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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."
Micrsofts plan is a "complete dominance of the market." This is new...
Because, you know, speculation about Microsoft taking over the world is sooo 90's.
Now is the time, if any, for people to start making games work in Linux as best as possible. If something isn't done soon, all the gaming manufacturers will start building games to work with this system and make them completely unusable in Linux.
Surely MS doesn't want to enable a lot of independent game developers...
...Complete domination is never good for the consumer (at least not often, because competition usually spurs innovation). However, I doubt Microsoft will dominate the video game market that easily. I wonder if it'll lead to better games, at least in the short run?
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Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
Is it just me, or are the folk at microsoft trying to live out some sick demented childhood fantast? "So what are we going to do this week brain?" "The same thing we do every week pinky - take over the world!" Agh
Hasn't it been readily apparent that MS can stand up like Ellsworth Toohey, admit their evil intent, and all we do is gasp and accept it?
How nice of them...trying to swallow another sector. All of you that bought an XBOX, and didn't mod it. For Shame... Everyone go buy a Gamecube now, even if you have one, buy a spare. Don't let M$ gain control of this market, speak with you wallet.
Ubuntu- Linux for human beings.
Microsoft is slowly learning in the console arena, but one lesson they absolutely need to do to make the XBox2 the dominant player is to get as far as possible from being a PC-Like system, as far away as possible from PC game ports, and keep every single game they can get their hands on exclusive for the life of that particular console if possible. Not just 3 months, but years. They also need to court Japanese developers, strike deals with the larger companies such as Square/Enix, get more games from KOEI, pay large sums for ATLUS to translate games specifically for them. They need niche RPG titles out the ass to pull in the anime geeks, they need to do a LOT to win the minds of all the Japanese gamers that ultimately drive more than half this market right now. And if they can get teams specifically for adding in Live! support to these devs games, its a good start.
It should be
"Gee, Bill what do you want to do tonight?"
"The same thing we do every night Steve. Try to take over the world!"
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Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
Who cares? Most of the truly innovative games were written by people and teams that made their own development system. Heck, SimCity was a development environment -- it started life as the in-house level editor for Raid on Bungling Bay.
Before the Xbox was released, Microsoft tried to sell Sony a development kit that would allow Sony (and their 3rd party developers) to develop games on a standard platform.
;).
If you read the book "Opening the Xbox", Bill Gates was pretty irritated and confused when Sony turned them down flat. Why would they turn down Microsoft? Oh, sure - it would also make these games easier to port to a MS based system in the future - but MS was trying to help Sony!
Anyway. Sony saw through the game. And while XNA might be the greatest thing in the world to folks who want to port games between the Xbox, the PC, the Pocket PC - it's probably not something that Sony and Nintendo give a big rats ass about.
That's not to say that Microsoft's plan is a bad one. When Thief III comes out, I'll probably get the Xbox version. I've got a Pentium 800 as my old "game" machine, and I haven't turned it on for about 6 months now (I made the OS X switch some time ago). The Gamecube, PS2 and Xbox let me play what I want and I don't have to spend $300 - $600 every 12 months to keep up my video card/ram/processor/motherboard/whatever.
MS probably realizes this; I'm willing to bet their seeing higher Xbox sales on Xbox/PC titles (such as Knights of the Old Republic). So for games, I'll expect to see more of their emphasis to the Xbox.
Which is kind of a problem - it's still a major money loser for MS. It could be a winner in the long run, but will that means they'll have to open it up a bit and start letting people use it as a PC like system, which could eat into their PC sales profits? That could be a dual edged sword, since that means people could get used to using a "console" as a computer.
Eh. Either way, I'll just keep my eye on the situation. The best games will rule (which looks to be Nintendo for the next 9-12 months, with some nice looking gems on the other platforms), and I'm not about to give up my Powerbook any time soon
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
There is going to be a lot in this interview that is going to be taken out of context however the thoughts this then brings is that it moves away from device dependance. Allard is really talking about taking MMO games away from Windows PC's and moving the functions to different devices. Most functions will work on the PC (There is no reason why this wont work on OS:X or *Nix) however simple things like trades could be done via a web interface or via your phone. As one who bought Gold of a Broker in UO This would have made it a lot easier to accomplish if i was at work when the broker was online. Just punch up the limited interface on the P900 or Palm or IPaq and off you go for the trade.
