Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
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.
... 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.
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.