MS - Next Xbox reveal live stream thoughts

Terrible, terrible move, Microsoft :

 

Read that and thought: Oh man... how stupid can you be?!?

They f***ed up so much with this console, it's not funny anymore...

 

Yeowza. That's the nail in the coffin for me (as a developer). I will inevitably still buy one to play Halo and because I actually like the smart-appliance-transmedia-super-tv stuff, but as a prospective developer I will definitely get a PS4 too and target that for deployment.

 

first paragraph of linked article

so basically the same system they have now. BTW, there will be no more distinction tabs between arcade and indie games, they are all lumped together. Lets not start S*** over nothing.

 

Care to substantiate that? They haven't even acknowledged XLIG as a thing for the next gen, or XNA. For all we know its just off the table.

 

well, how about we wait and see what MS actually does? They are still exploring other avenues, which is also stated in the tiny article. In otherwords, nobody (even MS themselves) know whats gonna happen.

 

I stand corrected. But this proves how much a mess that Arcade / Indie stuff is in the first place. When I wanted to buy Mark of the Ninja, I didn't know where to search, Arcade ? XBLIG ? what's the difference anyway ?

edit : XBLIG and Arcade are lumped together, but no-self-publishing policy is restricted to Arcade ? Wtf ?

 

Even if XBLIG still exists, this is a stupid move. If all games are just treated as games and put on the same store, then people won't pre-judge your game based on team size / budget. It only hurts game creators as well as game players in the long run (as game players might have encountered a really amazing game that they wouldn't have seen if it wasn't restricted to the XBLIG ghetto).

 

Like I said, that was an unsubstantiated claim.

XBLIG was a well hidden self-publishing platform specifically for XNA-developed indie games, and XNA has since been discontinued. I think it's a safe bet that there just won't be an XBLIG on the One.

 

and that's the problem, developers have been very damning about MS XBLA policies. Its not 'S***' about nothing its that MS had a great opportunity here to put the XBLA publishing mess behind them and move forward, much like Sony has and is apparently striving to do with PS4.

Where did you get that XBLA and XBL indie are going to be lumped together? I haven't seen anything about that, nor anything to replace xbl indie since xna is being phased out so indies wont be able to develop for xbox one any way.

 

I was talking to the creator of the Oddworlds series http://www.jawltd.com/and asked him why he has not put Stranger's Wrath on the Xbox 360 yet and he said that Microsoft does not want it on their Xbox 360 !

What kind of BS is that ? And...did you know that XBLIG is not run by Microsoft ? It is only run by MVP moderators whom answer to no one and get away with whatever they want there ! They run it like a mafia ring. If your heading into XBLIG or are there consider yourself warned !

Why do you think I said that part ? lol.. back in January of this year, I reported a rule breaking MVP moderator to Microsoft because he started saying bad stuff about me all over the XBLIG forums breaking the MS TOS agreement. So what happens the next day ? My XBLIG account got banned !!! Wah !! So I phone up Microsoft about it and they said they can't do anything about it because they don't run the XBLIG section ! I even emailed Bill Gates who got someone from the Xbox Live Team to look into it. A month later they said on the phone that they can't do anything either because they don't run the XBLIG section and they will not do anything about it ! Wah !!!!?!?!!?! And.... at the same time Microsoft announces XNA is dead :http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/185894/Its_official_XNA_is_dead.php
So consider yourself warned about XBLIG !

 

Well,looks like no Xbox development for me... bad move Microsoft, bad move.

 

It's crazy how they are pushing so hard for the indie market in Win8 Phone and RT, but so much against it in the Xbox. Its like they are trying to protect the interest of existing publishers... like they had some partnership with them to keep them relevant...

 

Yeah, but that'd be crazy... hey wait...

 

I was quietly happy with a few things I think people miss - in particular 8gb of ram. For a games console where you can guarantee a fixed amount of ram available to you, this is a game changer, big time. The ram alone puts it well ahead. Many shader effects and performance sapping tricks of current gen only exist due to ram limitations. Why do awesome fx in shader when frankly half of them can be offloaded to intensely high res textures? There's a lot here people are quick to bash, and I am not bashing it.

I don't have any concern about getting titles to it - if we make something good, it will happen, end of.

 

I dont think anybody is really bashing the hardware side of things too hard, especially not the ram other than it being DDR3, its just that there are so many other things that are undesirable from a consumer standpoint.

I personally think they should have gone with an intel chip, but theres likely a commercial reason for them choosing AMD that eventually benefits the price, and its not a *really* big impact to performance over an intel chip so the hardware isnt getting much beef from me.

