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> No downgrades, no overheating, full 1080p development, MOTION
> CONTROLLER - NOT TILT CONTROLLER, one level 4GB. It is particularly
> sad and tragic the xflop fanbitches only had nasty, lying gossip
> spreading on their side, since there was nothing positive about their
> piece of junk box. xflop 3-shitty is sooo DEAD.
> ----------------------
>
> 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=B4s 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.