Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Releases First X-Box Screens
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? "
sORRy hAd tO bE d00N
Free Unix? Free Windows. http://www.reactos.com
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
Dammit, forgot to hit preview.. that should be "a game with ping pong balls??" .. doh..
It's important to remember that Microsoft is trying to play on people's fears here. "If I get a PS2, will the X-Box come out and blow it out of the water? I don't want to make a bad purchase decision," says the consumer, pleasing Microsoft to the fullest. The X-Box is a direct response to Sony's release of the PS2 and, while the X-Box does look impressive, let's remember it's a _long_ way off and probably even longer than expected knowing Microsoft. They've only announced it to send potential PS2 purchasers shaking in their sneakers.
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.
Linux is only free if your time is of no value
Be in Your Senses
Of course, I'm kinda sceptical of a few static screenshots, just like I was sceptical of the PS2 shots too, when they were released.
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 $1000 I'd spend on building a nice PC game system will instead go towards a 3-tier total entertainment, cover-all-bases-take-no-prisoners console 'mini-arcade' for my living room...
(I bet they hand out those ping pong balls with "X" on them at trade shows.)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
...with a slot to put game modules in. I don't see what is so special about that. I bet that there will be game-module cards for regular PCs where you can put your Xbox modules in within a couple of months after launch of the Xbox.- --------
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
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UNIX isn't dead, it just sme
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Corollary to Moore's Law: The IQ of new computer owners is declining.
actually the best that Micro$ could do was render a demo on a SGI, that at best was a variant of the old Boing demo from the Amiga, see what happens when you are Market driven....
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.
Mine will.
Microsoft selling "loss-leader" hardware. Excellent. I will buy 10 and "repurpose" them. :-)
My other first post is car post.
So I guess Microsoft CAN innovate something.
It's not the ping pong balls...it's the NUMBER of balls. There are a few hundred there, each made up of how many polygons? Then realize that all of those balls are falling, bouncing and recoiling from the snaps of the mouse-traps (atleast that's what they look like to me) which are ALSO bouncing around in the room. That means a lot of physics (figuring the motion for all the balls and all of the traps). I wasn't there but I know that if the industry (take it for what it's worth) made a big deal out of it - there was a reason.
This image looks suprisingly like a 3D version of the MSBob desktop. ;)
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- 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.
Go to http://xbox.ign.com/news/18793.html and you can see some movies also :)
These have been around for a few weeks now actually.
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IanO
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Objects in Mirror are Losing!
Did you even watch the demo of the Ping Pong ball mouse trap thing, or are you just knocking it out of ignorance? I found all those moving polygones and calculations far more impressive then anything that I have seen so far on the PS2.
No, they can do it on a Pentium3-600 with a nVidia GeForce card, which is basically what the X-box setup will be.
My other first post is car post.
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!
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
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
Now I know you feel the need to bash Microsoft but think for a second. Just because they have a developmental unit working doesn't mean it's ready for fullscale deployment. How much is the cost per unit? too much right now - they can't market until it's reasonable (well atleast what MS thinks is reasonable). It does take time for chips to be made and all, and who's to say it's perfect? They have a dev unit up and running some pretty demos and that's that.
Who'd win if Lara Croft and Raven picked a fight? Er.. let's throw "Oni" in with 'em. Man.. that's a match. :-) - Carson http://www.holymac.com
- Carson www.holymac.com
Did you just read the headline on the slashdot home-page, then post? Its seems that way, because there was no game of ping-pong in any of the screen shots. Unless you consider placing ping-pong balls on mouse traps and having them trigger each other, a game.
Ugh... Powerposter...
First of all, a few screen shots of a couple ping pong balls and some butterflies tells me NOTHING about how it will handle hard core gaming. Second of all, take a closer look at those ping pong pictures and check out how horrible that Anti-Aliasing is. especially on the ping pong ball one since there's a lot of straight diag. lines. They're EXTREAMELY jaggie!
End Of Line
The magician Gates: "Look at my X-Box.. do not take your eyes of the X-Box while I divert everyones attention away from the evil that is Microsoft and pretend I'm happy spiffy Nintendo... Lookitmeee its Gatesio!"
Oh, nice butterflies. So what with the butterflies, anyway? I knew that M$ programmers were sex deprived but to this extent? (In some languages there is a second meaning to the word butterfly.)
What I don't understand is what is so special about this particular computer? Is it the powerful processor? We have seing reviews on PS2 processor - that was impressive. I see XBox as simply a desktop with an extra rendering capabilities. I wander how many times this computer will have to be rebooted during one single VFighter session - hate blue screens.
You can't handle the truth.
picture
is that a younger sexier bill in the loewer left corner? it looks like a picture of the founding members of ms from the 70's. thats a trip.
john
-- john
The other issue is market share. Currently, the PlayStation* is the thing to beat, and it doesn't seem to be going away any time soon. A number of gamer friends of mine have mentioned, "I like System X better, but System Y has all the games". Especially with the whole antitrust thing, is Microsoft going to be able to attract enough developers to this platform, and then keep them long-term?
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
...compare to the ColecoVision?
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.
Just because they have working fusion power plants does not mean we have cheap unlimited power. Just because you can build a prototype does not mean its ready for mass consumption.
This is just the same demo as I recall on the old SGI's and it is somewhat reminiscant of old amiga stuff as well. Clearly there is as much innovation here as MS2000's aliasing featurette.
