Bah. New Wild Mass Guessing: It's a re-incarnation of Vaati! See, he's even got the same style of cloak! :P
On engines: The engine will likely contain a lot of the code for the animations and interface as well - things like "when I lock on this character take this texture and place it above that character" and "when an enemy gets destroyed do this fancy smoke effect". Not all of that would be scripted, and I'd argue that a lot of the scripts for basic events also counts as part of the engine.
Anyway, that comment goes back to when I first saw a demo of Twilight Princess, and while most of it looked and behaved like a brand new game there were bits in it which were straight out of Wind Waker (the way baddies sorta explode into smoke when they die, for example). So it was mildly amusing to watch the trailer for SS and see some more of WW re-appear from under the TP stuff.
I do see this sort of thing at work - we've got one component which is all shiny and new and behaves mostly nothing like the previous version of it. If you go digging through the code however while most of it's been heavily modified over the years you'll still find a few pieces of a 20-year-old architecture that doesn't exist anymore. And there's various oddities in the configuration and how it behaves which again date from 10 or more years ago.
On the graphics: it'll certainly be up to xbox 360 levels of graphics, but I doubt it'll match the PS3. Then again it doesn't have to - the main advantage of the insane number-crunching power of the PS3 appears to be less that it can render stupidly-detailed scenes and more that devs no longer need to resort to cheap tricks like clamping the draw distance and billboarding sprites to get those stupidly-detailed scenes. Remember, even the 'cube was capable of some amazingly detailed games (Starfox Adventures, Crystal Chronicles) as long as you didn't look too closely at how they were achieving it.
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On engines: The engine will likely contain a lot of the code for the animations and interface as well - things like "when I lock on this character take this texture and place it above that character" and "when an enemy gets destroyed do this fancy smoke effect". Not all of that would be scripted, and I'd argue that a lot of the scripts for basic events also counts as part of the engine.
Anyway, that comment goes back to when I first saw a demo of Twilight Princess, and while most of it looked and behaved like a brand new game there were bits in it which were straight out of Wind Waker (the way baddies sorta explode into smoke when they die, for example). So it was mildly amusing to watch the trailer for SS and see some more of WW re-appear from under the TP stuff.
I do see this sort of thing at work - we've got one component which is all shiny and new and behaves mostly nothing like the previous version of it. If you go digging through the code however while most of it's been heavily modified over the years you'll still find a few pieces of a 20-year-old architecture that doesn't exist anymore. And there's various oddities in the configuration and how it behaves which again date from 10 or more years ago.
On the graphics: it'll certainly be up to xbox 360 levels of graphics, but I doubt it'll match the PS3. Then again it doesn't have to - the main advantage of the insane number-crunching power of the PS3 appears to be less that it can render stupidly-detailed scenes and more that devs no longer need to resort to cheap tricks like clamping the draw distance and billboarding sprites to get those stupidly-detailed scenes. Remember, even the 'cube was capable of some amazingly detailed games (Starfox Adventures, Crystal Chronicles) as long as you didn't look too closely at how they were achieving it.