The PS2 version of King Kong, on which all the other versions are based, is being developed by Xavier Poix and his team at Ubisoft's Montpellier studio. The Xbox 360 version, on the other hand, is being crafted in Montreal, which means communication between the respective development teams is difficult at best. Making the Montreal team's life even more difficult is that it isn't able to start work on upgrading any area of the game until it receives something resembling final PS2 assets from the Montpellier team. Since both games are supposed to be released around the same time, it's important that the Xbox 360 team be able to work quickly and efficiently, which is why it spent time developing a "displacement tool" that does some of the work automatically. We're not entirely sure how the displacement tool works, but based on the demonstration, it seems the tool is able to take environments from the PS2 game to create more-detailed geometry using information from the textures. Advanced texturing and bump-mapping techniques (not unlike the "virtual displacement mapping" of Epic's Unreal Engine 3.0) are then used to give relatively flat surfaces the appearances of craggy walls and uneven rocky paths, for example.
What followed was our first look at the Xbox 360 version of King Kong played in real time by a member of the Montreal development team. We got to see areas from four different levels being played, and later we had a chance to play through them for ourselves. The first of these levels, titled "Chased," will appear early in the game, and it will center around what will likely be your first encounter with one of Skull Island's seemingly many Tyrannosaurus rexes.
The level takes place on a stormy night, complete with heavy rain that splashes on the ground and flashes of lightning that illuminate the whole environment in a way that's both dramatic and convincing. Our starting location served as perhaps one of the best demonstrations of the Xbox 360's muscle (which King Kong purportedly uses only a fraction of) that we've seen to date, boasting vegetation that moved convincingly with the wind and ground that looked to be composed of individual stones and rocks--every one of them with a wet weather sheen that reflected the light from both the moon and a nearby fire. After spending a few moments examining the rocks closely and feeling suitably impressed, we progressed through the level and found that there was something far more spectacular waiting for us around the corner
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