It certainly seems that way. I sort of liked Templar personally. I mean yeah he was low key, but he was sort of a good, sober main character to have the others orbit around.

Rico is obviously in it, and I think someone said that Luger will have a supporting role aswell. In Liberation she was just on your com radio so maybe she's communications here too.

Personally I hope Templar is given a good role in cinematics instead. I would love to have him as the commander from time to time. He's a vet after all! :)

Well, it may seem obvious, but it seems that a very small handful of PS3 devs are taking this course of action. Port, port, port!

True.. but it's not just first party developers that are capable of stressing the platforms strengths.. third parties need to give Sony some love in that area as well. So far the only one who seems to be doing it, is Konami. No surprises there I guess.

Confused about the "AA off the charts" comments... there is a lot of aliasing in the picture. Look at the floor tiles or the back of the hat of the centered character or thr rail bar things behind and above the gun with motion blur or... it is all over the place! And this is at 1024x576. At 720p it is going to be even more pronounced.A lot of what they are describing is deffered rendering -- i.e. what UE3 does. Likewise shader based HDR (which a lot of games on the PC, PS3, and 360 are now using). And like Gears and almost every game before it over the last half decade they are using prebaked lighting with light maps on static geometry. On dynamic objects they are using "image based lighting" which is a way to summarize their use of SH (spherical harmonics i.e. one of the techniques, among a a handful, that MS keeps calling GI). They do a distinct weapon pass, which makes sense in that it is a large part of the screen and a good looking gun goes a long way for impressions. They also have support for Lost Planet style half/quarter rez particles.

What I like in their dev doc is they have clearly a) assimulated a lot of the successful techniques demonstrated in early next gen games and at dev expos and b) they have learned to avoid a number of mistakes from others.

What I don't like, beyond low resolution textures and shadowing issues (and other things I mentioned before) is that this document is just another example of a) not the direction development should go in the 3D world and b) misappropriation of resources. On the former it is clear their system is complex in regards to architecture (not necessarily techniques). On the later, a lot of people have been saying this a long time: RSX is going to need a lot of vertex help. skinning... triangle trimming... particles... culling... the entire list of "effects" they offload to the SPEs is exactly the stuff RSX should be doing. That is the entire benefit of unified shaders as all these techniques... just work on Xenos and G80/R600 GPUs. They are fast and easy to impliment. Devs having to jump through hoops like Guerrilla is showing to get solid vertex performance -- while we applaud their effort -- is exactly what is wrong with the industry. You cannot increase fidelity demands and then likewise significantly increase complexity of design. Keeping design overhead low is vital for software development and this approach, one Sony really wants to push in regards to a Cell world, is really the wrong direction imo. And oddly they talk about MSAA not being an issue when they are running QX MSAA which tells us MSAA may not be a technical issue of compatibility but performance (most likely bandwidth) is.

I was only refering to edge aliasing which is absolutely minimal in the shot.

Thanks for the quick rundown of the tech stuff.

I am talking about edge aliasing as well.

Our definitions of "minimal" and "off the charts" is probably different though. Aliasing on 480p images drives me nuts and on the PC I have been enjoying 1MP gaming with 4xMSAA for 5 years. And with the slew of no-AA games being called, "4xMSAA" I can see how actual MSAA, even if only 2X, can seem impressive at this point, especially with post processing (DOF, MB) to help further dull the edges.

For me the aliasing really stuck out (graphics hog) and off the charts is 8x or higher of bullshots.NP, although really not a full run down... more ranting actually. I think Guerrilla has done a good job getting the most out of the PS3, but I really dislike the hoops they have to jump through. It is nice to see a developer though building on the foundation others have built.

It gives me hope that games in 2008 and 2009 may really blow away 2006 and 2007 games.

Preview

http://spong.com/feature/10109670