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Sony Endorsing Open Graphics Format For PS3
News for nerds writes "At the tech talk as part of the forthcoming SIGGRAPH 2004 conference on August 11th, an open graphics file format for the interactive 3D [videogame] industry called COLLADA will be unveiled by Sony Computer Entertainment. COLLADA is supported by major 3D toolchain companies including Alias, Criterion, Discreet, Emdigo, Novodex, Softimage and Vicarious Visions. If you combine this with the recent news that Sony has joined Khronos Group to support OpenGL/ES, OpenMAX, OpenVG and OpenML, it seems evident that Sony is quietly fighting back against the loudly trumpeted Microsoft XNA (/. coverage) with its plan of an open game development platform."
Sony, known for pushing proprietary interfaces, is backing open standards. Pure pragmatism at its finest - Microsoft is pushing a closed standard, Sony wants to fight Microsoft, and the only effective way to do that is to be the opposite of Microsoft. Hence, make it as easy as possible to port games to the PS3. Of course, Microsoft is making it as easy as possible to port Windows games to Xbox, but that's just more lock-in as we have all come to know and hate it.
This is great news for everyone, because a giant like sony supporting open standards can only be good for us, so long as they don't pull a microsoft-like embrace and extend. So far though, Sony has been pretty good about that, choosing instead to create their own completely separate competiting formats when they want to try to kill a technology, which is infinitely preferable in my mind.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Blue lasers, now this... Lets all not forget about ATRAC3. Yet more proof that Sony is indeed afraid of the Xbox and the next gen Xbox.
Is this something along the lines of a graphics metafile format for 3d, or does it go beyond that?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
One of the major issues (or so I've read) about developing games for the PS1 and PS@ has been that they're difficult and expensive to develop for. Hopefully this will decrease development times with some form of cooperative graphics system, and thereby reduce costs and speed production.
The additional upside to this is that decreased development costs is good for the bottom line, which would decrease the likelihood that any given game publisher will go out of business, seeing as how they seem to die off with alarming regularity. And the upshot of this is that longer-lived publishers tend to increase the quality of their products over time thanks to experience.
Or maybe they'll just blow the money on ale and whores.
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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.
Because programmers enjoy the challenge of pushing metal to the limit. And for those people who have the skills and experience to do such work, companies are willing to pay extremely good money. Whenever a team finishes a project, everyone already knows at least ten things they could do better or would like to add to improve the title.
Plus rewriting an engine from scratch helps keep a clean, while getting rid of any crufty glue code that may have crept in during the previous project. Not forgetting that the hardware is constantly changing. Look at the evolution of the OpenGL extensions: from matrix blending to vertex programs and from register combiners to fragment programs.
Most of the major titles reuse their development tools (racing titles, sports) and just add new features. Audio, image and compression libraries only need to be written once.
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.
"Bedroom programmers" haven't gone away, they're writing open source games. If you have a Linux system, have a look at all the open-source games available (either under kde-toys or at freshmeat.org).
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As I understand it, the video game industry once lost consumer confidence because of low quality games. If the PS3 market is flooded with a lot of games, which includes a lot of low quality ones, then the PS3 could get hurt badly.
I kinda don't want to see the PS3 fail, since I've always liked the playstation a little better than the rest. I wouldn't want it to fall to something like that.
It's not gonna happen. (Not that you seem to believe it yourself)
The first movies were made by the Lumiere brothers, who invented the projector.
The first photograph was unincidentally taken by Niepce who unsurprizingly was the inventor of the first camera.
It follows naturally that the first computer games were written by computer hobbyists and programmers.
I believe however, that the day of programmers as the major creative force in computer games is over. Like the cinematograph and the camera, the computer has been accepted as an artists' tool and computer games as a medium. It's part of the entertainment industry now. And with that comes the high-budget, polished productions that cost money and bars the entry of amateurs.
Sure, now and then a small independent film made on grainy 16mm film unexpectedly breaks through and receives a cult following, and I expect something similar for amateur computer games in the future.
But the days when a guy sitting in his basement could produce a major computer game hit is simply over.
Serious Sam. Ok not exactly a small venture, but not Multimillion dollar Hollywood financed either.
Hell, you checked out shockwave.com lately? Lots of games from small time developers, actually selling! (same games are on games.yahoo.com and every other site).
Actually, I can't think of a single game genre that DOES demand a huge well funded team. A team sure, but five or six people really is sufficent, given that those five or six people are all very talented. This is no different from days of old, when it just took one or two talented programers to make a game, just scaled up a bit, (more than 4 or 16 colors on the screen at a time.
