Gamer's Outpost Press (archived)

by Giuseppe Nelva

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is one of the most anticipated titles for the beginning of next year, and many are wondering how it’ll hold up on consoles compared to PC.

We had a chance to chat with Viausl Effects Artists Jose Teixeira at Gamescom, and he gave us some more color on the issue.

Teixeira explained that the screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO) will be slightly different, the water in the ocean won’t have the same advanced tassellation, and there are other “tiny little sacrifices” that “hopefully won’t make a huge visual impact” but will give a big performance advantage.

He also mentioned that optimization on consoles is going a lot better than expected from the very start.

To explain that he brought up a little fun anecdote: the first time the folks at CD Projekt tried to run The Witcher 2 on Xbox 360, it wouldn’t run at all. It just crashed.

The first time they tried to render Wild Hunt on the new generation of consoles, it resulted only in a black screen, and everybody was overjoyed.

That may sound strange, but the black screen meant that the game was actually running, just not rendering properly, while on the previous game the team had to do a lot of work to even get to the black screen.

Teixeira continued by mentioning that the game is surprisingly running pretty well on consoles already, with some areas already running at 30 fps. While he doesn’t know if the final frame rate will be dynamic or locked, it’ll be at least 30 frames per second and console gamers can expect really impressive graphics.

Stay tuned for the full interview soon, and believe me, if you love geeky tech talk, you really don’t want to miss that one.

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by Grace Huang

Nintendo Co. rose the most in almost five months after its new Mario Kart 8 video game surpassed 1 million units in sales in the U.S.

Nintendo’s affiliate The Pokemon Co. also will make an online trading card game available as an application for Apple Inc’s iPad later this year, Engadget reported, citing the company without identifying anyone.

Nintendo rose as much as 6.5 percent, the most since March 24 on an intraday basis, before trading 5.9 percent higher at 11,950 yen at 10:25 a.m. in Tokyo.

Mario Kart 8 and a lineup of figurines that interact with games are part of the company’s strategy to revive flagging sales of its Wii U console and retain players who are shifting to games on smartphones and faster consoles like Sony Corp’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Corp’s Xbox One.

“Mario Kart 8 is selling well in other regions, as well,” said Yasuhiro Minagawa, a spokesman for Nintendo.

The Pokemon trading card game is already available for desktop computers, according to the company’s website. The Tokyo-based company’s media relations office didn’t immediately respond to a telephone message seeking comment.

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by Rashid Sayed

Popular middleware provider Geomerics have worked on AAA cross generation games like Battlefield 4 and Dragon Age Inquisition. But in the coming months they will be working exclusively on new generation hardware with games like Star Wars Battlefront and Mirrors Edge. This will have a big impact on how Geomerics works going forward.

Speaking to Chris Doran who is the founder of Geomerics, GamingBolt asked how they plan to use utilize the full potential of the new consoles and modern gaming PCs, given that they are freed from the shackles of old hardware. “The big difference with the new consoles is where the power is located. Pretty much across the board the new consoles are a factor of 10 better than the previous generation, but in terms of compute power the GPUs massively out-strip the CPUs in the new hardware,” Chris Doran said.

“This is great for us, as it enables Enlighten to interact much more tightly with the rest of the graphics pipeline. This removes any latency, and can drive higher levels of dynamism. We have also been researching the interaction between Enlighten and physically-based shading, and the results look great. We’ll see a lot more in this direction on PS4 and Xbox One,” he said.

Last year Doran had stated that 8GB of RAM will be sufficient to create realistic lighting. But now that we are settling down in to the new generation of consoles and with graphics technology setting new benchmarks, does he still think 8GB is going to be sufficient?

“Yes, it feels like the right amount. As mentioned above, the new consoles are nicely balanced between CPU / GPU / Memory. They have struck a sensible balance and given developers hardware that it will take a few years to really stretch.”

We will have more coverage for Enlighten and Geomerics in the coming days. Stay tuned.

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by L.W. Barker

The team at Creative Assembly are hard at work on their latest game, ‘Alien: Isolation’. The game’s graphics, and music score have already gone through various changes—an effort by the team to please fans of the hugely popular Alien franchise. Now they are focusing their skills on the design of the in-game Alien character’s legs.

As Lead Audio Designer, Mark Angus explained, “We’ve tried out many different varieties of design to see which one works best for the game,”  “if we had produced an alien that looked 100% like the original film’s and walked like a mummy, there’d be just as many complaints…we want you to have long, meaningful encounters with our Alien, and so the design has to support that.”

‘Alien: Isolation’ will be published by Sega for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC and is scheduled to be released on an unannounced date this holiday season.

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by L.W. Barker

Capcom’s producer duo Yoshinori Ono and Tomoaki Ayano provided some interesting information about the upcoming PS4 exclusive Deep Down, its engine Pantha Rhei and even the possibility of a chapter of the Street Fighter franchise on PS4, as reported by Bahamut’s Crazy Arcade. Ono-san explained that with the release of PS4 and the increase of the number of platforms available, the development burden has increased as well, with different target demographics for each platform. But Capcom has its own structure to develop the best games for each platform and its specific target.

For instance the upcoming Deep Down for PS4 is dedicated to hardcore gamers, matching the PS4′s features and visual fidelity. Although development is not easy, Capcom is gradually mastering the characteristics of that segment of customers. They were also asked if a future installment of the Street Fighter franchise would use the new Panta Rhei engine that powers Deep Down. Ono-san explained that Ultra Street Fighter IV uses the older cross-platform engine MT Frameworks.

For the development of Deep Down on PS4 they’re using Panta Rhei, but the new engine is being tailored around the game, and the current primary goal is to complete Deep Down itself, so the engine is not yet finished and its current engine is not suitable to fighting games. Yet he also added that if there’s demand for it, the development team will enhance Panta Rhei to suit the requirements of fighting games. Considering the realistic graphics showcased by Deep Down, it’s actually hard to imagine a Street Fighter game developed with the same engine. However, we’ll see if Panta Rhei will be up to par in that field. Capcom Senior Manager of Technology Management Masauru Ijuin definitely seemed to think so in a recent interview.

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