Microsoft Releases First X-Box Screens 341
Yu Suzuki writes: "Microsoft has released the first hi-res screenshots of the X-Box in action. Looks pretty impressive; especially the ping-pong ball demo. Is the X-Box going to be giving the PS2 some competition? "
cOmPLAte wITH TyPOS (Score:1)
Keep in mind that these aren't actual *games* (Score:1)
Re:Hyuh?! (Score:1)
Important to Remember (Score:3)
PS2 competition? I think not (Score:1)
Plus, Sony has a huge base already there, with a gazillion PSXs out there, and quadzillion PSX games, and the PS2 is backwards compatible with old PSX games, even enhancing them.
Looks good. (Score:3)
The first few butterfly pictures are pretty nice - I'd like to see the frame rate on that demo. If its smooth, that's quite impressive - though there are plenty of programming tricks that can be employed to boost performance on the butterflies that aren't immediately obvious - yet would give the impression of serious hardware power.
I'm reminded of early Renderware (remember them?) demo's, though. There's a clankiness to the edges of some of the objects in these screenshots that harkens back to the Renderware way of doing polygon transforms... can't place my finger on it, but it just 'feels' that way. Perhaps some other graphics guru's can explain what they see in those pics from a rendering perspective?
Overall, pretty impressive. I'll probably be adding an XBox to my setup, right alongside my Dreamcast and (this September) a PS2. The $1000 I'd spend on building a nice PC game system will instead go towards a 3-tier total entertainment, cover-all-bases-take-no-prisoners console 'mini-arcade' for my living room...
(I bet they hand out those ping pong balls with "X" on them at trade shows.)
It's just a PC (Score:1)
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
Re:Looks good. (Score:1)
Nothing that hasn't been done before (Score:1)
Re:Hyuh?! (Score:1)
Competition? Well yes, duh! (Score:1)
Well, the X-Box is a gaming console. The PS2 is a gaming console. So I believe they will compete. Just common sense here.
But the competition is going to be more like the upcomming competition between the PS2 and the Dreamcast in the US. You have 2 very advanced consoles, with one already out with a decent lead time. But the new one comming out is more powerful (Hmm, computing equipment getting more powerful as time goes on, thats odd). That point seems to be what people keep forgetting. An Athlon based system today will not beat a Pentium III or IV based system tomorrow in peformance. Same with the consoles in most situations.
Re:But (Score:1)
Mine will.
Microsoft selling "loss-leader" hardware. Excellent. I will buy 10 and "repurpose" them. :-)
Wow (Score:1)
Re:Hyuh?! (Score:2)
3D Bob (Score:1)
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Re:PS2 competition? I think not (Score:1)
*If* the XBox has good RPG's, you wouldn't play them simply because Sqauresoft doesn't make them?
Oh, and Bleem! may just make a PSX emulator for the XBox, and Bleem! does enhance games.
Xbox vs PS2 vs .... (Score:1)
- system performance
- types of games
- cost (of system & games)
Now my vote is for PS2; it's already out (in Japan), they've already got games for it, and they've already got a customer/player/fan base.I think that if MS is going to get anywhere in this market, they'd better come up with some really good games (this includes graphics & sounds & playability) AND have a low price for they're sistem.
There are movies too :) (Score:2)
These have been around for a few weeks now actually.
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IanO
Re:Hyuh?! (Score:1)
Re:bullshit (Score:1)
No, they can do it on a Pentium3-600 with a nVidia GeForce card, which is basically what the X-box setup will be.
X-Box interest (Score:5)
I'm no big friend of Microsoft's, but I have to admit that their doing everything right. I've been talking to some folks about what they think of it, and it's been interesting. One company in particular (I can't say who, but I'll just say "They make sports games" have increasing frustrations with the PlayStation 2, with its incredible level of difficulty to program for. MS has reduced Win2000 to a super small, super tight kernel, no GUI at all, just "load file, run file, close file" type stuff and memory management. Without all of the other 250 MB of stuff, it looks like Win2000 is actually a good system.
What they've done right:
Gotten developers kits quickly, and made it super easy to program for. Yes, it uses DirectX and the like. But for PC programmers, it's an easy jump from X-box to PC and back again.
Lots of built in stuff. Built in hard drive. Lots of memory, good processor, and a graphics chip by Nvidia, the current (if you don't include the $600 Voodoo 6000) graphics chip king.
Ethernet at the outset. They know that modems are going away, and that DSL and the like is what's going on.
DVD on the outset. It works for the PS/2, it should work for the X-box.
What they've done wrong:
Games. I haven't heard of any games (except for Munch's Oddysee, and that's not a definite yet) that are coming for the X-Box. It doesn't matter how pretty it is, it needs games. MS has been trying to buy up companies (some rumors include Square), but no go just yet.
Bad image. Let's face it, MS doesn't have the right image for, well, anything. And with their trial going on, this might be a problem. Is this an application or OS? If MS is smart, they'll spin it off onto its own company, Open Source the kernal (to let more developers into building for it), and they'll have a winner. If they try to keep their propriety hands on it, they won't win against big Nintendo and Sony.
John "Dark Paladin" Hummel
We don't just like games, we love them!
BSOD (Score:1)
I wonder if I'll have to sign an EULA every time I launch a game. Or if I'll have to pay a yearly license for the right to play the game I already bought.
I wouldn't waste money on a game console -- but if I did, it wouldn't be this one. Maybe once someone creates a clone knock-off...