Just some food for thought about the possibilities.
The MyTh - I am a figment of the Imagination - [Im Probably even not here]
The article's author hints that Microsoft's XNA will almost be a "gaming OS". A set of standards that various consumer electronic companies can build consoles for.
This will bring to console gaming the unreliability of the Desktop PC. An often cited benefit Apple has over the PC platform is that it knows its hardware. There are no wild cards. Console game developers have been able to count on this until now. You test and test, on a given company's box and you know your good.
If XNA takes off, look for crashes, due to one Manufacturer cutting corners, or another trying to add a beefier new edition of some chip.
There are some things where standards are great, and being able to commoditize the hardware is a great benefit to consumers. On the other hand gamers, who as a whole have demonstrated a willingness to spend for top of the line systems every few years are probably not looking for a less expensive systems at the cost of quality.
No doubt odds are in favor of something like this winning the mass market. In the mass market, the commodity item always succeeds, VHS over Meta, PC over Mac, etc. _However_, one of the console system may yet survive this if they can succeed in filling a niche in for a superior gaming experience that only a few percent of the market care about and build a fiercly, loyal following. -- Just as Apple Computers exists today.
--Aaron Greenberg
I don't like the idea of Microsoft controlling gaming but maybe they're on to something. This could help small developers because they won't have to create a new game for every platform on a limited budget. I think it's an ingenious idea, I just wish it wasn't done with continued world domination in mind.
Currently, the PC games market is dying. Too many poor quality and poorly tested games, high cost of entry for decent performance, and low cost of entry for consoles have all taken their toll.
The console markets are flourishing. While there are still many poor quality games, they are fewer in quantity due to the extra cost involved in making console titles available (platform fees, development kits) as well as the certification requirements for each platform.
To be honest, Microsoft establishing a true "base line" for PC's with DXNext/Longhorn, creating a common controller standard and common API's between the Xbox and PC can only help the gaming consumer in the long run.
Currently, the Xbox API's handle several things that are basically "random" on the PC: save game handling, data caching, controller handling, patching, etc. By making those API's available to PC developers, PC gamers will start getting a consistent feel for games (My Saved Games are here; an update is available...BAM! done; I pop a disk in and it only takes up disk space while it's running.)
The PC Live service will most likely require that participating titles certify themselves, similar to how Gamespy works with titles to integrate their service into new titles.
The common controller standard will ensure a base set of functionality, allow controller manufacturers to utilize the same chipset for console and PC controllers (reducing their COGS), and give OSS projects a stable hardware target to support.
Besides, given that the API's will have to be public (ala DX) in order to propogate, it's not like an OSS version of the API's will be that hard to "WINE" about.
RomSteady - I came, I saw, I tested. GamerTag: RomSteady / http://www.romsteady.net
Jesus people! this is competition! It's good that these companies compete. If microsoft blows nintendo and sony out of the console market, then start complaining. last time I checked, both of those companies were still kicking Xbox's ass. I know the idea around here seems to be to bitch whenever microsoft does something, but in this case they're still trying to gain market share, not kick everyone out. I think these complaints are premature.
and no, any replies pointing out how microsoft has taken control of other markets in the past (really only windows and office) are not insightful, they're redundant!
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I'm serious about this, Microsfot lacks soul. I'd say that Nintendo has the most in the gaming industry, though in recent years they seem to be holding more and more to post successes instead of creating new things which as long as they do it well is not a problem in my book. Even Sony has more soul than MS, there is more heart in their products. One of my favorite games is Halo so don't get me wrong, I do believe MS can turn out good games. I really do doubt however that they will every really dominate in the field.
vampirical
Why is there an assumption that Linux won't be successful if high FPS games aren't available for it ?
I don't care to play games under Linux (as I don't play games in general, they just don't hold my attention for some reason (probably biological)), so I don't care whether commercial games are supported. To me, Linux is already successful, and has been since I first started using it in 1993, as it has done everything I've wanted it to do.
