Despite using the same MIPS core chip used by the PS1 as the main CPU for the PS2 I/O processor, the emulation of the radically different graphics architecture wasn't perfect to this very day, and there are still games that glitch.
With Xbox and Xbox 2, there are even more differences, PPC vs. Intel, Nvidia vs. ATI, etc.
Given that console games rely heavily on the fact that underlying hardware is the same to get maximum performance (using hardcoded delay loops, writing direct GPU microcode rather than abstract shader programs, etc and such), it's even more important to make an emulation that will play games faithfully, and makes the task all that much more harder.
The most interesting Gmail twist I noticed recently: It seems that my Gmail invites I had sent out today were not being received by a large number of recipients -- upon further investigation, they all had Yahoo or Hotmail addresses. I asked them to check ther bulk/junk mail folder, and lo and behold, the Gmail invites were there!
A delibrate conspiracy by desparate incumbents? Or simply brain-dead overzealous spam filters that coincidentally targetted the invites? You decide...;)
The main thesis of the author seems to be that Xbox 2 will be difficult to develop for in a cross-platform environment.
I do not necessarily believe this to be the case. Xbox 2 alpha devkits are already deployed, and I think it's safe to say that major middleware vendors such as Renderware, Havok, etc. whose products are specifically designed to facilitate easy cross platform development are already working on Xbox 2 versions of their APIs.
When PS3 comes out, in theory (of course, I know in real life, it's never this easy), they should just be able to recompile and reexport art assets.
Furthermore, Xbox was much easier, from a developer's standpoint, to develop for than PS2. Microsoft had an full graphics, sound, and networking API in the form of DirectX/XTL, rather than Sony that gave you little more than a set of specs about instruction sets, registers, and memory locations for the various processors (EE, GS, IOP) and minimalist sample code. Xbox's dev/debug tools have always been much slicker and helpful than what Sony gave you out of the box.
Without disclosing any NDA stuff, I can say that developers will likely continue to have much less a learning curve with Xbox 2 than PS3, and this advantage must be factored in.
It's quite illegal to sell the devkits to the public. But if they weren't, this would be a steal. A single Sony T10K (PS2 dev system) sells for $20,000 alone.
Very true. I would not want to be in his shoes, particularly if if the seller and/or buyer is not a licensed third party developer that have already executed the necessary NDAs. And yes, the rules apply worldwide, including Japan.
The dev kits from all the manufacturers say explicitly "Property of [Manufacturer name]" on the back.
We've done a lot of research into uses of Nintendo consoles other than gaming, such as using it as a inexpensive terminal for Internet access, or more compellingly, education, and we have done preliminary work with various Chinese governmental bodies and NGOs to make games such as Super Marx Brothers and The Legend of Deng Xiaoping to teach Chinese youth in new and engaging dynamic ways.
Using older game consoles such as N64 and even SNES/SFC enables schools, particularly in rural areas, to immediately gain the benefits of technology without the cost and maintainence expense associated with traditional PC platforms. We look forward to seeing the results of this experiment in China, and will likely expand to other developing countries if it goes well.
I'm head of a advanced R&D team at a major videogame company. I just got back from E3 to look outside the ivory tower and see how things are in the trenches. What did I see but sequels, sequels, and more sequels. People just aren't taking any risk on new intellectual property (IP). Obviously there are some new games but very few.
The question is, how are consumers going to react? If consumers are fine with a bunch of Rambo 4s or Star Wars 6s at the movies, then fine. But I feel there's a point where sequels wear off. I think you still need to introduce new content to get people excited. I'm afraid that the [software] companies are being a bit too conservative.
It's hard to pin it on any one company. Everybody's got to manage their balance sheets and their assets so they don't take risks.
Sequels can be a proven formula. But then again, so how did Matrix 3 do? It bombed. My point is that sequels are no slam dunk either. You tend to spend more on the sequel. I think it takes some innovation. I'd like to see a blend, and I think we should just skew it towards sequels. I understand why these guys are being conservative, but I think what they don't realize is that the Matrix 1, which wasn't that expensive a movie, was a mass-market film, and it did pretty well.
I think companies are defining the mass market as "stupid people who don't have any taste" as opposed to "people who are every bit as hardcore as the core but don't have as much money." I think that there's a mix. There are people who just don't care--who have waited to buy a console because they're not that hardcore. And there are also a lot of people who care very much but don't have the budget to buy a console until it gets down to $149. I think the companies are lumping all of the mass market in the former category, "people who don't care," who will only get captured by Harry Potter, [even though] there's a significant number of people in the latter category who want to play the next Grand Theft Auto with the best of them.
Take EA. Is there any stopping EA? From a purely negative perspective, what typically ends the reign of a juggernaut in its prime? I think that the model is Disney...or McDonald's. Where did they become vulnerable?
They failed to adapt to the times. They failed to pay attention to what their competitors where doing and failed to address competitive advantages that others had. And so what Disney did was it didn't make R-rated moves. What McDonald's did was it stuck to its menu and didn't offer salads and alternative choices. Wendy's Value Menu just crushed McDonald's and took share. And all the other companies making R-rated movies just killed the Disney film division. And they both changed their minds way too late. They lost a huge competitive advantage.