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icq:2057699
seumas.com
Re:bullshit (Score:1)
Oooh, she's hot! (Score:1)
Re:Important to Remember (Score:3)
could get PS2s; I doubt those people are going to wait again for the X
box!
Did anyone see the demo at the Game Developers Conference? Any
feedback?
Re:Hyuh?! (Score:2)
Ugh... Powerposter...
Nice Screenshots? (Score:1)
How does it ... (Score:2)
Sorry I can't see the screenshots, but from what you fine folks is saying they does sound nice.
I'm not one of them serious gamers, but I have been known to shot down a few tanks on my Atari playing Combat. It's the only game I have for my 'tari, but it does me juss fine.
Movies available (Score:5)
Quicktime format. Not Sorenson codec, but Xanim still won't play it. I booted to Windows...
Microsoft should team with Bleem... (Score:3)
Re:Keep in mind that these aren't actual *games* (Score:2)
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icq:2057699
seumas.com
Smoke and Mirrors (Score:2)
What OS is this thing going to have? MS had stated it will be a "windows like" OS but not Windows Millenium or 2000 or CE. With Win2k SP1 and SP2, WinMe's next release canidate, and Win98 and WinCE support and bug fixes I can't see MS making yet another OS. Why don't they make just one good OS instead of tons of horrible ones?
How much will this cost? The upper limit for gaming systems seems to be around $200-$300. Any higher and it will not sell. Since XBox is just a nice PC, and most PCs that sell below $500 require rebates based on using an overpriced ISP, will XBox be tied to MSN?
Re:Keep in mind that these aren't actual *games* (Score:2)
You mean like this [ign.com], this [ign.com], or this [ign.com]? Come to think of it, the third one is labeled "Striking poses"...
Re:It's just a PC (Score:2)
There will be module slots for the pc that can take xbox games, but they will not be official. They will be pirated hacks that work very well, like the I Opener, or the glide wrapper for nvidia cards, and lawsuits will fly like cows in a tornado. Just like mp3. Just like DVD. Just like DivX (the warez codec).
This could get interesting.
X-Box won't have zone restrictions (Score:2)
Hardware redundancy after 6 months? (Score:4)
Given the current cut-and-thrust in the CPU and GPU markets on the PC platform at the moment, I wonder whether basing a console system on them is such a smart move. Let me explain my thoughts on this.
NVidia is producing the graphics processing unit for MS. By their own roadmaps, NVidia is doubling the speed of their graphics hardware inside a year. Similarly, CPUs are still following Moore's law of doubling ever 12-18 months. The X-box is supposed to have a 733MHz PIII in it at release, which given that it is probably 12-18 months away will make it about half the speed of the fastest CPUs on the market even if we are being charitable. So at launch, this platform will have a half-speed CPU and a state-of-the-art graphics processor.
But things don't stand still - so why bother with an XBox. When it comes out, I will probably have a 1.2GHz or better box with a GeForce 2 or better graphics card, so why should I even think about buying this object? It will be 'below spec' for me. Worse still, unless it is extremely upgradable (i.e. rip the CPU and GPU out and upgrade) it will be obsolete hardware when compared with the standard PC of the time only 6-12 months after release. So what is going on?
My thought on this is that MS is having increasing success in the gaming market, both on hardware peripherals such as game pads and also on the games themselves. But the consoles threaten to dilute this market so in goes MS after marketshare. Nothing wrong with that. The question is will MS move firmly into the XBox market to the exclusion of the PC, or will they ensure that the XBox games get ported back to PC land. The former might turn out to be business suicide against the PS2 and Dolphin platforms, since both MS's rivals are more experienced in this field and have an established fan base. The latter might be the real reason for this Xbox at all - to ensure a free-flowing supply of games to MS's dominant platform and therefore help keep people buying Windows - after all, 99% of the time I spend in Windows at home is playing games and all my real work is done under Linux. If Linux starts seeing lots of games, I shall be buying Linux versions in preference, particularly once I get Xfree86 4.0 and the TNT2 drivers installed. And maybe I'll be able to see my way to shrink that Windows partition down until I finally fdisk it out of existence.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Yay, thank you. (Score:2)
What game developer would write a game that works on the xbox but not on Win98/2000? And if this is the case -- that games will be available on both platforms -- what is the incentive of this machine over a Real Computer(TM)? Price seems to be the only thing; and I guess a kernel optimized for doing one thing and only one thing (games) will have significant performance advantages over a full-fledged OS (cough cough) like Windows 2000, but they're going to have to do some seriously asskicking marketing to beat out the PS2, which has all its hardware dedicated to doing one thing and doing it well. Yeah, MS is working with nVidia on the graphics card, but somehow I think an entire machine designed around one concept (alright, 2, Sony wants to be your Internet Appliance too) is going to kick the ass of a machine hacked together, even if its components are top notch (cough cough).
In the end it will likely come down to marketing dollars because at this point I don't think anything can amaze me, just like 2, 3, 5, 10 GHz does not impress me anymore. I am still in awe of Tekken 3 on PSX and Sould Calibur (?) on Dreamcast. But if there is any company with the resources to go head to head with MS, it's Sony (unlike poor Nintendo and Sega). If nothing else, this should be an interesting battle.
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Re:NV15 Chipset? (Score:2)
Re:X-Box interest (Score:3)
Microsoft Mice & Gamepads are good quality products (We'll forget "Natural" keyboards for now, although some people do genuinly like them, and they're still well built). And how about Microsofts last games-computer, the MSX? The quality was actually very good, and the games support was good too.