What if the government splits them up into 2 or 3 companies? Which company would be in control of the X-box?
http://xbox.ign.com/news/18793.html
Quicktime format. Not Sorenson codec, but Xanim still won't play it. I booted to Windows...
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
...and make it so the X-box can run Playstation2 games. :)
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
If I remember right, doesn't the X-Box use the NV15 (GeForce2 GTS) chipset for its graphics goodness?
It certainly outpaces what is currently available in the U.S. (although questionable in comparison to the PS2, already available in Japan), but will it be enough to compete with what could be coming in the near future?
I am fortunate enough to have an NV15 based adapter (Guillemot 3D Prophet II to be exact) in my gaming machine and I'll say the chipsets performance is nothing shy of impressive. Maybe they'll raise the core clock to 250MHz? In addition, I guess working with DirectX or something similar could be easier than the APIs for other consoles, though truthfully, I wouldn't know.
I've seen the screens and movies, and yes, nice indeed. But we can't tell much of anything until we start bringing them home. =)
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Isn't Microsoft the company which is booting previous customers from Ebay?
Isn't Microsoft the company which is seeking to remove user's comments from Slashdot?
Isn't Microsoft the company which refuses to acknowledge its anti-competitive monopolistic behavior?
I don't think I'm very interested in this X-Box.
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He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
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.
2) From the XBox FAQ on the same site:
Won't the processor be a little slow by the time the system is launched?
A 733MHz PIII processor is incredibly fast, but we all know that in 18 months it won't seem so fantastic when pitted against the gigahertz+ power of desktop computers. A separate graphics processor changes everything however, by taking the load off of the processor. Graphical data will be sent to the graphics processor while that spunky little 733MHz PIII will be able to focus solely on the computing powers at hand, instead of just pushing pixels.
Gee, why didn't everyone else think about that before? grin
3) The Raven pictures are pretty nice
4) Using a modified Win2k kernel. There is a great base to put a platform on.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Screen shots do not prove anything. From the hardware specs. that I have seen, this thing is a PC with a good video card. Color me unimpressed. There are some big questions hanging around:
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 $500 require rebates based on using an overpriced ISP, will XBox be tied to MSN?
-- soldack
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
The X-Box will be competition for the PS2, but not that much because SO MANY people will buy a PS2 that by the time the X-Box actually comes out, it'll be too late to stop the PS2. The X-Box will still do very very well, but it's a generation after the PS2 and NOT the same generation. IE. No direct and/or immediate competition.
Now we all know that it runs on an x86 Processor, And that it's going to run on a Windows-Based operating system. Problems? Microsoft can Do on e of two things here. They have the option of Making the XBox games able to run on ANY M$-Based computer, or They can make the XBox games NOT Compatible with These other games. If they make them compatible, the thing would turn into a little computer, and if it's incompatible, People who use computers for gaming wouldn't want to buy an Xbox just to play the same games, right?
So they're trying to appeal to the console gaming market, To try to enlarge their dominion. But the hardware traditionally used in console gaming is nothing even remotely like today's computers. These things are DESIGNED to kick ass for gaming and gaming alone. Why bother with the x86 processor and a microsoft operating system (Assumedly CE, Dreamcast uses it too)? I just think microsoft is trying to appeal to the wrong people here. Of course, They're actually only trying to apeal to people to the point that we pull out our checkbooks, right?
However, the playstation2 has quite an Awesome advantage here. TI's the backwards compatibility, Along with the Year Jumpstart. Right on launch, there's an astonishing amount of games available to play on it, Along with it's DVD capability and The fact that The PS1 IS the industry leader right now, Anyway. And with the new games that are coming out, Along with The new games coming out. Of course, we've seen things like this before. For example, The Sega Genesis came out well ahead of the SNES, but the SNES still became more popular in the long run. Why? Games, mainly. The Sega Master System was nowhere NEAR as popular as the NES, So everyone KNEW NES'S games, and they had some great titles lines up for SNES. Problem is, When the N64 came out, all of IT'S games were the same thing. some lameass running around in a 3d world. That CAN get boring After a while. My point is that if the Xbox wants to succeed, there's a hell of a lot of history to look at and obstacles to climb, hurdles to jump. We'll just have to wait and see...
get 0wned. irc.w30wnzj00.com
Unlike the PS2, the x-box won't have any region restrictions, unlike the PS2. I think region restrictions suck, so I am going to have to go with the PS2. There are lots of games that are only released to Japan that I want to play, but Sony denys me access to those games. I am going to put my money on a console that gives me what I want. That console is the X-box.
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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
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
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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rooooar
Can I have a copy of your "k-rad Elite" plugin for your web browser?
Please?
Yes, the screenshots are very impressive, but it does seem a little too much like vapourware at the moment.
I've got a question to ask - is there really going to be just one version of the X-Box, like with, say, the Playstation, Dreamcast and so on. I can't help thinking that if the X-Box is based on standard PC hardware, there will be a lot of temptation to upgrade the hardware at frequent intervals. The Playstation has stayed the same over the last couple of years, but PCs have advanced considerably.
It won't be that long until the X-Box's abilities, although impressive now, will be outdated. Games companies, porting their very latest PC titles, will probably have to simplify things considerably to get their games to run on the outdated hardware, negating the benefits of the X-Box being based on PC hardware. Instead of being a straight recompile with minor tweaks, the entire game will have to be redesigned, like with PC to console ports at the moment.
Of course, Microsoft could bring out a new revision of the X-Box every year or so, but it'll probably annoy the owners of older models when they find that the latest games need an X-Box 2002 to run properly, while they only have the 2001 model.