 

Agreed, although according to this chart, only 5GB of that 8GB is available to the game developer. Not sure if the same or similar goes for PS4.

edit: according to this postmortem slide from guerilla games on killzone shadow fall, the PS4 OS consumes 1536mb of RAM, so roughly half that of xbox one. So more RAM for PS4 devs, plus its significantly faster (GDDR5, not DDR3).

 

Interesting article at the verge focusing on indie games and developers with regard to the X1 reveal.

Well the X1 is running three OS at the same time, so i'd imagine that would eat up a fair amount of ram too.

However even 4Gb of ram for just graphics/textures is going to be a huge leap beyond current PC gaming. It may even reverse the problems seen on how games have to work on current gen vs PC where the PC usually has vastly more amounts of memory, now it might be the PC that struggle. I strongly suspect in a year or so we'll start seeing 2-6GB gpu's becoming far more common, especially for the PC gamer market.

Whilst the ram is a major aspect of the new consoles, I really don't get your point about how high rez textures relate to shader tricks? What are these 'half' of shader fx that can be off-loaded to a higher resolution texture? A shader fx is just that an fx, texture resolution is memory dependant I don't see the connection.

Obviously textures are going to massively increase infidelity, though I believe they'll still be limited to 4096 overal and thus you'll still want systems like mega-textures in place. However want I'd really love to see is a return to larger maps and levels which we've lost alot of this generation as there simply wasn't the memory to have them in place.

As for publishing on the X1 dream on, just because something is good isn't going to get you there, contacts will be where its at, and you'll likely be far better of with one in a publisher than one in MS. Then of course prepare to eat up all the inflated charges and hassles on updates. Thats the problem MS have not announced or shown anything to suggest they want to make the process easier or more streamlined.

 

Dude, I like me some high resolutions but not enough to cheat on my wife!

 

I am VERY guilty of this... I am using 1 4k texture for a character...

 

I actually was disappointed by that number. I was expecting them to toss 16GB in there. RAM is dirt cheap and this machine has to last for 5 years. Sure, 8GB puts it at the same level as the PS4, but... bah...

Both are also way ahead of the Wii U though (2GB... ... sigh)

 

LOL, I'm discovering writing replies on an iPad is not always the best approach, curse auto-correct and a dodgy spacebar.

 

Sure... lets now blame infidelity on apple...

 

Bet Angry Birds has no trouble getting on it and they wouldn't have qualified as 'publishers' before the success of Angry Birds so I wouldn't worry. Consider the various mobile platforms the minor leagues, you have to prove yourself before the major leagues.

 

Looking at lots of point cloud information that doesn't need calculating, textures that don't need to have procedural shaders (ocean calculations - ), water, mesh hull precomputation, expensive storage of data that is typically realtime. For example, you could probably fit an awful lot of mesh-based frames in a few gig which would be a pipe dream on playstation (although that was a common trick for a while) - taking it further what else is there? hell, you could have the entire sky just stock footage.


TANGENT:

What I am trying to say is that the more ram you have, the longer your console is likely to keep up visually. I personally have real doubts about there even being another generation of consoles. I think this is the first real sign (what with surface + cloud) that we're going to expect cloud based computation and gaming including phones/tablets being a driving force / integrator with the TV. I'm seeing them testing the waters for a mobile driven gaming future (including the big screen) with power being delivered by online subscription in the cloud.

By 10 years time, it's going to be incredibly hard to find a consumer who isn't online. It's going to be about onlive style gaming I think. You buy a game on your phone, walk in and put the phone down. This talks to the set top box and you wave your ass at the screen (you're kinky, for example) and it boots up xbox live two, and you're playing this kick ass raytraced experience.

It's a lot more cost effective if business is run remotely instead of having physical consoles. I can image an inclusive service like this with movies, music, whole gamut of home entertainment being a competitive 50 dollars a month. That's going to be the most lucrative thing ever, like some cheesecake nerd paying for 5 mmo subscriptions per month.

We are just a decade away from that, if you read between the lines of this xbox one presentation.

 

This is probably the source he was referring to.

A little snippet:

"In this new approach, indie games, AAA games and everything in-between will co-exist in the same "Games" marketplace. Harrison said this will solve discoverability problems that indie games face today, and Microsoft will still be able to highlight titles that it thinks players should pay attention to."

