E3 2010

redkaos said:
was there any news on that? Been on the fringes for quite some time now.
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Rockstar has confirmed a release window for LA Noir, which will be coming to PS3 and 360 this 'fall'.

"We have not announced a specific release date yet, but L.A. Noire is coming this fall. Stay tuned," said Rockstar, no doubt in response to Game Informer saying it's due in September.

First details recently arrived on the game too. Set in Los Angeles in 1947, Noire has you playing as beat cop Cole Phelps, who's out to clean up the streets of the crime-filled city. According to GI, Phelps has to deal with a police force that's corrupt from top to bottom, as well as some "very bad things" he himself did in World Ward II.

During the course of the game Phelps will progress through the "desks" of the LAPD, from traffic, to vice and ultimately homicide.

The core gameplay in 'Noire will have you out solving cases through a mixture of investigation, interviews and interrogations. According to the mag, when you come across a crime scene you won't find highlighted items sitting in obvious places; you'll have to carefully scan the area to spot important clues such as a pair of glasses on the ground.

La Noire's face animation tech "blew me away," boldly says CVG E3 agent, Tim Clark.

Reporting on his behind closed doors encounter with la noire's face capture gubbins, the opm editor-in-chief referred to impressive 1:1 lip sync, incredibly detailed character skin and real emotion in characters' eyes. Apparently it's amazing.

"the tech blew me away," said clark. "within seconds of watching it, every other cut scene i've seen before seems utterly clownish.

"the level of fidelity, not just in terms of detail, but the way the actors are able to convincingly evoke emotions, and suggest motivations that are often at odds with what they're saying, was just incredible. I can't wait to see more of la noire of the back of this."

It's sounding and looking excellent - especially in characters' faces. Hit the link for more la noir details.
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cvg
 
Your banging on about Sony working on this shite for 10 years when Nintendo had done something similar years before
 
Mozza said:
Your banging on about Sony working on this shite for 10 years when Nintendo had done something similar years before
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What are you talking about? What on earth does a power glove have to do with a Wiimote? There is no similarity between the two whatsoever. You might have a point if you brought up the Nintendo light gun that was used in titles such as Duck Hunt, but light guns were not invented by Nintendo either and were used on other systems beforehand, they didn't even come up with the power glove as far as I know. Neither were successful. Nintendo has a habit of taking technology from others and making it marketable by producing software that fits with it, it's what they are good at, not actually coming up with the technology themselves. That's the difference.

The year 2000:



Here's 1982 for you

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It's pretty similar, sensors on the tv and in the device to determine position to control games, Wiimote and Moves inspirtation.

Don't care that Nintendo use other peoples technology to make their devices, they had the imagination to turn them into controlers which open up all sorts of new game mechanics, well done them
 
Mozza said:
It's pretty similar, sensors on the tv and in the device to determine position to control games, Wiimote and Moves inspirtation.

Don't care that Nintendo use other peoples technology to make their devices, they had the imagination to turn them into controlers which open up all sorts of new game mechanics, well done them
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Yes, they marketed it right and built the software right, nobody denies that. The next Wii I would think however will take the Move approach with a full camera and a blob on the controller as although more costly, it makes more sense.

As we are on the subject of motion controlling, this doesn't sound too good, but take it with a pinch of salt.

E3 2010: Five Concerns about Kinect
Some pitfalls Microsoft must avoid in order for its motion-control system to succeed.

Kinect has impressed us at E3. The technology behind Microsoft's motion controller is pretty damn cool. But we do have some real concerns about Kinect. Microsoft has a lot of late nights ahead if it hopes to make Kinect a smooth experience for gamers and non-gamers alike.

Here are the five things that worry us most about Kinect. We think it's going to be pretty cool, but much of Kinect's success depends on how well Microsoft can resolve these issues.