Ford Prefect
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
I dunno about most of ya, but I've got fatpipe over here and could view the movies in less than a couple of minutes worth of download time. The movies were pretty nice, at least they weren't static. But from what I'm seeing here on Slashdot, these were all on SGI? If so, I'm rather disgusted, since it doesn't even represent the real power of the xbox which is all most of us care about. . . Does anyone know if the quicktime movies are from an XBox or if they're just SGI rendered?
TeamZERO -=[You can be smart as Einstein; But without passion for life, you suck toast.]=-
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.
Test your net with Netalyzr
BSOD? you should see how fast it renders :)
I'd have to run X windows at 320x200 before I could consider those 800x600 screen shots to be "hi res"
-PovRayMan
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Check out my blackbox styles
talk about posting before reading: he posted a correction before you posted your comment. Ugh... powerflamer...
No, but they run X11. That's why they're called X-box.
tee hee.
My brother is a project manager for a Game Developer- he just had a meeting with the "evil empire" last week to pitch a project for the Xbox- It sounds like they have some definate advantages. Apparently the PS2 is *not nice* to develop for, and they have a ways to go before the games will live up to all the hype- One of the major problems is that (apparently) PS2 has NO antialiasing capability.. I find this hard to believe, but from what he was saying a lot of the PS2 stuff looked "worse" than the dreamcast. If this is the case, the PS2 may not be the console champ it looked like it would be.
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, 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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air and light and time and space
It`s just an ordinary box with a super duper graphic card developed by nVidia. Anyone (with cash) can make such a deal with nVidia. But Microsoft has the power to push it forward and again dominate another market segment. IMHO the sooner M$ dies the better!
Let`s pray for salvation. Come on Tao show the world what your Elate RTOS can do!
NTSC television; the ULTIMATE in anti-aliasing. HDTV consoles will have a much tougher job.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
No, Microsoft acquired another UK based 3D graphics technology company called RenderMorphics, and their core technology Reality Lab was merged with DirectX to create Direct3D. Also, there's no "Renderware way" of transforming polygons. It's the same stuff, but here it's still reasonably low polygon counts. Butterflies, by the by, can be made of two triangles, actually. With appropriate Alpha texturing you can "cookie cut" a pretty butterfly from two flat planes. Jouni -- Jouni
--
Jouni Mannonen
3D Evangelist
Jouni Mannonen | Game Designer, Consultant
I was at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) a few weeks ago. Microsoft had an X-Box theatre there to show off these X-Box demo's. Before the Expo I had heard big things about the X-Box, but wanted to see it with my own eyes. Let's just say I was pretty impressed. It reminded me a lot of the PS2 power-wise, at least from what I saw with the demo's.
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.
I wonder if we'll be able to sell X-Box systems, games, and peripherals on Ebay or if Microsoft will get it canceled and make your feedback neutral.
-Antipop
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!
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, Planet Intra 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
the reason that there is butterflys and ping pongs is that they are showing the amount of calculations it can do.
What's wrong with people here? (well, most of them, anyway) Now, if Xbox would have been made by anybody else but Microsoft, it wouldn't get the shit it is getting here! Please, remove the Microsoft label and what do you see? A fairly powerful gaming machine using cheap but powerful stuff from Intel and nVidia. Microsoft is probably using nVidia optimized DirectX and PIII optimised cut down OS. This is a kind of system that no Open Source zealots [-1, flamebait] could hack to gether. It takes commitment and work (Read: working 8+ hrs a day, 5-6 days a week for few months) from talented and experienced people to design/program a thing like that. No matter how many pies you throw at Bill, I actually can not believe that MS HR department hire only idiots and half-wits! (Let's leave the Laywer/Marketing departments out of this, ok?) Yes, it's obviously aimed at the new Playstation, therefore the vaporware, but do you really think that the people behind this hardware had it ready just waiting for P2 to arrive ("Hey, Sony has a new Playstation, let's conjure something up to compete with it"). Maybe Microsoft should have founded "Scrim Foot" to market it? :)
Enough ranting...
Hmmm... I've heard this multiple times before, so I guess it's time to clarify.
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.
Q. Why?
A. Game consoles are usually sold at a loss. The companies make money from selling or licensing the software, not the hardware.
Q. What does this mean for us?
A. We can buy the hardware cheap and "repurpose" it. Sure, it will void our warranty, but how cool would it be to have a 600Mhz linux box with 64 megs of RAM, built in TV output, sound output, a DVD drive, a hard drive and ethernet for $300?
With hardware like this, it's only a matter of time before linux runs on it. And when it does, there is the obvious MP3 player idea, but there are also dozens of other uses such a device would have.
My other first post is car post.
Popping the screenshots into vi in binary mode reveals this partial image header:
ÿØÿà^@^PJFIF^@^A^B^A^@^O^@^O^@^@ÿí^O| Photoshop 3.0^@8BIM
And this, later on in the data:
^@^@^@^VIEC http://www.iec.ch^@^@^
And this:
@desc^@^@^@^@^@^@^@.IEC 61966-2.1 Default RGB colour space - sRGB
Makes you wonder, don't it. Anyone wanna investigate this one?
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
err, make that " 300MHZ" (as in less than 300MHz), rather than greater than.
The question shouldn't be "Is the X-Box going to be giving the PS2 some competition?", but rather "Is the X-Box going to be giving the Dreamcast some competition?"