 

Saying that, and reiterating that "Microsoft will maintain its current strategy with indie developers, meaning indies won't be able to self-publish their games on Xbox One" in the same article goes to show that:

a) Phil Harrison clearly has absolutely no idea what indie means, and by indie he's really just saying "not AAA".
b) XBLIG or anything comparable to it is definitely off the table, because the most important aspect of it was self-publishing.

It's laughable that he's suggesting they "solved indie games discoverability problems", because their solution was to just dump them altogether.

 

If they make a Sundance browsing section for Indys with less than 100,000 or 10,000 unit sales of all titles lifetime then I'll believe such marketing hype. You know, we all didn't just fall off the turnip truck.

Of course there is such churn at this level that it still needs all the date, sales, cost, and genre sorting refinements as well as the Sundance classification. It'd also be nice to sort by the original geographic location of the publisher.

 

Lets see how long this policy of "they all stay together" last. I bet it will be killed the minute an XBLIG game featuring bowling with new born babies gets automatically featured.

 

Games like that are why it takes a 'Angry Birds' type success for me to know it exists and it shouldn't surprise you: repel many potential customers from browsing the app stores and potentially finding your game.

Apple App Store did have the sense to ban one of the first apps in their store that featured shaking an infant to make it cry or something.

App Stores should have ratings systems too. If they did the Sundance thing with the extra sorting criteria and a rating system with violent games an automatic NC17; it would be a boon for the development of intelligent games just to escape the drivel of the violent games churning through the system attempting to win an audience via shock values rather than game play.

Also why I'm sure MS requires a publisher for the big boys to publish their console games. Not that CoD and the like aren't NC17 or the ESRB equivalent, just that they've been rated. Games rating are required when shrinkwrapped.

They need this badly on mobile apps too. A game is a game. And media is media. Obscenity laws apply. Even Iceland of all places is thinking of restricting internet access because all of the abuses.

 

I found it laughable that MS hired Phil Harrision, the guy was a bit of a disaster at Sony for PS3. One example, was his comments about the justification for removing rumble was so dumb, which is why they ended up adding it back in and paying the license for it.

 

I understand and fully agree with your later comment that 'the more ram you have', the better, but i'm sorry you can't say that it means you can ditch shader fx and switch to high resolution textures. Half the point with point cloud data, procedural data is that not only does it save memory (for use in other high rez textures) but that because its simply more efficient and often the best method to generate these things.

If you have a recent gpu and webgl browser check out the first page of the ShaderToy gallery where you'll see some stunning procedural cloud and others. Sadly this tech is computationally expensive, so it might be some time before we see it being used at the same level, but it is possible. Point is the shader calculations would be the smae wehter the clouds were generated via noise or stored as a texture, so again ram for texture space doesn't really get you anywhere in this regard.

Mesh based animation has never really been concerned with memory, mesh data is one of the smaller memory footprints, but its expensive to constantly feed it to the gpu. and so its often more efficient to avoid both issues and do it procedurally. While I would agree having so many gigs around would enable developers to just dump a load of mesh morphing targets into the memory, I'd still feel it was a waste and inefficient.

So again while I definitely agree with you that the shear amount of RAM these consoles have and its ability to be accessed efficient from the gpu is a major feature and one which will be a game changer in the future of games, I don't agree that high rez textures will replace the things you mentioned, because those effects utilise fancy shaders and procedural methods for good reason. If anything more of the ram will be given over to providing data for these effects, enabling massive particle systems, massive physics simulations etc, instead of being 'wasted' on a few extra high rez textures.

Oh with one exception - if someone ends up releasing a 4k game, then you're back to probably wanting as high a res textures as possible

 

and now something completely different.

So the article I link to is spouting off how PS4 and X1 are a generation ahead of PC's, but what cuaght my eye was the 8-10 times superiror tocurrent gen on the aduio front. It got me thinking why are both companies so narrow focused on just using their machines to deliver games and 'simple' apps? Why not leverage this amazing power and all the other advantages that consoles have, to start offering software as well?

More specifically why aren't they offering creative software (don't see much point for say MS Word or Excel ) something like Propellaheads Reason on an X1 or PS4 could be awesome. They'd probably need to drop the cost of it, but I could definitely see a potential market there. In fact if they were able to drop the cost substantially it could open up a whole new market to them.

Obviously they could do the same on PC, but I just have a gut feeling that perhaps there is a bit of an untapped market on the consoles for this type of software.

 

Well In all honesty they have rockband

 

lol hahahahah that's why i don't buy consoles.

 

[video=youtube;a-dEy6XSlyY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=a-dEy6XSlyY