EA is just like that with M-rated content. They keep saying, "We'll do it, but we're not going to do gratuitous sex or violence." I defy you to name a game that has gratuitous sex and violence. You can say Manhunt, and I can argue with you that it doesn't have gratuitous violence. There's a point to it. And Mortal Combat? Come on? Does anybody really think tearing a guy's head off makes any difference at all?
I don't know what's behind it. I don't understand them. EA's reality has EA's view at the center--as the median, the mean of the world. And they're not. They have an extreme view. Their extreme view happens to be skewed toward "We're a family-friendly company," but it's not mainstream. Mainstream is reflected by consumer culture. Look at television and film. And the fact is that there's gratuitous sex and violence in every movie--and there is on television as well. The EA guys are behind the times.
So if EA doesn't get it, in terms of tracking cultural trends, who does get it? Who gets it to a T? Probably Activision, because they have a balance. Take-Two gets that mature-rated content works, but they obviously can't execute. Midway gets it, but Activision probably has the right balance. Activision doesn't fe
Square/ENIX in particular are incredibly anal about people taking screenshots. At the most recent E3, they were constantly patrolling their booth, descending like hawks on anyone who did so much as take out a camera, and curtly and rudely (in a most un-Japanese way) saying "no" to them.
Of course, other companies sometimes had no photography rules, but they were all for games shown behind closed doors -- every game displayed openly in booths were being openly filmed/photographed with the encouragement of the developers. Square was the only ones who prohibited photography of all their games.
Hello Square! If you don't want people taking pictures of your game, don't show it openly!
I'm in research and development at a well-known video game company, and among the many areas that we conduct research in to make games better, ranging from graphics to human physiology, the art of storytelling is surprisingly one of them. There have been many strides made in allowing computers to assist the game developer in storyline creation and extension, even on the fly.
Many modern implementations of computer-generated narrative -- video games being no exception -- are built from large, preset blocks of text constructed by the author, with either a set path for the plot to follow, or a significant amount of pure randomization to
prompt variance in the experience. These approaches require skillful
craftsmanship by the author and explicit identification of numerous story
paths to an interactive and immersive experience.
Our work seeks to provide
interactive narrative dynamically by using narrative theories to continuously
adapt to the user's interactions while preserving dramatic content. We're investigating an architecture
provides a dynamic run-time narrative, as opposed to a strict path that the
user must follow to interact with the story.
The main challenge of building a system like this is to preserve the
story designer's dramatic vision while providing interactivity to the user. At
one end of the spectrum we allow the users complete freedom to do
whatever they please in their environment, without clear goals or limitations.
This is much like online communities such as The Realm [Codemasters],
where the users' goals consist of survival (or death if it interests them) and
wandering the countryside while doing as they like to the environment and
the other users. At the other end of the spectrum, we have the archetypical
"good story": immersive, extremely detailed and well thought out. The
reader is more or less constrained to experience the story exactly as the
author intended, without deviation or variance. This is comparable to the
epic film or engrossing book. We hope to straddle these two
traditionally exclusive forms of narrative and provide an engaging hybrid.
In a nutshell, our system is composed of a story clip database that models the components
of narratives and a set of algorithms that prescribe the combination of these
components to build a story. The story clips are implemented as brief
snippets of action or observation, with as little dependency on one another as
possible. Each clip contains explicit pre- and postconditions that define
limitations on when it can be added to the story and how the story is
changed. A set of state vectors, called the story snapshot, is defined at
runtime to permit fast verification of preconditions and simple accounting of
postconditions. The algorithms that combine the clips form a narrative
engine, which coordinates the concatenation of clips into a story that adheres
to Branigan's model. In this system, we pay particular attention to the
temporal relationships between story clips and define four dimensions of
time that must be obeyed.
The narrative engine is the core for production of interactive stories. The run-time character, world, and narrative state vectors are
compared to the precondition constraints of the clips stored in the database
to extract the most appropriate story clip candidates. This comparison is
accomplished by computing the vector difference between each story clip's
preconditions and the current story snapshot. The difference vector is scaled
by a proportional weighting vector to emphasize particular state vector
components. The candidate clips specify potentially divergent plot options
and some differences may rule out a clip completely, such as narrative and temporal cohesion. But variance is allowed and expected in the character
states, as they describe one moment of time where each of the individuals in
the story had one of many emotional combinations. The narrative engine
orders the clips according to the quality of their match with the current story
state.
Working in Japan for one of Xbox's main competitors, the prevailing sentiment seems to be that the reason behind XBOX's lackluster sales seem to be similar to those for American cars... they are big, bulky, typical of the American mindset that bigger is better. No one buys them (American cars nor Xboxen) in Japan because size is at a premium.
Whereas, with Nintendo, we have designed the GameCube from the ground up to reflect Japanese aesthetic sentiments of small size, symmetry, and fitting into the big picture without standing out, a fundamental tenet of Zen Buddhist philosophy -- not to mention the practical advantages when considering the size of the typical Japanese home.
