe that the PS3 has recieved an increase in VRAM or there is indeed something special about the RSX that makes it different from the PC part.

Something is up! And I think it's the specs.
Yeah man something is really kicking ass in that chipset. I think XB knows something to lol

[frosty]

These GFX match the E3 "CGI" (that was already said by a dev that knows WAY more than you ever will about graphics to be at least partially in game agantorange) or even exceed it, considering it was only 720p at E3. Agentorange is one of those people that will tell you the sky is green, and no matter how many people, even the whole damn planet say it's blue, he'll still swear it is green. Moronic Ignorance at it's best. What agenda are you attempting to further here? EVERYONE who has seen this game in action has been blown away, so enough with the bullshit lies man. We're all beyond sick of it, as your 5 red rep bars prove.


Just watched the playsyde video. That is easily the best looking PS3 game to date. This running at 1080p... MILR is right. Judging by what CPI has told us this shouldn't be possible. Look at the water, stunning. Even WAAAY in the background, you can see lava flowing into the water, and pillars of steam gushing up from the surface. Hundreds and hundreds of enemies all running around on the bridge, and the lighting is the best out there. When the sun shines through the dragon's wings you can see it illuminate every vein inside. Amazing. I'm floored. Most of all though, it looks like one hell of a good time to play! This game online would be the shit!!

[Siraris]

The thing that blows me away on the technical side is that the first level of Lair is over 4 GIGS in size. I thought Blu-Ray was unecessary? That's one level that is bigger than some 360 games.

:quagmire: :buldge: :wank:

[VG Aficionado]

These GFX match the E3 "CGI" (that was already said by a dev that knows WAY more than you ever will about graphics to be at least partially in game agantorange) or even exceed it, considering it was only 720p at E3. Agentorange is one of those people that will tell you the sky is green, and no matter how many people, even the whole damn planet say it's blue, he'll still swear it is green. Moronic Ignorance at it's best. What agenda are you attempting to further here? EVERYONE who has seen this game in action has been blown away, so enough with the bullshit lies man. We're all beyond sick of it, as your 5 red rep bars prove.Unfortunately, he's not going to care about this. Telling him we're all sick of his crap (bashing, derailing and outright trolling sometimes) and -repping him doesn't work. Honestly, putting him in the ignore list won't solve anything either... something needs to be done about him.

The thing that blows me away on the technical side is that the first level of Lair is over 4 GIGS in size. I thought Blu-Ray was unecessary? That's one level that is bigger than some 360 games.

:quagmire: :buldge: :wank:Whaaaat???!!! :buldge: Where did you read that?

[masteratt]

MS has a dictionary that defines "Un-necesary" as something different from the normal word.
Every new add-on coming to X360 was "un-necesary" a few months ago. :angel:

Anyway enough cheap shots to MS ;)

This game is way too early to comment on but the concept is still appealing but I feel I need to see more as I am slowly losing interest.

[Siraris]

Whaaaat???!!! :buldge: Where did you read that?

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.

[VG Aficionado]

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.Ownage!!!

[Old_Timer!]

Again I say Sony has let the games do the talking........

[Goki]

Now im a beliver in the saying "Size does matter" !!

[OmniCloud]

And they are FREakIN LoUD SON!!!!! JUSt finished watched the gameplay on gametrailers--OWNAGE!!!!

[makeitlookreal]

Yeah man something is really kicking ass in that chipset. I think XB knows something to lol

I totally agree RavenFox, however XBD doesn't know anything more than we do. He told us what he knew (about the extra cache in the RSX).

Basically, what stuns me is that some developers were boldly saying that a high quality 1080P game could not be done on the PS3. They were NOT saying it was impossible to have a 1080P game, but the quality would be diminished.

Basically, you have to take the number of pixels in the resolution screen you want. Multiply that to get color information. Multiply it again a few times for whatever anti-alising you want. Then you have to multiply it again for HDR.

A 1080P game takes up a bigger chunk of RAM itself and leaves LESS room for high resolution textures and other information. Another problem is that higher resolution games require higher resolution textures if you want the game to look sharp and detailed. So you have already reduced the available RAM but at the same time you have INCREASED the level of detail you need in your textures.

Now, lets look at the PS3. It has also been stated that texturing is going to be more difficult when you are getting the information from the XDR. It's going to be done, but it's not as efficent as getting them from the VRAM.

What I'm trying to get at is that something must have been improved upon to allow for a FANTASTIC looking game like Lair to run at 1080P.

Could it have been a RAM upgrade? Could it be some sort of special feature of the RSX we don't know about? Could it be some combination of these?

These are the questions that need to be answered by Sony.

[frosty]

Trust me, if they uprade, we'll know in due time before launch. But, my chips are with the existing hardware being more powerful then we expected. I know the Lair devs talk a WHOLE lot about streaming textures off the disc on the fly, and how when they went from 720 to 1080p it wasn't that big a deal because their engine was already so heavily reliant on streaming. I imagine there is some HDD caching going on.

[bigwig]

yeah, the lighting obscures the detail but considering the scale, I think when we see hd vid,,,this, along with HS, are right up there as two of the best looking ps3 games easily...It animates very well as well...Im very impressed....in theinterview the guy says that there is a level with rain and the game looks the same as in the demo

peace

[frosty]

lol. as I expected from the start, TGS leaves us with more questoins than answers.

[VG Aficionado]

The full interview: (http://ps3.ign.com/articles/733/733921p5.html) (sorry if it's been posted already)

IGN: This is the most quiet we've ever seen Factor 5 in regards to a project prior to release -- why all the secrecy?

Julian Eggebrecht: Because we have been so terribly busy. And of course we wanted to be a bit secretive about Lair and our next-gen projects in general, just as we were between N64 and GameCube. It has been an interesting time, not only getting a completely new, hand-tailored engine off the ground on a machine as complex as the PS3 but also at the same time creating new franchises.

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.

As for the publishing side of our games, we try to find the best publisher and the best platform for every title we want to create. Sony is extremely cooperative and supportive when it comes to new franchises and that, combined with the technology requirements made Lair a perfect PS3 and Sony-exclusive title.

When we thought of hundreds of dragons in air, thousands of troops and creatures on the ground, a gritty, dark, and photo-realistic style, and taking controls to a new level there really was no other option than the PS3 -- it was a match made in heaven. Sony believed in us and the vision behind Lair and we couldn't be happier with the relationship.

IGN: Since we're talking exclusivity, what do you think of the Wii announcements and Nintendo's direction, the choice not to support high-definition, the controller, etc? How do you see development differing between that system and the PS3?

Eggebrecht: I think Nintendo is doing exactly the right thing. They would have been crushed between the two others if they tried to go the same route. The all-in-one HDTV media monster is something I love and want at home, but Nintendo is simply not the company to create that beast. Sony is.

