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A Look At the Tools Used To Make Metal Gear Solid 4
Soft Image is running a detailed story about the making of Metal Gear Solid 4. They explain the game's development cycle, from the art direction to the animation of characters to the building of models and textures.
"In terms of bones used for constructing the bodies of characters, about 21 joint bones were used that contained animation data and were activated through these data. But many auxiliary bones were also used to supplement movements such as the twisting of knees, elbows, legs and arms. These were not activated by animation data. Rather, they were linked to the values of the basic joints that were activated by animation. ... They also used a tool to automatically generate the rig for controlling eyeball movement and the muscles around the eyes. Because the area around the eyes is also controlled using both shapes and bones, when the eyeball locator is moved, the muscles move smoothly just like they do for the mouth. Further, even if the shape is edited to redefine the eye edges, it does not spoil the blinking or brow furrow expressions at all."
Softimage [sic] is a company that makes 3D modeling and animation software. As such, their part of the story isn't related to gameplay at all, which is why only art and related programming was mentioned.
There never was any chance that Konami was going to downgrade MGS4 to be able to run on the massively weaker 360 hardware.
The gigantic graphical power advantage the PS3 has over the 360 is unlike any previous gen. Last gen the PS2,GameCube,and Xbox all could pump out roughly 15-20 million polys for high end games. The PS2 had sizeable floating point/number crunching advantage and fill rate advantage, while the Xbox was better at multipass rendering(making stuff bumpy/shiny), and the GameCube had its very fast RAM.
The GameCube was gimped with storage just like the 360 is this gen, but unlike the 360 the GameCube could easily hold its own graphically compared to the other two consoles.
The 360 is the first console ever to be totally outclassed in every single area by its competition:
Storage space
Floating point
Fillrate
Poly rate
and on and on and on
The 360 with its last gen storage space and 10 megs of EDRAM designed for 480p 4xAA output really isn't a next gen console. It's what can go terribly wrong with console hardware design when you are forced to rush something out the door like the 360 was by Microsoft.
I know Microsoft isn't in the same league as Sony in designing console hardware. The first Xbox was just a bunch of very expensive to manufacture desktop PC parts thrown into a big ugly black box and the second Xbox is universally regarded as the worst console in the history of gaming.
However, the utterly braindead EDRAM design that is only large enough for 480p framebuffers is just inexplicable. It's a giant fuck you to game developers who are faced with having their game be filled with jaggies due to 720p buffers having no space left over in the 10megs of EDRAM for AA buffers or waste time, effort, and performance writing a tile based renderer just for the damn 360 just to get something that should be just a switch. Idiots.
Hopefully the rumors are true that Microsoft is throwing in the towel in the console market and returning to focus completely on the PC gaming market.
"I dont see"
They're called Fanboy Goggles. They were invented by Dreamcast fans way back in 1999/2000.
2000:
"from what I have seen, so far it seems the Dreamcast could handle it"
2008:
"from what I have seen, so far it seems the 360 could handle it"
"They dont bother compressing, I suspect most of that data filling up the Blu Ray is just raw uncompressed data, it's just being lazy."
You're a pathetic idiot.
It's almost three years into the 360's disastrous life and the 'graphical showpiece' for the 360 isn't some amazing first party title, it's a game running on the fucking outdated Unreal Engine 3.
What's even more pathetic about the absurdly underpowered 360 graphics hardware is even running the Doom 3 era UE3 engine Epic still had to limit the number of objects/enemies onscreen to usually just a few and confine the player to tiny corridors and rooms and even outside the background draw distance is absurdly tiny with everything beyond the immediate foreground blurred out with a vaseline type filter.
Hell, the 360's botched graphics hardware couldn't even handle the unified lighting model Doom 3 had three to four years ago.
Epic Fail.
The original (2D) game was just called "Metal Gear". You played as "Solid Snake", and were trying to destoroy the ultimate weapon "Metal Gear". That made sense to me, even if the name Solid Snake seemed unfitting for a high-tech soldier.
I've always taken the "solid" moniker in the name to mean that the game had moved to 3D, and now had a solid environment instead of a flat one. After all, the second one is not called "Metal Gear Raiden" or anything.
Of course none of this answers your question. I've wondered myself, to be honest ;-)