Slashdot Mirror
Sony's Solution To Split-Screen Multiplayer
We discussed Sony's E3 announcement of the pricing and details of the Vita portable console (hands-on report), but they also made a stronger push into the 3D space, revealing a 24" display specifically designed for 3D gaming. Most notable about this display is that two players wearing 3D glasses can use it to view separate images on screen. This means that when playing with a friend, you need not sacrifice 50% of screen real estate to accommodate the other player. The Guardian has a good run-down of Sony's other E3 announcements.
I loathe split screen multiplayer, and wish they would come up with a solution giving 2 players the whole screen to work with.
Definite case of "YMMV" there, bud.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
True, if you're a pedant. The words "Split Screen Multiplayer" do not define a problem.
However the problem of how to sensibly divide a screen for two players is quite nicely addressed with this tech. Not that I'll be buying it, because I already have a TV and this is a Sony.
This is actually pretty darn clever. Maybe I don't know of the prior art everyone and their brother knows, but colored me impressed by a company I no longer expected this from. Not just in realizing this could be done, but in the executives allowing it to reach market.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
I was thinking do you get all the colors too :)
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
What about people who aren't playing and want to watch?
You can't take the sky from me.
Check this out, you can do it yourself:
"Full screen-split screen with any game."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVJcVPvjUJo
They're using cheap glasses from going to movies with one person having two left lenses and the other two right lenses.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Umm... that's nothing to do with Vita, Vita is the new handheld.
And 3d is failing for a lot of reasons. Glasses are part of it, sure. Complete lack of content for home users is another big one though. I bought a 3dtv but I'm damned if I can find anything I want to use it for.
The issues here are framerate and buffering.
Computer displays are double buffered. That is, you have an image being displayed and an image being drawn to. Finish drawing and you flip them. This is all well and good, but a 1080p 32 bit display takes 8 Megs. We need another 8 for the back buffer, possibly another 8 for a depth buffer and the same again for player 2. That's 48 Megs allocated just to drawing the graphics. You might be able to do something simpler with triple buffering but that doesn't save you a lot.
Framerate - we're drawing twice as many pixels and twice as many polygons. There's very little scope for optimisation here.
If you can make the scene a lot simpler, then you can actually gain in both of these. If you are absolutely certain that a display will be drawn in less than a sixtieth of a second, then you can just draw that while the other image is visible. This means you only need a single buffer per player. You might even find another way of dealing with depth if things are simple enough.
Since the article is about their upcoming hand-held device, how is that relevant?
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
Considering how few games for the PS3 are currently 1080p, it seems unlikely there will be anything other than small puzzle games that are actually 1080p to each player through this television.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
>"This means that when playing with a friend, you need not sacrifice 50% of screen real estate to accommodate the other player"
Right, it means you sacrifice 50% of the refresh rate instead. And with all the 3D TV's I have seen so far, that means FLICKER!!
If you can make the scene a lot simpler, then you can actually gain in both of these. If you are absolutely certain that a display will be drawn in less than a sixtieth of a second, then you can just draw that while the other image is visible.
So we'll have 3D versions of Battlezone, and it'll be called state of the art!
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
The second 3d tv's came on the market almost ALL gaming forums were full of the "Screw 3d, how about full screen for 2 player co-op?"
Sony steals that idea and patents it as their own.... Nice.
Thanks sony!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You're gonna have to be blinking might fast, lad.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
Is it just me, or anything putting "sony" and "solution" in the same phrase just don't make sense anymore?
-><- no
It is not only about refresh rate and shutter speed. One key problem is brightness and ghosting. If you do basically a time multiplex and want to achieve the same brightness level you have to boost the amount of light coming out of the screen quite a bit. Additionally all shutter glasses are not 100% dark, so even now you often see ghost images.
Hahaha how can anyone be talking about Sony and multiplayer in the same sentence now.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
But with that you still have the problem of having a restricted view. With ACTUAL full-screen split-screen, you can see an entire screen's-worth of the playing field. With that workaround, you still only see half a view stretched over the entire screen. It does seem like a neat way to stop screen lookers though.
I have a two-yea old, mid-range 42 inch Panasonic plasma and it suffers from smearing. Even though it has a refresh rate of 200hz, it is noticable on fast panning action.
I assume other large TVs also suffer from smearing.
With this new 'solution' I imagine seeing a ghost image of the other player's screen, or am I way off the mark?
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
I loathe split screen multiplayer, and wish they would come up with a solution giving 2 players the whole screen to work with.
They did, and it's called "network play", where each player sits in front of his very own monitor, yet people play against (or with) each other! I know, amazing concept, that! What will they think of next?
Ever since I saw Marble Madness and Populous split screen played with two mice on an Amiga, I have wondered why people want to crowd in front of a single monitor when they don't even look at the same thing. Do they like each other's body odour or something?
3D sends a different image to the left eye to the right, and the glasses for these screens flicker appropriately to only show one image to each eye. From what I can gather, If the sync for the left eye is employed in both lenses, the screen will display Gamer 1's screen. If the sync for the Right eye is used, then similarly the right eye will show Gamer 2's image. If you have the usual sync on the glasses, you will see both images - one in each lens. If it is a sufficient advantage, you could play with your game screen, one eye shut, and peek at your opponent's screen by switching which eye you have open.
Some sat-navs do this but without the glasses by having a holographic screen. From the driver's seat you see the navigation display and from the passenger seat you see a DVD.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Why when I heard SONY and SOLUTION I immediately thought "They came up with a way to have people who want to play split-screen to pay for two copies of the game instead of one. Some licensing/payment/authentication scheme that enables split-screen only if both players purchased the license."