I personally believe that Iwata-san, Miyamoto-san, and Takeda-san saw with GameCube that following down the path of the other two would be futile. Nintendo is embracing their destiny, being an interactive content creator whose content and platforms are very unique. Many people could do with just a PS2 and no GameCube, but the Wii is so radically different and fresh that everybody who buys a PS3 might also get a Wii in addition. If their strategy pans out and the consumer get's it, they can and will be much more successful then in GameCube days while happily co-existing with the other guys.

Developing for the PS3 is completely different from the Wii. The Wii technology for graphics is well-known; it's essentially a turbo-charged GameCube -- which for 640x480 resolution games is a very formidable chipset. The Wii PPC CPU is well known too, so especially if one has worked on the GameCube, you can just jump in and focus on the main thing -- the controller and all its myriad of details.

The PS3 challenges the developer on all levels -- and I mean that in a positive sense: There is this massively new CPU that seems to have almost unlimited power -- the more programming time you throw at it the more power you get. There is the GPU, which is so flexible due to the parallel Vertex and Shader units that you can implement any effect ever dreamt of in several ways. The hard drive and Blu-ray can be used to stream enormous amounts of data. All of these things add up to a completely new paradigm already, even before you start exploring the endless possibilities of motion control, be it simple tilt, yaw, and roll, or much more advanced gesture recognition and position in space computations.

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: 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.

On the ground, you stomp your enemies by ramming it down - and these are only a few examples. It's a whole new paradigm and certainly the most exciting thing for me as a game creator since the analog stick came about. It makes very complex moves very, very accessible for a broader audience. People who traditionally cannot play these types of action games due to the lack of analog precision and too many button combinations intuitively get it, while the pros get moves and a level of control that simply aren't possible on a stick.

Finally, in addition to the radically new gameplay mechanics, our take on fantasy has a darker, more contemporary tone and story, and we aren't shying away from themes that are very relevant right now - moral choices in wartime, religious extremism, political pretense and separation of church and state, global climate catastrophes. It's an epic story which we tried to put as many layers as possible into.

If games want to be recognized as the next relevant media after movies, we as creators need to stop talking the talk and start walking the walk. We need to take on themes that are relevant to society and actually comment on them the way other media have done for hundreds of years. You can gun down hundreds of soldiers in virtual battlefields, but none of those games ever even tries to make you think about what you are doing and maybe second-guess your choices. Movies give you the multi-layered part, sometimes pretentious, sometimes too simplified, but at least they try. Games need to get to that and we certainly try.

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 trailer from E3 shows one dude jumping off of his dragon and annihilating another dragon -- is this something that players will be able to do with regularity in the final game?

Eggebrecht: Absolutely. When you are in air you can take out only certain enemies with fireballs. For the tougher set you need to lock-on, and get in close combat using the motion control gestures. If you ram your enemy often enough, both of you tumble out of the sky and enter a combo-driven fight mode which makes things very personal. Then, on top of that, we have a system of killing moves in which you make the hero kill enemy riders and dragons in a ton of inventive ways. One of them you saw in the trailer.

IGN: Will the game have multiplayer elements or is it strictly a single-player story-driven actioner?

Eggebrecht: We carved out enough to do for us with Lair being a single-player experience, so multiplayer is reserved for any sequel if this first one is successful enough. The design group and I have a ton of ideas around it, so there is plenty of room to explore in the future, but we first need to focus on getting this one right.

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.

We'll probably have that very demo as one of the extras in the final game, with a fully customizable camera as well that allows you to examine the dragon models.

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.

On top of all that, there is a real-time fluid dynamics simulation running on Cell for really complex ocean wave and water dynamics. We built our whole engine, including the physics part, on our own, without using any middleware. That way we have much more control over every aspect and can cater every detail to the PS3s and the games´ needs.

In terms of shaders I could go on for a while -- you'll find everything that is possible right now and a few cool new ones. Our fire is not made out of pre-baked textures but is a real-time simulation running on RSX, we have advanced parallax shaders, volumetric clouds, fog, and smoke, real-time rain, wetness, lava, fur, and much, much more.

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: 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.

in fact I was begging the PS3´s controller designer early on to include full motion-sensing capabilities. It was something I was hoping for since the N64 days. For a short while it seemed to be an option for the GameCube but apparently the cost made it impossible at the time. I was certain that with the next round of consoles for a true next-gen jump it needed to be there. Graphics and sound are very important, but without a big generational jump in controls a new console is not truly next-gen for me as a creator. So remembering that PS3 controller meeting, I promised that our project, which would become Lair, would be the perfect showcase for the functionality.

IGN: Is downloadable content something you're looking at? If so, to what extent?

Eggebrecht: Absolutely. When we are finished with the game we will continue working on content. There is always stuff you need to abandon which in previous generations was lost forever. With the downloadable content option these oftentimes truly great ideas can be finished the way the team imagined them. We also have the opportunity to react to gamers and incorporate their feedback at that point. The possibilities are really fantastic.

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!

[Pumpkin Head]

Dragon Raid gameplay:

http://www.gametrailers.com/gamepage.php?id=2657


sry if posted i never saw it it's awesome...

[OmniCloud]

^been posted guys but good to have it it one section-I'm actaully getting quite pissed off now-because I wanna play the games...lol

[frosty]

OK, first off...

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.


Eat that AGENTORANGE!

Second:

In terms of shaders I could go on for a while -- you'll find everything that is possible right now and a few cool new ones.

So.... not a 7900 after all?

[VG Aficionado]

Eat that AGENTORANGE!ROFL! Gotta PM him that all the time.

[makeitlookreal]

I think the RSX is certainly more than a 7900. Basically, Sony would not have paid NVIDIA a ton of money just to add a FlexIO interface to an ordinary 7950GT PC part. They bragged and bragged on the GPU and logic tells me it must have at least some additional features.

Thanks for pointing out that statement Frosty. It gives us a little extra confirmation something special is in the RSX.

[Beenie Man]

^STFU please. If the RSX was a 7950 GXT overclocked, that would be one fine ass GPU considering the PS3's closed environment. Let me tell you something MILR, I am tired of your RSX shit and it is getting annoying as hell.

If you have listended to Sony's plan, the Cell+RSX(234 million transistors mixed with 300 million is like 500 million+), which will allow certain types of graphics techniques that can only be done with the Cell's SPEs vertex offloading, the Blu Ray+HDD which will allow huge amount of textures and varying textures(not repeats) to be streamed off the disc as well as Blu-Ray's space that will allow less compression taking wait off the Cell, aswell as higher res ones and more textures, HDMI 1.3, which allow which will allow slightly sharper graphics and amazing picture with the use of Deep Color.

The PS3 architecture as a whole is what will produce amazing graphics and gameplay.

[chrismt]

Wow it looks like devs already might be utilizing all of the available space in a BD50 already! I hope Sony puts in some additional layer support.

That was by far one of the most positive interviews talking about the PS3 I've read in a long while.