Voice Recognition
In more than a few demos, Kinect didn't always understand what people were saying. And these were folks without accents and in rooms without a lot of echo or noise. Kinect has a setting for audio that measures the amount of ambient noise in your room and filters it out, but until we can field test it, it's impossible to know how well this works. Accents are a bigger concern. We've been told the "hope" is that accents are not an issue. Maybe Microsoft can enlist Ubisoft for help, because EndWar used voice commands and did an excellent job accounting for accents.

Catching Your Movements
Some Kinect games are spot-on. Child of Eden has a good 1:1 tie to your movements and the actions on screen. Dance Central does a great job of recognizing your awesome dance moves. But then there are games like Kinect Adventures, which has delays between your movements and your avatars action. There are several more months development time and Microsoft will need to make this perfect. And it does need to be perfect. When I try to kick a ball flying towards my junk, I want my avatar to instantly kick forward, rather than get hit where it hurts.

Standing Room Only
According to Microsoft, you can play some Kinect games sitting down. It "varies" by experience. However, several developers giving us demos have said the exact opposite. Sometimes the contradiction comes from the same person--one day telling us you have to be standing and then the next saying everything can be done while sitting.

Which is true? We don't know for certain, as we have not had the opportunity to play anything seated. Suffice to say, if you have to stand for every game (or for menu navigation), that's a big problem. This remains a concern until we ourselves can test out Kinect from our rear.

Games for Gamers
There are some good Kinect games beings shown at E3, but with the exception of Ubisoft's Child of Eden and (somewhat) the Star Wars game, they are all geared towards folks who have never picked up an Xbox 360 controller. This makes sense, since Microsoft's main goal with Kinect is to attract a new audience. However, Microsoft needs the core audience to tell the casual gamer what is cool. And if Microsoft doesn't get that long-time Xbox 360 gamer behind Kinect, it will fail. We need some games that show what Kinect will do for someone who loves games like Halo or Castlevania or Gears of War. I'm not saying it has to be a first-person shooter where you are the gun, but we need to see more gamers that have depth to them.

Kinect Slapped Onto a Non-Kinect Game
The final concern really applies to what happens six months after Kinect is released. If successful, publishers will want to cash in. The easiest way? Add some cheap Kinect feature to a game just to get a "Compatible with Kinect" sticker on the box. One of the big benefits of Kinect is its potential to enhance the games we already enjoy playing. Having voice recognition in an NBA game so you can play like a real point guard, shouting and motioning your other players into position would be awesome. Tacking on "realistic" free-throw shooting would be dumb.

Kinect has a lot of potential, but it also has a number of pitfalls that must be avoided. Hopefully Microsoft is up to the task. We want Kinect to succeed. Because, seriously, we have to review this stuff and we'd rather spend our days with things that are great than things that are bad.
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E3 2010: Five Concerns about Kinect - Xbox 360 Feature at IGN

No wonder that they were showing it off using actors trying to copy the video motion rather than the other way around.
 
Nice interview.

Tech Interview: PlayStation Move - Page 1 | DigitalFoundry | Eurogamer.net

With Microsoft Kinect and Nintendo 3DS dominating the E3 headlines, it is perhaps too easy to overlook the strong showing of PlayStation Move at the industry's showpiece event.

The launch line-up of games is looking impressive: bespoke Move titles like Start the Party are genuinely great fun, previous hits like Heavy Rain are getting the upgrade treatment with well-realised interface implementations, while forthcoming heavy-hitters from Sony such as Killzone 3, Gran Turismo 5 and LittleBigPlanet 2 are all slated to support the new hardware.

While Move doesn't have the sci-fi allure of Kinect, the foundations of its basic design are extremely strong, and its performance in terms of precision and latency is best-in-class. There's also the device's basic flexibility: Move can "do" gesture-based games similar to Harmonix's excellent Kinect title, Dance Central. The E3 unveiling of the accomplished SingStar Dance proved that while full-body scanning can't be achieved, the overall effect turns out to be much the same.