Maybe the XBox will be a good product. Given Microsofts past history of hardware it seems like it may.
Why the Xbox is doomed to failure (Score:3)
It is considerably easier for Microsoft to make the X-box nearly bug-free when compared to most of their other products, for the simple reason that the hardware is under their control and the OS is much simpler. Even though Microsoft is going to produce it based on one of their existing OSs (probably NT), the act of cutting out huge volumes of unused and unneeded material and the necessity of supporting only a small amount of hardware, should make this a stable platform.
The problem with the X-box, however, is the heavily COTS (Commercial, Off the Shelf) design. Using a standard CPU, a standard OS, and what will undoubtedly be a modified version of a standard 3D graphics chip, all save on design cost and would save on production cost if only a small number are produced.
Yet game consoles sell by the millions, so the design cost is spread over so many devices and the cost savings of using COTS parts largely diminishes, since by the time someone fabricates one million custom CPUs, they don't cost any more than buying 1M comparable CPUs.
And the performance hit of using a COTS design is substantial. The Playstation 2's CPU is custom designed to the task at hand, able to perform a massive number of floating point calculations/clock cycle. It does not need to run SPEC, it is not an attractive compiler target for high performance code, and it is really 3 CPUs in one.
Thus, Toshiba's silicon (made for Sony) for the Playstation 2 drastically outperforms what Intel can possibly provide, for the specific tasks involved in driving an effective game console.
The additional problem with the X-box, again introduced by the COTS nature of the system, is the burden which even a stripped-down Microsoft OS places on the device. The cost of a hard disk and additional memory are potential killers when designing a device which should retail for less than $300.
A COTS design by Microsoft was undoubtedly chosen so they could hurry it out into the marketplace, but the result will probably be less then spectacular, since Sony's offering will probably significantly outperform the X-box once applications are written which can take advantage of the available computational power.
Re:A few points... (Score:2)
1) OK, so the XBox is supposed to compete with the Playstation2, but is coming out almost a year later? Does the Playstation2 coming out take back all of the money that Sega has made from the Dreamcast? Christmas is always the biggest time for console systems, and MS is going to miss an entire season. I can understand consumers waiting a month or two to compere two systems, but waiting a year in order to make a more informed decision? That is crazy.
Actually, The Playstation 2 is losing money with each sale. Profits come from the royalties from games, not from the consoles. Sega still lost money last quarter (though the least money in quite a while), despite the DreamCast's impressive opening here in the US.
Re:look at the picture on the wall (Score:2)
Re:X-Box interest (Score:2)
The PS2 movies that were shown MANY MONTHS back were NOT pre-rendered, they were calculated on the fly. The fluidity of the movement was incredible, the resolution, detail were superb.
The X-Box movies? Lots of "stuff" in the scene, yeah, but the motions suck, and to boot, this stuff is probably running a pre-rendered movie. If it weren't you can bet MS' PR department would be hyping that all over the place.
To boot, it doesn't look any better than the PS2, while the PS2 is available for sale NOW.
I'm still not sure MS really understands this market. For the same price, the hardware on X-BOX can't be better than what you can get a budget PC for (not unless MS is subsidizing the hardware!!). And if you can get a general purpose PC, that plays the same games as the X-Box, who wants an X-BOX???
More importantly, the style of games that works on a console for Joe Average is not the same style of games that works on a PC.
Re:Microsoft doesn't belong (Score:2)
The one that produces hardware. So they can build XBoxes, mice, keyboards, gamepads, and other things that Microsoft are actually good at. They could be one of the most sucesful, come to think of it.
Re:more importantly (Score:2)
Re:Yay, thank you. (Score:5)
1) Bus. The video and system memory are shared directly with the video card, there is no bus to go across, therefore moving data from system memory to the video card will be much faster.
2) OS. Yes, it's a modified version of the Windows 2000 kernel, but it's not the same Kernel, it's incredibly stripped down. I bet it doesn't even include multithreading code. There is almost no OS at all, as far as I know, all the Windows2000 kernel does on the X Box is handle reads and writes, and directX calls.
3) sameness. Every X Box will be the same, since Nvidia's involved, every X Box will have hardware Transformation and lighting, meaning everything can be moved off of the processor to the video card, allowing for advanced physics and AI, among other things. You could say that current Nvidia cards already do that, but it doesn't matter because programmers can't take advantage of it because not everyone has a T&L video card (BTW, PS2 doesn't have hardware T&L). This is a huge advantage, if you've seen Nvidia's tree demo, you know that T&L can be very impressive when you write directly to it.
3) sameness, instead of allowing to write directly to the same hardware, this "sameness" point deals with bugs. If there's only one platform, there are fewer bugs (blah blah blah buggy microsoft shit, blah blah), X Box games will generally have fewer bugs than their PC counterparts.
Those are pretty much the main differences, this is not a PC with no monitor.
Beware. (Score:2)
Since the Xbox is just a PC box, MS has a lot of muscle to get PC games ported (very simple) to the Xbox as well as creating new games, and Dreamcast now has the Playstation emulator [slashdot.org], so there goes the backwards compatibility argument for the PS2. Apparently no console has maintained market lead when jumping to next generation - it'll be interesting to see how this all shakes out.
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First hand accounts (Score:5)
I'd like to point out that I think the Raven images linked in this article are of the old Raven footage. That footage was of what the X-Box "might" be cabable of, before they had it actually running on the machine. At E3, they had the Raven demo running on actual X-Box hardware. The graphics weren't quite up to the original footage, but the poly count was still quite high, and still very impressive.