[Carlos]

Dragon Raid gameplay:

http://www.gametrailers.com/gamepage.php?id=2657

sry if posted i never saw it it's awesome...
Now I'm excited for Lair.

PS3 is getting better and better in my eyes. Now I want to eliminate Wii from my list this fall, and make it PS3 and Xbox 360.

[OmniCloud]

^NO!!! DOn't eliminate Wii! Wii is gonna be awesome..lol...I keep watching the gameplay video for Lair and I still can't belive how many effects are going on in this game. I love when u come down and decimate the whole army w/the oversized bulls...

[Nameless]

I really enjoyed the interview with Julian, he sounded really excited and passionate about the game's development. I'm taking his comments with a pinch of salt because he makes things sound almost too good to be true... Perhaps the game will live up to all of his lofty ambitious claims.

It's also good to hear how he enjoyed working on the PS3 platform, they need to have this guy talking at every Sony press event, he seems sold on the PS3... Peace

[EvilTaru]

This is what? The 3rd or the 4th game running at 1080p (RR7 and Virtua Tennis 3 being two of them)?

I think we really need better videos to really appreciate the visuals of the game. Things like the transparent wings aren't immediately apparent, so much of the details are subtle.

[Hrama]

Wow, all of the effects they are running in the game are increadible. It looks hot, plays hot, and certainly is hot. I think it's time to sell everything but my ears, eyes, and hands so I can get this and every other game I want for the PS3. Increadible!

[jrum]

lol, visiting every sperm bank in tampa as we speak.

[liver_kick]

So.... not a 7900 after all?

Damnit Frosty, ya reset the MILR machine all over again. ;)

But seriously, he's just referring to being able to target the GPU and get closer to the metal, come up with new tricks etc.

[agentorange]

OK, first off...



Eat that AGENTORANGE!

Second:



So.... not a 7900 after all?

Then why is it not as detailed as the e3 demo? The alliasing is noticeable and frame rate drop than the e3 demo.PR talk?

[frosty]

^:tardbang:

No it isn't. It's all an illusion created in that clouded little head of yours to try and justify your BS point of view. You can watch the gameplay videos and see a rock solid framerate, and there isn't even one out that is clear enough to see any aliasing if it were there.

And detail, aliasing, and framerate have nothing to to with each other.

[LaLiLuLeLo]

what did he say? I have him ignored.

[agentorange]

I was not impress by the pics and vids Actually after seeing this quote I was impress with there promises and vision

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.


On top of all that, there is a real-time fluid dynamics simulation running on Cell for really complex ocean wave and water dynamics. We built our whole engine, including the physics part, on our own, without using any middleware. That way we have much more control over every aspect and can cater every detail to the PS3s and the games´ needs.

In terms of shaders I could go on for a while -- you'll find everything that is possible right now and a few cool new ones. Our fire is not made out of pre-baked textures but is a real-time simulation running on RSX, we have advanced parallax shaders, volumetric clouds, fog, and smoke, real-time rain, wetness, lava, fur, and much, much more

Thats a perfect gaming nirvana if you read that. I hope its not just a PR tactic.

[Nameless]

^ I guess you are buddies with an admin, because you should have been booted a long time ago.

[Raijin]

Well at least, It's not anymore snes graphics, agentorange. ;)

[Sephiroth_VII]

Sorry if already posted.
TOKYO--It has been almost a year since we got our first look at Lair, the upcoming original game from Factor 5 for the PlayStation 3. The game first appeared in trailer form at last year's Tokyo Game Show. In a nice bit of synchronicity, it was in playable form at this year's show, and the demo let us experience the virtues of flying around on a dragon, shooting stuff, and jacking fools.

The playable demo at the show was broken up into two chunks: a tutorial and a proper bit of action that sent you off to burn foes up during a pitched battle between two armies on a massive bridge. The tutorial was a brief run through the finer aspects of dragon handling. You'll steer your dragon with the PlayStation 3's motion-sensing feature. You'll move left and right by moving the controller in the either direction. You'll adjust your height by moving the controller up or down. A quick downward motion lets you dash for a short time, which comes in handy when taking on foes.

The game features a combat lock that, once initiated, lets you stick with a set target and opens up a new aspect of combat. When you initially lock on to enemies at range, you'll be able to shoot fireballs at them. However, if you dash into them once you're locked on, you'll initiate an interesting multipart airborne melee system. The first part of it finds you flying next to your foes and able to ram into them by jerking the controller right or left courtesy of the tilt sensor.

The next part of the battle changes your perspective and brings the view in up-close and personal for you and your foe. You're literally locked claw-to-claw in a rough-and-tumble spiral for a short time where you'll be able to perform combos by hitting the controller's face buttons. This way, you can have your dragon claw and maul your enemy in fun and exciting ways. The final part of combat finds you wrapping up your fight to the death with a little God of War-style minigame action as you perform a finishing move to deal the killing blow to your enemy. The moves are multipart actions that require you to follow an onscreen cue--a reddish haze that creeps up around the edges of the screen--and either hit the controller's face buttons or simply jerk the controller quickly in any direction. The payoff is a slow-mo series of brutal moves that varied as we played.

Now while Lair is obviously about flying around and murdering foes, Factor 5 is throwing in some ground combat as well. The system isn't quite as elaborate as the air battling in the demo, but it's certainly satisfying and, oddly enough, reminded us a bit of Joust. Basically, you can land anytime you're near solid ground by pressing the triangle button. Besides the obvious benefit of riding atop a massive armored dragon as you wade into a battlefield, you'll be able to barbecue anyone around you. The combination of trampling and flambé action makes for a satisfying experience that's actually useful. A morale meter onscreen reflects how friendly forces are feeling about the battle. If it starts to dip, you can help cheer them up by murdering mobs of foes.

All told, the combat system in Lair is pretty fun once you get used to the game's control. The tilt sensor took some getting used to, as did the perspective changes during aerial combat, but it didn't take too long to get comfortable with the setup. The multipart finishers are cool and should be a favorite part of combat provided they don't drag out too long.

The visuals in the game are shaping up well and stay true to the teaser trailer we saw last year at the show. The dragon we rode sported a high level of detail and had a gritty look to it. The design was equal parts bat and dinosaur--different from the traditional look for dragons that we've seen in most fantasy games. The animation varied in quality, but there were still some nice touches when the dragon was in flight and during parts of combat. The two environments we saw had a weathered, "just had a war" look with a medieval slant. The tutorial area was just an open area set above a mountain range with floating rings. The combat area featured a massive bridge between two mountainous areas that ran over a large body of water that seemed to spill out into an ocean. The sky above was populated with an assortment of airborne foes riding dragons, much like yours, and the bridge itself was packed with two warring armies.

The visual effects included light bloom, assorted filters, and buckets of particle effects, which gave the action a flashy look. The frame rate was, for the most part, smooth and solid, with an occasional inconsistency. The camera worked to varying degrees, but it took some getting used to because of the tilt functionality when turning and the perspective changes during battle. The audio was a little tough to make out amid the din of the show floor, but what we were able to hear had a suitably eerie sound to it. The voice acting was sharp and suitably dramatic, and the TGS demo featured a language option for toggling Japanese and English.