There are 6 valid reasons the PlayStation2 will fail in the US: high price, no internet connectivity, shoddy graphics, a pain to code for, only 2 controller ports, it's ugly
The Dreamcast is Sega's PlayStation and the PlayStation2 is Sony's Saturn. Sega is doing everything right this time, while Sony is making the same mistakes Sega made with the Saturn.
Microsoft will be facing Sega, not Sony, and Sega will prevail as champion.
You know you are a cowardly troll when you post as an AC, null-wit.
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I believe that the x-box will not be able to compete with the PSX2 for one major reason: PSX2 is designed to do 3d gaming while the x-box is a computer with 3d gaming in mind. While the x-box is definitely impressive, a computer with a geforce2, lots of RAM and a fast proc will generate approximately the same performance.
Even if you want to send me mail. I obviously am not going to get it
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.
Is the data being pulled realtime from disk, or was it loaded into RAM before playing? What's the frame rate, and can it be sustained? Poly count? How much of the image is done realtime, how much is sprites or other pre-rendered stuff?
If this were a company I trusted, I might give them the benefit of the doubt and say "This is pretty much representative of what the X-Box does."
But coming from Microsoft, I see this as just an absolute best case example, probably better than we'll see for longer than however long a frame lasts. Without more information, these images are almost meaningless.
---
Dammit, my mom is not a Karma whore!
Let's see the speed this displays (pun intended) before being impressed.
"Before you can play Mechabutteryfly Pong attack you must agree to convert your TV to PAL and use only the MS PAL adapter with your XBox as anti-trust litigation has tied Microsoft's hands and we cannot be expected to make competiting products incompatible anymore."
Please, dont confuse Siggy with facts. It is not possible for his hard-wired brain to consider that Microsoft might be able to do something well.
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The X-Box isn't even scheduled to ship Q3 or Q4 in 2001, right? Is this classic MS vaporware?
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Hot damn! Look at the detailed accuracy in those screenshots! It looks almost like real life!
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?
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.
Like the subject says, haven't these pics and movies been oput since before E3?
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).
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
Having taken a good look at the xbox pics and counting the polygons I am quite sure that the pics are produced by a standard GeForce card.
The colors and the balance of polygons were tweaked to the max to produce the desirable wow effect, but it's much simpler to optimize polygons for a bunch of near-same-size balls than for a large number of humanoids that can be very close or far away varying the number of required polys by thousand times.
There is no x-box hardware yet, there is not even a report of an existing software emulator of the future hardware, so how can they show "screenshots of x-box in action"? I would call them hype-shots of Microsoft marketing in action.
In any case, the pics are disappointing. PS2 can easily render nearly 10 times the polygons of fake-x-box.
Look, I've just invented a game console that plugs into color PalmPilots to generate flightsims! Here 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?)
t's not the ping pong balls...it's the NUMBER of balls. There are a few hundred there, each made up of how many polygons? Then realize that all of those balls are falling, bouncing and recoiling from the snaps of the mouse-traps (atleast that's what they look like to me) which are ALSO bouncing around in the room. That means a lot of physics (figuring the motion for all the balls and all of the traps).
:).
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
oops
Even if you want to send me mail. I obviously am not going to get it
Let's see, MS tells us they are about to release a cheap (compared to a PC) console with fast hardware. They're even showing screenshots, but they don't tell when it'll be released. They won't release it now, because with the hardware they put in (read GeForce), they just couldn't compete in terms of price. This sounds to me like some way to kill the market for the PS2 and Dreamcast, so that they can wait, and release their stuff when prices drop. Am I just being paranoid... but it looks so much like the usual MS tactics.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Thats the grossest thing i've ever seen. No one look at the "better view"
"In a stunning development today, Microsoft Corp. announced that it's next generation video game console, the XBox, will not play DVDs. Rather, as reported by Microsoft spokesperson Bill Gates, the new XBox will have the ability to make pancakes. The move comes amidst intense negotiations with the Betty Crocker company. Says Gates, "The internal clock rate of the XBox will generate a tremendous amount of heat, and unfortunately the natural and forced cooling of the system is insufficient to properly dissipate the heat inside. To help cool the system, a heat sink in the form of a tasty breakfast treat will change phase from liquid to solid, thus properly dissipating heat." Gates made these statements in reference to Americans' taste for cakey breakfast foods. In further developments, Microsoft Corp. also explained that there will be no game or demonstration disc included with the XBox. Instead, a specially packaged 2-ounce packet of Betty Crocker's Bisquick brand pancake mix will be packed with the system. Pressed further as to why Microsoft's new video game system would make pancakes, Gates responds, "We all remember the wonderful treats coming from Easy Bake Ovens as children. Microsoft wishes to recapture that portion of the adult market who previously owned toy appliances as children. The tray mechanism in the XBox makes for an excellent pancake platter."
Every X-Box is a Linux box too, unless Microsoft intentionally prevents this. In which case they will have some serious explaining to do on the anti-trust front. We should be alert for any signs that Microsoft is planning to restrict the type of OS that can run on this hardware.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
If you look at the second screen shot (Butterfly Demo: Above the pond (hi-res)) the reflection of the bridge in the water looks quite jaggy and out of place. Although this could be "rippling water" rather than a jaggy reflection I couldn't help but notice it. The same thing can be seen in the next picture (Butterfiles landing). I must say though, that overall I am very impressed. The images look fantastic. Now - show me the real thing, and tell me when it's gonna be released and M$ just might have a customer.