Furthermore, we at Nintendo have always been sceptical of the "Everything and the kitchen sink" approach that Microsoft and Sony have taken with their consoles. We do but one thing -- gaming -- but do it well, unlike our other competitors who want to be a DVD player/CD player/PC/Internet terminal/TiVo. Our philosophy is to focus on one thing -- gaming, and make it our core competency, continuing to come out with seminal hits that people synonimize with the video game industry, Mario, Zelda, and so on.
We are continuing this trend with our future game consoles, and I would advise Microsoft to please do more serious cultural and marketing research if they wish to be a serious contender in the Japanese marketplace.
I do not think that the game industry will die. Rather, I think it will actually expand, but in a way not envisioned by many.
Being an employee of a major Japanese video game corporation, as an avid gamer at heart, I have myself deplored the commercialization of games, and the tendency for games to be produced "cookie cutter" style in one of several well-explored genres, and to not sell unless it has a popular movie license behind it like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, guns, and/or scantiily clad women -- even though the production values and budgets of today's games far outweigh those of before.
Yet, I do think that the enormous gains in technology on the hardware side will result in a transformation of the video game industry -- specifically breaking out of its roots in "entertainment".
Games, especially when powered by today and tomorrow's graphics hardware and multimodal I/O technology, have already been discovered by organizations such as military, fire, and police to be valuable education and training simulations. In fact, this year's GDC will have a Serious Games Summit to promote the use of game hardware and software for uses other than entertainment, for education and other uses.
At Nintendo, my research group has been heavily looking into ways to dissociate games with pure "entertainment", and have been working with the Japanese military and other groups to incorporate our hardware and software into their training, and even in their actual weapons systems.
Besides training, we are working with an unnamed Japanese automaker to explore the use of game controllers -- the product of our years of HCI research -- as an alternate control mechanism for tomororow's "drive by wire" automobiles which will hopefully greatly reduce the accident rate, especially for a generation of drivers already trained and honed on video games.
We are also working with underdeveloped nations such as China, to produce customized games such as "Super Marx Brothers" and "The Legend of Deng Xiaoping" to use as educational materials in their school systems, making their textbooks come alive.
These are just a few examples of how we in the industry are seeking to diversity, and why I feel the game industry is by far, the most exciting industry to work in today.
Since the earliest days of 3D graphics architetures on the PC, a major bottleneck has been the speed of the bus between main system memory and the graphics hardware, be it AGP, PCI, or some proprietary solution. This is usually the limiting factor when it comes to transferring models and textures of a size that we would like to use when rendering super realistic 3-D characters for games.
At Nintendo, we have been surprised that no major graphics vendor has really addressed to an adequate degree this problem, so we're currently spearheading the development of a new architectural paradigm called MARIO, standing for (Making Assets for Rendering I/O Optimized).
In a nutshell, we move bandwidth and space-consuming model and texture data from RAM and disc media, where it is time-consuming to load, to super-fast ROM, contained within the GPU itself. Having this data in silicon will dramatically speed up the rendering process and hence the user experience overall.
You may ask, how do we modify these models and textures? Of course, that is not possible, but we've done great research, and have found that for most of our games, the same models and textures are always being used anyhow, so it makes sense to put those in ROM.
Specifically, we're embedding data for Mario, Luigi, Donkey Kong, the Princess, and Link into ROM. For 99% of our anticipated future games, this will cause a dramatic speedup in performance, and will provide a great incentive for game developers to license the use of our assets in their games, instead of using their own proprietary non-Nintendo characters in order to make their 3-D rendering pipeline as efficent as possible.
We at Nintendo look forward to the quantum leap in graphics performance this new architectural vision will surely bring on and are quite excited as you can see!
One of the great things about Japan is that it's on the NTSC video system, same as the US, so you can easily use Japanese video gadgets in the USA (other than region codes of course). Even though the frequencies for over the air broadcasts are different, if you use a separate tuner box, it's not an issue.
This definitely makes life much easier for electronics (DVD, VCR, game console) makers as well, as they can market a product in two of the the world's three largest electronics markets with minimal internal modification. But will the same compatibility hold once we enter the digital era?
I congratulate the Chinese, and I place high hopes that my homeland of India will soon follow in their footsteps!
Let's get some more players in the space game. Maybe someday the USA will outsource their routine non-military space operations to India or China, like they do with their programming, manufacturing, etc!
At my last job at SEGA, my lab was in charge of coming up with many different and pioneering ideas for new ways to play video games, many of which, for one reason or another, never made it to market.
One of those was HOLO-GENESIS. It was a 3-D laser holographic projection device for the MegaDrive/geneis. It could have displayed 3-D rendered images, in full-color, in real-time, using a system of 3 red/green/blue lasers, and a finely-meshed micro-faceted surface which gave a pseudo 3-D effect based on carefully utilized light diffraction effects, a la printed holograms.
It was slated to come out in mid-1995, but at the time, we couldn't get a acceptable frame rate (3-D graphics accelerator hardware was still very primitive and expensive, the province of SGI workstations and arcade machines), so we decided to not commercialize it at the time.
In any case, I must say, this is a very interesting announcement, and I must congratulate Sharp for bringing such technology to the market. Hopefully they can continue to lower the price point and make it adopted wider.
