Tri-Ace Struts Their Stuff With Real-Time Graphics Demo, News from GamePro

The Star Ocean developer shares their experiments in real-time graphics with an impressive video clip.

The video above was posted yesterday bytri-Ace, the developer of RPGs such as the Star Ocean series andResonance of Fate. Say what you want about their games (they're an, uh, acquired taste), but since the beginning of the current console generation, they seemed dead-set on making the best-looking games they can.

The video shows a male space explorer/soldier of some kind in a scene that demonstrates many different lighting and physically-based shading effects to bring out a realistic look in many different types of surfaces and materials. On the whole, the scene is meant to show how real-time movie-quality animation can be done convincingly on today's hardware, even though the constantly evolving quality of PC games are where most of the advances are.

According to tri-Ace's ownresearch page, the animation was made for Xbox 360 and PS3 (they weren't specific as to which one the video comes from), runs at 30 frames a second at 720p, and uses real-time lighting and shadowing rather than light maps. There are many more technical explanations on that page, so anyone interested in computer graphics should give it a read.

Tri-Ace made sure to state that the video isn't indicative of any actual game they're working on, so don't go nuts thinking this is"Star Ocean 5."However, it's not outlandish to think they're going to be adapting these techniques for their next game(s). The thing about graphics demos is that they're just animations, and so can use as much of a console's power as they need without worrying about extra programming like AI, menus, and all the other little bits and pieces that go into the making of an actual game.

Epic Games likes to wow people withsamplesof what the next version of the Unreal Engine can do, but game developers have to start from the ground up, relatively, to get those kinds of results, not to mention dealing with all the red tape that comes up from publishers and elsewhere. And though thinking ahead is great, tri-Ace's approach to getting the most from five year-old technology is also kind of interesting.

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