"Success" is a relative word, and is used to measure something against a set of criteria. Change any of those criteria, and the former "success" might become a failure.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Quoting the article:
J Allard: [...] Fast forward four or five years when every game is online
Maybe it's just me and my 20some-year gaming history, but I don't see single-player games going away anytime soon. Online games are fine if you have a few (or several) hours to blow, but if you just want something to relax with for 15 or 30 minutes I doubt that's what you're looking for.
Plus, of course, there's the entire commuting/riding/etc contingent. This may not be such a big deal in the US, where if you're moving, you're usually driving, but here in Japan, it's typical to have 1-2 hours of "dead time" a day on trains, buses and the like. Plenty of people play games during this time (one of the latest rages is "Gyakuten Saiban"--"Turnaround Court Case", I guess--and I can't decide whether that's a bad thing, but that's a different story); but who's going to go to all the bother of logging into an online service when they'll have to drop out as soon as they leave the train?
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.
I can't see why Microsoft are going to charge extortionate fees or demand additional royalties for using something like this. Look at the model for Visual Studio. Does it make development easier? Yes. Do MS expect royalties from distributables? No. Does it tie you in to using Windows? Yes. The purpose of XNA is to make it easier for people to create games on Microsoft platforms. MS then make money on the OS or, in the case of consoles, from the sale of the game itself (just like Playstation get money from every PS game sold). Seems pretty transparent to me and hopefully good news for the smaller development studios.
I'm not so sure. The game industry is having trouble releasing new titles. Now it is more or less accepted by industry that the platforms can do just about anything you need them to do. More fancy graphics, more FPS, more... Whatever, is no longer the issue execpt in them of lead time. It's the game content that matters because people are no longer impressed by incomplete games. As far as i am concerned, if M$ can deliver good game, why not? Their attempt to "control" the gaming market through a techological gimmik is funny at best and shouldn't be something to worry about.
When Sony and EA have huge market share it's okay, but as soon as MS wants to be competitive it's sinister? They have to make a profit in gaming or get out and this is just another step in that path. Would it be better to just have Sony or Nintendo running gaming or have strong competition?
Not really. They're still *very* far behind Sony as far as installed base goes, and I think they're still behind Nintendo by a small margin - though with current sale rates that won't be for long.
But you say "kicking ass" like it's a definitive win for them, which it most definitely is not. The original PlayStation was Sony "kicking a significant amount of ass" back in the day. MS hasn't come close to that sort of coup.
± 29 dB
What's the deal with being online?
Online games are huge but usually equire enormous time commitment. Many occasional gamers like to spend an hour or two a week (say) playing games. With most MMORGs or online FPSs this is impossible, you either play all the time or not at all, especially since there is a monthly fee associated with it. If you play occasionally you either get your butt kicked all the time or you can't keep up with your friends.
My theory is that online multiplayer games will saturate their audience pretty soon, if it hasn't happened already. How many MMORGs can you play at once?
1) How would it be different from Windows? If it's just a set of standards, protocals, and software that can run on a ton of different types of hardware, how exactly is it different from Windows, or Linux? Is the console release cycle replaced by incremental PC-style upgrades? If so, I'd have to mark that has a huge disadvantage. I do not want to have to upgrade my console system. I don't particularly that every 2-5 years I drop another $150-200 on a new console and peripherals, if I don't have to spend $500 and build an entire machine every several years. The beauty of console systems is that they Just Work, no having to check "system requirements", no driver conflicts, ect. Far from creating a "standard" for developers to follow to improve game stability, ect., they now are encouraged to write code that may run on multiple platforms.
2. Do we really need to play Halo on a cellphone, hand-held game console, PDA and refridgerator? For some games I could imagine that having some functionality/interaction with the actual game would be nice, but I would fear this would become a serious distraction to developers who often seem to have a difficult time just creating a single stable, fun game. Even with a set of "standards" being introduced, it's more work for the developer to build the kitchen sink into their game. I question how many gamers would actually have the time and inclination to take advantage most of these features... is it going to increase sales of games that much? I fear it could eat into developer resources that should be spent creating a good game. It shouldn't be that hard to develop a good game for a three different platforms as long as each of those platforms don't vary in terms of hardware or software configuration at all (as is currently the case.)
