That's Peter Molyneux's new job.
Microsoft develops '' X-Engine '' tools for first party developers
- Thread starter bagofsuck
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Yes. Bear in mind an engine is only really going to be suited to one type of game or other. You may not want a complete engine, but may want help getting a particular game component running efficiently. For those wanting less performance and more ease, there's PhyreEngine. I'm not sure what level X-Engine (lame name BTW! What's with MS and all these X's? They're so 1980s!) is gunning for. A straightforward engine built around XNA may aid indie developers more than a complex highly-optimised one. And it's not like XB360 has been looking bad next to PS3 to warrant a large investment in efficiency
"XBox", "Xbox 360", "XNA" and now "X-Engine" are all representative of Microsoft's trade marked "Direct X" application programing interface platform although in this case its left to our imagination as to how its being used in a game console like theirs.
Being that their console has been touted as being soo very much "easier" to develop for and soo much more feature rich with their GPU and the reality that the Sony Playtstation 3 while "lacking" those advantages is hosting a months old retail game that renders polygons using a deffered engine running of one off of SPEs found on the "infamous" Cell BE
I gotta say wow though, it took Microsoft this long??!!... what is it 3 and a half some years AND special Dev kit consoles with twice the memory for debugging while Sony's Naughty Dog, Insomniac Games, Guerrilla Games, Polyphony Digital, etc took far less time on super "not as easy to develop for"...
Anyhow I am very interested to see how this will be applied to Gears 3, Halo Reach and whatever else Microsoft has in the pipeline as I personally have had no faith in them other than releasing a new updated console to sell on the basis of Direct X 11 to tout and advantage given that their Halo 3 sales of 8 million plus and potential of more for Halo 3 ODST makes my belief, erm "opinion" that much stronger thanks to those rumours.
Oh, sure. It's still rubbish and retro though
That's their style though. These Sony devs like low-level performance extraction. That's presumably why Sony bought them. This contrasts with many devs who want to turn out a product quickly and cheaply without headaches, to pay the bills. Bearing in mind MS have always been about providing high-level development platforms, the move to a lower-level performance engine is a bit of a departure for them (except at this point, we don't really know what the engine is all about
)Oh, sure. It's still rubbish and retro though
Well I was going to make a quick comment on how I read this article on CPU magazine years ago written by a former Microsoft employee called I forget his name but then I went to wikipedia and got his name as Alex St. John where he basically laid out what the meaning of X is to Microsoft in Direct X and XBox and anything trademarked by them with an X as a way to bridge consoles and PC for common software porting and therefore eventually Netscape the competition and dominate game development via an "easy" to develop for platform that is all about the API, not the hardware like the PC.
For more info you can check out this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_x where I found a funny quote like...
---"History of DirectX logo
The logo originally resembled a deformed radiation warning symbol. Controversially, the original name for the DirectX project was the "Manhattan Project", a reference to the US nuclear weapons initiative. Alex St. John, the games evangelist at the time DirectX was conceived, claims that the connotation with the ultimate outcome of the Manhattan Project, the nuclear bombing of Japan is intentional, and that DirectX and its sister project, the Xbox (which shares a similar logo), are meant to displace Japanese videogame makers from their dominance of the industry. However, this meaning is publicly denied by Microsoft, which instead claims that it is merely artistic design."---
That's their style though. These Sony devs like low-level performance extraction. That's presumably why Sony bought them. This contrasts with many devs who want to turn out a product quickly and cheaply without headaches, to pay the bills. Bearing in mind MS have always been about providing high-level development platforms, the move to a lower-level performance engine is a bit of a departure for them (except at this point, we don't really know what the engine is all about
Actually its not really just their style, Sega, Nintendo and others were going the low-level performance extraction route during the "mode 7", "blast processing" "console that does not have hardware capabilities is displaying said capability in a shipping game"
During Playstation Sony was initally boasting its "easier" to develop for marketing mantra but Sega's Yu Suzuki's AM2 and a few others were making humble worthy progress on Saturn so called "nightmare to program for" hardware with Core's Tomb Raider being intially developed on that hardware despite the PS version being known/remembered best, it still lacked some 3d effects like water distortion type effects found on Saturn.
