ScreenHunter_192 Aug. 01 18.32

We already know Sony’s PlayStation 4 is going to be great. We’ve already reserved a space for it under our TV and earmarked a couple of our old consoles for sale in order to pay for it. But this new footage from Capcom’s PS4 game engine has us eying our firstborns, wondering if it’s really worth hanging onto them when we could sacrifice them to Dark Lord Taro Aso to have him spirit us a brand new PS4 ahead of launch.

The game engine, dubbed “Panta Rei,” was unveiled in February, but details at the time were scant. Now Capcom has revealed footage of the engine used in practice, with the teaser trailer of work-in-progress game Deep Down – which appears to be a very confusingly named medieval low fantasy game.

As you can see in the above video, the ultra-realistic graphics are more lifelike than anything we’ve seen in gaming before;  which, granted, people have been saying since the original Wolfenstein 3D, but this time we really do think we’ll all be cruising around in floating cars with our beautiful robot girlfriends before someone can top these specs.

Everything from the lighting to the skin textures to the way the fire and smoke moves is so realistic it made us briefly consider whether we were watching a game, or if we were the game and we were looking out into the real world. Thinking about that too long then made us confused and angry, so we read some technical babble about the engine from the Capcom team working on it, which put us on the verge of sleep and calmed our nerves.

There’s some craziness about something called Semi-Lagrangian Mapping, something about advection, and Vorticity Confinement … oh jeez, this is making us angry again. Here, just look at some pictures:

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Admittedly, this may be more tech demo than actual game, but by god that’s pretty.

Here’s the technical demo which–sort of–explains how this is all possible.

The important thing to know is that the real breakthrough in the technology deals primarily with the way fluid mechanics are handled, which creates spectacular flame, smoke and water effects and addresses one of the major issues of human skin as portrayed in current generation games – namely, that it looks more plastic-y than Taro Aso’s human costume.

Source: Hachima Kikou