Monolith's forensic, horror and survival title Condemned 2: Bloodshot now boasts a stepped up graphics engine, although the game is only dedicated to the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. And according to Monolith's Frank Rooke, Condemned 2 is being designed to take full advantage of both next-gen consoles.

 

"Our engine is further optimized with a new shader system, new environmental effects and a new UI system. Our bloom support is now replaced by a new HDR functionality and we have made significant optimizations in CPU and memory use," Rooke said.

But all the new eye candy isn't going to hit the graphics powerhouses of Banzai Runners in the PC community. Rooke said that they have no plans for a PC version of the game at this time, although Condemned: Criminal Origins graced the platform about two years ago. Monolith is also known for Blood, a PC-only classic of... well, bloody proportions, making this call a change of moves for the developers.

But on the offset that opportunities might open up in the future, all fans of the game might want to know that a plethora of new gameplay mechanics have been added, including a new combo hit system. Successive hits mean additional and accumulated damage in the long run, while pushing up the chain meter faster.

Pipes no longer are glued to arms, since Rooke claimed that the pipe can now be hurled arm-to-noggin in graceful - but deadly - fashion. Add to that some new firearms, new weapons and more creative environment kills, and the Condemned player in you can be satisfied for months on end.

Aside from giving an in-depth focus on Ethan Thomas and a twisting story on violence, Condemned 2 will also sport multiplayer gameplay which Rooke vividly describes as something different from the single-player scare:

Imagine you are the only player left on the team and you have successfully tracked down the evidence hidden by the enemy. You're just about to finish the evidence scan and win the match when a bum charges in from behind a dumpster and bashes you in the head with a pipe. Win or lose, you can't reload and try that scenario again.

In a recently published interview by Worth Playing, Free Radical Design has pegged their upcoming next-gen shooter HAZE (still for the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3) as a worthy product to their impressive reputation as innovators in the first-person shooter genre.

 

They have used their prior experience in first-person shooters to deliver an action-packed game like never before. But this time around, they will also be taking the player through an emotional ride, tapping deep into the recesses of personal beliefs, convictions and the ethics of war. HAZE will sport a far deeper story, with emotional ties. Derek Littlewood, team leader of the project, explained:

One of our chief priorities has been to deliver a genuinely moving and emotional experience – but never at the expense of the gameplay. The narrative is packed with rounded characters, each suffering or succeeding in their own human journey.

Perspectives change, and players will get introduced to view-skewing plot twists and turns as HAZE unfolds. Free Radical doesn't want to reveal anything more than they should, although we already know about the Nectar flukes. They hope to succeed in merging a certain level of quality writing that they believe "should exist in the next generation of games." Littlewood expounded:

We want to redefine the intensity and variety of emotions a player can experience in an action FPS. We want HAZE to become the definitive next-gen shooter and maintain Free Radical's reputation for developing some of the best games in the world.

But how will the gameplay turn out? Free Radical designed HAZE so that everything seamlessly unfolds to the next, with no need for loading screens and no mission select screens. Continuity was a goal they sought to achieve, which in turn accomplished their hopes to create a realistic, immersive game world.

Aside from four player cooperative modes through the campaign, Free Radical has pointed out that each version has been designed to take advantage of parallel-processing for squeezing out more power. Although all platforms are capable of this feat and they've catered fairly to all platforms, Sony's PlayStation 3 was probably one of their favorites. Steve Ellis, director of Free Radical, said:

Working on PS3 has allowed us to create vastly superior environments that verge on photo-realism – full-screen effects, High Dynamic Range (HDR) and obscenely complex shaders. It's more challenging than ever before, but the power is greater than anything else that’s out there.

Croteam, developers of the Serious Sam series, has given word that they have teamed up with Gamecock Media Group for their next project. Gamecock will be publishing the next Croteam game which is being developed on the Serious Engine 3.

Croteam's CEO Roman Ribaric spoke on their choice of publisher and why they decided to go with Gamecock.

The Gamecock team includes some of the best people we've worked with in our 14 years of game development.We had a great time and learned a lot when we worked together to produce the first Serious Sam and we are confident that we will achieve similar success this time around.

The company's next venture looks really good based on their background and the engine that they'll be using for the game. The Serious Engine 3 is the proprietary "game creation system" of Croteam and was billed to be designed for next-generation consoles and state-of-the art PC hardware.

The system is said to be able to take advantage of multi-core HDR-rendering graphics systems complete with full per-pixel lighting, shadowing, and shadowbuffers. It also has a custom GPU-accelerated baker for GI lightmaps, multi-threaded physics solver for multicore CPUs, and even built-in support for action-game models.

CEO and Head of Marketing for Gamecock Media Group Mike Wilson commented about the Serious Engine 3 and Croteam's prospective future in the gaming industry saying that "now, with its next-gen engine pushing the latest gaming hardware to the limits of its potential, Croteam is producing a game that will confirm its position among the world's game development elite".

This new game is slated to be released this 2009 on the PC and next-gen consoles. This may be something to look out for, considering the lovely screenshot demos they've produced with the said engine. Be sure to check back for more details on this game.