Based on this early look, Lair could be a very cool game. The gameplay is an interesting mix of familiar mechanics and some new elements that use the PS3 controller. Though what we played was understandably rough in a few places, especially considering the game is not due out until next year, there's some nice potential here. We're curious to hear more about the game's story and how big the adventure is going to be. . Lair is currently slated to ship in spring of 2007. Look for more on the game in the coming months.

-GameSpot

[frosty]

Man, I can't get this game off my mind. I've got the gametrailers gameplay video looping continuously on my second monitor. It's just amazing. Can't wait to play it.

[yoshaw]

2 new cool looking artworks. A wee bit different from eachother.

http://xs306.xs.to/xs306/06386/999_0001.jpg.xs.jpg (http://xs.to/xs.php?h=xs306&d=06386&f=999_0001.jpg) http://xs206.xs.to/xs206/06386/999_0002.jpg.xs.jpg (http://xs.to/xs.php?h=xs206&d=06386&f=999_0002.jpg)

[-gin-]

thats awesome.. would make a cool poster for the game. (second one is better btw)

[agentorange]

The water effects actually looks great in this early build. If only there is physics included in it where if a dragon fly nears to it and very fast the water splashes and dispurse realistic

http://images.playsyde.com/gallery/public/4151/999_0004.jpg
http://images.playsyde.com/gallery/public/4151/999_0016.jpg

[OmniCloud]

^I'm so proud of Agent Orange!!! THis game is under high scrutiny right now and yet u managed to find something good outta it and not pinpoint stupid details that will be ironed out by the time it ships:cheers: lol-yes the water does look amazing-they must've borrowed some ideas from the Warhawk team...

[section]

Dunno if this has been hinted at here before but this Gametrailers video (http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=13309&type=wmv&pl=game)puts all other TGS06 offscreen LAIR videos to rest. This game is already a marvel on many aspects. And I got goosebumps.

[CrumCon]

This game made me want to slap Team ICO.. cause Lair reminds me of Ico team

But the soldiers looks so dumb, all of them has thesame animation, and act exactly as the other at the same frikkin time!! its looks so bad.

[frosty]

Give them time on that, they have quite a while before this one releases. Look how far motorstorm has come since E3.

[EvilTaru]

2 new cool looking artworks. A wee bit different from eachother.

http://xs306.xs.to/xs306/06386/999_0001.jpg.xs.jpg (http://xs.to/xs.php?h=xs306&d=06386&f=999_0001.jpg) http://xs206.xs.to/xs206/06386/999_0002.jpg.xs.jpg (http://xs.to/xs.php?h=xs206&d=06386&f=999_0002.jpg)

They need to take that tin can helmet off!!!:grouphug:

[bigwig]

see, this game is easily one of the most impressive technically and scale wise...looks very great...but the lighting is messed up, it gives the dragons a messy look and some of the structures a yellow sheen, alot of the detail is lost...when you can get a really good look at the dragon, you can see it is very detailed, but most of the time it looks muddy...I expect this game will look very impressive when released, cause you can see lots of detail even on the individual soldiers

peace

[Insane Metal]

Dunno if this has been hinted at here before but this Gametrailers video (http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=13309&type=wmv&pl=game)puts all other TGS06 offscreen LAIR videos to rest. This game is already a marvel on many aspects. And I got goosebumps.

Yeah this is the best footage by far. It shows the ground battles and individual battles with the dragons on air. But this last one is very rough yet, they have many things to fix.

[LaLiLuLeLo]

Well it definitely puts the doubters to rest from that oooooold ass screen cap. I can't wait to really utilize the SIXAXIS controller.

[agentorange]

If they stay trie with htere promises and vision on the ign interview then it will be great but I hope it thus not suffer the fate of other ps3 games which are now scrutinize because they have not achieve the CGI demos of last year. Im really looking forward for this one. Two bad theres no multiplayer functions

[EvilTaru]

http://ruliwebfile.dreamwiz.com/mpeg3/tgs2006/ruliweb_tgs2006_lair_ps3_hd.wmv

[Insane Metal]

http://ruliwebfile.dreamwiz.com/mpeg3/tgs2006/ruliweb_tgs2006_lair_ps3_hd.wmv

OMFG !!! O_O

This is simply the best footage !! My god, so beautiful !! Those mountains seem real !!

[masteratt]

http://ruliwebfile.dreamwiz.com/mpeg3/tgs2006/ruliweb_tgs2006_lair_ps3_hd.wmv Beautiful. Simply beautiful.
I don't know what else to say....Just beautiful.

[Rubbernek]

For those who can't download/view the HD trailers:

http://www.gameklip.com/v/1577

http://www.gameklip.com/v/1578

[section]

Official website of the game (http://us.playstation.com/Content/OGS/GMID-016/Site/)

No old screenshots in sight :)

Unfortunately nothing new either :(

But it says "full website coming soon".

[VG Aficionado]

I think one of the screenshots is new, and another one is bigger than the ones we've seen so far.

[overclocked]

Lair is probably the height this hardware can generate, maybe more but they are so skilled its amazing technically. I think certainly that for title 2 they optimized the SPE s so one do what three does now. Pretty dumb post but whatever ;)

[Epix]

Lair is probably the height this hardware can generate, maybe more but they are so skilled its amazing technically. I think certainly that for title 2 they optimized the SPE s so one do what three does now. Pretty dumb post but whatever ;)

How can you say ANY 1st generation game is the height that the hardware can achieve? It's ludacris....(not the rapper)

[EvilTaru]

How can you say ANY 1st generation game is the height that the hardware can achieve? It's ludacris....(not the rapper)

You mean ludicrous?

Obviously second/third gen games will look better, but first-gen games looking great is very promising, can't wait to see what second/third-gen games will look like. ~_~

[yoshaw]

New LAIR gameplay at playsyde

http://www.playsyde.com/news_3564_en.html

[makeitlookreal]

I downloaded that file and it would not play or open.

[EvilTaru]

Thx Yoshaw.

Sometimes I lose sight of how well that dragon animates. ~_~

[lips]

must be difficult to make a fantasy dragon game. provided the graphics are 'playable' and atleast better than anything on ps2, I will definitely be interested in playing. I know everyone was impressed by the giant eye demo from e3 years back, we will have to wait a long time, imho, for the final product to decide.

[Old_Timer!]

Wow Lair seems truely incredible, the amout of characters on the ground looks as though it's in the 1000's. Yet the graphics look great, and very fluid. I can't believe that they will still add polish to this title, but I know they aren't satisfied yet. Hopefully this game turns out great......

[OmniCloud]

Looks very nice...I'm more interested in Warhawk tho since they both seem to focus on flight. I'll be keeping a close eye on it..

