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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."
pointless... Especially considering the cost of the enhanced version would likely be the same. And also the possibility of future games being released with enhanced versions on the HD versions.
Ahh the tax of the early adopters, we salute you Microsoft!
Loss of initial sales means fewer number on the market. The fewer on the market means that developers have less reason to make games for that consol, and with less games it will mean fewer buyers.
A similar occurance with the DreamCast. Fewer people bought it and was waiting for the "vastly more powerful" PS2. Now Sega no longer makes a console thanks to the above cycle.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
While Japan is real big on the "console that does everything" in a large part because apartments tend to be small, that's not such an issue in the states. People will be willing to have a device for palying games, and a device for playing DVDs, and so on. Everyone I know that owns one or more game consoles also owns a seperate DVD player, though the new consoles could do that, if they wanted it to.
An upgrade is certianly an option too, bring your box to an authorized dealer, they upgrade it, maybe for free, maybe for a small charge.
However I suspect it won't really matter, the HD-DVD feature will be cool for those that want to use it as their player, but I don't think it'll matter for games. You have to remember that a regular DVD will hold 16GB of data in the case of DSDL, and 8GB for DL. That's plenty for the forseeable future of games. Currently the largest game I've seen is Everquest 2 and it spans about 10 CD, so 7GB at most. It's also an anomoly at the high end, most fit in under 4GB. It's just hard to generate that much data for a game. You can only develop so much content on a reasonable budget.
I think any disadvantage of having peopel wait will be compensated by being first to market.
Sounds like Bill is doing an Osborne (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect)
I think some of you are over reacting over the news that future XBox360's will incorporate a HD-DVD. Considering that 99% of game barely use the space on a single DVD (I'm not sure if any use dual layer DVDs). It's likely that XBox 360 games will only come out on DVD. I suspect that there will be two different SKUs for the XBox 360, one with the DVD drive and the other with HD-DVD. And the HD-DVD one will cost more for those who want it.
Microsoft SCEO Steve Balmer interview on Engadget: "It's a little bit like the discussion about HD DVD type storage. Will we have it? Sure. It's not like by the next generation there won't be a way to get massive storage on an Xbox. You'll get it." http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000597043723/
May 18th ... you don't make it look better for /.
/. article is wrong and old.
Anyway, the words from BG last month are clear enough:
"We are looking at whether future versions of Xbox will incorporate an additional capability of an HD DVD player or something else."
The
... 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.
The funny part is that in the current generation they were the only one of the three that DIDN'T fracture their market this way...by shipping all Xboxes with ethernet and a hard drive standard, they made sure that everybody had the same console, so that software publishers could target those features knowing that they'd be aiming for the -entire- market. There's a reason networking never really took off for PS2 and GameCube in this generation, and I'll be interested to see how successful HD-DVD is for the Xbox in the next.
You realize that means that PS2 games on Blu-Ray discs will blow Xbox360 games out of the water in terms of graphics and features, right? I'm sure Sony will make sure something really stunning is available at launch just to make Xbox owners cry.
Hilarious. MS is shooting themselves in the foot on features, Sony is shooting themselves in the foot on price, and Nintendo suddenly looks like the little engine that could, or the tortoise racing two hares.
I worked on Medal of Honor Pacific Assault, and the idea about pre-rendering *all* the lightmaps for each (multiplayer) map for various times of days came up. This would have been a nice visual effect, letting players vote on what time of day they would like to stab each other in the face.
Unfortunately, due to the extremely painstakingly long process of correctly completing one set of lightmaps for each map, this was just not feasible. (BTW, the lightmaps would not be loaded in real time, but rather during the eternity which is the loading screen).
There is an increasing trend of the artwork/assets of a game taking more and more of the development man-hours. The engineering work necessary on modern games is growing, but not nearly as quickly. I have no doubts that games will soon fill up even HD-DVDs. I just don't envy the army of artists that will be tasked with producing the content.
