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Half-Life 2 Not On Xbox?
Thanks to Evil Avatar for pointing to a Puget Sound Business Journal story suggesting that Half-Life 2 may not come out for Xbox after all. This relatively obscure article has word from David Hufford of Microsoft that "As of now, Half-Life 2 is not going to be on the Xbox.. Valve is sending us mixed messages on that." Up to now, established sites such as Planet Half-Life have said of the sequel: "An Xbox port is very likely", but it looks like that may no longer be true. Update: 06/09 21:34 GMT by S : GameSpyDaily have got hold of Valve's Doug Lombardi, who is saying that Half-Life 2 is still planned for both PC and Xbox - it may be that either contract negotiations or simply misinformation is clouding the issue.
GamingNEXT - With the outstanding graphics that HL2 is using, what should gamers have, minimally, to run this game?
Gabe Newell - An 800 MHz P-III and a DX6 level hardware accelerator (e.g. TNT).
- GamingNEXT Interview, May 2003
The PS2 has a fairly unique architecture, but he GameCube is a Power PC with an ATI Radeon 8500 (ish) graphics chipset. The Cube is not supposed to be a big pain to write for.
;)
PowerPC is sometimes a simple port, sometimes a complete rewrite. Remember, there was never a port of HL to the Mac, either (though they did have someone working on it for some time before they trashed it).
However it is highly unlikely that HL2 could be ported to ANY of the consoles without major reduction in capabilities. Remember the Xbox is about equivalent to a 1GHz Celeron running a GeForce 3 Reference (pre-Ti) chipset. (its actual clock is 700Mhz but it gains some speed advantage due to some mainboard and memory enchancements)
Celerons lose their speed in the same places where the XBox gains it's speed, but in the end it doesn't really matter. Also, it's important to remember that a console port doesn't have to run at the highest PC resolutions (although most XBox games are supposed to support 1080i iirc). You also don't have nearly as much overhead on the XBox as you do on a normal PC, and don't have to worry about what people are running in addition to your game.
HL2's absolute minimum requirements (with nearly every detail setting lowered all the way) has been rumored to be in the 900Mhz GeForce 3 range. To play at anything remotely similar to the detail level of the E3 demonstration is going to require systems 2-3 times as powerful.
Someone else quoted something different elsewhere in this thread, and that at least seemed more substantiated, though I don't trust what Gabe says for much. We'll see when the game comes out what it requires on the PC. Consider, though, that the original HL had pretty low system requirements for it's time (in part due to the engine it was based on, even though they did a significant rewrite of that engine), while still having superior AI to every other FPS game that was out at the time, or even most of the games since.
It's time for a new generation of console players to learn what the last one did. Consoles will always fall behind top end PCs in terms of graphics performance. And given the delay between new console products you will generally have one year in which you can attempt to claim your console is more powerful than any PC when it comes to games (you'd be wrong, but you can get away with it) followed by 2-3 years of being obviously less advanced.
I've always been a huge PC gamer, but there's always going to be an advantage to playing on a console: the system is a known environment for the developer. What runs on a 700MHz PC w/ a high-end GF3 card is going to run significantly better ported to the XBox. PC game developers write games knowing that to get the widest possible audience they'll have to make their game flexible enough to run on the lowest possible system requirements, while still gaining something from higher-powered systems. Meanwhile, console developers only have to write their software to the restrictions of a fixed specification.
As someone that's done both semi-official and unofficial support for the first Half-life (first for Sierra through their message boards for Half-life, TFC, and the first HL expansion, second for PlanetFortress through their website (maintaining a technicallly-oriented FAQ and answering emails to the game-support email address)), there are so many things an end-user can have on their PC that affects game performance that it can get tiresome. If you have an AMD processor, an ATI graphics card, a non-Intel chipset with an Intel CPU, or Norton Anti-Virus is running, I wish you luck playing games (because all of these caused significant problems with Half-life at one time or another).
Of course you won't be spending as much money on hardware as PC gamers so there are some benefits.
Oh, and that, too. Instead of buying a graphics card every 6 months I've bought a new console every 6 months since the DreamCast started to fad
-PainKilleR-[CE]
"Seriously, though, my main problem with your kind of speculation is, well, that it's speculation."
Agreed, so here is some non-speculation. During the video of hl2 from e3 (the 500meg one thats been doing the rounds), the presenter can clearly be heard saying "The graphics of the source engine are based around shaders". Now, as i'm sure your aware, the 3rd Generation GFX card in the XBox is capable of supporting only the most simple vetex and fragment shaders, not ones which can support techniques such as "bump-mapped subdivision surfaces" (yes, another quote from the video). Just to be clear - whilst the XBox's gfx card can support these techniques, it cannot do so using shaders, it must rely on the fixed function pipeline and as such will be incapable of rendering the (jaw dropping) scenes we saw in the e3 videos.