Moreover, unlike Kinect, core titles can be easily supported. SOCOM 4 demonstrated that Move adds genuine value to a tactical shooter in a way that simply couldn't be implemented on the competing HD motion controller, providing a naturally intuitive interface that we found to be markedly superior to the standard DualShock setup.

However, it's fair to say that reception to PlayStation Move hasn't been uniformly positive. There's a train of thought that suggests perhaps Move doesn't offer enough to differentiate it from the Wii remote, that the accuracy and performance it represents isn't the hook required to bring the casual audience to the PlayStation 3.

So, when Sony offered us the chance to speak one-to-one with R&D Manager of Special Projects, Dr Richard Marks, that was the very first point we put to him...

Digital Foundry: At the Sony media conference, the emphasis with Move was on fidelity and precision. From a design perspective, that's the Holy Grail: ultra-low latency and accuracy. But does that tally with the needs of the audience that Sony needs to attract to the PS3? Would a casual gamer really be attracted to Move because of its precision?

Richard Marks: My colleague Anton [Mikhailov] has a really good way of summarising that actually. The thing that matters to the average person is not how precise it is or how responsive it is at all. Those words don't have much meaning to them, but how well connected you feel to the game matters. They want to feel like their actions matter. They don't care if it's sub-millimetre or anything like that. They want to know that what they're doing is having an effect. That 1:1 feeling of it doing the right thing is all that matters.

The broad numbers aren't so important but the fact that it feels right when you use it, that's what matters. The way we think about it is that there's a data layer and that has to be really good. On top of that you have the interpretation layer: how you choose to interpret that data. We want to give the game developers as much freedom as possible to interpret the game data so if the data is as good as possible they have more freedom to interpret it as they want. They can smooth the heck out of it, make it super-sluggish or super-stable or they can make it super-responsive. We want that creative freedom to be available to the game developer.

If we wanted them to make one kind of game, we would have tuned everything to that one kind of experience. That's all it would do, and that's not what we tried to do.

Digital Foundry: When you began your research, did you look into the z-cams, like Project Natal?

Richard Marks: Yeah, actually we did...

Digital Foundry: You - personally - were doing the precursor work to that before with EyeToy, right?

Richard Marks: Right. I'm still a heavy proponent of 3D cameras. I think they're really interesting technology. We had many different 3D camera prototypes and we had our game teams look into that to evaluate what they could do with it. There are some experiences that it can do that are really neat but there just weren't enough experiences that made it make enough sense as a platform-level controller.

Coming back is that sometimes we need buttons to have certain kinds of experiences. Other times we need more precision than we can get out of those cameras. We need to know exactly what you're doing with your hands, especially in the more hardcore experiences.

Digital Foundry: So you're saying that the technology actually limits the kinds of games you can make?

Richard Marks: If it's just that 3D camera, yeah I guess. That's what we ran into with EyeToy. When you have only the camera, it's a magical feeling but sometimes you just wish you could select something. I don't want to wave to click a button.

Digital Foundry: Weirdly, they seem to have Microsoft Kinect adverts in the E3 toilets, saying that this is the controller that's taken five million years to develop. That five million years doesn't seem to encompass the evolution of the hands or the fingers. Kinect is cool but it can't scan fingers. That's where the lowest possible latency is, the most direct connection you have with the game.

Richard Marks: In one of his books, Isaac Asimov talks about the difference between humans and animals and he believes it's our hands that make us different, more than our brains. Most people say it's the brain that's so much better, but he says it's the hands. He says that the ultimate interface to a computer isn't a probe that jacks into your head, it's where you insert your hands into this device. You have so much bandwidth going through your fingers. It's science fiction but...

Digital Foundry: A lot of science fiction becomes science fact.

Richard Marks: There's another big factor. Like you said, you have so much fidelity with your fingers and wrists. It's such a high dynamic input. We do want to give that to people, but also the tactile feedback of knowing you're making a click is such an important thing. When you make these gross movements [gestures] you know that you're doing them. When you're doing subtle things it's difficult to know that the system "knew" what you meant, or accepted your input.

