Great article about the Quantum3 engine:

http://wii.ign.com/articles/982/982962p1.html

and a great post by a developer:
http://blogs.ign.com/HV_TheConduit/2009/05/14/120421/

Quote:

It needed to be able to handle lighting properly for large numbers of light sources of a variety of types that would apply to an extremely flexible material system for skinned and nonskinned objects. We had an overall idea of what we wanted to implement but had no idea if the Wii would get bogged down when the advanced techniques were combined. What we found really surprised us. We kept adding features to the pipeline and the Wii kept up. It really excelled in the area of texture fill and we focused a lot of our efforts on refactoring graphics techniques onto the flexible interface we provided ourselves to the Wii hardware. We were able to get beautiful radiosity lighting effects combined with many dynamic lights, projected texture lights, applied to materials featuring normal mapped lighting, reflection, refraction, detail maps, and much more. I don’t want to be misleading, obviously we couldn’t “turn everything on” for every surface. But there was enough performance and flexibility for our artists and designers to create the dramatic settings and explosive conflicts in The Conduit and support twelve player multiplayer gameplay. Throughout this process, we worked hand-in-hand with the art staff iterating on technology and techniques. Some conventional approaches were either impossible or too expensive to use. We had to invent some new ones unique to our engine and this game, including dynametric light tightening, reframbriance, and approxiflexion to name some of the more interesting.

I hope this studio pics up some former Factor5 employees as Factor5 closed it's doors last week.

Last edited by Lou on 20-May-2009 at 06:40 PM.

@MikeB

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MikeB wrote: @Lou HD DVD drives were half the speed of the PS3 Blu-Ray drive, had worse seek times, eject and load times were bad as well.

How does this differ from the mandatory HDD installs we (err...YOU) have now?

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In addition the format itself provided less storage capacity, is more scratch prone, used more closed technology and provided lower maximum bitrates for high definition movies.

There you go with movies again...how does that benefit games. Regardless, HD-DVD format was quite a competent format.

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A good majority of manufacturers and content providers preferred Blu-Ray disc.

and a good many didn't...

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It would have been cheaper than Blu-Ray initially, but more expensive than a DVD player as well.

...and cheaper in the long run... In the end, the price is the PS3's #1 issue. If you ask me, it's more of an issue than that RROD... Think I'm wrong? Look as sales figures...but that's a dead horse that simply proves my point that BluRay was bad for the PS3.