As soon as you come up with a mechanism to physically get 16 megs of data off a DVD rom faster than 1 second, I'll be all over improving load times. It's truly staggering how much data has to be loaded from disk and how frequently it has to be done. On the PC, fire up ye old task manager sometime and turn on the I/O stats for the process. Then be shocked as your game loads multiple gigs of data from disk over the run of the game. All in the name of that "immersion" you're looking for.
I'm willing to wait for a game to load when it starts up. After that, it should be virtually invisible. I'm aware that it is difficult to manage data in a large non-linear "open world" game, but there are ways of doing it. And for most games, there is no excuse at all. If I am going down a hall, with only one exit, then there is no excuse for me to see "loading" when I open the door at the end. Where was I going to go? By the time I get to the end of that corridor, the room behind that door should be loaded. In most linear or quasi-linear games, I should only see a load screen if I do something really weird.
"Better for a console" and "better for a PC" are two very different things, and confusing the two is silly.
This is true. A PC doesn't really need as much power as a games machine. Hardly any applications are as computationally demanding as modern games. Most people could probably get by with a low-end single processor Intel-based PC. These consoles are more comparable to high-performance PCs tricked out for games play.
You know what I want from gaming consoles? Something *new*. When I say *new* I don't mean hi-def resolutions, better sound, faster game play, or even high density storage mediums. When I say *new* I mean I want to see something I have never in my life seen before...
Well, don't expect a new console to bring it to you. Quake is a rare example of a game that was revolutionary because of hardware. The rather basic concept behind Quake had been running around for years, and the hardware finally caught up. But now that we've made the jump to 3D, new console generations bring little more than prettier pictures, and more "stuff" on the screen. Rarely is that enough to make a revolutionary idea possible.
Revolutionary ideas show up only rarely (and a lot of them suck). And they are rarely timed to new console generations. So you are about as likely to see something genuinely new next year as you were to see it this year.
Nobody is using Intel processors unless they are locked into it by legacy software. All 3 new gaming consoles are using PowerPCs. Microsoft clearly thought the advantage of the PowerPC justified the extra trouble of adapting the XBox OS to a different processor, not to mention the difficulty in implementing compatibility with XBox 1.
Which is one reason why I find the suggestion that Apple will be switching to Intel CPU's laughable.
On the other hand, this could be a prelude to Microsoft switching to PowerPC. Imagine a PowerPC based PC, running PowerPC native Windows, PowerPC native MS Office, and all old Windows applications using the Virtual PC Intel emulator (which Microsoft happens to own).
I've never really understood why people (who probably have a fairly modern PC) would be interested in a console system such as an XBox or PlayStation. PCs (of whatever flavor) are so much more capable and customizable than consoles, and are much more flexible as well.
I spend most of every day sitting in front of a computer. When I get home, the last thing I want to do is sit at a desk with keyboard and mouse. I want to kick back and lounge with a controller. Console games are designed to be playable with a handheld controller, and consoles are designed to interfaces conveniently with home electronics and not to take up a lot of space in my component cabinet.
Yah.. and the guy REALLY came up with it all is dead, his name was Frank Herbert....
In fact, the roots of Star Wars go back long before Dune, which really has very little in common (and is a far more sophisticated and original concept).
Star Wars owes far more to classic space opera, as exemplified by the work of Doc Smith. What made Star Wars so popular was not its originality, but rather its familiarity--seeing classic (if somewhat hackneyed) SF themes given the big-budget movie treatment.
An even better question is "If the XBox 360 runs on a powerPC-like CPU, will MSFT start selling W2K for the G5?"
Microsoft already sells VirtualPC for the Mac, which includes Windows running under an emulator. A dynamite enhancement would be to run Windows native on the PowerPC, while continuing to run Windows applications in emulation, somewhat similar to what Apple did when they switched from the 68K family to PowerPC.
Or Microsoft could use the same strategy to release their own PowerPC based Windows PC, and supplement it with a PowerPC native version of Microsoft Office.
Seems pretty optimistic as far as the timeline is concerned, considering that at the present time we have no clear idea of what data would have to be "downloaded" to provide an adequate description of the physiology and state of a particular brain. It could well require determination of the location of most synapses in the brain, along with the number of neurotransmitter receptors at each one, their phosphorylation state, and quite possibly other info. Even if we knew what to download and how to plug that data into a simulation, it could be extraordinarily difficult to get that data out in a nondestructive manner.