On the other hand, one might tip the balance of work back towards the engineers by developing some sort of programmatic content generation (e.g. a program that generates GTA-like maps). You could set some tuning parameters, seed a random number generator, and have the program go to town. The artists could then go in and give the generated content some character.
Creating the content for games like GTA 6, 7, 8, etc will become intractable unless something like this is done (if it isn't already).
Well, my guess is that Blu-Ray is going to be the "winner", or that some compromise will be made and all players will support both BR and HD-DVD. In either case, I'm not willing to bet with my dollars, so the PS3 having Blu-Ray from the start is going to mean I can experiment with BR titles without having to buy a new separate player. For HD-DVD, I'm just going to wait. I wasn't going to get an XBox360 anyway, since I have a bunch of PS2 games I'll still want to play, but not having at least one of the new formats certainly makes it even less attractive to buy it out of the starting gate.
Where this could really hurt Microsoft is if initial sales are really soft because of it, that fact alone could hurt future sales more than having simply been late to market. If the HD-DVD version takes 3 or 4 months to come out, putting it close to the PS3 release, I can then see lots of people holding off just a few months to see how that turns out. PS3 demand is likely to be through the roof, and the perception that it is more popular than XBox360 at launch could help keep it there. That in turn could lead to a perception that Blu-Ray is also a more desirable format than HD-DVD, which further decreases demand for the updated XBox360 version.
The only thing that might prevent such a situation is if the initial release includes a coupon for a free (or incredibly cheap - $20 or less) upgrade - either user-installable (not a problem, as most early adopters will be capable of doing it), or including labor. Anything less than that will probably cause a significant number of people to hold off, if only to see how PS3 turns out and how Blu-Ray fares against HD-DVD after that release.
My prediction: PS3 is going to blow away Xbox360, and that will directly solve the chicken-and-egg problem and lead to Blu-Ray becoming an accepted format, which will in turn lead to HD-DVD quickly falling out of favor (unless they immediately decide to license it so cheaply that players that support both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD can be sold for less than $200 by the end of 2006, in which case it may be able to hang on - but all those PS3 consoles that can't do HD-DVD will inhibit that).
All should be fairly clear within a month of the XBox360 release, and crystal clear a week after the PS3 release. I'll crow, or eat crow, then.
No I understand it quite well, you seem to have a concept of how things were done a couple years ago. Yes, games like Deus Ex did the high-res texture trick you talk about, detail textures I believe they were called. You'd get close to an object, they'd render another layer of textures to give additonal detail. Of course this still isn't what the GP was talking about, this was another layer of rendering.
Now normal mapping is something else entirely. That's an operation to fake geometry, more or less. Tou design a high detail model, then you cut it way down so it can work well on a graphics card. Then you use a normal map to fill in the missing detail, which it does faily well.
Also I'd note normal mapping in games is exceedingly rare these days.
Now you are correct in that there are methods for using modified texture mapping to do high resolution renderings, such a thing was done in Fight Club for the apartment scenes. However that isn't the direction computer games are moving. They come from a realm of nothing but texture maps. The orignal 3d games were just mapped textures and a light map on that. Not until the GeForce 3 genrations of cards could you get mathematical textures. As time goes on cards get better and better at this (having more powerful pixel shaders is a big thing) and games go over to it.
It's not supprising, space aside, games have demands movies don't. In a movie, you know the lighting, the camera angles, etc. So you can work on your textures and have them right for what you are doing. Not the case in a game, people can wander aroundand do as they please. A texture needs to look good from all arbitrary angles, not just one. The lighting can change as well, as the environment is dynamic. Thus it makes a lot of sense to use procedural textures.
In some cases it's real simple. World of Warcraft basicaly throws a specular shader on a bunch of stuff to make it shiny. Cheap trick, but nice visualy. Doom 3 makes far greater use to get reflections off of surfaces to look somewhat correct.
Regardless of all this, the point stands. You go ahead and render every texture and light combination perfectly form every angle. You aren't streaming that off DVD in a fashion to make a game playable. It needs to be done in realtime in hardware.