3. Do we really trust Microsoft to do a good job? Microsoft has a poor track record for producing stable and secure products. Though I've been skeptical of the idea of trojans, ect. that spread through gaming consoles up until now, I would not be surprised if in several years we saw a worm reap havoc because too many people didn't run "XFS Update" often enough.
4. Is this legal? Microsoft is a monopoly. DirectX is a part of Windows, which is essentially the subject of their monopoly. Outright admitting that they are attempting to dominate the market with a standard that they own, and using their existing "clout" with DirectX, ect. seems to me to raise a few red flags. What I find ironic is the guy talks about the consumers not having a choice--since when has that ever been a concern of Microsoft's? And I do think I have a coice. For console systems, I can choose a GameCube, or a PlayStation 2, or an X-Box. On any of those systems I can choose from a multitude of games from a multitude of developers. Or I can choose to game on a PC (which I can build myself or buy from any number of OEMs), running Windows or Linux. Or I can choose to game on a Mac. Is this not choice? If a substantial number of these options were replaced by XNS, just how is my choice broadened? I do not understand.
Not really trying to be a Microsoft basher, but I'd be expressing some serious doubts even if it were Nintendo (and I'm something of a fanboy) proposed something like this. The fact that it's Microsoft makes me even more skeptical.
Dominating the gaming market is probably MS's biggest opportunity right now to grow it's market share beyond PCs and operating systems.
The reason for this is simple: Microsoft's proprietary graphics and sound APIs are lightyears ahead of rivals and open source.
Windows destroys Linux when it comes to 3D graphics and sound. It's a combination of hardware support and mature APIs. Windows also destroys the Mac on price/performance ratio because of open hardware.
Now Microsoft wants to essentially take the mature APIs and hardware support that they have under Windows and box that up into a universal gaming standard that can be licensed to Sony, Nintendo, etc. MS also gets to write and sell development tools for this standard and to license the right to distribute games using it. So, they get to collect a toll in three places:
1) Development tools
2) Game distribution
3) Licensing the API to console makers and/or other computer companies like Apple.
Best of all... all three of these places are invisible to the consumer! This is another plus for MS, as they have engendered a lot of ill will by collecting such conspicuous taxes on the IT world with their name and logo plastered everywhere. Nobody likes an egomaniac, and getting "behind the scenes" is one way MS could keep revenue coming in and at the same time shed some of this image through simple invisibility.
If the OSS world wants a piece of the gaming market, then people need to really get up off their butts and start developing a mature 3D graphics and sound API. There's a good start in place in the form of ALSA and OpenGL2, but the follow-through needs to be there. Getting 3D to work right and perform well under X is still painful. It has to work "out of the box" folks. It may already be too late.
This has very little to do with porting games at all -- XNA doesn't particularly make it much easier to port a game to a different platform. The author of the article on Eurogamer makes some far fetched comments to that effect; which seems to indicate he has no idea what development is like, or what XNA will really provide.
The whole point of XNA is provide a solid common library, which focuses on common game development tasks. This allows different platforms to very easily interoperate, but does not make it significantly easier to port games to other platforms. For instance, making a set of games that share the same game world and are all Live aware becomes quite simple, but porting a Xbox version of that same game to PC does not suddenly become a simple task.
I don't see how people are jumping to the conlusion that providing XNA and reference designs is economically infeasible. Certainly Microsoft would like to create a reference design platform in the future. Yes, Microsoft thinks this can start with with XNA. Yes, it's a good idea.
The whole pointing in having a reference design is to increase interoperability, reduce development time, and reduce development cost. If another company makes a device using a reference design, it won't take your suggested 3 months to port a game to run on this new device -- it will take zero months, zero weeks, zero days, zero hours... no time at all since it will run on that device immediately.
