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

Impressive at Best...

[UberMench]

I do have to say that Microsoft's plan for gaming interCONNECTIVITY is quite impressive. Their press conference at E3 really demonstrated how cool connecting a Vista PC to a 360 to a Cell Phone could actually be. The portability of the GamerTag is truly awesome, but I'm still not sure if it will be enough to take the #1 spot from Sony. (Wii is in a class all its own.)

Listen to Will Wright

[Roy van Rijn]

The biggest problem is that the user is expecting bigger worlds with more nice stuff to look at every new game. The problem is creating this huge content.

This is just what Will Wright is solving with Spore for example. What is the thing people like more then watching all this content? Making it! Thats why his games let people create it in a smart way instead of the developers/artists.
And the biggest advantage is that he is letting people share their content creating a huge repository for people to get all their ideas/content.

That is (IMHO) the future of gaming, and hopefully for them, the future of Microsoft gaming.

Re:4 more years! 4 more years!

[Osty]

all 4 years of it? or will they decide that 4 is far to long for the system and knock it down to 3 years? then the one after that would be 2 untill we are buying a new console every single year! :P

Well, the 360 is designed to eventually break-even or even make money, which the Xbox was not. So, Microsoft will not be as pressed to get the Xbox 3/720/Next/whatever out in another 4 years. And if all goes well (poorly, that is) with the PS3, Microsoft will be in a much more comfortable position and not have to fight for first-mover status like they did with the 360.

That said, even during the Xbox's four years, you could visibly see developers making advancements in technology. A good example is Halo vs. Halo 2. Not only did things get shinier/bumpier (adding more detail through bump mapping techniques rather than geometry), they also were able to render in widescreen while the original didn't. If you compare Project: Gotham Racing to PGR 2, you'll see similar changes -- better trackside textures and models, better textures all around, better car models and environment maps, etc. And then compare PGR2 to Forza, and you'll see even more differences (though some are under the covers, such as the 4-wheel independent suspension physics simulation used in Forza, compared to the standard of Pacejka's Magic Formula). It's certainly not as much of an improvement as we saw through the life of the Playstation (compare Final Fantasy VII to Final Fantasy IX), but it's still there and once would expect similar advances on the 360 as developers get used to the technology.

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.