At this year’s E3 Neversoft released the first Tony Hawk’s Project 8 trailer but after that things got quite and nobody knew exactly what to expect of the eighth installment in the Tony Hawk series. Luckily Xboxyde got a hold of the first ever screenshots and it’s starting to look good. It’s no Gears of War or Halo 3 but it looks pretty decent and it’s a huge leap forward from that craptastic Xbox 360 port of American Wasteland. It appears as though Neversoft is going for a more realistic feel with this one, let’s hope they’ll also cut down on the vaseline filter.

Screenshots courtesy of Xboxyde.

Yahoo! Video Games: What engine changes does Tony Hawk’s Project 8 bring? How will it be taking advantage of its next-generation platforms beyond the visual enhancements?

Brian Bright: The render engine for Project 8 is a complete rewrite from what we used for Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland on the 360. To make the game look and feel as realistic as possible we now have rendering support for normal, environment, specular, and ambient light maps. The next-gen engine also gives us shaders such as metal, grass, water, and glass. These shaders provide depth and resolution to our textures, so you can see every crack in the concrete and every nick in a hand rail. Additional full screen effects such as bloom, depth of field, and radial blur give the game an entirely new look for the world.

Previously in Tony Hawk games we would play one animation at a time with minimal blends. This was functional and looked good, but now we have the power to run a more complex animation system across multiple processors. We wanted to create the most dynamic and fluid animation system possible, one that would depict skating in its purest form and complement the amazing player control. To get realistic motion to drive this system we had all of the pro skaters come to Neversoft and we recorded their motion capture data on a variety of setups: mini ramp, rail slides, and primo boxes. To motion cap Tony Hawk we went down to Birdhouse Industries and captured Tony on his 14 foot ramp. This mo-cap data powers a real time animation system that can play up to 20 different animations on the skater at once. What this means is that the skater now dynamically reacts to the environment.

For more info on this, checkout this video interview or this regular interview with Neversoft.