A score is 20, right? The Civil war took place in the 1860's (or thereabouts). The Revolutionary war was 1776 (or thereabouts), which means "Four score and seven years ago" (Gettysburg Address) = 1860-1776
4n+7=1860-1776
4n=77
n ~~ 20
What an intensly scientific proof!
There are 6 valid reasons the PlayStation2 will fail in the US: high price,
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
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Seeing that the Playstation 2 will be entirely backwards compatable with the current library of Playstation titles and hardware, there's going to be a tremendous amount of software available for the PS2 that the X-Box won't be able to touch. Look at recent games such as Driver, Gran Turismo 2 and Metal Gear Solid. Not to mention that sequels to these games are be coming for the PS2 and already look incredible. /curt
Yeah, they really optimised the most often used bits:)
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 :)
This "PC is dead" crap is pure bullshit. MY setup will always have a BIG keyboard and a BIG screen. That's hard to do in a portable. Furthermore, there will always be usage for the extra CPU as it is developed. Not to mention joysticks, flightsticks, speakers, printers, etc. Are all these GIANT devices going to attach to some walkman-sized PC kept in your pocket?
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.
Except for that little company called Nintendo and their Dolphin system...
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
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.
Am I the only one to read this article and say "Isn't that a little mean, to compare this to the IBM PS/2 which hasn't been made in many years?"
These are "hi-res" shots. What's up with that? TVs can't exactly do Hi-Res, which is what the X-Box is s'poded to hook up to. It'd be more important to have anti-aliasing, which these shots obviously don't have. The lil jaggies are really quite ugly. Take a look at some of the desk and ping-pong shots to see what I mean. That chalkboard looks horrible. And there's nothing saying that this is being done in real-time, like the playstation 2's bird demo thing from a while back.
OK, I loved the pingpong movie. The question is, has anyone actually *done* that? I realize it would be a huge pain in the ass to set up, but a riot to watch..
Well, i'm just guessing at what it could be that you are saying, but i would believe that clankiness your describing is the aliasing... and a lot at that. Not that aliasing is a bad thing. It is a bad thing for 3d graphics artists like me (it looks bad), but for games, its not that bad since it takes more processor power (or now a days, more video card power) to antialias edges. I think i saw somewhere that the new voodoo cards and nvidia cards can and will be able to handle antialiasing the edges of meshes, but at the expense of fps... If you wanna see aliased edges in action, just turn on quake3a or unreal tourny and use the default settings, pump up the resolution and look closely at the edges of the map, and especially the part where the weapon meets the map. See those jagged edges? Thats the aliasing, and thats what i saw on those xbox pics. Didn't notice much on the raven pics though.
Just don't try to sell one on E-bay when they come out.
Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not
Sure you don't work for M$? My mind is open. Except unlike yours, my brain hasn't fallen out.
Are you referring to that same shit used on all Tandy/RadioShack TRS-80 Color Computers from the 80's? Yeah, that had graphics framebuffer built into the RAM, too. As well as most peripheral configuration (somewhere before 0xFFFF and 0xFFFF was used for controlling peripherals--memory locations were POKE and PEEK'able (w00 BASIC!) to do everything from turn the cassette motor on to speed up the processor) I'll have to admit, that was a VERY fun machine to play with though. Sad thing was its ROM BASIC was written by Microsoft...
the real at&t mix
I could tell ya the biggest reasons why, but then I'd have to either kill you or put you under NDA.
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.
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 :)
I predict that it will be approximately 3 minutes (the time to checkout and drive home after purchase) for the first slashdotter to install linux on their xbox upon it's release.
--------- Beware the dragon, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
Will it work with existing USB peripherals that work under DirectX?
i.e. If I decide to get one of these can I use the Logitech USB Force Feedback Wheel I have already bought for my PC?
There's no reason why not as far as I can see, as long as there is a way to install 'drivers' for 3rd party controllers.
If not, i'll spend the money an X-Box would cost on a processor that's twice as fast and, by the time it's released, a video card that's twice as impressive. Err, that's if I was considering getting one.
However, consoles output to a TV, not a progressively scanned monitor a foot or two from your face. TV has around 500 lines of resolution (and it's interlaced at that!), and is (depending on where you live) ~ 30 frames per second. It's not going to matter one whit if you can run a game at higher resolutions / frame rates if you're using a TV to view it.
The question is more whether you can prevent those frame rate drop-outs caused by scenes with lots of action and chock full of polygons and textures (where the game gets "chunky" or actually slows down). This is what a GPU excels at, providing rock steady frame rates as you force feed it ungodly amounts of scene information. This is also what makes for better looking / playing games.
I don't see any proof that these movies are being (or ever will be) rendered real-time. The reason we're dissing MS is because in the past they have overhyped and underdelivered. I can't think of an instance MS HASN'T done that, in fact. Even Windows 1 was buggy yet hyped. Until they do anything different, I'll (wisely) assume that these clips, while impressive, are not valid examples of working MS technology.
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
Now you see why we doubt.
This is "hype for gamers", and it's hype from a company that has lied about every single product they've released in living memory.
The X-box will suck. It will be late. It will be unstable - remember who's building it. It will have resource shortage problems.
Most importantly, unless it really is a Windows 98 PC, it will not run existing software, and *BAM*, it's totally, utterly, irrelevant.
Every Microsoft product that has done well has done well by being bundled with a product that's already doing well, or by being compatible with stuff you already have. They don't have that this time, and that makes it pretty much irrelevant to the gaming community.