[ddaryl]

Lair is probably the height this hardware can generate, maybe more but they are so skilled its amazing technically. I think certainly that for title 2 they optimized the SPE s so one do what three does now. Pretty dumb post but whatever ;)


Wow, I think Lair looks pretty good for a PS3 game that is less the 50% complete, but it isn't up to the level of Resistance, or a few other games that are closer to completion graphically, or gameplay wise yet IMO.

I don't think any game on the PS3 is pushing the system even close to its potential. That's going to take years before devs really get the hang of it.

[Rubbernek]

Awesome new screens pulled direct from the latest HD video!

http://i96.photobucket.com/albums/l168/a1tereg0/1.jpg

http://i96.photobucket.com/albums/l168/a1tereg0/2.jpg

http://i96.photobucket.com/albums/l168/a1tereg0/3.jpg

http://i96.photobucket.com/albums/l168/a1tereg0/4.jpg

http://i96.photobucket.com/albums/l168/a1tereg0/5.jpg

http://i96.photobucket.com/albums/l168/a1tereg0/6.jpg

http://i96.photobucket.com/albums/l168/a1tereg0/7.jpg

http://i96.photobucket.com/albums/l168/a1tereg0/8.jpg

http://i96.photobucket.com/albums/l168/a1tereg0/9.jpg

http://i96.photobucket.com/albums/l168/a1tereg0/10.jpg

This looks sensational! :banana:

[VG Aficionado]

35% finished game =-o =-o =-o

[agentorange]

the water looks great I hope it has tons of effects like splashing , dispursing, etc.

[Old_Timer!]

I'm excited about using the eye-toy in conjunction with the sixaxis controller, the devs didn't go into detail(ign interview) about it yet. They just hinted, but I know this could be really fun.
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.
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.

in fact I was begging the PS3´s controller designer early on to include full motion-sensing capabilities. It was something I was hoping for since the N64 days. For a short while it seemed to be an option for the GameCube but apparently the cost made it impossible at the time. I was certain that with the next round of consoles for a true next-gen jump it needed to be there. Graphics and sound are very important, but without a big generational jump in controls a new console is not truly next-gen for me as a creator. So remembering that PS3 controller meeting, I promised that our project, which would become Lair, would be the perfect showcase for the functionality.

[frosty]

He doesn't mention using the eye toy at all, just using the controller to gesture certain commands.

[OmniCloud]

Is he hyping his own product or what? Cuz all the function u can do w/the controller does make it sound a LOT more than just tilt functionality..

[frosty]

It senses pitch, yaw, and tilt with extreme precision, and also can sense if it is being accelerated, like if you thrust it forward.

[OmniCloud]

Hmm...not bad Sony...There seems to be a lot of Flight games using the controller as that's the most obvious function i guess. Is there any racers confirmed using it Frosty?

[EvilTaru]

It senses pitch, yaw, and tilt with extreme precision, and also can sense if it is being accelerated, like if you thrust it forward.

I still can't believe PSM tried to write off the PS3 controller's motion-sensing capabilities by using a third-party tilt controller for their "test".

[OmniCloud]

^lol..That was a good article man...that junk was madd funny-And they had the original warhawk in the background!!

[PUNK em 733]

Would it be possible to use it for a racing game? Twist it left to right to steer, is what I'm thinking.

[lips]

the new controller sounds identical to the wii controller. no wonder nintendo was upset. If all new next gen titles are going to use motion sensing, looks like xbox might be shut out.

[EvilTaru]

Would it be possible to use it for a racing game? Twist it left to right to steer, is what I'm thinking.

I don't see why not, it might offer more precision handling.

[Z]

I think there are areas which PS3's pad may be more suitable than the Rev's remote. that is because it is a game pad that also has 'motion' sensitivity. with Rev's pad, you basically get a bar for tilting. that is why they had to dangle it with a cord with a bulge at the end of it having another analogue and shoulder button. with PS3's, it is all seamless; one second you are smashing buttons and trying to ontrol your game, the other second you are tilting your pad. sometimes both at the same time. ;)

speaking of which; Ninty should have seriously made the attatchment buldge wireless as well. it would have been worlds better. oh well, what does a toy company know about electronic designing.

[agentorange]

I still hope the vibration be back imagine being hit by fire or rocks

[Siraris]

I think Sony may smack Nintendo down if they ease people into motion sensing and push it in the games.

Think about it, people could go into Best Buy and say "So I could get a Wii with this motion sensing controller and this assed up nunchuck and really dated graphics, or I could get a PS3 with the best graphics out there, a hi-def movie player, AND the same motion sensing the Wii has?".

It would really take the wind out of Nintendo's sails. People will be biased towards PS3 because it's Playstation, and if they know it has the same functionality as the Wii, people are going to not give it a second glance.

[agentorange]

I cannot believe that there will be levels as large as the bay area wow

[PUNK em 733]

I cannot believe that there will be levels as large as the bay area wow


Wait...just wait a minute...was that an actual compliment?!:banana:

[VG Aficionado]

LAIR - graphics and gameplay developer interview (http://trailers.gametrailers.com/gt_vault/t_tgs_lair_int_gt_h264.wmv)

[OmniCloud]

I just finished watching it VG-u beat me too it..lol NIce interview this guys is really sooped about his team's motion based game...

btw-scroll down and check out Gears-the more I see of it the more I'm unimpressed. Why is there like 3 guys shooting at u:huh: and show us a different gun Man!!

[VG Aficionado]

Official site (http://www.us.playstation.com/Content/OGS/GMID-016/Site/default2.aspx)

[Z]

Thanks VG!

there is just something about dragons that make them so magical and majestic- and I don't mean those kiddy pink spin off joke kinds.

[Nerve-Damage]

In this months EGM (November), Julian Eggerbrecht states; The Cell generates all the polygonal models in the game, from the soldiers, creatures, and terrain (32 Kilometers square). While handling all the A.I. :drool:

I’m guessing many developers will probably be using the RSX mostly/only for pixel-shader and other effects purposes. I knew the Cell was a badass…but damn!!

[LaLiLuLeLo]

holy craaaaap.
multitasking and synergizing!!!!

[Raijin]

No scan?

[CrumCon]

i dont believe it.

[EvilTaru]

In this months EGM (November), Julian Eggerbrecht states; The Cell generates all the polygonal models in the game, from the soldiers, creatures, and terrain (32 Kilometers square). While handling all the A.I. :drool:

I’m guessing many developers will probably be using the RSX mostly/only for pixel-shader and other effects purposes. I knew the Cell was a badass…but damn!!

You forgot the WAVES!!! The spus are handling the wave system in real-time, also the dynamic lighting and shadowing plus the day/night cycle.http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v500/EvilTaru/gladtomeetya.gif

[Nerve-Damage]

No scan?

I'm currently nowhere near a scanner; Im texting from my Nokia 770 at the moment.


i dont believe it.