I've always wondered what it would be like in the world if barriers for people to interact with people from other parts of the world, whether geographical or language were removed. Would we actually have world peace if people weren't so "isolated" as they are in the real world? And I believe we may soon find out, via MMORPGs.
One of the emerging trends that I see coming is the ability for international players to freely communicate and interact with each other, free of language barriers. Nintendo, SEGA, et al. have been working on this problem for quite some time now, and have even started to commercialize it. It's one of the emerging trends in MMORPG game design will create interesting interactions and facilitate global play to a greater extent than is now.
Some early results can be seen in the GameCube/DreamCast title "Phantasy Star Online" where you can select from a menu of sentence patterns, subjects, objects, etc. We're trying to get it to the point where you can translate free text, without the awkward results that stuff like Babelfish, et al. yield, maybe augmented by a player-aided cache of words and phrases, with dynanmic improvement in translation accuracy using in-game human feedback and machine learning.
I am really looking forward to the time where international players freely interact -- it will be an interesting sociology experiement to see how national and cultural means, norms and paradigms manifest themselves in a virtual world free of linguistic, political, and physical barriers.
We use LaTeX at Nintendo as well, and it seems to be the norm at most conferences I've been to, such as SIGGRAPH, SOSP, USENIX, VLDB, SIGARCH, SIGGAMES, etc. The only papers I've seen that don't really use LaTeX much are those from Microsoft Research -- no big surprise there.:)
Contrary to what some people think, we have a world-class research division, which I helped get off the ground, on a par with any top university or corporate lab, doing basic research in many fundamental fields that may see applications in our products 10-20 years down the road, including solid state physics, optics, algorithms, graphics, robotics, vision, compilers, cryptography, and more, and we have submitted numerous papers to prestigious conferences. But back to the topic, we use LaTeX at Nintendo as well for our papers... or at least I've been trying to get my co-workers to.*
(*Most Japanese tend to use localized M$ products because it's so much easier with the Windows IMEs. Since research is about collaboration with your peers around the world, I've been trying to get them to use LaTeX more in their papers, as well as use English in day to day work in the lab, so they can practice their speaking skills. Next up is for me to get them to stop bowing to me every time I tell them to do the simplest thing and shouting "Hai, Gupta-san!")
I've always wondered what it would be like in the world if barriers for people to interact with people from other parts of the world, whether geographical or language were removed. And I believe we may soon find out, via MMORPGs.
One of the emerging trends that I see coming is the ability for international players to freely communicate and interact with each other, free of language barriers. Nintendo, SEGA, et al. have been working on this problem for quite some time now, and have even started to commercialize it. It's one of the emerging trends in MMORPG game design will create interesting interactions and facilitate global play to a greater extent than is now.
Some early results can be seen in the GameCube/DreamCast title "Phantasy Star Online" where you can select from a menu of sentence patterns, subjects, objects, etc. We're trying to get it to the point where you can translate free text, without the awkward results that stuff like Babelfish, et al. yield, maybe augmented by a player-aided cache of words and phrases, with dynanmic improvement in translation accuracy using in-game human feedback and machine learning.
I am really looking forward to the time where international players freely interact -- it will be an interesting sociology experiement to see how national and cultural means, norms and paradigms manifest themselves in a virtual world free of linguistic, political, and physical barriers.
It's gotten so bad that at many third-party developers I've had the chance to work with and talk to, all development work must be done on-site, and no development or QA hardware or recordable media (CD-R, DVD-R, external hard drives, etc.) may be taken in/out of the office.
Furthermore, many protocols such as outgoing FTP, etc. are blocked, and exceptions need to be handled on a case by case basis.
Textmode GUIs not all that new
on
GTK+ TTY Port
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Borland had something like this in their DOS-based IDEs (Borland C++, Turbo Pascal, etc) back in the 80s.
Very cool for the time, supported dragging, resizing, iconifying windows, even pseudo 3-D buttons and "shadows" underneath windows.
I have a Ph. D in multiple fields of study, and am currently working in the video game industry doing long-term fundamental Research and Development. I used to be in academia for a few years, but left when I realized that it was just a mad rat-race for tenure and name recognition.
A Ph.D indicates to employers that you have the persistence and discipline to see a long-term project and goal (5+ years) to completion, and also mostly guarantees that you have a knowledge of the academic and research forefront of whatever specialty you choose to pursue. Even though there may be a long gap between the academic cutting edge, and commercial reality, these days, especially in technology, the gap is shrinking.
Finally and most important, it shows you have initative and creativity to pursue independent research and come up with something new.
Many companies these days do have basic research labs which employ as many Ph.Ds and churn out as much research as any university, like AT&T, Microsoft, IBM, Nintendo, etc. and there are obviously opportunities for them that REQUIRE a Ph.D, so no, you are not definitely overqualified with one!
Our team spent dozens of man-years researching and laying the technological groundwork for this product in absolute secrecy, and working with other hardware and software R&D teams to see it to fruition.