No network effect means that quality matters, and I just don't see Microsoft being able to produce a *good* platform. "It crashes every so often and you have to reboot" isn't going to go over as well with console game players as it does with office workers who have never used a stable computer in their lives.
I don't think slashdot should be dignifying this box with coverage.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Damn, why did IGN put so much JPG compression in those images, they looked like crap!
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I mean, I can do kenetic physics in real time on a ti-83, in interpreted basic for one ball. I would excpect that this X-box is a bit faster then interpreted basic on a ti-83, wouldn't you?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Troll me or don't, but it has to be said
two words: blue screen
Thank you.
-- From my Best Friend (Written to me over ICQ): "i was gonna go to a party...but i had to reinstall windows"
It's Microsoft after all.
Do you know how many polys I'd use to make a ping pong ball? (wait for it).... One.
Actualy, its more likely that they're using two poly's, since most hardware is optimized for triangles. You'd need two triangles to make a square bounding box. That demo didn't really look that impressive to me anyway
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
come on. of course there is some of them somewhere down deep in the m$ catakombs. They must have build alot of testing models to make sure it works as they want it to.
do you think that people that construct hardware just takes a bunch of cool looking chips, some wires and some other stuff they have lying around. Throw them together and starts selling them? No, of course not.
you didn't forget to hit preview, you forgot to look at the fucking article first, you fucking idiot. i'm sorry, i don't care if this is going to lose me karma. i really don't care. this fucking idiot needs to be called out.
Which demos have you seen? Everything I've seen so far has had more "jaggies" than even N64 games.
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."
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I dunno.. my computer kinda looks like that...
I believe Square has stated (or at least strongly implied) that they will not be making Xbox games.
Linux is only free if your time is of no value
Be in Your Senses
Of course the final product usually turns out better than most of the prototypes.
Playstation 2 will win it for the same reason it won against the N64. Sony will flood the market with games, some good, some not so good, and some incredible, making it a must-have system. Metal Gear Solid 2 anyone? Gran Turismo 2000. And countless others. Microsoft just won't be able to come up with the games fast enough, and developers will have no reason to switch to a less established platform just to make MS happy.
I've got a N64 here next to my PSX, do I ever play it? Is it because I can't easily copy ROMS, and I don't want to buy a Z64? Probably. But if I could, what games would I even want for 64?
No thanks, give me my PSX and the rows and rows of rent-to-own games at my local video store.
Ok, they're good and they work 60,70 hour weeks-so what? Does that change the fact that their employer has consistently turned out bad products and FUDed all good products? I think not. MS is still bad no matter who works for it. I'm kind of surprised people with talent and intelligence work for them, instead of for a company that focuses on quality rather than market share. What do MS employees have to say about this?
I guess you haven't been keeping up with the 3D technology that's developed on the consumer level over the past few years.
Those shots look really good, but there's no reason to assume they can't be done with current technology.
Ever seen the nVidia GeForce2 demos?
BTW, I'd say the clips are not so much valid examples of MS technology as they are examples of Intel and nVidia technology, because that's the hardware in the box. And both Intel and nVidia are quite proven when it comes to technology.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Who cares if it runs Linux; the real question is whether you can run a Beowulf cluster off of a bunch of these! :)
Mike "I'm Joking" Greenberg
http://www.yourmothernaked.com
Then what was the X-Box demo at E3?
Just go to www.xbox.com, and read the fine print. These are all pre-rendered, and not to mention that the raven demo is obviously ray-traced. I knew that there was no way the X-box could be that good!
My company has hired over 200 developers to develop games for this platform. We work close with MS on getting games for thi platform. So far we are working with ID on porting a version of Q3 to that box. Also Epic Games has also gone into a contract with our developer team to port some of thier games to this X box.
Wow, I'm usually not easily offended, but I have to say.. that was offensive :)
I was explaining to a friend of mine why I wasn't interested in becoming a freelance PC consultant. It might be fun for awhile, but long-term prospects aren't good... and here's my reasoning:
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 $200 or something it's not a huge investment anyway.
If it's not the i-Opener per se, then the PS2 or the Palm 2005 or who knows what... the point is, Joe Consumer is going to honest-to-god truly plug and play this thing and he's not going to be calling us geeks to come fix it because his hard drive puked or Windows is fubar'd.
And sometime around then someone will make a business version that connects to a network (but is NOT an NC, notice), and the PHBs are going to be all over it.
I compare computers and cars a lot, and the way I figure it, we're at about 1933 in car years. Cars are mass-produced and reliable enough not to require daily maintenance and futzing around, but they still require some degree of training and knowledge to operate... and the roads are mostly in place, but there's no superhighways yet. I think, allegorically speaking, the leap from the cars of 1933 to the cars of 2000 is going to happen in the next 5-10 years for computers.
And I don't know if all y'all have noticed, but people generally hate monkeyin' around with their PCs. They hate how unreliable and confusing they are, and I don't blame them. Us geeks will always enjoy it and probably always have the option, but I gar-awn-tee everyone else is going to be more than happy to kiss their PCs goodbye. In fact, they'll be goddamn THRILLED.
The death-of-the-PC meme may be especially trendy right now, and I agree it's a little too soon to be trumpeting it, but be aware... it's actually going to happen. Maybe sooner, maybe later, but count on it - 10 years from now our mothers aren't to be e-nagging us from a PC!