So the click of a button is equally the input, but also the feeling that it actually occurred. That's such an important thing. If you make a gesture to make something happen all the time, you don't have that immediate feeling of knowing that it worked. You have to wait and see if it happened and that just slows everything down. A click gives instant knowledge...

Digital Foundry: There's something annoying about gesture control: the response mechanism. There's 1:1 tracking and that's just brilliant but then there's also gesture recognition. At some point the CPU has to decide that the motion you're performing is a gesture that should be acted upon, and only at that point will it begin the effect, the animation on-screen or whatever.

Richard Marks: I'm not a big fan of gestures myself. There is a place for them in certain types of game but I think the worst thing is that you need to do all this kind of "stuff" and it's the equivalent of one button press. You've replaced that one button with all of that?

I don't want to just be harsh about gestures. My favourite use of them would be something like this: imagine you're casting a spell by drawing in the air and how well you draw it matters to the spell strength. Then it actually starts to have a meaning. I'm not just trying to do a button press. How well my form was is scored...

Digital Foundry: You have gesture control in Move of course...

Richard Marks: Yes, we can do that.

Digital Foundry: Let's talk for a moment about the Navigation Controller. Is that effectively a redesigned, pared-down DualShock? Does it add any kind of additional motion control to the system?

Richard Marks: No, it is exactly the left "hand" of the DualShock. And it's not necessary. You can always use the DualShock instead of the sub-controller.

Digital Foundry: But that would be a bit of a handful on a game like SOCOM...

Richard Marks: I found that if you're sitting down and it's on your knee, it's not a problem at all, it feels pretty natural. But if you want to stand up and you want a user-friendly game then you use the sub-controller.

Digital Foundry: It seems to be the case with Kinect that it operates on a principle that the more features you use, the more CPU time is consumed. So there's a base-line, a fixed cost, but then there's a bit extra if you want to use the RGB camera, or if you want to use voice control. Is everything integrated in Move? For example, surely for the tracking you're using the camera all the time? Is it a fixed cost?

Richard Marks: It's very nearly a fixed cost. There are two tiers of cost, really. There's two controllers and four controllers. The extra cost is negligible, there's no extra memory required. On the CPU, one of the SPUs does a little more work to track the other controllers.

Digital Foundry: The head-tracking we're seeing in some of the games is intriguing. How does it work? Can it only track the physical movement of the head, or can it pick up actual changes to the direction you're facing?

Richard Marks: The head-tracking is not part of Move, it's part of PlayStation Eye libraries we provide. There are many ways and flavours we can use it. We have detection, where it just finds a face. We have things like smile detection, things like that. We also have tracking and lots of different flavours of tracking. The London studio created their own, for example, they have a lot of experience with EyeToy. Everyone always thinks that head-tracking would be the ultimate thing but when you're playing a game you rarely look away from the TV.

Digital Foundry: You'd need to constantly changing the direction of your face, sure. You'd need to be consciously doing that as part of the control scheme.

Richard Marks: We found that although at first you might think looking left and right is more natural, actually leaning left and leaning right works better. If you hook up head-tracking to a first-person shooter, you can lean around a corner. You can peek out and peek in. We've been looking into that for games where there's cover you can hide behind. It's a really neat feeling.
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Digital Foundry: Obviously stereo 3D has been really big at E3 this year and the potential with Move is sensational in terms of the handling of objects within 3D space.

Richard Marks: Our team has been really focused on the Move only so far but some of the game teams have been combining 3D and Move. Just last week we got a 3DTV into our area, just because we were coming to E3 and we wanted to make some new demonstrations. It's really, really crazy how it feels when you combine Move with the 3D television. Most of the games for 3D so far are "flying through" games and that's a really strong 3D feeling but another kind of experience is a diorama experience.