From the horse's mouth, trust me, you'll be blown away -- not to mention our competitors as well.;-)
I'm an Indian expat currently working in Japan, and I take time every morning to do Jnana yoga. While I'm not a devout religious follower, I really do think that this practice of my homeland helps to simply collect your thoughts before starting off your workday, and ponder the big picture, as well as gain a sense of perspective. For the West, it might be akin to taking a "power nap" during the middle of the day in terms of its invigorating and rejuvenating effects, but it's done early in the day, and is really much more proactive than reactive.
I've encouraged others in my group to do it as well -- the Japanese have their own meditation flavour, zazen, but regardless, we all try to start our day with it, and I really think companies in the West should adopt it too on a voluntary basis.
Slashdot Mirror
With Xbox and Xbox 2, there are even more differences, PPC vs. Intel, Nvidia vs. ATI, etc.
Given that console games rely heavily on the fact that underlying hardware is the same to get maximum performance (using hardcoded delay loops, writing direct GPU microcode rather than abstract shader programs, etc and such), it's even more important to make an emulation that will play games faithfully, and makes the task all that much more harder.
Everyone is bitching about outsourcing of jobs to India, but this is one area where I'm sure us Indians would:
:)
1. Have a marked advantage (able to blend into the local population, and be less conspicuous than a white person)
2. Americans would actually WANT for others to take their place, so they don't have to put their asses themselves on the line.
So, how about it? Bring the business our way!
Don't shoot, I'm Canadian!
The most interesting Gmail twist I noticed recently: It seems that my Gmail invites I had sent out today were not being received by a large number of recipients -- upon further investigation, they all had Yahoo or Hotmail addresses. I asked them to check ther bulk/junk mail folder, and lo and behold, the Gmail invites were there!
;)
A delibrate conspiracy by desparate incumbents? Or simply brain-dead overzealous spam filters that coincidentally targetted the invites? You decide...
The main thesis of the author seems to be that Xbox 2 will be difficult to develop for in a cross-platform environment.
I do not necessarily believe this to be the case. Xbox 2 alpha devkits are already deployed, and I think it's safe to say that major middleware vendors such as Renderware, Havok, etc. whose products are specifically designed to facilitate easy cross platform development are already working on Xbox 2 versions of their APIs.
When PS3 comes out, in theory (of course, I know in real life, it's never this easy), they should just be able to recompile and reexport art assets.
Furthermore, Xbox was much easier, from a developer's standpoint, to develop for than PS2. Microsoft had an full graphics, sound, and networking API in the form of DirectX/XTL, rather than Sony that gave you little more than a set of specs about instruction sets, registers, and memory locations for the various processors (EE, GS, IOP) and minimalist sample code. Xbox's dev/debug tools have always been much slicker and helpful than what Sony gave you out of the box.
Without disclosing any NDA stuff, I can say that developers will likely continue to have much less a learning curve with Xbox 2 than PS3, and this advantage must be factored in.
It's quite illegal to sell the devkits to the public. But if they weren't, this would be a steal. A single Sony T10K (PS2 dev system) sells for $20,000 alone.
Very true. I would not want to be in his shoes, particularly if if the seller and/or buyer is not a licensed third party developer that have already executed the necessary NDAs. And yes, the rules apply worldwide, including Japan.
The dev kits from all the manufacturers say explicitly "Property of [Manufacturer name]" on the back.
We've done a lot of research into uses of Nintendo consoles other than gaming, such as using it as a inexpensive terminal for Internet access, or more compellingly, education, and we have done preliminary work with various Chinese governmental bodies and NGOs to make games such as Super Marx Brothers and The Legend of Deng Xiaoping to teach Chinese youth in new and engaging dynamic ways.
Using older game consoles such as N64 and even SNES/SFC enables schools, particularly in rural areas, to immediately gain the benefits of technology without the cost and maintainence expense associated with traditional PC platforms. We look forward to seeing the results of this experiment in China, and will likely expand to other developing countries if it goes well.
I'm head of a advanced R&D team at a major videogame company. I just got back from E3 to look outside the ivory tower and see how things are in the trenches. What did I see but sequels, sequels, and more sequels. People just aren't taking any risk on new intellectual property (IP). Obviously there are some new games but very few.
The question is, how are consumers going to react? If consumers are fine with a bunch of Rambo 4s or Star Wars 6s at the movies, then fine. But I feel there's a point where sequels wear off. I think you still need to introduce new content to get people excited. I'm afraid that the [software] companies are being a bit too conservative.
It's hard to pin it on any one company. Everybody's got to manage their balance sheets and their assets so they don't take risks.
Sequels can be a proven formula. But then again, so how did Matrix 3 do? It bombed. My point is that sequels are no slam dunk either. You tend to spend more on the sequel. I think it takes some innovation. I'd like to see a blend, and I think we should just skew it towards sequels. I understand why these guys are being conservative, but I think what they don't realize is that the Matrix 1, which wasn't that expensive a movie, was a mass-market film, and it did pretty well.
I think companies are defining the mass market as "stupid people who don't have any taste" as opposed to "people who are every bit as hardcore as the core but don't have as much money." I think that there's a mix. There are people who just don't care--who have waited to buy a console because they're not that hardcore. And there are also a lot of people who care very much but don't have the budget to buy a console until it gets down to $149. I think the companies are lumping all of the mass market in the former category, "people who don't care," who will only get captured by Harry Potter, [even though] there's a significant number of people in the latter category who want to play the next Grand Theft Auto with the best of them.