You don't have to rewrite anything in a PC game to have your game run a different manufacturer of GeForce 4 cards -- it works on the reference design boards, it works on Asus boards, it works on Hercules Guillemot boards, and it works on everyother board based on the NVIDIA reference design. Does this fact suddenly make NVIDIA foolish for abandoning their board manufacturing business in favour of performing just the design tasks and chip fabrication? ATI seems to be following a similar plan these days as well -- platform and reference design work.
If Bob decides to buy and use a reference design for MasterBlasterSuperConsole, he's essentially creating a MasterBlasterSuperConsole -- not another platform. Say the original MasterBlasterSuperConsole designers still sell their version of the MasterBlasterSuperConsole and everyone likes Bob's MasterBlasterSuperConsole better. The consumers proceed to buy more of Bob's than the original by a large margin. Are the designers of the original sitting on the street crying? No, they're taking in a killing from Bob's MasterBlasterSuperConsole since he has to pay the original designers a very significant percentage of his profits to them. Is Bob upset? Not really, he didn't have to design much -- just copy the reference design and add a few tweaks here and there.
There are a lot of companies that operate in this fashion -- ARM in one of the largest microprocessor developers in the world without even selling microprocessors. IBM also licences out it's microprocessor designs to other companies (the Power architecture seen in PowerPC, amongst others, is a good example). Ericsson isn't loosing any sleep from becoming increasingly a design house, providing specifications and reference designs to companies that specialize in mass production. There has literally thousands of companies that do business in this very fashion with great success.
Microsoft and Sony have been doing this for decades in various different industries -- it's one of the reasons they have been so exceptionally successful. I wholely agree with Allard, it's just a matter of when this will happen.
...are standardization and reliability.
Console graphic programmers know exactly what hardware they will be dealing with, and what that hardware is capable of. They can test and tweak to refine the framerate and level of detail, and push the hardware to its limits.
Likewise, consoles and their games do not require configuration, multiple driver versions, or myriad other things that PC gamers need to deal with.
Having a dozen different consoles that support this standard would mean that games that perform well on some might not do so well on others. Developer testing and standards adheretion should rule out complete incompatibility, but it would still be no small deal of trouble for the consumer.
But then, the consumer is never high on Microsoft's list of concerns. The hardware at this point is largely irrelevant; while the leap from the graphically inadequete Nintendo 64 and Playstation to their next generation counterparts was a marked improvement, the generation after will benefit from no such revolution.
Graphic evolution only props up consoles for so long; eventually the graphics become largely ignored, and the gameplay and art design take the forefront.
I have been on a retro kick lately, and playing 8 and 16 bit games. In those days game designers had just enough machine to have decent graphics but not enough for a game to rely on them without anything interesting behind them, although plenty of games tried.
While graphics have advanced quite rapidly in the past decade, gameplay is progressing much more slowly. Which certainly makes sense; whereas art is a factor of time and hardware, game design is a much more complicated beast to wrangle with.
Hopefully those in charge will realize that graphics are nearing a glass ceiling, and will sllow more freedom to game designers to make interesting and unique gameplay experiences, rather than relying on the old assumption that polygon and texture layers directly relate to sales.
Renderware is billed as a "universal game engine", more or less. Actually, it's the physics engine from Mathengine, an AI engine from Knyogon, a rendering engine, and an audio engine, which more or less play together. There's also a generic level editor, a build tool, and a configuration management system for all the game assets. All the major target platforms are supported.
In general, none of those components are considered the best in their class. When you look at the titles supported, you don't see any of the top 10 games. But there are time-to-market advantages in buying them all your tools from one vendor. That's the sort of thinking that attracts Microsoft.
So if you want to see what XNA would be like, check out Renderware.
"The first thing we've learned about Xbox in this dimension is that the average number of rooms in Xbox visits is about 1.85, meaning that a kid will bring it down to the big screen TV when his dad's on a business trip for a week, or bring it over to their mum's house for the weekend or his friend's house for a sleepover, so the console moves."
Going to put on my Microsoft-is-evil hat here and ask, how the heck do they know this? A possibility: when connecting to xbox live, it sends the id of the box along with which video connections you are using. Jimmy's xbox was using analog video yesterday, now it's connected on component video, he must have changed to his dad's plamsa screen.
