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Xbox 360 to have HD-DVD, Eventually
thebaboon writes "Bill Gates announced that the Xbox 360 will have an HD-DVD drive, just not for launch. From the article: "According
to the statements made by Bill Gates in Japan, Xbox 360, the new gaming console, will include HD-DVD drives. Considering that such a decision would postpone the launching date, Microsoft will equip the initial models with classic DVD drives, and only after the new HD-DVD are ready, the Xbox will incorporate them."
This will make fewer people buy the 1st gen, and instead wait for the 2nd gen. Nobody wants to have to pay for an entirely new console to get the HD-DVD functionality. Unless they somehow release an upgrade to the 1st gen boxes, this is REALLY dumb.
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
... there's nothing so bright as selling a console where some users have different capabilities than others.
Potential to fragment and confuse the XBox 360 market.
This sig has been deprecated.
1) Release 360 for Holiday Season
2) ?
3) Profit!
4) RE-Release 360 Later with HD-DVD
5) MORE Profit!
All the more reason I WON'T be getting a 360 till about a year after release. Heck, I didn't get an X-Box till about 7 months ago.
sega cd?
I think MS may be hedging their bets on this one. There's still a ton of talk going on about which format to go with as the standard (HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray vs. some hybrid version). By holding off a bit, they still get to market ahead of Sony and depending on when/if a format is chosen, they can put out a drive that is supported by the 360 with a simple software update. If they put in an HD-DVD drive now, they're stuck with it (and possible a dead format).
> I've written this before, but there are a million ways to fill a HD-DVD.
You mention a dozen esoteric ways to fill a HD-DVD except the obvious one:
Full motion video at 1080p
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
And the lack of HD-DVD will negatively impact very few users - please recall that few world-wide households have HDTV - less than 1%! And about zero percent have HD-DVD discs.
HD-DVD != HDTV. It's a higher capacity format, and while the specification does include higher resolutions for HD-DVD video, the higher capacity (and perhaps bandwidth) is more relevant to gaming. The problem is it would create two classes of Xbox 360s, meaning older consoles would need to be physically upgraded to play new content on HD-DVDs.
Where HDTV is concerned, at last check roughly 10% of households in America have HDTVs. These are individuals willing to spend more money on their entertainment technology and willing early adopters; this is exactly a company selling gaming devices would be targeting.
"Net result is the textures look more real, and properly react to the environment, they change as the light does and so on. That's actually how it's nearly always done on for high-end rendering. You don't texture map something, that won't look good, instead you use material shaders to describe the surfaces, and the engine calculates how it all looks."
Except you're wrong. Most textures in the highest resolution systems (e.g. movies, etc.) are most certainly NOT procedural. They're just extremely high-resolution texture maps (including high-resolution normal and bump maps).
Procedural textures are extremely important and useful, but there are certain effects (such as the texturing of a face - which requires coloring specific to the contours of a face, etc.) that are not viable via procedural textures but are easily accomplished with high-res textures. Your comments indicate that you don't understand the workflow involved in high-end rendering, much less games (which involve more texture mapping and less procedural texturing than film work).
"Stumble before you crawl"