I know, I know. Don't give them ideas. I hope they don't read Slashdot.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
please people, pay attention!!
why do so many of you think that ps3 runs its games in 1080p? i've seen a lot of ps3 games and none of them goes above 720p, most are even lower.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Ahhhh, thank you. I misunderstood the "not in this mode" bit, apparently :-)
That does make a lot more sense.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
I'm not so sure that PC gaming is the target market with this "multiplayer without the split screen on your TV" technology.
Can you honestly not imagine, oh, I don't know, some crazy and ludicrous hypothetical situation where two people own one console (a young engaged/married couple living together, siblings, you get the idea) and would want to play multiplayer together on it with each other but don't want to deal with the split screen? How about having friends over! That's a case where one person owns one console but would appreciate this technology. Since this requires a 3DTV, it's not going to be tiny either, which means no cramming together and smelling each other's asses is even necessary!
Do you have that much trouble thinking outside of your own little world, or did you just want to come in here flexing your "back in my day" memories? Or do you just believe that everyone should be like you, that is to believe that networked multiplayer gaming is the only kind of gaming?
How about having friends over!
This tech will be useless for that. All your friends would need glasses too, and would only be able to see ONE of the two screens. So it's actually anti-social, excluding your friends compared to a normal game.
As for multiple TVs, I believe the average number of TVs in a household is now above 2. And a games console is going to be cheaper than the glasses needed for this. So what's the problem, again?
:) Brilliant, and funnily enough it has been done http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNpR3b1gm-w
On a sadder note, DUST 514 is going to be ps3 exclusive?!?!?!? WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!!!1!
Look up "defensive publication." It's done all the danged time.
But his requirement be that it's free. Something like halfbakery.com is probably what he's looking for. The WP article on it lists some of its competitors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfbakery
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Make sure that Russian hackers have all your personal information and credit card numbers.
is there anything they can't do?
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Well, if the display is 240Hz it could provide 3D for 2 players (if the console supports it), or 2D for 4 players, I guess. it's only a matter of how high the refresh rate is
Democracy: Crowdsourcing a country near you
"wearing 3D glasses"
Never mind. Still nothing to see here.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
It looks like a great 3D TV, until they gain enough popularity and Sony decides to remove the multiplayer feature.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
You lose 50% of the refresh rate (e.g. 120Hz appears as 60Hz for each player). After all, I'm assuming that they're using the glass's active shutter system to display half the frames to one player and the other half to the other player. Or did they do something different?
Like many have said, I think this is a great idea. One of the things I dislike about multiplayer on the same console is the amount of screen you lose. This would be great for two vs. two as well; both players on one team can only see their teammate's screen and not their opponent's screen.
The downside to this is you can't have people watch you play. They're either going to see your screen or their screen, they won't be able to see both. I imagine games that use this technology will have a "traditional" multiplayer for when there are more than two people in the room.
Regular 3D just looks blurry to someone without glasses beacause the two images are pretty similar. What happens when the images are drastically different? It will be impossible to watch.
The single worst thing about traditional split-screen play, though, is that you can see the other player. This solves that, so that you can for once actually use tactics and sneak up on them as opposed to being restricted to bashing at each other because you both know where you are at all times.
You can do this with two machines networked together, but that's cumbersome. If you use a 1080P TV, it's essentially a 1000X1000 square that you'll be seeing - plenty of resolution to play a good game. (I'm figuring about 100 pixels at the bottom for status messages and so on)
I don't think glasses are the problem, so much as the crappy-fake 3d gives most people headaches and still looks fuzzy because the angles of the stereoscopic images aren't quite right. In this case, you have 2 glasses viewing a one 2d-image and filtering out the other. So, potentially, there would be little to no fuzzing as your brain isn't trying to integrate images at angles it's not used to processing. It could work well for this particular use.
Be interesting to know how the eyes would handle the flicker. Even through each eye is still getting 60hz, the period of time the shutter is open has gone from 1/2 to 1/4.
Would it be possible to use this concept to allow only one person to see what's on a screen? This could be a potentially powerful tool for security and secrecy.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
Pretty sure that video shows an ACTUAL full-screen image for two different players at the same time.
:(){
I think it would be kind of like watching things with a strobe light. I read somewhere that the retina "holds" the image it's getting for some time, that the image doesn't need to be persistent in order to see it, but I digress, it's just a theory loosely based on some reports I'm not even sure I read
Democracy: Crowdsourcing a country near you
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No, it shows a half-screen image stretched to the full height of the screen. You're still missing half your FOV and everything looks all wonky.
http://www.youtube.com/v/Uef17zOCDb8?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&hd=1
Fast enough for you?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
you need not sacrifice 50% of screen real estate to accommodate the other player
Yes you do, the 3D display process is already halving your resolution - which is exactly the same thing: you lose 50% of screen.
But I read on anyway and it still sounds bizarrely bizarre. Like, you're going to have friends round to play a multi-player game, and they're not going to bring their own laptop? Weird concept. How are you going to swap porn and jack off together. Yeuch - the very idea of jacking off onto someone else's keyboard is ... strangely appealing.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Terrariums custom designed with silk flowers. Terrarium UnderGlass Gardens LLC, dedicated to supporting botanical gardens throughout the world, offers custom designed botanical reproductions displayed under glass in terrariums utilizing the highest quality permanent florals.