Quote Originally Posted by JKTrix View Post
Quote Originally Posted by Maxico View Post
Quote Originally Posted by JKTrix View Post
To see GTA IV in action, on your TV, go buy Table Tennis on 360. Same graphics engine they'll be using, though it's only the humans you'll see. And it's a nifty game to boot, cheaper than Virtua Tennis.
I think there's a slight difference between rendering table tennis and an entire cityscape full of people.
What I said was not incorrect, nor was what you said. There is a difference in what has to be done to achieve each thing. However they will likely look the same as far as humans go, and judging from that trailer they do. Russian guy looks like he could have walked straight out of Table Tennis.

Table Tennis was openly shown as a sort of 'tech demo' or warm-up for Rockstar's RAGE graphics engine, the technology they announced that they were using for GTA. The game came out $20 cheaper than most things on the 360, and there aren't many extra features in it. If anything, GTA IV has the potential to look even better than that.

In Table Tennis, the characters move pretty fluidly and their facial animations are quite striking. At least they were striking when it came out in May. Compared to the emotional output of the character models in GTA games prior, it is a huge leap.

So to clarify my original point. If you want to have an idea of how the people in GTA can potentially look and potentially act, play Table Tennis on the 360.
The problem with your statement though is that there's a huge difference between devoting engine and hardware resources to modelling, essentially, just people, and rendering an expansive, living world. The first could easily be made to look a lot better than the latter, but it's not really any more impressive. I haven't seen this Table Tennis game, so I can't really comment much on the visuals, but I can say that just because it runs on the same engine, doesn't mean it would necessarily look anything like GTA IV when it's finished.

I'll take your word for it that the guy in the trailer looked like something out of Table Tennis and assume that in this instance you're correct, but in general, you can't assume two games in vastly different genres will look similar just based on the engine alone.