So there's like a virtual diorama or dollhouse. With the Move you can actually reach into that wherever you want and move around, it's such a compelling feeling. It feels like it's right there. Then we tried that same demonstration with a 2D display and it's really hard. Shadows can help you...

Digital Foundry: You can move your light sources about in 3D and still know where your objects are in 3D space. With 2D you really need the shadow directly beneath the object to figure out depth.

Richard Marks: We've done things like attach a light to the Move, so the lighting changes as you move the controller. Not only do you get the shadows, but the light moves with it. There are a lot of tricks that people will come up with in how to give a more 3D feeling with only a 2D display, but 3D really is like a Holy Grail. The ultimate demonstration which I didn't have time to complete last week is to combine the head-tracking and the Move with 3D. It's like a holographic experience. Now you can look around, now you can look behind things, reach in there, grab that.

Digital Foundry: You're ready to roll out now. The hardware is ready, the third parties have got the tools. What involvement do you have in working with the developers in getting the most out of the controller?

Richard Marks: Right now we've been acting very much like a dev support team since we made the software. But it's pretty much got to the point now where the actual dev support team understand everything we understand. We help teams now mostly doing something new. So there's a data layer and there's an interpretation layer... if they're interpreting the data in a new way that hasn't been done before then we're interested in helping them and understanding what they're doing. But if it's something like pointing and shooting, that's pretty well established. Third parties don't need any help, we have sample code for that.

Digital Foundry: So if developers come to you with a concept you've never seen before...

Richard Marks: Then that's where we'll get involved. Actually the teams have been really good. I think the developers have been really shocked when they get the source code, the SDK. It comes out with position and rotation. That's just it. That's the answer. That's the way it should be. It's very simple.

Digital Foundry: It must be pretty easy to get basic game concepts up and running quickly if so much of the game data is derived directly from the user.

Richard Marks: Right, and we have another tool from the dev support team that broadcasts the data across the network from the Move, so you can send it to a PC. You can wrap a prototype on PC, or Flash or anything like that and still use the Move.

Our artists actually have a plug-in for Maya where they can do some content creation things in Maya in 3D. We actually have a new demo here for content creation... [starts using Move demo on a nearby PS3]. This is like a 3D modelling demonstration. You can spin this object like a lathe and I can carve away on it. So for content creation, you have the tool in one hand and the object in the other. It's super-natural what you do with it. You don't have to think. This is what our artists are excited about.

Spatial input on a PC is a little bit tricky. For effectiveness they can flip into 2D and have 2D views for everything but for "naturalness" Maya isn't super-intuitive though it is effective. With content creation for the average person, this kind of UI can be used by any one but a complex modelling package... not many people can use that.

Digital Foundry: And that's another aspect that would be boosted immensely by stereoscopic 3D...

Richard Marks: Yeah, we actually have this demo running in 3D. All these demos can be moved to 3D very easily. The multi-touch demo you saw on Engadget, that looks really neat in 3D also.

Digital Foundry: On a somewhat more mundane level, what's the battery life like on the Move controller?

Richard Marks: Battery life is about 10 hours when it's fully charged and obviously that changes depending on how much rumble is happening, how bright the light is; the light adjusts to the room lighting. It charges from USB and we've just announced the charger. It's pretty cool... Move snaps in, standing up.

Digital Foundry: Your tech demos are great, the GDC and Engadget demos in particular. A lot of the PlayStation audience are early adopters, they are going to be getting into Move, they're going to buy into 3D. There's an argument that your demos are far more of a transparent view into the potential of the Move technology than many of the games. Would you be prepared to release these as a PSN download?

Richard Marks: We've been asked that before. As a group we make the demos to create an impact, to explain a concept but we don't run them through QA the way you would with a game. We've been wrestling with it: if you give these things to people and they crash, there's a certain level of people that'll be OK with that because we're giving them things they wouldn't have otherwise. But there's another level of person that wouldn't be happy that Sony has something out there that crashes. That's bad.

