The Future of Microsoft Gaming

Ars Technica has an interview up with Matt Lee, a software developer in Microsoft's Xbox division. He's got a lot to say on the subject of the future of MGS gaming. He touches briefly on Xbox Live, Games for Windows, and the powerhouse that is the 360. From the article: "The tessellator in the Xbox 360 GPU is indeed a very powerful piece of hardware, and you're right--most games have yet to take advantage of this. I think you'll see more titles use it in the future. As for procedurally generated worlds, I believe the biggest obstacle to overcome is how to design and build the content for such a system--it can be quite a departure from today's art pipelines. Game studios will figure it out though--it's crucial to generating and delivering ever larger worlds without having to exponentially grow the size of the art team."

Comments

Procedural gaming, in demo form

[SirSlud]

http://games.slashdot.org/games/04/04/15/1239203.s html?tid=127&tid=186&tid=204

Under 100kb of code creates a fairly rich, neat demonstration of procedural game content.

Procedural is definately one way the industry is leaning, but its not the end all be all. Testing collision related bugs in games that has procedurally created collision requires some concessions to be made in terms of the game design. Its tough to create a game where content is created dynamically, but doesn't create situations where the player can get stuck, or produce other similar 'progression stopper' kind of bugs.

SpeedTree works in wide open environments, but indoors, in tight quarters, procedural content is a whole different bag. I think the biggest potential is in creating procedural textures that ensure no two places look exactly alike. But as with any new approach, procedurally generated content provides a whole new set of challenges and cons.

I've heard that one before.

[KDR_11k]

(Realtime) Tesselation was a feature in Ati cards since the 8500. How many games made use of it and how many don't look ugly when they do? Tesselation reduces the artist's control over the mesh and only makes sense if you have a severe bottleneck in the system preventing you from having models use this many polygons right away without any post processing beyond what's found in the file. From what I heard the 360 does suffer from bottlenecks like the relatively slow DVD drive, overall tesselation is not the future, it's a workaround.