Take EA. Is there any stopping EA? From a purely negative perspective, what typically ends the reign of a juggernaut in its prime? I think that the model is Disney...or McDonald's. Where did they become vulnerable?
They failed to adapt to the times. They failed to pay attention to what their competitors where doing and failed to address competitive advantages that others had. And so what Disney did was it didn't make R-rated moves. What McDonald's did was it stuck to its menu and didn't offer salads and alternative choices. Wendy's Value Menu just crushed McDonald's and took share. And all the other companies making R-rated movies just killed the Disney film division. And they both changed their minds way too late. They lost a huge competitive advantage.
EA is just like that with M-rated content. They keep saying, "We'll do it, but we're not going to do gratuitous sex or violence." I defy you to name a game that has gratuitous sex and violence. You can say Manhunt, and I can argue with you that it doesn't have gratuitous violence. There's a point to it. And Mortal Combat? Come on? Does anybody really think tearing a guy's head off makes any difference at all?
I don't know what's behind it. I don't understand them. EA's reality has EA's view at the center--as the median, the mean of the world. And they're not. They have an extreme view. Their extreme view happens to be skewed toward "We're a family-friendly company," but it's not mainstream. Mainstream is reflected by consumer culture. Look at television and film. And the fact is that there's gratuitous sex and violence in every movie--and there is on television as well. The EA guys are behind the times.
So if EA doesn't get it, in terms of tracking cultural trends, who does get it? Who gets it to a T? Probably Activision, because they have a balance. Take-Two gets that mature-rated content works, but they obviously can't execute. Midway gets it, but Activision probably has the right balance. Activision doesn't fe
Square/ENIX in particular are incredibly anal about people taking screenshots. At the most recent E3, they were constantly patrolling their booth, descending like hawks on anyone who did so much as take out a camera, and curtly and rudely (in a most un-Japanese way) saying "no" to them.
Of course, other companies sometimes had no photography rules, but they were all for games shown behind closed doors -- every game displayed openly in booths were being openly filmed/photographed with the encouragement of the developers. Square was the only ones who prohibited photography of all their games.
Hello Square! If you don't want people taking pictures of your game, don't show it openly!
Many modern implementations of computer-generated narrative -- video games being no exception -- are built from large, preset blocks of text constructed by the author, with either a set path for the plot to follow, or a significant amount of pure randomization to prompt variance in the experience. These approaches require skillful craftsmanship by the author and explicit identification of numerous story paths to an interactive and immersive experience.
Our work seeks to provide interactive narrative dynamically by using narrative theories to continuously adapt to the user's interactions while preserving dramatic content. We're investigating an architecture provides a dynamic run-time narrative, as opposed to a strict path that the user must follow to interact with the story. The main challenge of building a system like this is to preserve the story designer's dramatic vision while providing interactivity to the user. At one end of the spectrum we allow the users complete freedom to do whatever they please in their environment, without clear goals or limitations. This is much like online communities such as The Realm [Codemasters], where the users' goals consist of survival (or death if it interests them) and wandering the countryside while doing as they like to the environment and the other users. At the other end of the spectrum, we have the archetypical "good story": immersive, extremely detailed and well thought out. The reader is more or less constrained to experience the story exactly as the author intended, without deviation or variance. This is comparable to the epic film or engrossing book. We hope to straddle these two traditionally exclusive forms of narrative and provide an engaging hybrid.
In a nutshell, our system is composed of a story clip database that models the components of narratives and a set of algorithms that prescribe the combination of these components to build a story. The story clips are implemented as brief snippets of action or observation, with as little dependency on one another as possible. Each clip contains explicit pre- and postconditions that define limitations on when it can be added to the story and how the story is changed. A set of state vectors, called the story snapshot, is defined at runtime to permit fast verification of preconditions and simple accounting of postconditions. The algorithms that combine the clips form a narrative engine, which coordinates the concatenation of clips into a story that adheres to Branigan's model. In this system, we pay particular attention to the temporal relationships between story clips and define four dimensions of time that must be obeyed.
The narrative engine is the core for production of interactive stories. The run-time character, world, and narrative state vectors are compared to the precondition constraints of the clips stored in the database to extract the most appropriate story clip candidates. This comparison is accomplished by computing the vector difference between each story clip's preconditions and the current story snapshot. The difference vector is scaled by a proportional weighting vector to emphasize particular state vector components. The candidate clips specify potentially divergent plot options and some differences may rule out a clip completely, such as narrative and temporal cohesion. But variance is allowed and expected in the character states, as they describe one moment of time where each of the individuals in the story had one of many emotional combinations. The narrative engine orders the clips according to the quality of their match with the current story state.
The narrative engine uses the evaluated story cl
Working in Japan for one of Xbox's main competitors, the prevailing sentiment seems to be that the reason behind XBOX's lackluster sales seem to be similar to those for American cars... they are big, bulky, typical of the American mindset that bigger is better. No one buys them (American cars nor Xboxen) in Japan because size is at a premium.
