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."

Comments

MS has failed once already with "Talisman"

[Thagg]

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

Re:Huge opportunity for MS

[ardor]

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.