  

IGN had a sit-down interview with Evolutions Studio's Martin Kenwright, who was more than happy to talk about their Motorstorm title that's hitting Japan in about two weeks. The interview covered details of Evolution's upcoming title, from its early conception based on Evolution's success with their World Rally Championship (WRC) title, MotorStorm's reception at E3, and future plans for both Evolutions and the game.

Based on their success with WRC, Martin's team had decided to follow it up and build a game that contained the ideas they always wanted to place in WRC, but never could. With MotoStorm, and with the Blu-Ray tech the PS3 offered, their team had the opportunity to let lose, if the Motocross' demo over at the E3 is any indication.

Because we started work on MotorStorm three years ago, we thought that maybe the hardware would be more potent than we expected, or possibly it would be less powerful. Looking back now we've actually exceeded in some areas considerably, which we're amazed about. Some of the lighting and HDR effects are much better than we ever expected. Other things, we haven't quite matched our initial ideas due to technical restraints.

Indeed. And as for future plans, Martin's still keeping his horizons open, and while he doesn't have any clear plans for the next five years, it looks like Evolution's planning to ride out MotorStorm's success until they can come up with a bigger, better title, or at the very least downloadables for this current title to make the most of its capabilities. For the full interview, feel free to read the source link.

Frontlines: Fuel of War for Xbox 360 and PS3 is still far from being available in your friendly-neighborhood stores, since it is slated for a Fall 2007 release. The game, in case, you are a newbie, is set 20 years in the future, as the world’s dependence on oil increases, so does the tensions. Survival of the fittest is the name of the game as countries scrimmage to secure their economic sources. Small outbreaks turn into a full scale war. This causes new alliances to be formed, and you must now decide which side you will fight for: the Western Coalition or Red Star Alliance.

Kaos Studios' General Manager, Frank DeLise, sheds some light about the FFOW's title, gameplay, maps, and multiplayer gaming. The title is obviously politically motivated, as DeLise explains, "it’s the FUEL that drives us to the “Frontlines” of tomorrow to our next great “War.” Fuel has dual meanings, obviously from our dependency on Oil and is what Fuels a global war. Frontlines came from the game mechanic that allows us to be on the front of a battle...So Frontlines is the franchise name and Fuel of War is the beginning of the global war."

He also believes that developing the game on the Unreal 3 Engine was a good choice since they plan on devoting their time on developing the gameplay and not on designing a game engine. When asked about the gameplay, he mentions that "in FFOW you are always chipping away at the battle and you can form new strategies as you go. For Multiplayer, I [DeLise] really want teamwork to matter. In FFOW, teamwork truly makes your team stronger. More than two people in a vehicle make vehicles much more powerful by target sharing and counter measures, the frontline only moves forward if you work as a team, so expect to see some really cool team based features using the latest military equipment."

A game like FFOW would of course be incomplete without game maps. For now, DeLise divulged that they are planning to have tight infantry maps and large scale Tank/Air battle maps in both Single Player and Multiplayer. HDR support is definitely in the picture.

Ninja Theory's Marco Salvi sets the record straight on High Dynamic Range lighting or HDR, in an interview with psinext's Carl Bender.

According to Salvi, the term has become very common nowadays and is often misused. He clarified that when rendering an HDR image, you are basically storing all of the information needed to represent the amount of light that passes through every pixel in the picture. This captures a scene in all its color and luminance.

"Unfortunately, current low-cost display technologies (common LCDs, CRTs, etc..) can't properly display an HDR image, so we need to go through a process called 'tone mapping' to remap our image to an LDR (Low Dynamic Range) image in order to display it on a screen," says Salvi. Tone mapping he says, can be used to simulate the way our eyes slowly adapt to different light conditions.

When asked what kind of scenery within a game would benefit from HDR he quickly answered, "Compared to LDR rendering, every scene that requires a very low or very high global luminance image, or an image with a high contrast ratio, would benefit from HDR lighting."

It's a good way to avoid images being too bright or vice versa, that makes gamers lose precious lighting information that makes the scene pop out of the screen.

If you want the full 101 on HDR just click on the read link below this article. But for the meantime here's an excerpt:

PSINext:  People have come to associate high dynamic range lighting with on-chip hardware support for either FP16 or FP32 HDR rendering.  How does Team Ninja implement NAO32, and can it be considered 'real' HDR?

Marco:  The FP16 and FP32 rendering formats give a developer the opportunity to collect per pixel information (respectively 8 and 16 bytes per pixel); hence they easily enable us to render and to store an HDR image. Unfortunately, these framebuffer formats are inherently slow because they require more memory bandwidth and increased memory space: an FP16 720p image with 4X anti-aliasing requires about 30 MBytes of memory!

At the same time it's important to understand that it does not matter how we store our HDR images so long as we find a way to encode them without losing too much information.

The RGB color space is not very efficient at encoding HDR images, so after a bit of research we found another color space that is far more efficient at representing HDR images.  Its name is CIE Luv, and it splits a color into 3 components: one is not normalized and represents how intense a color is (luminance), while the other 2 components are normalized between 0 and 1.

Gregory Ward, a pioneer of HDR imaging, exploited this color space many years ago to store HDR images in a file format he called LogLuv, so we built upon that work and we customized it to our purposes.