Turtleboy1017 said:
I'm not quite sure I understand...
What do they mean by these fully moving pieces? I have played games in the past where I am on a train, or a crumbling building, and still managed to interact with other things around me... Can someone shed some light on the subject for me?
The player is actually standing on an object the size of a rail car, moving through a game level that is to-scale several kilometers long.
That's quite a technological achievement, seeing as games that have done things that appear similar have had many things hidden or simplified that are covered up.
In Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, that came out in 2004, had a mission in which you got to play on a French High-speed train. However, compared to [Uncharted 2] it was not all that much of a technological achivment, because the player was never on a rail car in it. The player was inside a standard game room that's painted up to look like the inside of a TGV with a giant box-room outside that's animated to make it look like you're moving.
Imagine a prop boxcar on some hydraulics so it moves around a bit and the player stands on that with some backgrounds moving by on a reel-to-reel background mural. Like the guy in this video [Link [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDNmLPATW0s]]. That is far less demanding on a computer than having to think about very large open visleafs [http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Visleaf] of a nominal section of a railroad for a level and a large portion of an entire freight train as a navigable environment.
Small set with train on hydraulics versus actual full train on railroad. One can easily imagine which is much more technologically intimidating when it has to be calculated by a single console while still churning out a minimum of 30 frames a second.