Who wants to go first? We'll just serially section your brain, characterize all of your synapses, and bring your consciousness back up in a computer simulation. It worked in the monkeys...
Presumably, the first volunteers will be incurably ill incurable optimists--the sort of people who these days have their brains frozen. Come to think of it, maybe those frozen brains would make good test subjects. Something to write into your will before you have your head frozen?
I forgot about MacDraw, but it wasn't out when Dvorak said that anyway.
MacDraw was released with the Mac; it was derived from LisaDraw.
What Dvorak said was of course trivially true, but abysmally stupid--there was of course "no evidence" at the time that people wanted to use mice, because when he wrote that statement, hardly anybody except for a handful of Xerox Star and Apple Lisa users had even touched one.
I would say that MacPaint was a demo/toy program and software like Excel didn't really show the advantage of a mouse becuase you could do these tasks just as well on a console screen. It wasn't until FreeHand/Illustrator/Photoshop came out that people really saw the light, and that's reflected in the Mac's sales figures.
Actually, MacPaint and its companion object oriented drawing program MacDraw were a fully functional drawing programs that were widely used for preparation of newsletters, advertisements, technical diagrams, and scientific illustrations. In terms of mouse usage, they anticipated and defined the fundamental operations that were adopted by subsequent graphics programs such as those you mention (area selection, object selection, pixel level editing, multiple selections, changing line weight, editing shapes by moving handles, altering fills, changing object priority, grouping and ungrouping shapes, alignment, etc., etc.). The main limitation of early Mac graphics programs was not ignorance of the value of the mouse, but rather the lack of reasonably priced output devices capable of producing true publication-quality outpu. The limitation was resolved with Apple's introduction of the first Postscript laser printer, the Apple Laserwriter. Which was the point at which sales for desktop publishing applications took off.
That's true. There was no evidence that people wanted to use Mice. The Mac sold quite poorly early on -- it wasn't until people wrote software that really showed what a mouse could do that it caught on.
Nonsense. The Mac came with software that showed what a mouse can do--MacWrite, MacPaint. Microsoft Excel was available almost immediately. There is very little that a mouse does on modern computers that was not demonstrated in the software included in the very first Macintosh. The Macintosh took a while to catch on because people were locked into legacy DOS software, and because people needed to be convinced that the features offered by the Macinstosh--GUI, mouse control, fully bitmapped screen with software fonts--really were so valuable that they justified the performance hit. Most other computers of the time, with low resolution screens driven by character generators were hardware-incapable of animating a cursor (there were attempts to implement mouse pointers on character mapped displays, but they were horribly ugly and jumpy and unpleasant to use).
every sony DVD and CD Drive I've had have died ! (even in my PS2)
My nephews are on their 3rd PS2 (I've been more lucky, but mine doesn't get as much use). The PS1 also was notorious for disk drive failures. I'm also hoping that Sony improves their standards. There was a time when Sony was known for quality components.
If there are HD BluRay DVD disks out for it, I'd be tempted to pay a bit extra to get a BluRay player. But I'll have to be convinced that it is a good player. I was encouraged to buy the PS2 early because it had a DVD player, only to discover that its DVD player was really crappy. Once burned, twice shy.
This is elementary marketing, you _must_ have run into it before. When touting your own product you want to make it seem as cheap as possible, so you pick how much it costs (or how much you think it will cost) add a tiny increment, and say it costs less than that...If Sony _knew_ they were going to sell it at $299 they would be saying "less than $300" (or whatever the yen equivalent of that is.) The fact that they're not saying that indicates they think there is a reasonably strong possibility that it will cost more than that.
However, that mainly applies to a released product. Prerelease, demands of marketing can be offset by a desire to keep competitors off-balance. When the PS1 was introduced, Sony tacitly encouraged speculation that the US price at introduction would be $399. Sega, anticipating that there would be room a two-tier pricing structure for videogame systems released the Genesis 32X expansion at $160 and the Saturn at $400. When the Playstation was actually introduced at $299, it both greatly undercut the Saturn and encouraged sales by coming in at a price well below what consumers had been led to expect. Sega had to reduce the price of the Saturn, to compete, greatly straining Sega's finances, and was still unable to match the Sony's heavily subsidized price point. This left no market for the 32X, which was ultimately abandoned by Sega, hurting the company's reputation and further damaging them financially.