Once Sony adopted lower level development and stuck with it and then made the PS2 as an initially difficult custom hardware platform that eventually met all their rendering goals they followed up with PS3 only this time they went much more hardcore as far as getting performance at a much earlier time in the console life cycle.
With Last Guardian, Uncharted 2 and God of War 3 Sony could have released CGi target renders and the gaming media and forum gamers would have ridiculed them like Killzone has but now its like Sony is really reinforcing the full gameplay or near final render and its making things really scary imho to Microsoft's marketing and evangelical machine.
I really believe that this X-Engine is just a smoke and mirrors way to keep the faithfull from having a heart attack specially after the Uncharted 2 gameplay trailer that lasted 5 minutes and that their real and predictable and desired goal is to once again transfer gamers to a new generation of a Direct X console with Dx11 and ATI/AMD huge lead despite the economic crisys because to me, Halo fans seem much more likely to buy up 8 million consoles in one year if they can only play Halo Reach on a next gen console.
However its just my gut feeling, I do not mean to derail the thread but I do understand the target focus of the new X-software being with first party games meant to be exclusives for 360 but in the longer term, Microsoft just cannot compete with Sony unless they upgrade their hardware because it serves a one two bombs erm punch to fighting off two opponents, one being Sony and the other being Nintendo with rumored "Xbox natal" including the interface right out of the boX.
Hopefully we can get some devs to give feedback on this (or grandmaster to tell us more
I hate NDA! Wouldn't want anyone to lose their jobs...I doubt a dev would post anything about this - since they can be tracked from their username I'm sure. Grandmaster can potentially tell us more though
I'll leave more informed posters to address the technical details of this statement, but from what I can gather, there are still many aspects of the xb360 which have not been used to great effect up to this point. (memexport, tesselator, etc)
Beyond this point, we have the sales figures which do not coincide with an impending doom to which MS must respond with a higher tech spec console to compete.
Killzone2 was without a doubt a technical showpiece and a great looking game, but sales figures did not coincide with similar "wow factor".
In other words, even if this technical edge continues with ps3 1st party devs releasing superior technical showpieces over what MS 1st party devs come up with, MS will still carry on with solid, if not superior sales figures which means they will not be forced into releasing a next gen system to compete with a handful of 1st party Sony games.
That was my point. If we accept (and this is just for illustration purposes) that KZ2 is a remarkable technical achievement unmatched on any system and only possible thanks to Sony's crazy hardcore first-party code-ninjas, and Halo 3 is a mediocre engine knocked out by fresh graduates, at the end of the day the sales don't favour a technical marvel investment. MS don't really need a technical showcase, certainly not at the moment, though maybe they want to hedge their bets in case PS3 does show some marked improvement. But even then, I doubt that'll be a huge deciding factor. So what if KZ2 looks better than Halo 3? More people will buy an XB360 to play H3 than will buy a PS3 to play KZ2!
But we can't really explore the intentions of the X-engine without some details. With the Develop conference next month, will we get any feedback on new tech, or is it all locked away in secret corridors?
I completely agree with your post, I did not mean to lack information as I mentioned it as my gut feeling.
Killzone 2 did not surprise me when it lacked the sales given that the first game did not really generate a huge following and how gamers have become so polarized in FPSs when they pick up something with an unfamilliar.
However it still served its purpose of breaking the wall of "it cannot be done" to use a Hideo Kojima presentation so its progress is more longer term than sales records being broken since many more games will be developed using those newer graphic libraries or dev tools.
And its not really about "impending doom" for Microsoft but rather their pre-emtive strike because it really just makes more sense to upgrade their hardware compatability to Direct X 11+ by next year specially because they know that for Sony it would be impending doom to even mention it prematurely.