M$ shoved it down our throats that Windoze problems were always the fault of a "poorly written driver", until W2K came out, and suddenly they released figures and pie charts that showed that 40% of NT's problems were "core NT" (source Microsoft, as reported by infoweek), NOT drivers. If their most important product was 40% crap, (and this can be proved by running it on anything picked from the HCL) what difference will it make if they only have one platform to deal with? Having read the Linux kernel core source code, I can see why Linux runs rings around NT - it's coded to work with the hardware and deal with, not ignore, hardware deficiencies.
"I'm kind of surprised people with talent and intelligence work for them, instead of for a company that focuses on quality rather than market share."
here's some news for ya... there aren't any large well paying companies that focus on quality rather than on market share.
HAHAHAHAAH
What PC's are you talking about? There isn't a PC now, nor not for about 5 years, that will be able to produce the kinds of real time graphics this thing will be capable of.
I suggest you take a few seconds out of your ignorance, and learn something about the subject which you comment on.
I don't know if I'm alone in being a bit worried by some recent comments from game developers such as Peter Molinuieyx..Moulnie....Moll....damnit, you know who I'm talking about, the guy behind Black&White. What he and others have been saying is that developing for the PC is much riskier and brings less profits than developing for consoles. With PCs you have to try and estimate how much technology will have progressed when the game is finished, and how many consumers will have access to that kind of system. If you overestimate it you will have a game that few people will be able to play (a few hardcore gamers will spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to upgrade their system, but the majority will not) and if you underestimate it you will have a game that looks ugly and dated and no one will buy (er, Might and Magic or Daikatana anyone?). Also for PCs you have to optimise for an enourmous amount of different configurations - different OS versions, new DirectX or OpenGL, different processors, new drivers, different graphics cards etc etc, and try to eleminate all the bugs. With a console, it's just one configuration which equals less development time and money spent on bug chasing, and more spent on game content and polish. All this means a whopping success on a PC will make the company around the same profits as a console game that sells only so-so, and a huge console hit brings in profits PC developers can only dream of. For these reasons, some venerable old PC producers such as Psygnosis have already gone console-primarily or console-only. BUT - if the X-box is a great hit that would mean developers have an architechture that is very close to the PC. It will have a permanent hardware and software configuration so they now what to aim for in development, and it will be much easier to program for than the PS2 - they can use their old knowledge of PCs. Games can fairly easily and cheaply be ported to the PC for added profits. This could prevent the migration away from the PC by game (and other!) developers. And if the X-box is a huge hit, maybe this can finally do something about all the crust (cruft?) that has built up around the PC over the years with regards to hardware, and the messy state of PC hardware. Hardware developers will have an incentive to create PCs that are fairly similar to the X-box. Bye bye ISA and all old ports on the back, hello GPU and fast memory as standard. But the PC can still continue to evolve and change to take advantage of the latest tecnology breakthroughs, unlike the consoles which are stuck. We will have a base unit, the X-box, for those who want something cheap, and the more advanced PC for those who want that. Do I have something here, or am I completely wrong? Comments? /Lars Information Science student, Uppsala University Sweden (currently at University of Adeladie, Australia)
you got that right bro.... eventually - perhaps we'll get to the point where instead of just working for some international mega-corp; etc..... - things are the way they are -
Get up!
so i was just curious if anybody out there is completely boycotting MICROS~1. I know a lot of people (myself included) who boycott things like pepsi/coke, GE, GM, Exxon-Mobil/Texaco/Shell/BP-Amoco/Chevron (man, those oil companies all suck, ehh), things from Burma, things from Taiwan, animal flesh/products, things that "require" testing on animals, etc.. I recently started a boycott of MICROS~1 because i feel like they, as a corrupt corporate entity, deserve it just as much as anything else in the above list. I thought it was a bit strange that i've never heard of anybody else boycotting MICROS~1. Are there any others out there? if so, how have you done it? how far have you taken it? anybody change jobs or schools (yes, my current school is in bed with the evil empire) based on the allmighty ethics?
Look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology; Ain't got time to make no apology
Why didn't they release actual movies (made in RT) of the games ? Is it because the actual frame rate is too slow to be shown ?
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
Was I the only one to notice that? Look closely on the book in that image An NT server 4 book as a desk toy!
Won't these be plugged into TV's which, compared to a nice monitor (even 800x600!) are a crap resolution?
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Its not just the consumers that MS wants to influence here. Influencing the developers is arguably more important. This could be an effective weapon to stall developers who traditionally do Windows games from making console ports at this point where PC and PS2 are relatively close in specs. 'Hey, that PS2 is much harder to develop for than our X-Box, why not use what you know already to build launch titles for our product instead?'. Double whammy!
Dammit, this thing might be 600MHz or whatever, but its only a 32-bit CISC chip. Its some x86 piece of shit with like 15-years of legacy support built in to it, designed from day one to run general applications. Step back a moment, consider that Nintendo and Sony are using 128-bit RISC chips with modern designs and NO BAGGAGE. Isn't this like the US car market? I read somewhere that a few years ago the Japanese entered the US car market with their super-efficient, highly engineered cars, which have moderately sized engines, and started wuppin' the ass of the US car companies, whose only response (at that time) was to put out cars with even larger capacity engines. As a Englishman, I have alway wondered just what the point is of a 4.5 litre engine when the speed limit is 55?
there have been xbox prototypes ever since the first 3D accelerator hit the PC platform...
Have you seen N64 and PSX2 on a computer monitor, or just a TV screen? TVs blur the edges , making jaggies look smooth.