Whereas, with Nintendo, we have designed the GameCube from the ground up to reflect Japanese aesthetic sentiments of small size, symmetry, and fitting into the big picture without standing out, a fundamental tenet of Zen Buddhist philosophy -- not to mention the practical advantages when considering the size of the typical Japanese home.
Furthermore, we at Nintendo have always been sceptical of the "Everything and the kitchen sink" approach that Microsoft and Sony have taken with their consoles. We do but one thing -- gaming -- but do it well, unlike our other competitors who want to be a DVD player/CD player/PC/Internet terminal/TiVo. Our philosophy is to focus on one thing -- gaming, and make it our core competency, continuing to come out with seminal hits that people synonimize with the video game industry, Mario, Zelda, and so on.
We are continuing this trend with our future game consoles, and I would advise Microsoft to please do more serious cultural and marketing research if they wish to be a serious contender in the Japanese marketplace.
Being an employee of a major Japanese video game corporation, as an avid gamer at heart, I have myself deplored the commercialization of games, and the tendency for games to be produced "cookie cutter" style in one of several well-explored genres, and to not sell unless it has a popular movie license behind it like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, guns, and/or scantiily clad women -- even though the production values and budgets of today's games far outweigh those of before.
Yet, I do think that the enormous gains in technology on the hardware side will result in a transformation of the video game industry -- specifically breaking out of its roots in "entertainment".
Games, especially when powered by today and tomorrow's graphics hardware and multimodal I/O technology, have already been discovered by organizations such as military, fire, and police to be valuable education and training simulations. In fact, this year's GDC will have a Serious Games Summit to promote the use of game hardware and software for uses other than entertainment, for education and other uses.
At Nintendo, my research group has been heavily looking into ways to dissociate games with pure "entertainment", and have been working with the Japanese military and other groups to incorporate our hardware and software into their training, and even in their actual weapons systems.
Besides training, we are working with an unnamed Japanese automaker to explore the use of game controllers -- the product of our years of HCI research -- as an alternate control mechanism for tomororow's "drive by wire" automobiles which will hopefully greatly reduce the accident rate, especially for a generation of drivers already trained and honed on video games.
We are also working with underdeveloped nations such as China, to produce customized games such as "Super Marx Brothers" and "The Legend of Deng Xiaoping" to use as educational materials in their school systems, making their textbooks come alive.
These are just a few examples of how we in the industry are seeking to diversity, and why I feel the game industry is by far, the most exciting industry to work in today.
At Nintendo, we have been surprised that no major graphics vendor has really addressed to an adequate degree this problem, so we're currently spearheading the development of a new architectural paradigm called MARIO, standing for (Making Assets for Rendering I/O Optimized).
In a nutshell, we move bandwidth and space-consuming model and texture data from RAM and disc media, where it is time-consuming to load, to super-fast ROM, contained within the GPU itself. Having this data in silicon will dramatically speed up the rendering process and hence the user experience overall.
You may ask, how do we modify these models and textures? Of course, that is not possible, but we've done great research, and have found that for most of our games, the same models and textures are always being used anyhow, so it makes sense to put those in ROM.
Specifically, we're embedding data for Mario, Luigi, Donkey Kong, the Princess, and Link into ROM. For 99% of our anticipated future games, this will cause a dramatic speedup in performance, and will provide a great incentive for game developers to license the use of our assets in their games, instead of using their own proprietary non-Nintendo characters in order to make their 3-D rendering pipeline as efficent as possible.
We at Nintendo look forward to the quantum leap in graphics performance this new architectural vision will surely bring on and are quite excited as you can see!
One of the great things about Japan is that it's on the NTSC video system, same as the US, so you can easily use Japanese video gadgets in the USA (other than region codes of course). Even though the frequencies for over the air broadcasts are different, if you use a separate tuner box, it's not an issue.
This definitely makes life much easier for electronics (DVD, VCR, game console) makers as well, as they can market a product in two of the the world's three largest electronics markets with minimal internal modification. But will the same compatibility hold once we enter the digital era?
I congratulate the Chinese, and I place high hopes that my homeland of India will soon follow in their footsteps!
Let's get some more players in the space game. Maybe someday the USA will outsource their routine non-military space operations to India or China, like they do with their programming, manufacturing, etc!
At my last job at SEGA, my lab was in charge of coming up with many different and pioneering ideas for new ways to play video games, many of which, for one reason or another, never made it to market.
One of those was HOLO-GENESIS. It was a 3-D laser
holographic projection device for the MegaDrive/geneis. It could have displayed 3-D rendered images, in full-color, in real-time, using a system of 3 red/green/blue lasers, and a finely-meshed micro-faceted surface which gave a pseudo 3-D effect based on carefully utilized light diffraction effects, a la printed holograms.
It was slated to come out in mid-1995, but at the time, we couldn't get a acceptable frame rate (3-D graphics accelerator hardware was still very primitive and expensive, the province of SGI workstations and arcade machines), so we decided to not commercialize it at the time.
In any case, I must say, this is a very interesting announcement, and I must congratulate Sharp for bringing such technology to the market. Hopefully they can continue to lower the price point and make it adopted wider.