Believe it!! :thumpsup:

[Nerve-Damage]

You forgot the WAVES!!! The spus are handling the wave system in real-time, also the dynamic lighting and shadowing plus the day/night cycle.http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v500/EvilTaru/gladtomeetya.gif

No I didn't...hehehe :cloud9:

[PUNK em 733]

Yes he speaks the truth, I have the same mag. I would have let you guys known but I have no scanner, I know how much you guys like proof.

[CrumCon]

so RSX is there only to output the stuff to your screen? isnt that a waste for such powerful gpu?

[Nerve-Damage]

so RSX is there only to output the stuff to your screen? isnt that a waste for such powerful gpu?

NOOOOOooooooo

The RSX is probably doing all the pixel-shader data, lighting, HDR, AA, AF, ECT....

[frosty]

No, RSX is doing all the pixel shading, normal mapping, texturing, etc.

Edit: ^ Beat me to it.

[Nerve-Damage]

No, RSX is doing all the pixel shading, normal mapping, texturing, etc.

Edit: ^ Beat me to it.

But it should still be noted Frosty; that the Cell will/stilll be assisting to some degree on the things we mention on the RSX. Man the Cell is a monster!!

[saxdawg00]

I call Pre-rendered CGI,lol

[Siraris]

It's true, I am looking at the article right now.

[CrumCon]

scan it

[Sephiroth_VII]

They also stated it in the dev interview (http://forums.e-mpire.com/showpost.php?p=1252815&postcount=1) that it seems no one ever watched, despite it being on the first page for over two weeks.

[Slay]

They also stated it in the dev interview (http://forums.e-mpire.com/showpost.php?p=1252815&postcount=1) that it seems no one ever watched, despite it being on the first page for over two weeks.
yes i remember that interview, he called it progressive mesh, and he said that they're able to sustain so much detail in the ground scenes because every model in the game is LODed continually through Cell.

[Nasadus]

I guess those Hundreds of gigaflops wasn't a moot point afterall.

[VG Aficionado]

LAIR IS PWNAG3: Check my first post at the turn of the page :-p

[SToRM666]

A lot of this is also explained in the 1UP show of 09/29/2006.
At around 10:20 the part about Lair starts.

I am not yet allowed to post a link but you should be able to find it on the 1UP website.


(First post btw)

[Viano]

x2 game over loL

[VG Aficionado]

I posted this a while ago (http://ps3.ign.com/articles/733/733921p1.html), and I guess it's time to post it again ;)

About Cell:
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.

On top of all that, there is a real-time fluid dynamics simulation running on Cell for really complex ocean wave and water dynamics. We built our whole engine, including the physics part, on our own, without using any middleware. That way we have much more control over every aspect and can cater every detail to the PS3s and the games´ needs.

In terms of shaders I could go on for a while -- you'll find everything that is possible right now and a few cool new ones. Our fire is not made out of pre-baked textures but is a real-time simulation running on RSX, we have advanced parallax shaders, volumetric clouds, fog, and smoke, real-time rain, wetness, lava, fur, and much, much more.

About 1080p:
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.

"Can LAIR be done on 360 as is? Hell, NO!"
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.

Blu-ray is critical for LAIR:
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.


Conclusion: LAIR is PS3 PWNAG3 (and it's not even finished yet, and PS3 isn't even out yet!)

[Goki]

OH MY GOD! I WANT THE PS3,ITS OWNAGE, Its looking like 1080p is a must if u are enthusiastic!

[section]

I want them to polish their bloom HDR, it's one main reason the offscreen captures look overbright and brightness looks burnt.

After F5 does the polishing touches I hope for them to finally release some direct feeds, thankx very muchos :)

[BruceWayneIII]

I want them to polish their bloom HDR, it's one main reason the offscreen captures look overbright and brightness looks burnt.
(...)

I wouldn't judge the bloom just yet. Offscreeen footage creates some strange lighting effects due to the camera's adjustment of the input.

An example can be found when Phil Harrison is showing the PS3 user interface. You'll see obviously clear and sharp text becoming overbright and bloomy. That says more about the camera than the actual onscreen material.

[venomv]

I also have the article but no scanner....

They talk about onine too and says they won't have onine play...

but it will have a leaderboard, XBox Live style achievments, and links to "a lot of community stuff," says Eggebrecht. Downloadable content is in the pipeline, too, with Factor 5 ready to add anything fans ask for. "Hey, if they want to breed dragons," he says of a possible minigame, "let's breed your dragons."

[Domination]

In this months EGM (November), Julian Eggerbrecht states; The Cell generates all the polygonal models in the game, from the soldiers, creatures, and terrain (32 Kilometers square). While handling all the A.I. :drool:

I’m guessing many developers will probably be using the RSX mostly/only for pixel-shader and other effects purposes. I knew the Cell was a badass…but damn!!

I suspected this for a long time. It was just never announced openly if it was the case or not. It's just a shame that the true pontential underneath the hood of this console won't be realized until late, late after it's launch.

EDIT:

KK: Cell's seven Synergistic Processor Elements (SPE) can be used for graphics. In fact, some of the demos at E3 were running without a graphics processor, with all the renderings done with just the Cell. However, that kind of usage is a real waste. There are a lot of other things that should be done with the Cell. One of our ideas was to equip two Cell chips and to use one as a GPU, but we concluded that there were differences between the Cell to be used as a computer chip and as a shader, since a shader should be graphics-specific. The Cell has an architecture where it can do anything, although its SPE can be used to handle things such as displacement mapping. Prior to PS3, real-time rendered 3D graphics might have looked real, but they weren't actually calculated in a fully 3D environment. But that was OK for screen resolutions up until now. Even as of the current time, most of the games for the Xbox 360 use that kind of 3D. However, we want to realize fully calculated 3D graphics in fully 3D environments. In order to do that, we need to share the data between the CPU and GPU as much as possible. That's why we adopted this architecture. We want to make all the floating-point calculations including their rounded numbers the same, and we've been able to make it almost identical. So as a result, the CPU and GPU can use their calculated figures bidirectionally.

[rpgamer_2k5]

This really isn't surprising at all. In fact such discussions were on this forum in the past. Many believed that the RSX would be solely the vertex-processing beast, but they were wrong!!! ^_^

The Cell is more powerful than the RSX in the vertex op era. It offers more flexibility and can output a lot more as well. Since the RSX is a GT-level card, one SPE can match the maximum output of the GT while offering greater flexibility since Cell is programmed through C/++. Sure the triangle count ceiling is the same as the RSX (due it going through the RSX), it's still going to be able to handle the vertex ops more efficiency and then pass it over to the RSX which would be predominantly doing shading.

The result - graphics that goes beyond what we see today. :)

[section]

I wouldn't judge the bloom just yet. Offscreeen footage creates some strange lighting effects due to the camera's adjustment of the input.

An example can be found when Phil Harrison is showing the PS3 user interface. You'll see obviously clear and sharp text becoming overbright and bloomy. That says more about the camera than the actual onscreen material.