I agree; the DS version is the one that I'm looking forward to. The attempts at 3D Castlevania never quite seem to come off. And I'm interested to see how the dual screens and touch screen control will be used.
Everybody said the same thing when they first got a look at the PSX controllers, too. It was crazy... the traditional D-pad was replaced by four buttons! How absurd!
That was my first reaction. And after several years of playing with those controllers, I can say with confidence that my first reaction was absolutely correct.
The new controller still has all the problems of the PS1 dual shock. The damned 4-button D-pad, the fact that the D-pad is still in the prime thumb control position, with the A-stick awkwardly placed too far to the inside, even though most games today mainly use the left A-stick.
The boomerang shape is nothing new--it has been used by 3rd party controllers, none of which were terribly successful (which probably tells us something). Looks cool, though. My guess is that they said, "It's basically the same as the old one, so we don't need to bother with user testing."
Presumably, they kept the two triggers on each side, which were the best thing about the PS controller. Your thumb really isn't that good for hitting buttons. I'd love to see a controller design with 4 triggers on the right side and only a joystick on that side on top.
The X-Box:360 demos look good. Great even. They're definitely an incremental improvement over the current generation. The PS3 demos, however, look like something a movie studio rendered.
Hard to know what to make of these demos. Sony is somewhat notorious showing impressive demos that the actual games don't quite measure up to. On the other hand, Microsoft's demos reportedly weren't even running on the XBox360 hardware--apparently, Microsoft used Macs.
Of course, the problem of chips working loose was primarily a consequence of using socketed chips, which made it possible to repair the motherboards at home with cheap chips from the local electronics shop.
Even the Apple II's chips tended to work use after awhile. When I was using Apple IIs for scientific data processing, my routine maintenance was to reseat all of the chips once a year.
If I were Apple I'd think seriously about licencing the fabled x86 build of OS X for business use only.
It doesn't really make sense. The only reason why anybody uses x86 these days is that they're locked into it by legacy software. Even Microsoft, for their XBox system, has abandoned x86 in favor of a PowerPC based system. Since an x86 build of OSX still wouldn't run legacy Windows applications, users would have the disadvantage of OSX (limited applications) combined with the disadvantage of Windows (x86 hardware).
On the other hand, it might make a lot of sense of Microsoft to come out with a PowerPC version of Windows, running Windows natively and running legacy applications in emulation, the way that Apple did when they switched from 68040 to PowerPC.
they revolutionized and other company rules the market ?
Yep, because every computer today works basically the way the Macintosh worked, even though at the time many computer "experts" were highly critical of the GUI approach.
I'm getting a definite sense of deja vu, remembering how Sega rushed out the somewhat less-powerful Dreamcast in hopes of getting a headstart on the market before the PS2 arrived. It didn't work. And now Sega is a third party developer of PS2 games.
Of course, Sega was a real loss. Once one of the most creative game development houses, their games have been pretty lackluster since they went 3rd party.
Would anybody really miss Microsoft? I suppose I'd miss Bungie....
Of course, one big difference between Microsoft and Sega: Microsoft can afford to lose two generations in a row and still stay in the game.
It looks like an improvement on the PS2 controller, but it still shares its greatest fault: the analog joysticks are too far toward the center. This means that the natural extension and pivoting movements of your thumb do not correspond to X and Y directions; instead, each direction is a combination of both. It was easy to understand why the initial dual shock used this design, when most games were played primarily off the D-pad; there is no excuse for it in modern games. With all of the flaws of the XBox controller, Microsoft was smart enough to follow Sega's example and put the left joystick in the prime thumb-control position. While this sacrifices the appealing visual symmetry of the Sony design, it is far a far more usable arrangement for modern games, where the left thumb typically spends most of its time on the left joystick and the right thumb spends most of its time on the buttons.
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As soon as you come up with a mechanism to physically get 16 megs of data off a DVD rom faster than 1 second, I'll be all over improving load times. It's truly staggering how much data has to be loaded from disk and how frequently it has to be done. On the PC, fire up ye old task manager sometime and turn on the I/O stats for the process. Then be shocked as your game loads multiple gigs of data from disk over the run of the game. All in the name of that "immersion" you're looking for.