I remember seeing a VGA 320x200x256color screen for the first time, and thinking how ugly those (perfectly sharp and clear) little rectangles were, compared to the smoothness of all the edges on my 256x176x16color speccy on a 21" TV.
If you're looking for technical reasons and comparisons, you're not gonna get them because of NDAs.
Since the story is getting quite old, I suspect that nobody will read this, but anyway:
What I meant was it takes a team of developers full-time working to create stuff like this. Yes, open source developers could do it, if they would get a sponsor to pay for computers/office space/pizzas/toilet papar/etc... But then wouldn't you rather work for some money?
:/
J.
My God!!
It must be my immaturity but I had to follow the link.
I just seriously hope that that isn't you!!!!!!!!!!!!
"The way she used to say Rimmer as if it rhymed with scum" Red Dwarf
They simply market & rebrand it.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
While I agree with a lot of your comments. I think your time frame is compressed. Ten years from now this process will probably start getting going. The one item everyone refers to is broadband. It is going to take a lot longer then people think for usable bandwidth to be readily available for processes like this.
I use this same argument that ASP's won't be truly viable for home and many small business use until the pipelines to do an 80 Meg transfer in a couple of seconds is available across the board.
Broadband growth will be slowed by regulation and foot dragging, IMHO.
Who's technology did they steal to make it?
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
-shogusumi
$email =~ s/(mon|key)//g;
Computer geeks are the ultimate recyclers... especially those of us on AC
Um, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but to my knowledge the next-gen nVidia hardware that's going to be in the X-Box hasn't even seen first silicon yet. The final product is (at least) a year off.
So how in fsck are they producing demos from a hardware platform that doesn't exist yet?
-- He's fantastic, made of plastic....
Everyone seems to be up in arms about whether the xbox can compete with the ps2 when it comes to hardware. The main reason that the xbox will fail to defeat or even compete in the console gaming market is the sole fact that Microsoft is releasing its console way to late in the game against industry titans Sega, Sony and Nintendo. Not to mention the fact that M$ has no strong third party support to back the xbox. We sure as hell wont see Final Fantasy or Metal Gear Solid on the XBox, or any Rare titles, or Phantasy Star Online all of which are major reasons for owning a PS2, Dolphin or Dreamcast.
I know m$ fans, if there are any reading this, will recall the Gates statement reverbing all of his conquests after coming into a market late. But the xbox hardware will be dated severely when it is finally released not to mention that the PS2, Dreamcast, and Dolphin will already hold a strong library of software and already have gobbled up most of the powerhouse second party support. If M$ wants to make a mark in the console market it should concentrate its efforts on establishing a solid development relationship with one of the game developers, many if possible.
GrimDog out
I remember the video that Microsoft made for its lawyers to show in court for their antitrust trial: it was a total fake, but not so obvious except to the attentive eyes of David Boies, who caught the fakery and rubbed Microsoft's nose in it. These demo screens and movies likely were created on SGI machines so Microsoft can use them in its vaporware campaign against the ALREADY EXISTING Sony PS2.
Erchie
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Folks, please try to remember that what really sells consoles is what games it plays. I wouldn't buy any console that doesn't play the games my family wants to play (Old Fart Alert), and for my kids, that means Pokemon. That's why we have an N64, and not a PS or DC box.
;-)
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.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
The thing that worries me is not the XBox itself. Even if MS is cheating on the demos now, I'm sure they'll still kick out a fairly decent product.
But we've got the PS2 with already huge support in Japan and it looks like a big market here in the US, coming out in a few months, with lots and lots of game backers behind it. I follow some of the XBox news and while it does look cool, it certianly doesn't yet have the bigname game developer support the PS2 does. This may change as they get closer to release date, but they have a lot of hype to generate first, and Sony already appears to be working on the PS-3. By the time the Xbox finally hits the shelves, it may already be irrelevant, doomed to the same realm as the ColecoVision.
The Xbox is only going to be as fun as the games that are written for it...
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"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
These MS things are outright lies, neither are they Unix boxen nor do they run X like my gaming machine. Next thing they'll be claiming that they started the internet-- oh wait they do.
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What! You mean a site named www.xbox reckons that the X-box is gonna be better than PS2? Get outta here!
As for your assertions about the use of Direct X, well the whole problem with creating abstraction layers between the hardware & software is it slows things down, and reduces the possibility of optimising for reliably predictable hardware.
The X-box is simply a PC which has a gaming focused harware setup. It is not a dedicated 3D/gaming machine like the PS2. It will flop in Japan, and because of this it will flop in the States.
Just because the 14 year olds posting on this threads are PC gamers, they should avoid thinking that a MS branded console is going to clear up.
OK, now that I could agree with. I just couldn't let the flamebait in the original post go by, well, unflamed. :)
Haven't heard too much in the posts about MS's new game engine API that is to be released in future versions of its Direct X API. This along with some of the new features of DirectX 9 will make game development very easy for the casual coder. I've seen some demos of the new DirectMusic syncro that are really sweet. I expect their tactics to be as follows: -Make this the easiest console to dev for -Through use of new i/o such as ether and hd spreading content will be easier than on any other device -With people developing and demo groups pumping out some really cool stuff, I expect many people to pick these up. Most importantly, I think the ether and potential PC integration could be huge...i.e. with 100Mbs, could I potential outsource some processing to my PC? Maybe hook into my win2k cluster for realtime raytracing/radiosity rendering?