This is probably as you say, this type of game should be seen with your own eyes to appreciate every aspect of it. On offscreen video it looks marvellous to a certain degree, on other hand there are some things I would do very differently (if I knew jack about computer graphics anyway :)).

But as they have quite some time to polish their graphics and gameplay quirks I'm not worried a bit considering the whole package. All in all the game engine is pretty awesome, as we've seen the draw distances are humongous, object counts are almost ridiculous by traditional standards and it's all in 1080P so there is some awesome work they've put to their engine.

[xbdestroya]

@Slay: Exactly.

@Storm666: Welcome to the forum. :smoke:

[lips]

good to hear. lets hope for ever more advancement in future details.

[PUNK em 733]

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.


My good lord in heaven...that's almost one of those, I refuse to believe type of statements...:wank: :wank: :wank:

[VG Aficionado]

"When I heard what was going on at Nintendo, I cringed," Factor 4 President Julian Eggebrecht says about the development of the underpowered Wii. "Its audio is relatively mediocre. It is essentially GameCube 1.5, which is fine because of all the motion-control stuff they're doing is pretty radical. That's precisely why the 360 wasn't exciting to me, because it didn't have the jump there, even though it had everything else." So what's a company famous for pushing hardware to the limits doing? Jump to Sony's ship-and here's why...

Reason 1: The Cell thingamabob

The multicore processor the PS3 is a turbo-powered leap over what Factor 5 was used to working with on the GameCube. For Lair, the cell is used to govern A.I. and generate all the polygonal models in the game, from soldiers to creatures to terrain. "Our worlds are 32 kilometers square," says Eggebrecht. "By contrast, the Rogue Leader levels were 16 killometers and every 16 meters, we had some detail in the world. Here, we have detail every two meters. It's a big "wow" in terms of how much detail we can provide. It's also a lot more work for us."

Reason 2: The HDMI whatsit

That fat A/V socket on the rear of the $600 model PS3 gives the home-theater fanatics at Factor 5 a funny feeling in their video cables. For one thing, it's letting them display Lair in cutting edge 1080p, an incredibly sharp video mode they claim won't take a hit on performance. For another, Lair will support 7.1 uncompressed digital surround sound. "Once you hear it for the first time in uncompressed audio, there's no going back," says Eggebrecht , adding the game's super sound in one area that most consumers won't own the right A/V gear to enjoy. "I hope enough people put down the cash for [a compatible receiver]," he says. 'Maybe we're just doing it for ourselves."

Reason 3: The tilt-and-tumble controller

Eggebrecht has never thought motion-sensing would make it into the PS3 controller even though he lobbied for it all along. "[Sony] had to pay for the Blu-Ray drive," he says. "They had to pay for the Cell. So I was absolutely blown away when the motion controller made it in, because that's the whole package. As for the loss of the controller's rumble feature, "I never cared for that anyway," Eggebrecht says.

Reason 4: Those blue rays

"If people are saying it's inconsequential that they can't use more than the nine gigabytes [of conventional DVDs], that's absolutely wrong," says Eggebrecht . He points to Lair's ultra-hi resolution textures, which stream off the game's 25 gigabytes Blu-ray disc to paint increadibly detailed landscapes, fortresses, soldiers, and creatures. Add in its animations and other data, and just one level alone fills more than four gigabytes of the disc space. "Which is fine if you want to make just a two-level game on the other systems," Eggebrecht says.

Reason 5: Finally online gaming

After dealing with the GameCube's lack of networking abilities, just the prospect of any online system gets Factor 5 jazzed "Sony has for its online program pretty much everything that Microsoft has, plus more" says Eggebrecht . Lair won't offer online multiplayer, but it will have a leaderboard, Xbox Live-style achievements (based on the medal system that was so popular in the Rogue Squadron games), and links to "a lot of community stuff," says Eggebrecht. Downloadable content is in the pipeline too, with Factor 5 ready to add anything the fans ask for. "Hey, if they want to breed dragons," he says of a possible minigame, "let's breed your dragons."

"Five reasons Factor 5 hearts the PS3" (http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/action/lair/show_msgs.php?topic_id=m-1-31136166&pid=929230) (from a recent EGM article)

So LAIR:

- Supports true native 1080p resolution
- Supports 7.1 uncompressed HQ sound =-o (a first in the industry, or at least a first on consoles)
- Takes advantage of Blu-ray extra storage capacity
- Makes extensive use of motion sensing

No other platform can do all that.

[Bliss]

I'm speachless....PS3 is the monster I was waiting for....and Lair is a Launch Game........speachless......really...

[VG Aficionado]

I'm speachless....PS3 is the monster I was waiting for....and Lair is a Launch Game........speachless......really...I would say "launch window", but that doesn't make it less impressive since it's a first generation game :-p

[Bliss]

I would say "launch window", but that doesn't make it less impressive since it's a first generation game :-p

ops...I thought it was a Launch Game...but the story...as you said...is the same ! :) and...can you imagine a new Jack & Daxter by Naughty Dog taking advantage of PS3 ? eh eh... :)

[EvilTaru]

When the final retail version of Lair and the Naughty Dog's new jungle game come out, those two will setting the technical benchmark for other developers in terms of graphics and seamlessness of the game world. ~_~

[FantasyGhost]

Well that does it. Though it's no 7.1 but i think i'll buy me one of those The Bose® Lifestyle® 48 Series III DVD home entertainment system (http://www.bose.com/controller?event=VIEW_PRODUCT_PAGE_EVENT&product=ls48_dvd_index)

[Hrama]

Uuugh Bose... four grand for that? Jesus, I never thought they would have the balls...

[Insane Metal]

Jeez.... this hardware kicks serious ass O_O

[Hrama]

Yeah, I am seriously excited about full uncompressed 7.1 surround sound. God, if I had the setup at home, lord knows I would be in heaven with that. I also find it impressive that Cell is doing so much work in the graphics area, it sounds unreal. It appears this game was made to seriously flex the seemingly superior muscles of the PS3 right off the bat at launch window times and with its impressive technical landmarks, it looks like it's set to do just that.

[VG Aficionado]

Lair Revisited (http://ps3.ign.com/articles/740/740243p1.html)
Come not between the dragon and his wrath.
by Jeremy Dunham

October 19, 2006 - Journalists that attended the 2006 Tokyo Game Show may be disappointed to learn that the playable version of Lair at Sony's Gamers' Day is "content identical" to what they saw there, but the company has made a few visual improvements in the weeks since. Specifically, Factor 5 has enhanced the framerate when running in 1080p (the resolution we played both levels in), and it moved along at a pace 5-10 frames faster than last month.

As for the levels themselves (the likes of which you can learn more about by reading our TGS preview), they were broken up into two types: a tutorial and a bridge battle. The tutorial uses PilotWings' loops to teach players how to control their dragon with the SIXAXIS (tilt left and right to bank, forward to descend, backward to rise), and eventually you'll learn the more advanced moves too -- harshly tilting left and right allows you to dodge, while slapping X beats your dragon as if he was Gerry Cooney so that he moves faster.