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DirectX (and XNA) detail more than just graphics.
You also have sound, storage management, process control, peripheral access (joysticks, etc.), and communications (broadband, dialup, etc).
To truly be an open standard, all of above need to be addressed.
And of course, once the above are agreed upon, deploying those same games on Linux becomes possible, without any added significant development costs.
(I specifically did not mention content protection)
If Sony (or any other company) releases free development environments then they should be applauded because at least it gives anyone the opportunity of turning a good idea into a tangible game or piece of software.
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.
Thats what Sony does. While Nintendo has fewer games their quality meets Nintendo's standards. Sony will let just about anyone create a game for the PSX, and thats what made it wildly popular. Independent labels (ok, not bedroom programmers) were able to get into a market with the big guys and thats where we saw innovation. Then again, among the hundreds of games for the PSX we're going to have a ton of crap. You've got to take the good with the bad.
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.
Most PC games license engines. A few years ago there were really only a copule of engines being used for FPS style games at least. I cant count how many games I've played on the Quake3 engine.
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
id gives the source away to its older games. If it didnt, the amazing port of Quake to Pocket PC would not be possible. I cant wait for the source to quake 3 to be released!
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.
"Bedroom programmers" are still able to make good games, but not by themselves anymore, and they're not really games, they're called mods, or TC's and they're one of the things that will get your foot in the door in the gaming industry. Take a look at the wildly popular Half-Life mod Counter-Strike. I know tons of people who bought HL just for this mod, which started as a hobby project by a VT student (someone correct me if it was another university).
Incidentally, I don't, for one minute, expect this to happen because there are far too many concerns about making money
If you want to make games, then by all means do so. Nobody is expecting you to code away an awesome engine, draw fantastic graphics and models, and design interesting levels all by yourself. Get the doom3 SDK when it comes out and spend a week RTFMing and experimenting. Get on a project or start your own, maybe it will get popular, maybe it will be mentioned on slashdot, maybe you'll get picked up by a game company, I dont know, but I do know that complaining on slashdot about how its not like the old days isnt going to get you very far.
but I guarantee most game players have spent far more money on disappointing games than good ones.
Thats why theres suprnova and usenet. Its called try before you buy. or just buy the game and if it sucks take it back and say you didnt agree to the EULA. I played Call of Duty, which was awesome. Finished it and wanted more WWII action, so i bought metal of honor, big waste of money, took it back, said i didnt agree, no questions.
Now dont get me wrong, im not encouraging piracy, just dont waste your hard earned cash on crap, its common sense. support the developers and become one if you so wish. I for one will be buying doom3 the day it comes out. I'm not going to bother with a demo, I'm not going to pirate it, I'm going to *proudly* display my box on top of my monitor. I dont need to try before I buy, its id, its going to rock.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
This is Sony Computer Entertainment not Sony Pictures or Sony Electronics. SCE, which is the Sony division responsible for the Playstation, has quite a different outlook on things than much of the rest of the company. For example, its SCE which provided the Linux on Playstation kit. Also, when SCE was first working on the Playstation, they decided to develop and manufacture their own chips and electronics rather than go threw SEL. Essentially, they didn't want to deal with the rest of Sony. And it has paid off. In fact, due to the Playstation's success, SCE managers are finding their way up the ladder into the upper Sony Corp circles and are hoping to change the way the rest of Sony does business.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
I remember reading the announcement back then. It's a shame it never seemed to take off (OK, Alias and Wavefront did merge, but that was due more to Microsoft buying out Softimage, who have since been sold to Avid). .Maybe now with vertex and fragment programs that allow RenderMan shaders to be translated straight from the art package to the hardware, this might work out. Development tools were Sony's weak point with the PS.
Back then, SGI Indy workstations still didn't support OpenGL with hardware texture mapping, and console systems didn't have the memory to support high detail/resolution models. It didn't help that SGI workstations where so expensive, which allowed Micrsoft to muscle Windows NT in with the claim that "UNIX is dying"
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OpenGL/ES has nothing to do with OpenGL? What kind of retard are you? It says right on the OpenGL/ES page on Khronos's web site that it's a set of subset profiles of OpenGL that are accelerated in hardware.
1 6/sgi_transf ers_3d_graphics_patents/
As for the patents, do try to pay attention:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/01/
It was covered on Slashdot at the time also.
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