Before people start spewing off that MS will lose the console race I'd like to say that they really are giving game developers something to talk about. The first being using off the shelf components. If you can program for PC, you should be able to program for this thing. Compare that with PS2, which is a nightmare to program for. A lot of the developers I talked to at the Expo thought the PS2 would pull in better numbers than the X-Box simply because of the Playstation name, but that it may be more cost effective to program for the X-Box instead simply because of the ease of coding the thing. There are many more benefits to Microsofts strategy in the console business, but I'm sure you can read about those on any of the gaming sites.
I'd also like to point out that even though we're talking about technology in the X-Box that may be "obsolete" when it comes out, it doesn't have the overhead of an MS OS running on it. This will be a video game console. It is being marketed as a direct PS2 competitior. Thus, everything Sony does, MS will try to do one better. And so far, I think they're actually doing a pretty good job of that.
At the same time, they have hurdles to overcome. One being that they'll be launching a year after PS2. It will be hard for them to catch up, especially since the MS name isn't very attractive to the hard core gamer. Another downfall is that they are entering this race as the new kid on the block. I think MS is in for a serious wake up call here, as the console industry is probably one of the most cut throught industries there are. Microsoft will be the underdog going into a huge war I'm not sure it can survive in, even with it's marketing muscle. Sony, Sega, and Nintendo will not give up that easily.
Make no mistake about it, MS wants to own your entertainment system. It wants to be your Gaming, Movie, Music, and Internet experience. Then again, so does Sony. It will be interesting to see how this all unfolds.
PS2 Competition? Who are you JOKING? (Score:2)
Hey people... The DreamCast is already out and i bet the games are many times better on the DC. The graphics on the PS2 are nothing to run home about.. for the same price as a PS2 i can get an 700mhz athlon MB and TNT 2 card and get better results!
I hate to say it, but please talk about competition with products that are released. The PS2 is Competing against the DC in japan and 5 months from now it will finally be *ABLE* to compete with the DreamCast (which will have 10 million units by then..).
So when speaking of competition, atleast be real! The Dreamcast, N64 and Playstation are all that are competing in the US. 5 Months from now you will be able to talk about the PS2 competing, until then.. don't dog either product as BOTH or nothing but piss in the wind for US people.
Meanwhile get a DC and play some real games!
Re:Keep in mind that these aren't actual *games* (Score:2)
PC's will be obsolete (Score:3)
The pc is steming out into 2 seperate markets: the web pad and the game console. Microsoft realizes this and they're going after both.
In a few short years everything that you do in the lines of word processing, e-mailing, chatting, web surfing etc. will be done on portable pads that you can take anywhere. All of your applications will reside online, hosted by asps. Proof is msn [msn.com], Planet Intra [planetintra.com] etc.
The only thing that this leaves out however is gaming. Hence the X-Box.
With MSN and the X-Box Microsoft is preparing themselves for when the PC market is obsolete.
Garett Spencley
Not quite (Score:4)
How can you everyone the PS2 doesn't have hardware T&L? Does it not have 2 vector processors (operating on 128bit floating point data), with one linked directly to the graphics chipset (one could argue it's a part of the graphics chipset), for the sole purpose of transforming and lighting vertices? Seriously, there is NO WAY the >300MHz MIPS processor can transform the claimed 60 million polygons/second by itself. So, the PS2 *does* in fact have hardware accelerated transformation and lighting.
The only difference between hardware T&L on the PS2 and on a GeForce is the way it's used. On a GeForce, the D3D/OGL driver takes care of everything for you and hides all the ugliness. You just hand it some vertices and say 'Go.' It's a bit more complicated on the PS2, where the programmer has to write his own T&L engine in assembly.
By the way, I'd be willing to bet the X-box does support multithreading, as generally sound and I/O runs in it's own thread on both PC's and consoles.
p.s. To my credit, I am a PS2 software engineer (writing low level graphics routines) at a respectable game studio, with several months experience with the hardware.
It's jawdropping! Admit it morons. (Score:2)
X-box is going to be brilliant. The idea to use commodity hardware is even better. Writing games that target both the Peecee and X-box should be a doddle. Probably the same source base will do and packaging will be the only difference. Expect to see A LOT of games companies interested in it. Besides when it comes to developers' support MS are more than generous. The online help is extensive and pretty cheap and unlike Linux api's it is consolidated in one place and thus very searchable (MSDN cds).
Finally schoolboys, X-box is not going to be a repackaged Peecee! Ever heard of UMA? I thought so. Well the UMA stands for Unified Memory Architecture and it is the same technology that gives such a kick to the graphics of boxes like O2 and Octane. So your bleeping 1.n GHz peecee still won't touch the graphics capabilities of an X-box.
Finally I hate Microsoft as much as everyone else here and I wish that X-box werent going to be a success especially that they screwed AMD with it. BUT let us admit it folks: X-BOX is likely to be a major success. After seeing where they've got with it I'd see the days of PSII as counted.
Just finished reading the EULA (Score:2)
Re:Keep in mind that these aren't actual *games* (Score:2)
Re:Looks good. (Score:2)
Ship date? (Score:2)
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Consoles vs. PCs (Score:3)
The same argument could be made about any other gaming console, and holds. However, the reason why Playstations and Dreamcasts still sell is that they are far, far cheaper than the PC that blows them away.
For anyone who has a good gaming PC, a console can be argued to be redundant (aside from the little matter of getting all of the console _games_ on the PC).