When locked in air combat with another winged lizard, players can then use any of the four face buttons to initiate different combo strings or solo attacks (you can use lashing motions with the gamepad as well). Once the screen turns red, this means that it's time to initiate "Killing Moves" that require you to hit a button every time there's a red flash to play out a scripted death scene (example: a rider jumps to an opponent's beast and stabs it in the head before leaping back to his own mount -- as seen in the trailers). Admittedly, the combat is a little on the simplistic side right now, but Sony reps mentioned that because of how early the build is, that a lot of the battle mechanics are still placeholder. Fleshing out the fighting techniques will come at a later date.

Speaking of placeholder, the only onscreen HUD right now is a morale meter similar to that of Dynasty Warriors. Your side (the Asylians, colored red) and the other side (the Mokai, colored Blue) struggle for morale dominance by killing each other's soldiers and monsters; once the bar is made up of just one team's color then the battle is over and it's on to the next area -- where it's expected to happen again. Factor 5 will eventually implement a health bar as well, but what kind of form it will take is unknown. Sony also discussed with us the possibility of your dragon taking visible model and texture damage as he's injured, but that is still a feature being discussed and it may or may not make it into the game.

But even without real-time lizard damage, Lair is still looking pretty impressive. Thousands of ground soldiers with high detail are displayed at once (though their animations are a little on the passive side), while dragon fire itself offers its own ambient light in real time. A number of other impressive visual effects grabbed our eye as well -- from the shadows and dragon animations, to the details of the environments and the extremely realistic-looking water. As our dragon swooped down over the water at high speed, the resulting physical effects looked fantastic.

For the sake of being completists, we also pushed Sony for some details we may not have touched on before. There are three different dragon types in this demo, for example, and they include the Flame Dragon (yours), The Ice Dragon, and the Dark Dragon. Giant bull-like creatures known as "Tauros" made appearances as well, and apparently there will be plenty of other monsters and critters revealed over the coming months.

Other tidbits: if you want to eat enemy soldiers to replenish health you can; tapping square shoots fireballs, while holding square down initiates fire breath; there will be some form of player progression that affects how well your dragon handles over time, and possibly also its strength; and finally, its acoustic layout supports up to 7.1 uncompressed audio.

So what's the outlook? Good, so far -- though, as we mentioned earlier, the combat is still pretty basic and animations for ground soldiers are somewhat flaccid, so we'd definitely like to see an improvement there. The real trick, it seems, will be balancing the aerial brawls properly with assaults on soldiers. Even so, Lair has a lot of promise, and of all the full-on PS3 games we've played so far, is one of the most dedicated to using the tilt function of the SIXAXIS controller.Updated screenshots here (http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/761/761161/imgs_1.html)

[makeitlookreal]

And this is with the game at only a little more than 35% done? By the time it launches it will be truly amazing.

[Kiosko]

Lair is a beast. Uncompressed 7.1. Audio is very imrpessive. I'm glad to see that the frame rate is increasing in 1080p.

[Sephiroth_VII]

I'm glad that I've just bought a complete 7.1 set! LAIR is starting to sound really cool.

[makeitlookreal]

I checked out each of those screenshots. The game is looking very good for only 35% of it being finished. Of course the game looks much better in motion, but I hope they do a little work on the dragons and human character models. They could use a little work. But the game looks fun to play and the water looks amazing.

[Insane Metal]

The only problem with the dragons is their tail. It really needs some more polygons.

[woundingchaney]

The very best part of the game is simply the concept. It doesnt get much better than recking shop with dragons.

[LaLiLuLeLo]

yeah, I get the idea this is what drakengard should have been. I can't wait.

[Slay]

There are 6 new HD videos (http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/761/761161/vids_1.html) there too, is there somebody able and willing to share them with the rest of us?

[yoshaw]

Latest Videos for LAIR via IGN
(640x360 .flv's)

Amazing Scenery 29MB
http://ps3movies.ign.com/ps3/video/article/740/740242/lairsp2_101806_flvhighwide.flv

Ground Battles 30MB
http://ps3movies.ign.com/ps3/video/article/740/740242/lairsp5_101806_flvhighwide.flv

Dragon Hijacking 30MB
http://ps3movies.ign.com/ps3/video/article/740/740242/lairsp3_101806_flvhighwide.flv

Fast Flying 31MB
http://ps3movies.ign.com/ps3/video/article/740/740242/lairsp4_101806_flvhighwide.flv

Tilt Control Tutorial 34MB
http://ps3movies.ign.com/ps3/video/article/740/740242/lairsp6_101806_flvhighwide.flv

Mount the Dragon 18MB
http://ps3movies.ign.com/ps3/video/article/740/740242/lairsp1_101806_flvhighwide.flv

:cheers:

[Applefiend]

Watching them now, HD versions. Lair kinda looks like an oil painting in 1080p. It's gorgeous, and can only get better.

It's absolutely gorgeous, makes Warhawk look like a pile of poo. Removed some of the lingering doubt I had about the power of PS3.

Happy. :)

[makeitlookreal]

Anyone able to upload them to Megaupload or somewhere like that?

[Applefiend]

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=46VE8XLG Video 1
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=S2PK4BVU Video 2
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=Y1G9Q52U Video 3
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=R26FPNKT Video 4
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=BS6WI485 Video 5

[makeitlookreal]

Thanks applefiend downlaoding now...

[Applefiend]

Uploading the rest now, veeery slowly, I'll re-edit the original message.

[curryking1]

Wow Applefiend thanks a lot for the 1080p versions.

The only beef I have with Lair though is that, in it's current state, the gameplay looks kind of weak and the soldier AI is borderline imbecilic. I really despise that you just hit the dragons on the side 3 times to kill them, and then a noninteractive scene appears... Also, those soldiers need to learn some god damn AI from Medieval II: Total War, like holy crap.

Thank god they said the gameplay stuff is placeholder right now, and the graphics look amazing. The mountainous environments are insanely good looking, but I still can't help but feel the dragons don't look as sharpely detailed. The game graphically is still quite amazing though.

[Pumpkin Head]

http://xs308.xs.to/xs308/06425/29b94a0a6e9ceadf5da57f9f05bdbbccrq1.jpg This game rocks ps3 4 life


http://xs208.xs.to/xs208/06425/lair192.jpg

[NeoPlayStation]

OMFG!
The best GFX ever!

[NeoPlayStation]

http://smallvillestories.free.fr/images/Afrika/lair192.jpg

WOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

[liver_kick]

*Keanu* "Woah".

Nice paralax mapping on the stoney bridge there. Seems they toned down the awful yellow bloom as well. Coming along nicely.

[curryking1]

HOLY ****! Are those the graphics!!! That just shut me the f**