It's a tough call. I'd love to share these things with people. We work with them and they're neat. Some of them are really powerful, visceral experiences. But some of the game teams would rather we didn't share them because they'd like to use the concepts in their games and be the first ones to do so...
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He is right about head-tracking, it is pointless twisting and turning if you are not looking at the screen. I am personally not fussed about motion control by itself, on top of controllers yes but not replacing them. I was dissapointed with super mario galaxy and felt it was primative just waving and shaking this stick around, I don't think it works for many types of game.

I really do like what he says about Asimov, that he is looking at it quite philosophically rather than from a pure technological point of view, I would be dissapointed if Nintendo's next console doesn't return to a pure controller with such technologies on the side if relevant to a game.
 
Team Brian GB said:
He is right about head-tracking, it is pointless twisting and turning if you are not looking at the screen. I am personally not fussed about motion control by itself, on top of controllers yes but not replacing them. I was dissapointed with super mario galaxy and felt it was primative just waving and shaking this stick around, I don't think it works for many types of game.

I really do like what he says about Asimov, that he is looking at it quite philosophically rather than from a pure technological point of view, I would be dissapointed if Nintendo's next console doesn't return to a pure controller with such technologies on the side if relevant to a game.
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It's not for everyone's liking, no. I can't believe you are dissappointed in MG just because the Wii remote though, it still plays like a standard platformer!

Oh, and you can use a Gamecube controller with a lot of the Wii games that would traditionally work better with a controller too.
 
Redlambs said:
It's not for everyone's liking, no. I can't believe you are dissappointed in MG just because the Wii remote though, it still plays like a standard platformer!

Oh, and you can use a Gamecube controller with a lot of the Wii games that would traditionally work better with a controller too.
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It just didn't seem right with a wiimote, I prefer super mario sunshine to it. What I don't understand is why Nintendo feel they have to make every game with the wiimote in mind I don't know.
 
Team Brian GB said:
It just didn't seem right with a wiimote, I prefer super mario sunshine to it. What I don't understand is why Nintendo feel they have to make every game with the wiimote in mind I don't know.
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Well I've never heard anyone say that before, but it's all down to opinion ;)

As I've said, most Wii games that people might like to play with a controller are compatible with the controller released for the Wii, or a gamecube one. However, it would be pretty strange for them to release a dedicated motion control system, but make games on it just for a control pad. They might as well made it a power house system and competed on the same level as the other two then.
 
Redlambs said:
Well I've never heard anyone say that before, but it's all down to opinion ;)

As I've said, most Wii games that people might like to play with a controller are compatible with the controller released for the Wii, or a gamecube one. However, it would be pretty strange for them to release a dedicated motion control system, but make games on it just for a control pad. They might as well made it a power house system and competed on the same level as the other two then.
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I have use the wii and gamecube controllers for it, but for developers to assume that the wiimote is better for every game than an orthodox controller and games should be made with that in mind is quite ridiculous.

But on a completely different note and contrary to what I have been saying, I can't figure out why they have made F Zero Wii, of all of their franchises it is probably more suited to the wiimote than any other.
 
looking forward to mgs rising, the idea of being able to cut things to feck pleases me

 
is it not a kojima game? tbh i dont know much about it i thought it was a kojima game but that makes things interesting, does that mean we wont have hour long cutscenes? i admit i loved the storyline of MGS4 but some of those scenes were very tedious.
 
Kinect is becoming an ever increasing clusterfeck now, as there are reports that it can't track more than two people at once, so feck knows what happens when the cat or the dog walks in front of it. It seems that more and more of the promotional videos are fakes, similar to most of the "demonstrations" of it on the E3 stages. It now seems that you can't use it sitting down, and only have a maximum of 2 players at once.
 
no problem, as its main purpose is fitness and dance games - and you can take turns in those

I think it'll be enormous success.
 
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