I've always wondered what it would be like in the world if barriers for people to interact with people from other parts of the world, whether geographical or language were removed. Would we actually have world peace if people weren't so "isolated" as they are in the real world? And I believe we may soon find out, via MMORPGs.
One of the emerging trends that I see coming is the ability for international players to freely communicate and interact with each other, free of language barriers. Nintendo, SEGA, et al. have been working on this problem for quite some time now, and have even started to commercialize it. It's one of the emerging trends in MMORPG game design will create interesting interactions and facilitate global play to a greater extent than is now.
Some early results can be seen in the GameCube/DreamCast title "Phantasy Star Online" where you can select from a menu of sentence patterns, subjects, objects, etc. We're trying to get it to the point where you can translate free text, without the awkward results that stuff like Babelfish, et al. yield, maybe augmented by a player-aided cache of words and phrases, with dynanmic improvement in translation accuracy using in-game human feedback and machine learning.
I am really looking forward to the time where international players freely interact -- it will be an interesting sociology experiement to see how national and cultural means, norms and paradigms manifest themselves in a virtual world free of linguistic, political, and physical barriers.
We use LaTeX at Nintendo as well, and it seems to be the norm at most conferences I've been to, such as SIGGRAPH, SOSP, USENIX, VLDB, SIGARCH, SIGGAMES, etc. The only papers I've seen that don't really use LaTeX much are those from Microsoft Research -- no big surprise there. :)
Contrary to what some people think, we have a world-class research division, which I helped get off the ground, on a par with any top university or corporate lab, doing basic research in many fundamental fields that may see applications in our products 10-20 years down the road, including solid state physics, optics, algorithms, graphics, robotics, vision, compilers, cryptography, and more, and we have submitted numerous papers to prestigious conferences. But back to the topic, we use LaTeX at Nintendo as well for our papers... or at least I've been trying to get my co-workers to.*
(*Most Japanese tend to use localized M$ products because it's so much easier with the Windows IMEs. Since research is about collaboration with your peers around the world, I've been trying to get them to use LaTeX more in their papers, as well as use English in day to day work in the lab, so they can practice their speaking skills. Next up is for me to get them to stop bowing to me every time I tell them to do the simplest thing and shouting "Hai, Gupta-san!")
I've always wondered what it would be like in the world if barriers for people to interact with people from other parts of the world, whether geographical or language were removed. And I believe we may soon find out, via MMORPGs.
One of the emerging trends that I see coming is the ability for international players to freely communicate and interact with each other, free of language barriers. Nintendo, SEGA, et al. have been working on this problem for quite some time now, and have even started to commercialize it. It's one of the emerging trends in MMORPG game design will create interesting interactions and facilitate global play to a greater extent than is now.
Some early results can be seen in the GameCube/DreamCast title "Phantasy Star Online" where you can select from a menu of sentence patterns, subjects, objects, etc. We're trying to get it to the point where you can translate free text, without the awkward results that stuff like Babelfish, et al. yield, maybe augmented by a player-aided cache of words and phrases, with dynanmic improvement in translation accuracy using in-game human feedback and machine learning.
I am really looking forward to the time where international players freely interact -- it will be an interesting sociology experiement to see how national and cultural means, norms and paradigms manifest themselves in a virtual world free of linguistic, political, and physical barriers.
Most game software "leaks" are inside jobs.
It's gotten so bad that at many third-party developers I've had the chance to work with and talk to, all development work must be done on-site, and no development or QA hardware or recordable media (CD-R, DVD-R, external hard drives, etc.) may be taken in/out of the office.
Furthermore, many protocols such as outgoing FTP, etc. are blocked, and exceptions need to be handled on a case by case basis.
Borland had something like this in their DOS-based IDEs (Borland C++, Turbo Pascal, etc) back in the 80s.
Very cool for the time, supported dragging, resizing, iconifying windows, even pseudo 3-D buttons and "shadows" underneath windows.
I have a Ph. D in multiple fields of study, and am currently working in the video game industry doing long-term fundamental Research and Development. I used to be in academia for a few years, but left when I realized that it was just a mad rat-race for tenure and name recognition.
A Ph.D indicates to employers that you have the persistence and discipline to see a long-term project and goal (5+ years) to completion, and also mostly guarantees that you have a knowledge of the academic and research forefront of whatever specialty you choose to pursue. Even though there may be a long gap between the academic cutting edge, and commercial reality, these days, especially in technology, the gap is shrinking.
Finally and most important, it shows you have initative and creativity to pursue independent research and come up with something new.
Many companies these days do have basic research labs which employ as many Ph.Ds and churn out as much research as any university, like AT&T, Microsoft, IBM, Nintendo, etc. and there are obviously opportunities for them that REQUIRE a Ph.D, so no, you are not definitely overqualified with one!
From the horse's mouth, trust me, you'll be blown away -- not to mention our competitors as well. ;-)
I've encouraged others in my group to do it as well -- the Japanese have their own meditation flavour, zazen, but regardless, we all try to start our day with it, and I really think companies in the West should adopt it too on a voluntary basis.