However, Joe Average doesn't have a good gaming PC. Joe Average may not even have a PC at all. However, Joe Parent can more likely afford to shell out for a cheap console than for a full computer when their kid finally convinces them to buy a game system.
For people who don't already have PCs, a console is a good investment. Heck, it may cost less than your PC's next video card.
uhhh... Haven't these been out for a while? (Score:2)
Also, the xbox is not that impressive. Let me repeat that, the xbox is not that impressive. Firstly, the system is not scheduled to come out for more than a year, Christmas 2001. PSX2 comes out on October 26. PSX2 will be out almost a year before xbox, look what this did for the N64, Microsoft and Sony are aiming at two diffrent markets. Sony at its installed base of Playstation owners, and Microsoft at the die-hard PC game addicts who wouldn't normally buy a home console. Secondly, these are VERY diffucult promises for MS to deliver upon. No home system has ever been announced this early in its dev cycle, at least not with this many details. The N64 was supposed to ship with the PSX and Saturn(remember that?). It was also supposed to blow the others out of the water with SGI quality graphics and whatnot. It didn't deliver. Personally I don't think that MS can deliver upon all these wishes (the real time demos I've seen aren't that impressive compared to the PSX2 stuff I've seen anyway).
Re:Hardware redundancy after 6 months? (Score:2)
And, if you listen to people like Peter Molyneux speak [ign.com], it sounds very likely that developer support for the pc will be less and less.
Re:Microsoft doesn't belong (Score:2)
Forget it (Score:3)
Look, I've just invented a game console that plugs into color PalmPilots to generate flightsims! Here [airwindows.com] is actual video footage taken off the PalmPilot's actual screen- this was generated by a PalmPilot in REAL TIME and you'll be able to fly combat missions against your friends on the Internet, while jotting down notes in Graffiti! (Do you believe FNORD! that?)
Cheating at ping-pong (Score:2)
The physics, at least, takes a negligeable amount of processing power for only a few hundred balls. Collision detection is the only thing that might be a concern, and there are algorithms that can do that efficiently.
That leaves the rendering. Now, you could probably render that scene in real-time with multi-polygon balls (you have a graphics card that can render hundreds of thousands to millions of polygons per second). However, if you're being evil about it, you don't need to. Pre-render pictures of the balls with the "X" at various positions, and render them as 2D sprites (texture maps on 2-triangle quadrilaterals). It would only give visual artifacts on shadows _on_the_balls_, which would be uncommon and difficult to see when present for the demo being used.
They probably rendered this mostly-legitimately, but don't underestimate the power of creative cheating
Every X-Box is a Linux box too (Score:2)
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The bigger problem... (Score:2)
We'll see what the price actually ends up being at launch.
no internet connectivity,
Really? What's the modem for, then?
shoddy graphics,
I definitely agree with this. PS2 very well may be a polygon-pushing fool, but where is the anti-aliasing??
a pain to code for
Yup. Apparently somebody from Konami (Metal Gear Solid) was on CNBC not to long ago discussing this very issue.
only 2 controller ports
It has USB, though, so one could probably plug in a controller expansion unit throught there. Purely a guess, though.
I have a Dreamcast, btw, and like it quite a bit. However, if Sony screws things up technologically, I don't know if that means everyone will jump ship for Dreamcast. Sega has to get their marketing act together and raise the userbase immensely in the next 4 months. The Dreamcast is free now, which is great, but WHERE are the TV ADS about this? Hello?
Sony has the advantage of an incredible brand presence and marketing power behind them. PlayStation has been such a consumer electronic phenomenon, that they will sell million of units just by the fact that the thing is called PlayStation 2. Sony also has the advantage of access to tons of third party developers.
Sony is the 800 pound gorilla on the block. Even if PlayStation2 doesn't live up to all the hype, Sega will still have a very tough road ahead. Look at how many people are still content with PlayStation 1, despite its 486-class graphics. The bigger problem is, if neither Sony nor Sega can really own then grow the market signficantly, then Microsoft will just swoop in 18 months from now and buy its way into the pole position.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Re:Beware. (Score:2)
Seriously, though, the PS2 is the game player's dream console; Sony's doing everything right, and MS is producing what seems to be (at best) an obsolete piece of hardware with no real added value over a top-of-the-line PC.
BTW, when I say obsolete, I don't mean right now. Obviously, the X-Box wouldn't be obsolete if it came out today- but is it out today? I thought not.... by the time it gets out, you'll be able to pick up a regular PC with more horsepower and more capability for less money. I think this is going to be a BIG mistake on MS's part. I'm not buying one, and none of my friends are either; if we want DirectX, we install it on our PCs under Windows.
Re:Yay, thank you. (Score:2)
Quake3 "uses" Hardware transformations, but barely, you hardly get any performance increase. If you had an API directly for a specific video card, or a 3d library written for a video card, it would be much better than current T&L implementations. Unfortunately this is impossible on the PC.
Polys (Score:3)
One.
Just get a lot of sprites with that little 'x' facing in all directions, keep track of the 'rotation': if the X shows, choose the relevant sprite. If the X is facing away- always use a featureless blank ping-pong ball sprite.
Presto- all the ping pong balls can be ONE poly. Don't even waste your time looking at them and trying to figure how many polys it is! I suspect even if the demo is totally rigged the balls are _still_ one-poly cards drawing from a really large selection of sprites: this serves several purposes. One, the entire ping-pong ball load is about as much as one Quake model, and two, if they can get people trying to imagine how many polys make those 'round' ( ;) ) forms, they can get people imagining huge impossible poly counts.