1.85 rooms... what a bizarre stat to pull out of your ass and throw out there.
Once again, this Microsoft representative is touting choice of hardware platform as a primary advantage of XNA. But in the past Microsoft have also claimed that Windows gives the customer the choice, which is obviously a blatant lie in the same context.
But imagine for a second if Microsoft really did end up getting something like XNA standardised. Then we might see implementations of it on other platforms, even if such implementations are technically illegal (think MP3.) It would make game development cheaper again, and knock-offs of the development environment for these standard games might even open up the market for hobby game development again, which has been more or less shut off for years.
The idea is intriguing but I can't see Microsoft successfully implementing what it looks like they're describing. I suspect that at best, they will tie the damn thing to Direct3D, and everything will fall apart from there.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Wasent the MSX standard in Japan just this - a set of standards that companies could build their game- system to play MSX cartridges.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Online games are huge but usually equire enormous time commitment. [...] If you play occasionally you either get your butt kicked all the time or you can't keep up with your friends.
I'm having exactly that experience in FFXI (which, FWIW, isn't as bad as others since it doesn't have general PvP). To be honest, most of the reason I still play at all is because of friends who also play--even if I can't play with them, I can pretend the game doubles as an IRC client and chat with them while I play with others. And as long as the monthly fee is low enough, it's ignorable, at least for those of us with stable incomes.
Which is why I think there's still room for at least a few more online games. Certainly, any one player will only play a couple of online games at most, but just like there are gazillions of IRC networks and multiple IM networks, different people will be interested in different games.
(That said, I still don't think online games are the ultimate form of gaming--though I have to admit getting kids to interact with other people through online games is probably better than having them playing alone . . .)
How can so many people say "gaming is dead"? Are you that ignorant? Gaming revenues have been going up exponentially for the past 3/4ths of a decade, surpassing the movie industry long ago, and getting bigger and bigger. While over the past couple of years we have seen the game industry try to produce massive numbers of titles that lack quality, (they are exploring the market) it is certainly going the other way, right now. Look at upcoming games....RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 will be the first truly good one of the series, Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 are coming out, MMORPG's are becoming mainstream, and more. To say gaming is dead, or even dying, is just stupid. Idiotic to say that PC gaming is dead or dying, too - PC's will be able to run games in a superior manner across the board forever, due to the nature of consoles and computers. Looking at what MS is doing with this, they of course are the first ones to see it - games will all be made for the PC, then ported to consoles. It is the easiest way....you program the best graphics, sound, everything for PC games, then you can downscale for consoles. Think this through, people. Microsoft will become huge in this arena, and everyone will bitch about them having a monopoly, because they were smart enough to see where things were going. Sound like a familiar history lesson? :)
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).
Fr0dicus meet sarcasm, sarcasm, fr0dicus. I'll leave you two to get acquainted.
To a developer, easy cross-platform compatibility is great. But compatibility among platforms in different markets is priceless.
I love free stuff. If I can get cross-platform development for free (or close), I'll take it. The ability to create a substantial application and have it run well on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux means I can reach a greater audience. But what XNA promises is almost impossible to resist: the ability to develop a substantial game that runs on your desktop, in your livingroom, and on your keychain -- three large markets that do not directly compete.
Applications drive an operating system; a stack of exceptional programs give consumers a reason to buy your OS. A complaint I've long had with Palm is that they haven't made it easier to develop for Palm OS. Microsoft gives its development environment away for free. In fact, it's possible to develop simple games concurrently for Windows Desktop and Pocket PC. If XNA can make it possible for a small studio such as mine to develop our more complex offerings concurrently for Windows and Pocket PC, will I care about Palm OS, Mac OS, or Linux?
What I'd like to see from companies such as Apple and PalmSource are environments like Torque, which makes it possible to write for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux by abstracting each environment. But Torque is really an ad-hoc solution (in both senses of the term); it's not a hollistic system, and it's not supported by the OS vendors. Though an awkward combination, if it were possible to develop substantial applications for Mac OS, Palm OS, and Windows, I might. But if XNA allows me to develop substantial applications for Windows, Pocket PC, and the Xbox concurrently -- three different, juicy markets -- that's even better.