I'm willing to wait for a game to load when it starts up. After that, it should be virtually invisible. I'm aware that it is difficult to manage data in a large non-linear "open world" game, but there are ways of doing it. And for most games, there is no excuse at all. If I am going down a hall, with only one exit, then there is no excuse for me to see "loading" when I open the door at the end. Where was I going to go? By the time I get to the end of that corridor, the room behind that door should be loaded. In most linear or quasi-linear games, I should only see a load screen if I do something really weird.
"Better for a console" and "better for a PC" are two very different things, and confusing the two is silly.
This is true. A PC doesn't really need as much power as a games machine. Hardly any applications are as computationally demanding as modern games. Most people could probably get by with a low-end single processor Intel-based PC. These consoles are more comparable to high-performance PCs tricked out for games play.
You know what I want from gaming consoles? Something *new*. When I say *new* I don't mean hi-def resolutions, better sound, faster game play, or even high density storage mediums. When I say *new* I mean I want to see something I have never in my life seen before...
Well, don't expect a new console to bring it to you. Quake is a rare example of a game that was revolutionary because of hardware. The rather basic concept behind Quake had been running around for years, and the hardware finally caught up. But now that we've made the jump to 3D, new console generations bring little more than prettier pictures, and more "stuff" on the screen. Rarely is that enough to make a revolutionary idea possible.
Revolutionary ideas show up only rarely (and a lot of them suck). And they are rarely timed to new console generations. So you are about as likely to see something genuinely new next year as you were to see it this year.
Come on, don't we all know by now that prerelease console demos at E3 are just "artists conceptions" of what they hope the games will look like?
Nobody is using Intel processors unless they are locked into it by legacy software. All 3 new gaming consoles are using PowerPCs. Microsoft clearly thought the advantage of the PowerPC justified the extra trouble of adapting the XBox OS to a different processor, not to mention the difficulty in implementing compatibility with XBox 1.
Which is one reason why I find the suggestion that Apple will be switching to Intel CPU's laughable.
On the other hand, this could be a prelude to Microsoft switching to PowerPC. Imagine a PowerPC based PC, running PowerPC native Windows, PowerPC native MS Office, and all old Windows applications using the Virtual PC Intel emulator (which Microsoft happens to own).
I've never really understood why people (who probably have a fairly modern PC) would be interested in a console system such as an XBox or PlayStation. PCs (of whatever flavor) are so much more capable and customizable than consoles, and are much more flexible as well.
I spend most of every day sitting in front of a computer. When I get home, the last thing I want to do is sit at a desk with keyboard and mouse. I want to kick back and lounge with a controller. Console games are designed to be playable with a handheld controller, and consoles are designed to interfaces conveniently with home electronics and not to take up a lot of space in my component cabinet.
Yah.. and the guy REALLY came up with it all is dead, his name was Frank Herbert....
In fact, the roots of Star Wars go back long before Dune, which really has very little in common (and is a far more sophisticated and original concept).
Star Wars owes far more to classic space opera, as exemplified by the work of Doc Smith. What made Star Wars so popular was not its originality, but rather its familiarity--seeing classic (if somewhat hackneyed) SF themes given the big-budget movie treatment.
An even better question is "If the XBox 360 runs on a powerPC-like CPU, will MSFT start selling W2K for the G5?"
Microsoft already sells VirtualPC for the Mac, which includes Windows running under an emulator. A dynamite enhancement would be to run Windows native on the PowerPC, while continuing to run Windows applications in emulation, somewhat similar to what Apple did when they switched from the 68K family to PowerPC.
Or Microsoft could use the same strategy to release their own PowerPC based Windows PC, and supplement it with a PowerPC native version of Microsoft Office.
Seems pretty optimistic as far as the timeline is concerned, considering that at the present time we have no clear idea of what data would have to be "downloaded" to provide an adequate description of the physiology and state of a particular brain. It could well require determination of the location of most synapses in the brain, along with the number of neurotransmitter receptors at each one, their phosphorylation state, and quite possibly other info. Even if we knew what to download and how to plug that data into a simulation, it could be extraordinarily difficult to get that data out in a nondestructive manner.
