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Microsoft's Real Plan For XNA Gaming Domination?
h0tblack writes "While many have heard about the XNA 'game software development platform' from Microsoft's announcements at GDC earlier this year, the full scope of their plans are only just becoming clear. Eurogamer has a surprisingly candid interview with J Allard covering the latest plans from Redmond. XNA isn't a rehash of DirectX tools for the Xbox2, PC and WinCE devices after all, it's a full-on assault on the gaming world, with the prize being complete dominance of the market. The site also has a BitTorrent of the interview, since it was originally recorded in video form."
Microsoft has tried to revolutionize the gaming world through radical software redesign once before, in the mid-to-late 90's, with a project called Talisman. Microsoft had assembled a team of CG scientists that ripped the heart out of the industry, and they put them to work on this project.
The idea of Talisman was that each frame of a game is very much like the next one. In fact, rather than render the next frame from scratch, it might be possible to do projection of the previous frames image to get the next frame. Even if this couldn't be done for the whole image, it could certainly be done for part of it. For example, in a flight simulator, even if the ground is not flat, it is piecewise flat, and those pieces could be 2D-transformed from one frame to the next without the expense of full 3D rendering.
Microsoft hired the best people in the field of DVE (digital video effects) including Steve Gabriel and Alvy Ray Smith, almost certainly to work on this project. Steve Gabriel built the Ampex ADO, the first high-quality digital video effects machine, in the early 80's. Alvy Ray Smith wrote the Siggraph paper on 2-pass transforms, the foundation upon which the ADO is built.
Well. It turns out that rendering texture-mapped polygons can be done very very quickly indeed, and the analysis necessary to "save" time using the Talisman ideas was exceedingly complex and expensive. In the best case, Talisman might have sped things up by a factor of 2 -- about six months time given the fervid pace of graphics board development.
I don't think of this as particularly reassuring, though -- Microsoft usually fails a couple of times before achieving domination. Perhaps Talisman was Rev 1, and XBOX is Rev 2...
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
If your into FPS you know how long it's been since a decent shooter has been made by one of the "old school" recognized giants of the field. We are hungry for new victims!
Id has never been the same since they lost that maniac Romero. He needed to be reigned in but not fired. Without his eccentric edge their company lost about 90% of their charisma and talent.
Sierra somehow created a game that was even better than the original Quake, and has yet to recover. It's like Lucas trying to create a film as good as The Empire Strikes Back. It can't realisticly be done without an AMAZING effort.
Looking Glass seemed to be the last glimmer of hope but they buckled soom after their incredible Thief series ( now in the less the capable hands of Ion Storm).
If Microsoft, the company responsible for making dial up networking work so smoothly with Quake making it the FIRST FPS being played by tens of Thousands online, can do a better job at cranking out games, so be it.
Microsoft only got into the console industry because it can smell a good ripoff and Sony/Nintendo/Sega and all the other console designers have been doing it for years with no complaints. When Pac-Man came out for Atari and cost $60 back in 1980 nobody said a word when it didn't look a thing like the arcade game. It was all we had and we loved it because the alternative was spending $60 every other week at the arcade.
If Microsoft can meet the average gamers lust for blood then we will honor them.
Its called OpenGL and its cross plaform.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
You're wrong. It is not difficult to create 3D programs in Linux. Just use SDL or ClanLib and you're set. It is in fact just as easy as programming OpenGL in Windows. I'm doing this right now, coding OpenGL stuff in Anjuta, and it is doing very well. And, I have a Radeon 9600...
As for 3D hardware audio, you may be right. However, I dunno how the ALSA support for this is.
And, it is not true that DirectGraphics is light years ahead. See the features of OpenGL 1.5 and compare it with Direct3D9 - there is no "better" one, it's a draw.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
DDE
.NET
...again.
OLE
OLE2
COM
ActiveX
COM+
MSDNA
All essentially the same technology, but just different enough to make the PHBs think those new little clicky icons were worth the upgrade, and also different enough to require the programmers to cram several months/years work in a toilet and start over.
WinG
DirectX 1
DirectX 2
DirectX 3
DirectX 4
DirectX 5
DirectX 6
DirectX 7
DirectX 8
DirectX 9
XNA
Same thing. Oh, and game developers: you know all those tool$ that work real well with those half-million $$$$$$ DirectX-based engines? They'll be clogging the toilet too.
Congratulations! Time to start over...
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I'm not so sure that'll happen. DirectX is pretty much standard in the Windows gaming world (and due to MS's dominance, the PC gaming world is pretty much synonymous with the Windows gaming world), but that didn't stop iD using OpenGL and making a linux version of QuakeIII - it didn't stop UT2003 and UT2004 being released for linux, nor did it hinder the release of Neverwinter Nights or Sim City.
Granted, linux isn't exactly the OS of choice for the hardened PC gamer, but I don't see any cause for doom and gloom.
Actually, Apple has had an API for gaming developers for a long time. It's called Game Sprockets.
http://developer.apple.com/games/sprockets.html
Unfortunately it seems to be only available to OS 9 and below. There doesn't seem to be a version for OS X. AFAIK, Apple now encourages developers to use OpenGL for their games development - OpenGL is very well supported by the platform. However, most developers probably would like to see more resources available.
As I recall, right before Jobs came back to Apple via NeXT, Apple was trying really hard to woo back gaming developers, as at that time, pretty much everyone was jumping ship. That's when sprockets were developed. I remember reading it in a gaming mag circa 1997.
-B
When you look at the titles supported, you don't see any of the top 10 games.
You mean "besides GTA III"?
To a small extent, the success of games on Windows has put a lot of Windows PC's into the home, and by extension of familiarity, a lot of Windows PC's on managers desks and throughout companies.
From my experience, the machines at work dictate what people buy for home, not the other way around. In fact, a very large club the DOS/Windows market used against Macs and other systems were that they were "toy" systems focused mainly on gaming, whereas the PC was a "business" system that tacked on gaming as an afterthought.
At least they didn't mod you Insightful.
The current version, DirectX 9.0b, is backwards compatible all the way back to version 3, or thereabouts.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
OpenGL does graphics (2D and 3D). Sound is done through OpenAL (which, like OpenGL, is cross platform). Network abstraction is provided by OpenPlay, which is open source under the APSL. Movie and music playback is done by QuickTime, which runs under Windows and MacOS but nowhere else (although you can play the media files with other MPEG-4 implementations, if you pay a license fee). Force feedback and HID stuff for OS X is fairly platform specific, although you can always use SDL if you want cross platform code. Seems to me like Apple have done a lot to make game development easy. If you write games for Windows, you are going to have a headache porting them. If you write games for the Mac then you are going to find it very easy to port to Windows, and quite easy to port to Linux/BSD (which don't have large enough userbases to justify a large porting expense, but if it's just a couple of days of coder time then the extra sales from having a single boxed set for all platforms would probably cover the expense).
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