and again with the oblivion comparisons.............

image's*

Looks very good. I enjoyed Oblivion, so I will probably enjoy this as well. I just hopes it improves upon some of the disappoints of Oblivion (animation..). The eye does seem te be copied, because Oblivion used a similar thing.

First I was i like'd it..but I found a movie on some german site..and it SUCKED...gameplay wise

i have seen it in motion and it hasn´t the atmosphere like oblivion... i think this game doesnt have a great story like oblivion but probably i play this one, too

Please wait unitl the game is actually finished before deciding whether or not it sucks.

Halo 1 went from distinctly 'meh' gameplay wise, to fucking amazing in the final few months. Pardon my Klingon.

What's with the floating green vagina in image 4?

Where have you been, if you look outside in the outside world we all have them now. Or being more serious i think it s the interface system, something to do with seeking i think there is news snippet on 1up or joystiq or ign?

Game looks great though, i am a real adveture rpg convert since oblivion, this and elveon are worht keeping an eye on.

Only major complaint I have about this game is the lighting saturates *so* easily.
http://www.xboxyde.com/pop_image.html?G=5083&N=2

They are using a lightmap, or some sort of accumulated lighting, and then multiplying by the colour of the environment (textures)... But the lighting is saturating (hitting the limit of 8bit colour), hence the inner white/yellowy circle of light being cast from the orange light sources. This should just be much brighter orange, not dull white.
It looks utterly terrible to me. Haven't seen this sort of thing since the quake2 days.

They seriously need to reduce the brightness of the lightmap, and bump up the resulting modulation to get some decent contrast in the lighting. It would look worlds better.

This is my quick and very rough attempt to hide the saturation in paint.net:
http://www.hungryspoon.com/random/2w.jpg
If they did it themselves it would look a damn sight better.

graham,i didnt know what u meant until u did a comparisdon,the one u didd looks alot more relistic,if iot was done by a pro.
is this game online like eq2 or world of warcraft,or is it single player

What I mean is you loose colour.

The light cast from the lanterns (?) is orange.
So it should be a spherical volume of light... Which is brightest in the very centre (ie, right where the lantern is).
So if you think of it mathematically, at the edges, it should be 0 (no light) and in the centre, it should be a large brightness, eg 5...
So if the colour of the light is orange, that will be an RGB of 1.0, 0.8, 0.2 (or thereabouts).
So at the outside, it's 0,0,0 (they are multiplied), at the inside it should be 5,4,1.. Ie *lots* of red, lots of green, some blue (combines to make orange).

You then multiply it with the surface texture (in this case cobble stones) to get the output. The cobble stones are dark grey, so abour 0.3,0.3,0.3. So at the centre of the light the output pixel should be *really* bright, 1.5, 1.2, 0.3.

However, the lighting is being precalculated, and stored in an 8bit/colour format, so values are being clamped (aka saturated) between 0 and 1.

So at the centre of the light you will get 1,1,1. Multiply this with the cobble stone texture, you get 0.5,0.5,0.5. So there is a *large* circle of light where the lighting does not change, and has no colour. It's not until nearer the edge of the light that you get into unsaturated values (ie, below 1).

They could fix this in two ways:
Store the lighting information in a higher dynamic range (eg, FP10, int10), or store it *darker*, then scale the final value up.

Thats what I've tried to show in the pic, what it *might* look like... But it's hard to do.
There is no big white circle at least.

(does that make sense?)

At any rate it's a very *basic* graphics mistake to make.

It annoys me that people compare it with oblivion even though this has been in the making for just as long.

If ever there was a place for parallax mapping, its in a castle milieu (à la Kameo). Sadly its not being used here.

You mean the green eye? :P

Hate the art direction, but love the atmosphere.

Wow i didn't know people got this stupid.
Critics of this game aren't accusing it of copying oblivion they just point out the obvious similarities, wich fans of this game somehow choose to ignore and claim that "it's nothing like oblivion" when it obviously is. I just don't get why people get so upset when this is compared to oblivion.

I remember seeing extremely sharp and crisp textures.. or is that only in the pc version? :\

Looks pretty good but I'd say it's rather similar to Oblivion and other such games

that isn't Oblivion it's Assassin's Creed.