We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.
It wants to own the entire standard of gaming across every platform.
Microsoft's managers still hang on to the silly dream that they can create a single platform that works for everybody. They can't. First, technically, people have needs and interests that are far too diverse to be served by any single platform. Second, even if it was technically feasible, any market like that is far too large not to attract competition--that's, after all, the purpose of a free market economy.
The only way any company can maintain dominance in a market like Microsoft does is through monopolistic practices. Microsoft could get away with that once because they succeeded when people didn't understand what was happening--but that isn't going to work again, under the scrutiny of competitors and anti-trust enforcement.
Well that's a little out of context. This whole topic is about gaming, and therefore Linux's success in gaming. I suggest, in order to make this more useful for you, that gaming has a spill on effect into new markets.
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.
Apple tries very hard at the same tactic - ever wonder why there are so many Macs in schools? Because Apple practically gives them away there.
If Linux was the premiere gaming OS, and only lamerz used Windows for gaming (not the case at the moment), Linux proliferation in single PC families would dramatically increase. Imagine if 80% of homes with PC's were running Linux, because the best gaming experience was on Linux. We can then also imagine a change in the reputation of Linux in other PC industries.
I suggest, then, that Linux would experience more success than currently if it were a better gaming platform.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
The problem I have is with the game companies themselves because making money from games and having a constant supply of good quality games are mutually exclusive.
For starters, I don't understand why there is a necessity to constantly re-invent the wheel and create gaming engines from scratch just about each time a new game is released. Surely it would be better to throw out the source code to current gaming engines to the Internet community to see what enhancements get added as a result - sure, keep the level design, textures, etc. for a specific commercial game that uses that engine under wraps so that, as a game company, you can make money from it.
One advantage that consoles have over a PC is that developers for a console platform must constantly "push the envelope" to get the console to do more and more as time goes on - this, in turn, creates better, more efficient coding. On the PC, the expectation is that users simply upgrade hardware to meet the requirements of a new game, no games developers get long enough with a particular, say, graphics chipset to fully understand what they can get it to do and, as a result, we, the end users, end up with sloppily coded games that need constant upgrades to get them to work properly.
My point is that we need a return to the good old days of the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum & Amiga when it was possible for "bedroom programmers" to create good quality games. Sure, games were much smaller then but that's why game development environments like XNA, SDL, etc. exist now in order to cut down the development times. What would really put games development back into the hands of single programmers or small groups of game designers, is having access to the core engines as well so that the most important aspect of game design, the initial good idea for a game design, can become tangible much easier.
Incidentally, I don't, for one minute, expect this to happen because there are far too many concerns about making money (which is why money and good games are mutually exclusive in my view) but it would be good to see the games buyers become a lot more discerning when it comes to purchasing games.
Sure, we all own games that we feel were worth the money and that provide us with good entertainment but I guarantee most game players have spent far more money on disappointing games than good ones.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
but i really feel that the console market is different to the PC one in alot of ways, and maybe MS (having not done so well in it) are trying to change it into something they think they know, and have more experience in (i.e. the PC market). all the way that article, that is what was running through my mind.
the thing about the console market is that there is more soul in the games than you will find in PC's (as a rule).
i sometimes feel that console games are more like a collection than pc games - in the same way that a music collector will pay a premium for a rare cd, a games collector will pay for a rare game. good examples of this would some classics for that most ill-fated of consoles, the saturn. you can't pick up Panzer dragoon saga or Radiant silvergun for 5 in a bargin bin.
the point is, there is more to games than just the number of polygons that can be generated, or the crispness of the graphics - it's hard to define, but in some ways i think that the more experienced console game makers have it in spades. AFAIK, gamecube is much less powered than PS2 or XboX, but has still done well enought to lead to talk of GC2
oh, and did you notice that at E3, sony made a big thing about how PSP would be so powerful it could do all this shiny stuff, whereas nintendo tended to focus more on the games they had created. the specs of the DS weren't as important as the software - all sony seemed to promote was the spec.
