Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
You make it sound like COM, COM+, ActiveX were each complete revolutions that required the programmer to start from scratch, rather than providing additional functionality that builds on an existing model. To suggest that every new advance requires (at least) months of work to be junked is a bit of a stretch. I also question the presence of DDE on the first list as it's quite a different fish (given that everything else there is your good ol'e OLE family tree).
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"?
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