Sprite cards are actually a damned good way to do 3D game programming- look at Myth and Myth II, the characters in that are all sprites on cards and it lets lots of activity be happening on relatively humble computers with good framerate- and allows more CPU to be used for terrain. However, used as a fraud, it's annoying :)
Bullshit (Score:2)
To use an analogy - if you took the applications from 8 years ago - you might conclude that the PC would be dead in 2000. After all, what could you do 8 years ago on a PC that can't be done on a cheap portable?
Applications however do not stand still. Video display, video caputure (PC TV/VCR anyone?), 3D, multiple screens, networking, massively complex games with AI opponents, speech recognition/interpretation (more big CPU crunch), automatic security surveillance. Am I leaving anything out? Yes about a million things.
Sure, everything I do today can be done tomorrow on some piece-of-shit portable. Big whoop.
Re:X-Box interest (Score:2)
Re:Hyuh?! (Score:5)
But take a moment to think about the hardware engineers, and coders who stay up all night behind deadlines trying to sqeeze a few more frames per second out of the hardware. Did you see how many butterflies there was on the screen, or how many ping pong balls there was? Or how fine the polygons where on the Raven models.
Now I like bashing M$ as much as the next guy. Its easy to do, they have made silly mistakes in the past, but this demo I can respect. Slasdotters always complain about the FUD, or try to turn everything into FUD. Have you ever thought about the hardcare coders, and hackers at M$? Oh yes.. they are there. Microsoft has some of the most dedicated and hardcare techies out there.
You know what I think is happening. I think that you see these amazing and beautifully renders screenshots, and you know that its good, you just dont have the balls to admit it. That said, I work at a major telecom company that *cough* *cough* (created UNIX). I love Linux/FreeBSD I use them at work and at home extensively. Just because I love UNIX doesnt mean I cant see the beauty in other things. The words of Socrates come to mind.
I went to a man who was reputed to be wise, thinking that there, if anywhere, I should prove the answer wrong. So I examined the man -- I need not tell you his name, he was a politician--but this was the result, Athenians. Then I conversed with him I came to see that, though a great many persons, and most of all himself, he thought he was wise, yet he was not wise, though he fancied he was. By doing so I mafe him indignant, and many of the bystanders. So when I went away I thought myself, "I am wiser than this man: neither of us knows anything that is really worth knowing, but he thinks that he has knowledge when he has not, while I, having no knowledge, do not think I have. I seem, at any rate, to be a little wiser then he is on this point: I do not think that I know what I do not know."
Socrates - The Apology
So I ask of you dear Slashdotters, tell us not that the XBox blows, but also tell us your reasoning behind so we may become clear in the truth.
This is not news. (Score:4)
Okay, folks...
a) These screenshots are not new. I have seen magazines at the newsstands with these exact same screenshots. M$ probably pumped them out to the print media months ago. I've seen them online in various places also, though not in high-res.
b) Demos tell you nothing about the power of a system. I saw screenshots of demos for the Sega Saturn before it was released... a complete human skeleton with all 200-some bones dancing to hip-hop. It looked nice and was running on actual Saturn hardware, but nothing like that would ever be in a game due to practicality.
And the Nintendo 64, (back when it was the Ultra 64) had demos running on SGI workstations that had 2 to 3 times the power of the actual N64 today. As a result, Nintendo wowed the public enough to keep interest in the system. But those demos, amazing though they were, were far more impressive than the actual N64 at launch time. Thus, don't expect hundredes of butterflies in your video games when you bring the X-Box home.
c) Microsoft mentioned that these demos do not run on the actual X-Box hardware, as none exists yet. Their graphics designers were told to whip up some demos while trying to conform to the theoretical specs of the X-Box. That's why you have high-res screenshots.
How many polygons? (Score:2)
I saw the quicktime movie earlier and didn't see any significant evidence of shadows and light on the balls- lighting was very even, which also suggests use of one-poly 'balls'.
If I wanted to be really evil I'd draw _polygonal_ ping pong balls on the one-poly cards :) it's just a question of how subtle, and how evil, these guys were willing to be. If you draw the things perfectly round it's _obviously_ sprites. Making it a little polygonal would be elegantly misleading :)
Re:It's jawdropping! Admit it morons. (Score:2)
They're showing a mockup of performance they hope to get, from an assumed platform that may be produced within the projected timeline.
I wonder what sort of response those screenshots would attract if say, Transmeta were behind X-box.
This happened, just a few months ago. Transmeta showed real applications running on real silicon.
I think any company showing canned mockup demos deserves to be slammed. Now, whether Transmeta would have been treated the same way is anyone's guess. But they had the good sense not to try it.
Re:PS2 competition? I think not (Score:2)
PSX2 does not enhance PSX1 games.
Oh yes it does. It adds bilinear filtering to the textures, and other improvements such as a higher resolution depending on the game. I've seen it in action... no more huge texels whenever an object gets close to the camera.
*If* the XBox has good RPG's, you wouldn't play them simply because Sqauresoft doesn't make them?
This is something a non-Squaresofter would say. But in general, you are correct. We are a devoted bunch and have noticed that Squaresoft always picks the system that is going to do best in the marketplace and proceeds to make kick-ass games for it. Happened with the SNES, and it happened with the PSX. Why should we start doubting Squaresoft now?
