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PSP Launch Coverage
Sony's handheld console has launched with great fanfare, and already there are plenty of places to get opinions and reviews. Shacknews has a nice hands on with the player itself, Gamespy has reviews of the launch titles, and Gamespot has coverage of just about everything on its PSP Launch Center page. From the Shacknews hands-on: "Technically speaking, the PSP is a far superior machine to the Game Boy Advance or Nintendo DS. It's a powerhouse device, capable of displaying modern graphics, playing robust sound, and can even replace a portable DVD player. However, many of its launch titles are just watered-down versions of PS2 games and Sony has no experience in portable gaming. Nintendo has been doing it right for a decade and half, why should we think the PSP can just waltz onto the scene and take over? Can it even be done?"
People asked the same things when Sony announced the original Playstation. Give them a shot, it's not like they're totally out of touch with the gaming community.
"Nintendo has been doing it right for a decade and half, why should we think the PSP can just waltz onto the scene and take over?"
Maybe I'm crazy, but it looks to me like Sony already has experience in the whole "beating someone after over a decade of dominance" thing.
I just read about this in the Seattle Times, and wrote a letter to the columnist (the article is: PlayStation Portable: Sony's new handheld does a lot more than play games):
Hi Mark,
Long time Seattle Times reader here....
Liked your article on Sony's new playstation... a few thoughts though...
I too have long considered Sony to be a great innovator but here is what has frustrated me for sooooo long and here is why I probably will NEVER buy a Sony product again unless and until they change some of their practices.... I'll illustrate by example:
Come to think of it... I'm not so surprised, or maybe it's a lucky thing Sony's Beta never became the standard, while I wasn't really there to be part of that decision in my purchasing power... but maybe VHS was the better choice after all (even though it wasn't quite as good technically).
Just my $.02
Anyway, thanks for the article, a good read....
Namco's got a set of their 'classics' coming out for PSP; should be pretty nice.
:)
Personally, what I most want on the PSP is MAME. The default 32Meg Memory Stick will hold approximately 1.37 metric buttloads of old arcade ROMs.
It's not nearly as big as the Lynx. Here are some pictures to put things in perspective.
It's the physics engine. Multiple collisions is a really hard problem for a physics engine to solve.
There are different ways of approaching this.
- Check your collisions once a frame and bounce or something when you collide.
DOWNSIDE: If you have a car running at really high speed you could actually run through a wall or another car, totally unacceptable.
So you have to do a time-sweep. In other words trace the entire movement of the object from time when the movement started until the end, ie do the calculation between 2 consecutive frames.
Now all collisions are detected, but how do you handle the collision?
- Stop the object at location it had in the previous frame.
DOWNSIDE: if you are chasing another car and bump into the rear your car would loose all speed. totally unacceptable in a racing game but could work in a platform game. Another illustration is a box sliding down a slope, it would never get down the slope because it would be stopped from "falling" each frame without sliding.
- Create bounces to be calculated next frame and forward the time.
DOWNSIDE: if your car rams into a wall at high speed it could possibly be stuck, the problem would manifest itself as an erratic bouncing. You can sometimes notice this problem when throwing grenades in various games for example.
- Stop the time when the first collision occurs, recalculate trajectories and do a new collision test to see when the next collision occurs. Do this over and over until you've reached the target time.
DOWNSIDE: Every iteration of the collision tests has to be run several times for each frame. This will take ALOT of time and could cause bad stalls if you don't have plenty of CPU.
The last solution shown above could possibly be the one they selected for the game, that the problem occurs when all the cars collide is almost the type case for the problems. However the method works in a stable way and they probably couldn't get any tweaked way to work in a reliable way so this was the least horror.
/ Jonas Lund