Marshall Brain's Blog

You will be able to touch things and actually feel them, with the same realism as the pixels in Half-Life.
 

Graphics programmers use all sorts of tricks to make graphics look better to the human eye. Certainly in a game there is nothing wrong with this, but it can be fun to consider how they do it.

I suspect the images are photographs. At least photographs of buildings mapped onto polygons. The wireframes they show are not detailed enough to get that sort of image any other way. The thing about a photograph is that they do not look correct from all angles. In a racing game that isn't so important. You are always at street level, so you take the pictures at street level. The side-to-side perspective is a bigger problem, but hopefully the player will be zipping by so fast that he won't notice so much. It is hard to tell how good of a job they did from a still picture. Notice that both of of the pictures are taken from nearly the same angle.

Contrast this with Half-Life 2 where you go inside and on top of the buildings. You get to see everything from lots of different angles. The shadows and lighting have to be done dynamically there or things will just look wrong.

Again, I can't emphasize enough that this is not meant to denigrate the Project Gotham people. I am sure they are using the right techniques for their problem. But it does not mean that the XBox360 is going to be light years ahead of PC technology.
 

here you have original 1981 old games to play

Old games
 

I felt here because I googled my nickname combined with a favorite number of mine, 11 (i.e., "mickoz11"), mainly because I am a spoiled brat pissed off that people now also use "mickoz" online, especially for their username (which prevent me to use it when signing up for accounts).

Well, I posted my previous comment here long ago (I do not see the date as Blogger show only the time, probably a temporary bug). What is funny is that lately I have been listening to an anime called Sword Art Online and at the beginning, the action take place in a virtual world (MMORPG) and if people end up dying in the game, they end up dying in real life too! The author probably ended up here and inspired himself from what I said (because I am the only one having had that idea!) -- seriously, you can head up to Crunchy Roll in the event you want to check it (there are free ad-supported streaming).