Who wants to go first? We'll just serially section your brain, characterize all of your synapses, and bring your consciousness back up in a computer simulation. It worked in the monkeys...
Presumably, the first volunteers will be incurably ill incurable optimists--the sort of people who these days have their brains frozen. Come to think of it, maybe those frozen brains would make good test subjects. Something to write into your will before you have your head frozen?
I forgot about MacDraw, but it wasn't out when Dvorak said that anyway.
MacDraw was released with the Mac; it was derived from LisaDraw.
What Dvorak said was of course trivially true, but abysmally stupid--there was of course "no evidence" at the time that people wanted to use mice, because when he wrote that statement, hardly anybody except for a handful of Xerox Star and Apple Lisa users had even touched one.
I would say that MacPaint was a demo/toy program and software like Excel didn't really show the advantage of a mouse becuase you could do these tasks just as well on a console screen. It wasn't until FreeHand/Illustrator/Photoshop came out that people really saw the light, and that's reflected in the Mac's sales figures.
Actually, MacPaint and its companion object oriented drawing program MacDraw were a fully functional drawing programs that were widely used for preparation of newsletters, advertisements, technical diagrams, and scientific illustrations. In terms of mouse usage, they anticipated and defined the fundamental operations that were adopted by subsequent graphics programs such as those you mention (area selection, object selection, pixel level editing, multiple selections, changing line weight, editing shapes by moving handles, altering fills, changing object priority, grouping and ungrouping shapes, alignment, etc., etc.). The main limitation of early Mac graphics programs was not ignorance of the value of the mouse, but rather the lack of reasonably priced output devices capable of producing true publication-quality outpu. The limitation was resolved with Apple's introduction of the first Postscript laser printer, the Apple Laserwriter. Which was the point at which sales for desktop publishing applications took off.
That's true. There was no evidence that people wanted to use Mice. The Mac sold quite poorly early on -- it wasn't until people wrote software that really showed what a mouse could do that it caught on.
Nonsense. The Mac came with software that showed what a mouse can do--MacWrite, MacPaint. Microsoft Excel was available almost immediately. There is very little that a mouse does on modern computers that was not demonstrated in the software included in the very first Macintosh. The Macintosh took a while to catch on because people were locked into legacy DOS software, and because people needed to be convinced that the features offered by the Macinstosh--GUI, mouse control, fully bitmapped screen with software fonts--really were so valuable that they justified the performance hit. Most other computers of the time, with low resolution screens driven by character generators were hardware-incapable of animating a cursor (there were attempts to implement mouse pointers on character mapped displays, but they were horribly ugly and jumpy and unpleasant to use).
every sony DVD and CD Drive I've had have died !
(even in my PS2)
My nephews are on their 3rd PS2 (I've been more lucky, but mine doesn't get as much use). The PS1 also was notorious for disk drive failures. I'm also hoping that Sony improves their standards. There was a time when Sony was known for quality components.
If there are HD BluRay DVD disks out for it, I'd be tempted to pay a bit extra to get a BluRay player. But I'll have to be convinced that it is a good player. I was encouraged to buy the PS2 early because it had a DVD player, only to discover that its DVD player was really crappy. Once burned, twice shy.
This is elementary marketing, you _must_ have run into it before. When touting your own product you want to make it seem as cheap as possible, so you pick how much it costs (or how much you think it will cost) add a tiny increment, and say it costs less than that...If Sony _knew_ they were going to sell it at $299 they would be saying "less than $300" (or whatever the yen equivalent of that is.) The fact that they're not saying that indicates they think there is a reasonably strong possibility that it will cost more than that.
However, that mainly applies to a released product. Prerelease, demands of marketing can be offset by a desire to keep competitors off-balance. When the PS1 was introduced, Sony tacitly encouraged speculation that the US price at introduction would be $399. Sega, anticipating that there would be room a two-tier pricing structure for videogame systems released the Genesis 32X expansion at $160 and the Saturn at $400. When the Playstation was actually introduced at $299, it both greatly undercut the Saturn and encouraged sales by coming in at a price well below what consumers had been led to expect. Sega had to reduce the price of the Saturn, to compete, greatly straining Sega's finances, and was still unable to match the Sony's heavily subsidized price point. This left no market for the 32X, which was ultimately abandoned by Sega, hurting the company's reputation and further damaging them financially.