As for Bleem!, I've tried it and it is shit. The only emulator that I can trust to give me a good gaming experience is ZSNES, which emulates a (drum roll) SNES. If SNES emulation just recently (within the last few years) got to a high-quality standard, then how long before PSX? Sure, the N64 has UltraHLE, which is pretty good, BUT the game compatibility is suck.
Re:First hand accounts (Score:3)
Take MS's demos with a salt mine. Years before they started faking courtroom video "evidence", they used to fake a Mac-like windowing system for DOS, which was always coming out Real Soon Now. It took them years to deliver it, and of course you already know what a piece of crap it was when they finally did deliver.
Demos, for Micorsoft, have always been part of their vaporware strategy of laming the competition before MS itself even had a product in the field. "Don't spend that money - you can get our really good stuff Real Soon Now!!!"
Perhaps this time Micorsoft really will get it right and soar with the eagles, but since they haven't done anything else right in living memory, I wouldn't bank on it. Nor would I buy version 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, or 4.0, no matter what they bundled with it. And especially, I wouldn't pass up a known-to-be-reliable product from an established maker, in order to wait for reality to condense out of the vapor.
--
Re:PS2 Competition? Who are you JOKING? (Score:2)
You obviously haven't seen the latest batch of PS2 games in action. Believe me when I tell you, the games I saw (and played!) at E3, BLOW AWAY the DC games I saw. True, the first generation games were simply on par with what the DC has to offer, but the titles looking to arrive after Christmas are simply amazing.
A perfect example of this is Metal Gear Solid 2. Konami played an MGS2 movie every hour and on that hour everyone in attendance went to watch this game. It raises the bar so high on video games I was in awe. You really have to see it to believe it. Screen shots are really doing less and less to get an idea of how a game functions, because so much is going into the presentation of the moving images now days.
MGS2 will change the way games are made, trust me. This is just a start to what we'll be seeing from PS2. I'm seriously wondering if DC has the power to measure up to something like this. That's not a knock on DC (I own one). That's just a reality from a development perspective.
Re:First hand accounts (Score:2)
This is exactly the hurdle I was talking about. Simply because it's MS, a lot of people are going to instantly no trust it, and not want to buy it.
What we need to realize is that taken in a gaming console context, Sony, Sega and Nintendo are really no different from Microsoft. They ALL blow smoke up everyone's asses and promise things that they never deliver. In fact I would say Nintendo is probably the worst offender of this I've ever seen (even more so than MS). But this is just how the industry works. Half the skill in this business is just trying to see past all of that.
And because of that, I actually think MS fits right in with the others. But like I said, it's going into war with 3 other companies that play hardball just as much (if not more) than MS does. I think MS seriously has it's work cut out for them. As as such, I think they're going to need to be VERY upfront with developers. They ARE the underdog in this whole deal.
Re:Polys (Score:2)
Nice idea, but you're talking 256 color sprites, at least 256 different sizes (1x1 -> 256x256), each in different rotations - say 51471 different pixels (centre spot coordinate for the largest of the images). And that's not including all the ones where less than half of the X is visible. Soooo....
Currently I get 3.2Gb needed to store all the different positions. I've not seen the moving demo, so I can't tell you how valid my estimate of the number of different images needed is. However, even for not-so-smooth motion (100 different angles), you'd need 6.4Mb to store all the data. Which is not only causes cache-coherency problems, it's also more than most video cards can handle in terms of textures.
Not to mention that it wouldn't be perspective correct, which those balls appear to be.
Simon
The Demo... (Score:3)
The engineer, weary of design trade-offs and wary of uninformed decisions, asks for more details. "Sure," replies the gatekeeper. "Here is the elevator. You can ride up to see Heaven and down to see Hell. Take your time and make your choice.
So, off the engineer goes taking the elevator up to Heaven. He sees the angels playing on their harps and blissfully flitting back and forth among the clouds.
"That looks about like what I expected, but it doesn't look ... well, exciting" he says to himself.
So, off he goes down the elevator to the floor labeled "Hell" to look around. He finds sandy beaches, beautiful women, snowcapped mountains, and parties going on all over.
Returning to the gates, he has no problem informing the gatekeeper of his decision. "Heaven looks fine, but pretty boring to me. Hell is what I have always dreamed of! Let me in."
The gatekeeper hands him an entry pass and the engineer goes back down the elevator to take his place in Hell. But, to his surprise, he finds none of what he saw before. Instead, he finds himself in a pit swarming with vipers, fire and brimstone.
"Wait! What happened to the beach parties, fun, and sunshine I saw before?" "Oh," replies Lucifer. "That was the demo."
Re:Ignore it. No network effect. (Score:2)
As to the stability thing, the same argument would imply that WinCE PDA's would be very stable, but they aren't. They're unstable and bloated. The "variety of hardware" thing is a traditional Microsoft excuse. Ever wonder why Linux systems with a variety of hardware don't crash all the time?
Without network effects, Microsoft is a joke.
Re:Every X-Box is a Linux box too (Score:2)
Are you rude?
I don't mean to insult you...
Yes you do.
This isn't Nintendo. This isn't SNES.
Same way that Apple won't get in trouble by not letting other people make os's for their hardware, because, it is THEIR hardware, it's proprietary.
Microsoft is a monopolist. That is a fact, not an opinion. Monopolists must play by different rules than other companies. That is what anti-trust law is all about.
They can do what they like.
No they can't, at least not after final judgement is entered. This may be news to you, but Microsoft is going to jail.
I stand by my original comment: if Microsoft attempts to tie their OS to this product, they are in deep doodoo.