For instance, Splinter Cell. Playable on console, unplayable on PC. You had to click a mouse button to go forward.
WHere did you get that from? I only played through Splinter Cell last month, and you certainly didn't have to hold down a mouse button to move. Can't say I had any problems playing with keyboard + mouse, it all felt pretty natural to me.
Could of course be that they think their is a market, there isn't, could be they think it will win them customers, it doesn't. OR just maybe these companies don't enjoy they idea of being locked onto a OS made by a company that is DIRECTLY competing with them and has a very long history of wiping out competition.
It has far less to do with promoting linux as not ending up in the pockets of Microsoft.
For now DirectX is pretty open and you have the half-life people saying that the PC is for them more profitable because of the lack of license fees wich are needed for console titles. If MS every comes to truly own the gaming world how long do you think this will last?
You are living in a dream world. Small independent game companies are going bust. The Xth rehash of ancient games does NOT count. It is the orignal new stuff that is getting more and more owned by the BIG companies. Companies that can afford a string of money losing titles without going out of business. Would you enjoy a future where games are owned by only the big boys? I wouldn't.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Online gaming isn't restricted to MMORPGs. Online play includes any sort of network gaming, like deathmatches or racing with a bunch of random people. Basically, anything where a second person can pick up a controller and play with you at home can (well, should) be capable of being played online.
Sony really, really need to do something about the quality of their tools. I've spent the last two years on a game that runs on the XBox and PS2. The XBox tools are just amazing -for example you can click on a pixel and see a dissasembly of the shader that produced it.
:(
The Sony tools are hideous. Well, the debugger has a nice graphical frontend provided by a third party and is fairly slick and fast compared to Visual Studio, but the compiler and libraries provided are terrible - a patched up gcc 2.9.5 which has a prediliction for internal errors when the array indexing operator [] is used creatively , and that doesn't always optimise away empty constructors. And the libraries provided - at least initially were slow, and crufty and not suitable for game use. At least now, two years after the release of the PS2, Sony provides some decent middleware.
They MUST get developer tools right from the off with the PS3 - especially if it has 8 CPU's. I really, really hope they do. I'd hate to see my market swallowed by the Beast. At present it's economical to develop for the PS2 without needing a single Windows liscence. I hope it stays that way
/usr/games/fortune > ~/.signature
Sorry, I wasn't aware that the Xbox was actually doing well in some places. I live in Japan, where the Xbox is selling about as well as, say, cowpies. The most recent sales data I found was here; the PS2 and GBA are running about neck-and-neck, both beating the Xbox by about a factor of 100 (yes, one hundred). In recent weeks the Xbox is facing a serious challenge from the PSOne.
So maybe Microsoft can establish an American standard, but no way are they in shape to take on Sony here.
Because alot of people who like linux are gamers
i mean take myself as an example
i have windows on my primary machine for the sole reason that i am a gamer
if games worked on Linux i would never install windows again
and id say that there are a lot of people who are in the same situation so with that in mind making linux better for gaming will make it more successful because you win over the gamers who dislike windows
Get one of these, Sony actually have a relatively inexpensive kit to get you started it includes full documentation, code samples and libraries to get you started . The only thing they wont give away is how to crack the CD/DVD protection. But hell this kit is available to anyone which , in my mind shows that Sony are much more "Homebrew" friendly (by actually selling this kit) than any of the other console manufacturers.
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Nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
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.
Sony is a Japanese company. Nintendo is a Japanese company. For all they have international branches, you damn well better believe the Japanese market still has importance.
If anything, I'd say Microsoft is tapping the market of people who don't play the kind of games available on the Sony/Nintendo(/Sega) systems, so I doubt Sony or Nintendo have anything to worry about anyway. I have no problem with Microsoft going after their own market. After all, the majority of games released on Japanese consoles have been from Japanese publishers--who tend to publish with a Japanese audience in mind--so if Microsoft can get its hands on Western publishers, I wouldn't be surprised if its games were more widely accepted in the West.