We’ve got a stack of posts on the forums about yesterday’s 1080i story! It seems a few of you don’t believe us.

I guess that’s the problem with posting on April 1st, but when it comes to enjoyment of Burnout Paradise in high def – we never joke around.

We set up this site, so we could listen to you – the fans – and respond to your requests. We want to bring you the news direct and as it happens, so if that means posting on 1st April then that’s what we’ll do.

We want to talk directly to you guys and be THE source for the most up-to-date and accurate information on our games and how we build them.

PS3 1080i support is real and working and will be available as part of the Cagney update.

Here's Paradise's expert on this subject, AlexF to give you a little more detail on how this happened:

"With the latest SDK Sony freed up some memory. We've upgraded to this SDK and made use of the extra memory to scale the 720p game to 960x1080 as part of the very final post-process render stage in the game; this 960x1080 video mode uses the PS3 hardware scaler to upscale the image horizontally to output at 1920x1080.

"This scaling process in Burnout costs a very small amount of frame time (under 0.4% of a 60hz frame, which we can afford without dropping frames) since we're going to a larger number of pixels, but it enables those with 1080i TVs that don't support 720p to play in HD.

"We really hope that this new option in 1.3 helps those people (with 1080i but not 720p-capable TVs) to enjoy Burnout Paradise in HD!"

If you find the Paradise servers are not running on Tuesday mornings, that’s because we run routine maintenance on them every 2 weeks at that time.

We usually run some diagnostics to check the servers are working well and deploy updates to address issues like disconnects or VOIP problems and generally make improvements to the service.

We try to minimise the disruption to you guys as much as possible – this normally takes a few hours, but at the latest, the servers will be back up by mid afternoon.

We’ve just finished today’s maintenance, so expect this again on 15th April and keep an eye on the site for regular updates.

Most nights after work, we just kick back and play games, but occasionally we like to get out and about. For example, last week, we didn’t have much on, so we decided to head up to the Emporio Armani store in London to hang out and play a little Paradise.

But just our luck, the guys from Chelsea FC got there first.




Here you can see Shaun Wright-Phillips hogging the controller, and with Chelsea stars Ricardo Carvalho, Wayne Bridge, Frank Lampard, Ashley Cole and Florent Malouda standing by who were we to argue?!

Next time we’re going to Gucci to meet the Arsenal.

These shots courtesy of Darren Walsh, (c) Chelsea FC and taken from the recent CLIC Sargent Charity event. For full details of the event, check Chelsea’s site.

We got a mail this morning from ZachC asking how we determined the speeds for the Acceleration Test story we ran yesterday. Well, here's MattF on how we did that:

"There is a special debug output from the custom versions of the game that we use here at the studio. From this we can get all sorts of crazy, mostly useful information.

This output can display the time spent in each gear and the speed the car was travelling at when the gear change occurs. From this you can extrapolate the 0-60 and 0-100 times. It's not 100% accurate as the acceleration is not going to be linear in each gear, but it's close enough.

Or, to put it another way, we hired some officials and close the roads while they set up their timing equipment."