urk said:
I'm pretty sure the 60fps puzzle is been a bit harder to solve than just dumping a few polys from the crowd. Jesus.
Yeah, there's likely more to it. They have to consider every worst case scenario. Come around a corner, LONG view of the track, all cars on screen, and lots of nice lighting effects. Even without the crowds, some scenes might have caused the framerate to dip. So, if they can't get 60, at least they are giving us as much detail as possible.
Then again, it sounds as if they had a hard enough time hitting 30 fps. While PGR1 was 60 fps, perhaps they simply became too ambitious this time around. They were guessing for so long (alpha kits and what not) and perhaps aimed too high in some cases or simply made some bad choices that kept performance down. We really don't know.
I'm sure that's where the "a few more months and we'd be at 60" comments came from. They probably only got ahold of finished hardware recently, so with more time, they could probably go after the faults in their engine and shoot for 60 fps. As it stands, they need to concentrate on getting this game finished and out the door.
The lack of 60 is a huge blow to SOME of us, but most won't notice or care. The motion blur should really help as well (yeah, it's kind of an excuse, but it's partially true). Considering that this game looks to be WAY ahead of other launch games, MS probably wants this on shelves ASAP in order to demonstrate the machine. To the casuals, 30 fps won't make a damn difference.
It's obvious to me that the hardware has plenty of room to grow now and that developers simply haven't grasped it yet. Unlike most machines, the launch is occuring in the US FIRST and US developers haven't had the chance to "dig in". They must have had XBOX1 kits for a longer period of time or something, though, as XBOX games were generally more impressive (for their time) at launch...but still. Armored Core 4 is the one game that gives me a lot of hope for the machine. That trailer and those screens from the trailer are FAR beyond anything we've seen from other developers (including themselves, as Tenchu is very "1.5"). AC4 is mind meltingly impressive looking. It looked even more impressive than the old "Project Force" PS3 footage. I don't know what FROM is doing, but holy shit, they know their 360 hardware.