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Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Hyuh?! (Score:2)
Re:Hmmmm... Something curious about the images. (Score:2)
Bobo loads screenshot into Photoshop to add IGN logo.
Bobo saves screenshot from photoshop to put on web.
Slashdot Reader loads screenshot into Hex Editor, sees "Photoshop," and thinks "conspiracy."
I believe the word you're looking for is "DUH."
Look here [ign.com] instead, for some videos. But don't be surprised if you see "Quicktime" near the beginning of the binary stream.
Death to PCs! (Score:2)
PCs will always be around. In 5-7 years, I think they'll be mostly for geeks. In 10-15 years, they'll be mostly for uber-geeks, like the amateur radio guys - a real niche.
What's going to kill PCs for the masses? Two things:
1) Static RAM hard drives, or whatever you want to call them... flash card hard drives, whatever. As soon as we ditch mechanical hard drives, we kiss a lot of problems goodbye.
2) Combine the above with the i-Opener of three years from now and a broadband connection. The thing won't ever need service from a hardware standpoint (and if it does, it's a factory kind of thing), and all software updates can be done over the wire. The processor will be, what, 3 to 5 ghz or something, which should be plenty for speech recognition and photorealistic 3D graphics, so the "obsolete" thing should not be a big deal for all but the most hardcore gamers, and even so, since it only costs $100 or $200 or something it's not a huge investment anyway.
If it's not the i-Opener per se, then the PS2 or the Palm 2005 or who knows what... the point is, Joe Consumer is going to honest-to-god truly plug and play this thing and he's not going to be calling us geeks to come fix it because his hard drive puked or Windows is fubar'd.
And sometime around then someone will make a business version that connects to a network (but is NOT an NC, notice), and the PHBs are going to be all over it.
I compare computers and cars a lot, and the way I figure it, we're at about 1933 in car years. Cars are mass-produced and reliable enough not to require daily maintenance and futzing around, but they still require some degree of training and knowledge to operate... and the roads are mostly in place, but there's no superhighways yet. I think, allegorically speaking, the leap from the cars of 1933 to the cars of 2000 is going to happen in the next 5-10 years for computers.
And I don't know if all y'all have noticed, but people generally hate monkeyin' around with their PCs. They hate how unreliable and confusing they are, and I don't blame them. Us geeks will always enjoy it and probably always have the option, but I gar-awn-tee everyone else is going to be more than happy to kiss their PCs goodbye. In fact, they'll be goddamn THRILLED.
The death-of-the-PC meme may be especially trendy right now, and I agree it's a little too soon to be trumpeting it, but be aware... it's actually going to happen. Maybe sooner, maybe later, but count on it - 10 years from now our mothers aren't to be e-nagging us from a PC!
Re:Microsoft should team with Bleem... (Score:2)
He knows exactly how different they are. That's why he said team up with Bleem!, who have a retail Playstation emulator. Bleem is porting their emulator to the Dreamcast as well. Currently it runs on PCs, and performs admirably well on my K6-2 333 with a Voodoo3.
The problem is emulating the rest of the chips in the PS2.
Re:Not quite (Score:4)
Okay, I'll try to do this again, without breaking the NDA
"It does not have a processor specifically designed ONLY for performing transformation and lighting calculations."
BZZZZT. Wrong again. There's really no way for me to argue against this without going into detail on the instruction set of the vector units (which would be violating the NDA). Why else would you stick a vector processing unit, perfectly fitted for processing 128-bit (4x32-bit, the size of a vertex) floating point data, directly next to the GS, with a number of instructions dedicated to communicating with the GS? If that's not custom design and integration, I'm really not sure what is.
"A spare high-precision FPU certainly helps, but it hardly counts as a part custom optimized for T&L."
As far as it not being a "part custom optimized for T&L," its sole intended purpose is in fact for transformation and lighting. This CANNOT be argued, as it is plainly stated in the VU users manual.
Regards,
Terrence
www.umr.edu/~tcaton
Desk toy and NT? (Score:2)
Re:Polys (Score:2)
Re:In addition (Score:2)
Re:Hmmmm... Something curious about the images. (Score:2)
Re:X-Box interest (Score:2)
Re:Important to Remember (Score:2)
could get PS2s; I doubt those people are going to wait again for the X
box!
And then there are the REAL gamers who have a Dreamcast, a Playstation, an N64, a Super Nintendo, a Regular Nintendo, a Game boy, and will have a PSX2, a Dolphin, and an X-Box.
I mean, come on, why buy just one when you can buy all 3?
Kintanon
Not only that... (Score:2)
There are a few things they've got to do right in order for this whole thing to work:
Probably we all know this already, and MS should too. My main point is that a few tech demos don't mean dinkus. Let's see how they do once they come up with an addictive game, great AI, destructable poly models, and all that jazz that we've seen in our favorite actual games. (Go watch the preview for Metal Gear Solid 2 at tv.ign.com - tape your jaw to your head first).
-ben
Pokemon Stadium II on the X-Box? NOT! (Score:2)
If in 2001 it sells with whatever game it is that my kids are screaming over, we'll buy one. Otherwise, forget it. (Unless it sells with a really rocking version of Mechwarrior V, in whihc case I'll get it for me.
Re:It's not all about the hardware (Score:2)
Re:Microsoft should team with Bleem... (Score:2)
I'm not saying it would be possible (due to emotion engine or whatnot) but if it was, how better to help a fledging new console than to be able to play games for the other hot console on the market?