I agree; the DS version is the one that I'm looking forward to. The attempts at 3D Castlevania never quite seem to come off. And I'm interested to see how the dual screens and touch screen control will be used.
Everybody said the same thing when they first got a look at the PSX controllers, too. It was crazy... the traditional D-pad was replaced by four buttons! How absurd!
That was my first reaction. And after several years of playing with those controllers, I can say with confidence that my first reaction was absolutely correct.
The new controller still has all the problems of the PS1 dual shock. The damned 4-button D-pad, the fact that the D-pad is still in the prime thumb control position, with the A-stick awkwardly placed too far to the inside, even though most games today mainly use the left A-stick.
The boomerang shape is nothing new--it has been used by 3rd party controllers, none of which were terribly successful (which probably tells us something). Looks cool, though. My guess is that they said, "It's basically the same as the old one, so we don't need to bother with user testing."
Presumably, they kept the two triggers on each side, which were the best thing about the PS controller. Your thumb really isn't that good for hitting buttons. I'd love to see a controller design with 4 triggers on the right side and only a joystick on that side on top.
Since it is supposed to be - quoting TFA - "backward compatible all the way to the original PlayStation" - it will be obviously possible.
Not necessarily. Backward compatibility could simply mean that the new controllers will work with your old games.
The X-Box:360 demos look good. Great even. They're definitely an incremental improvement over the current generation. The PS3 demos, however, look like something a movie studio rendered.
Hard to know what to make of these demos. Sony is somewhat notorious showing impressive demos that the actual games don't quite measure up to. On the other hand, Microsoft's demos reportedly weren't even running on the XBox360 hardware--apparently, Microsoft used Macs.
Of course, the problem of chips working loose was primarily a consequence of using socketed chips, which made it possible to repair the motherboards at home with cheap chips from the local electronics shop.
Even the Apple II's chips tended to work use after awhile. When I was using Apple IIs for scientific data processing, my routine maintenance was to reseat all of the chips once a year.
If I were Apple I'd think seriously about licencing the fabled x86 build of OS X for business use only.
It doesn't really make sense. The only reason why anybody uses x86 these days is that they're locked into it by legacy software. Even Microsoft, for their XBox system, has abandoned x86 in favor of a PowerPC based system. Since an x86 build of OSX still wouldn't run legacy Windows applications, users would have the disadvantage of OSX (limited applications) combined with the disadvantage of Windows (x86 hardware).
On the other hand, it might make a lot of sense of Microsoft to come out with a PowerPC version of Windows, running Windows natively and running legacy applications in emulation, the way that Apple did when they switched from 68040 to PowerPC.
they revolutionized and other company rules the market ?
Yep, because every computer today works basically the way the Macintosh worked, even though at the time many computer "experts" were highly critical of the GUI approach.
I'm getting a definite sense of deja vu, remembering how Sega rushed out the somewhat less-powerful Dreamcast in hopes of getting a headstart on the market before the PS2 arrived. It didn't work. And now Sega is a third party developer of PS2 games.
Of course, Sega was a real loss. Once one of the most creative game development houses, their games have been pretty lackluster since they went 3rd party.
Would anybody really miss Microsoft? I suppose I'd miss Bungie....
Of course, one big difference between Microsoft and Sega: Microsoft can afford to lose two generations in a row and still stay in the game.
Too small for good HD. I may not upgrade my existing DVDs, but I'll certainly be looking for titles in Blu-Ray in the future.
Of course, that's assuming that Sony actually comes up with a decent player to go with the drive. The DVD player in the PS2 was horrible!
It looks like an improvement on the PS2 controller, but it still shares its greatest fault: the analog joysticks are too far toward the center. This means that the natural extension and pivoting movements of your thumb do not correspond to X and Y directions; instead, each direction is a combination of both. It was easy to understand why the initial dual shock used this design, when most games were played primarily off the D-pad; there is no excuse for it in modern games. With all of the flaws of the XBox controller, Microsoft was smart enough to follow Sega's example and put the left joystick in the prime thumb-control position. While this sacrifices the appealing visual symmetry of the Sony design, it is far a far more usable arrangement for modern games, where the left thumb typically spends most of its time on the left joystick and the right thumb spends most of its time on the buttons.