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Salon on the XBox
ozric writes "Salon has a front-page story on the XBox. The writer says the thing will "devastate" the market for PC games, and claims that's a *good* thing due to all the problems of developing for the PC as opposed to a dedicated machine. A little pro-microsoft, but good reading nonetheless." Actually it says a lot of things worth thinking about (complexity and size of the existing PC gamer market, relative niches of existing gaming platforms, and even mentions the Indrema Linux console)
Why is that?
The inputs are such an integral part of the equation and are what keep me coming back to PC games. I know that they are not as fancy as graphics and sounds, but they play as much a part in game design, if not more, because they dictate the type of interface that you can build, which in turn dictates the type of game mechanics that can be built, which THEN determines the presentation bells and whistles (of course, that's purely theoretical, as most games just follow a successful formula and therefore only concentrate on bigger badder graphics with a few minor twists on the interface/control scheme).
Until consoles provide more than the Joypad/Analog Stick/8 Button environment, then they will always be severely retarded compared to PCs in terms of the variety of gaming experiences that they can deliver. You will get fighters, platformers, menu driven random combat-fest "RPGs" with no character interaction, puzzlers, and drivers. The other hugely successful gaming genres: First Person Shooters, Real Time Strategy, and Massively Multiplayer RPGs, will remain the domain of the PC until such time as controls better suited to their application appear on the console (namely the keyboard/mouse combination).Yes I realize that SEGA is doing some MMORPG based on Phantasy Star (one of their earlier console RPG hits), but try to imagine for one second how hard it's going to be for the palyers to communicate with one another without a keyboard. What will make this a compelling experience, beyond what is already capable on a console, if the players can't easily communicate with one another?
I also realize that GoldenEye is a great console based FPS, but it dosn't come close to replicating the feel of Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, or QuakeX. Furthermore, when the console FPS crowd eventually go online, they'll have to remain in their own server spaces simply because they won't have a hope in hell against keyboard/mousers. The same thing goes for RTS games.
Sure, inputs might be the simplest of balances to rectify, but how come they NEVER discuss this topic? It's always about graphics and blah blah blah. So what! All you'll get is better looking versions of games that you already own. And forget about cross-platform development of PC and console games on the X-Box if they do not support similar control options.
All this grief just adds to the fact that by the time X-Box, GameCube, and the PS2 are released, PCs will be 2 generations ahead technologically... which is all anybody cares about anyways it seems.
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
I can rattle off lots of processors that are more efficient than x86 (RISC processors such as PA-RISC, MIPS, SPARC, DEC Alpha ARM, etc.)
Most of these processors aren't appropriate for a gaming platform.
PA-RISC, SPARC, and Alpha chips are workstation-class and priced accordingly. They'd cost at least as much as the retail price of your console - not something you can use.
ARM chips have horrible FP performance (the older versions didn't even have an FPU). This is a deliberate design trade-off; having only integer operations lets you save a lot of silicon and a lot of power. But gaming consoles need floating-point big time for physics, 3D collision detection, and any transformations that aren't handled by the hardware (there will be many). So this too is not something you can use.
MIPS chips would be an acceptable choice - if you license the core and fab your own chips. But this is expensive, and leads to more effort required in the motherboard design as well. You can do this if you're a console company and are optimized for it - but Microsoft isn't on either count.
So Intel looks like the best choice for Microsoft just from a price and design effort point of view.
remember NT came out originally for MIPS, Intel and Alpha. Mips and Alpha are long gone
And this is another *VERY* big reason for Microsoft to use Intel chips - they don't need to rewrite their operating system from scratch for a new platform. That would take a horrific amount of work, especially since they're porting DirectX as well as the OS itself.
A gaming console must do one thing and it must do it well, which screams RISC to me
Modern CISC-ish processors are just as efficient. Instruction decoding is a little hairier, but that's pretty much a solved problem. This is the old "CISC decoder with a RISC core" description that you've been hearing for both Intel and AMD chips (not precisely accurate, but close enough).
The big flaw in Intel chips is that it has few general-purpose registers, but so far the chips have held up without a vast performance gap.
I've read the article over at Ars on the Emotion Engine and it looks like if software developers can get their heads around it, the Playstation 2 should lay waste to the Xbox.
The Playstation 2 is nice, but still have a few serious design flaws. The fact that it has only a miniscule amount of frame buffer memory is the most obvious of these, but I'm a bit skeptical of the bus as well.
Realistic performance figures that I've heard for the Playstation put the X-box ahead (not surprising, as it has a graphics chip that's a couple of generations later than the Playstation, due to a later release date).
Software optimization *should* be a solved problem if Sony writes or has written, say, an OpenGL implementation optimized for their hardware.
I'm not a big fan of the X-box, but I'm afraid that I disagree with several of the points you use in your argument against it.
Hard drives and Windows are both notoriously prone to failure.
I'll have you know that my Windows 2000 box has an uptime of 3 years, and my box running the yet to be released Windows ME has an uptime of 1 year.
I don't.
The argument for royalties is that it allows the console price to be lower, allowing more units to be sold, and theoretically allowing you to sell enough more units to offset the royalty.
The downside is that if a large chunk of the console revenue must be derived from software royalties, it must be made impossible to bypass the console company in the production of a title.
This forces them to resort to various copy protection and registered developer schemes, which open the door to all the back room scheming between publishers and the hardware vendor about shipping sequencing, and content aproval.
I would rather have a console that was six months less powerfull, but 100% completely open, and that anyone could press games for.
(Indrema has not disclosed me on their hardware.)
John Carmack