This time, the Duck In Water Demo was running on Sony's powerful PlayStation Portable unit. This looked to be exactly the same demo shown at TGS so long ago, just now running on the handheld instead of the console. The demo was fully interactive -- change the floating model to a boat if you want, or bounce the ducky around and create beautiful ripples that course across the tub. As before, this isn't an indication of what water will look like in gameplay -- this demo is meant to show off, and we're guessing is still too processor-intensive to do on a large scale even though Sony was able to convert the PS2 engine to PSP so effortlessly. However, it is a Rubber Ducky, and he's the one, because he makes bathtime lots of fun.
Beyond that, Sony had three other demos to check out. One was a world/ball demo that made use of bump mapping to show incredible detail and light modeling playing across a surface (it pretended to be a world molting and building itself, as if flows of lava and ice were creating its surface.) Different lights were settable and moveable as they played across the spinning, mottled surface that looked like a planet (it was called Mars Forming, so you get the idea.)
The Harmonic City demo flew across a gigantic, abstractly-rendered world filled with buildings (it begins so far away, the world looks like a microchip), swooping from high up in the sky down to the street level to see simple shapes moving about as if they were traffic in the world. The city demo map is not in the same league of size as a Grand Theft Auto world, and the buildings were rendered without detail texturing (just simple shading across the surfaces), so this unfortunately was not a great indication of just how big a world the PSP can create, but it was an amazingly smooth flyby that kept the large shapes in perspective. Again, lights were controllable off the surfaces, which was quite cool given how large these buildings are initially drawn from in polys, and also amazing given the high-end radiosity effects used in creating the light sourcing effects.
And finally, Luga's Forest demo showed a running character jogging through a forest. This was a character skin & modeling demo -- spline rendering of a moving character, multi-bone modeling, and fully-skinned textures (not skin as in skin, but rather a texture wrapping -- the character actually was more of a cartoon rendering than a demo of this kind would usually boast with.) Luga, the running figure, was actually controllable in the demo -- the character could be moved left and right, and could also roll or jump with the press of a button. The cool thing about the Forest demo, of course, was the demonstration of the much-touted Spline rendering technique to create a detailed and rounded character out of simple polygons by ascribing mathematical equasions to the figure's geometry -- curves are drawn instead of flat polygons, giving a character a round look without having to use an enormous number of polygons to do so.
All three demos are confirmed to be live demos on actual PSP hardware (though these demos were also bolted into the floor kiosk and could well have been run by wire feed instead of relying solely on the hardware used to play the demos), and were amongst the few PSP demos to actually be designed with the most recent PSP specs in mind -- all of the PSP video trailers were dev kit presentations in order to meet Sony's video reel deadline, and most developers are only now actually receiving the hardware in order to experiment with the final set kit properly.
Check out our live recordings of PSP Demo Video, actually shot off of the handheld system while it's running and interactive (it's a nice screen, if you don't already know.) It's fairly amazing stuff, so check it out.
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