I really have no faith that Microsoft is really going to allow all their game devs 1st or 3rd to use proprietary GPU hardware capabilities that go against the philosophy of Direct X.
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I don't understand why you would say that when MS had ATI design the chip with these features in it.
I think there's validity in your statement in a vision that MS would have, but it doesn't coincide with design decisions that were made for THEIR console.
If that were the gameplan, they could have just pulled an off the shelf GPU without any special features and plugged it into xcpu and called it a day.
I'm thinking they wanted as much in the box as possible to answer whatever Sony would come up with for ps3. Turns out at the moment, xb360 isn't needing to be pushed to the limits in order to compete close enough visual to maintain a decent sales lead.
If Sony's "to the metal" approach starts turning into sales, I'm sure MS will start to push the xbox harder and tweaking code to attain maximum performance. But until sales dictate that change of direction, I think MS will keep their focus on Natal and lowering xb360 hardware costs.
Hopefully more info will be made known then.
Really though, I'm more interested in what MS is doing behind the scenes to lower dev costs in asset creation.
Really though, I'm more interested in what MS is doing behind the scenes to lower dev costs in asset creation.
I'd have thought nothing. Asset creation is the domain of Autodesk and Adobe, Allegorithmic and Speedtree, etc. 3rd parties already have a wide range of options, and I don't see a need for MS to invest in tool development of this sort. X-Engine on the other hand is either filling a need for a high-performance platform specific/optimised game engine where the current options are cross-platform middleware.
I'll say this:
Asset creation is one of the biggest expenditures in development costs. If one were to come up with a way to shave this cost (for a significant portion of asset types) to a fraction of where it was, it would be worth something to MS devs.
As for this engine, as has been said: certain engines are good for some things but not others. But certain pieces can be plucked away for use in custom engines. Why not develop a set of universal engine(s) that can be used for many game types?
I'd be interested to find out who worked on this engine.
I remember a while back there was speculation that MS would buy Epic for their engine expertise going forward. I still think that would be a smart move on their part. They are a top notch engine developer and have come up with impressive results even with a multiplat engine like UE3. Imagine what they could do if they focused solely on one platform. MS would finally have someone like Naughty Dog on their team to really dive into their hardware (now and moving forward) and bring the most out of it. They'd also have a key partner in deciding where to take hardware in the future and locking down a key developer with key IP (Gears).
It'd also be of significant advantage to competing 3rd party tool developers, who are much more experienced and constantly looking into streamlining creation. I can't see anything MS could do in that vein, nor any reason to try. The 3rd parties have it covered and certainly aren't slacking! Can you propose any feasible technology MS could pursue?I'll say this:
Asset creation is one of the biggest expenditures in development costs. If one were to come up with a way to shave this cost (for a significant portion of asset types) to a fraction of where it was, it would be worth something to MS devs.
Harsh!
From what I recall, UE3 (when it was announced/shown) was cutting edge.
And this from a multi-platform engine.
I can't say for sure, but I imagine they could get better results if they focused their attention on just one platform.
Am I way out of line in thinking this?
There was speculation, and I believe Mark Rein said: "I have not seen the actual GamePro article but if they're going to make predictions about us selling Epic we would prefer if they started at $2 billion," he said. "Because we don't want anyone thinking that we're cheap.
" So they're not in a hurry to be bought out. And considering how MS' strategy regarding exclusives has panned out I don't think they're in a hurry to lock Epic down either.Hopefully we can get some devs to give feedback on this (or grandmaster to tell us more
NDA or not I've never heard about this "X-engine". Either it's a secret project and still in development or this story is all fabrication.
Usually Microsoft distributes all their know-how via the XDK docs and the accompanying samples.
EDGE-like high-performance code for X360 would be a good idea actually. If there's any truth to this, I'd love to find out more.
Natal SDK and/or hardware if truly being distributed are probably reserved for Epic and Bungie and the likes, since I haven't even heard the mention of anything coming our way via the official channels (us being third party developer working on mainstream license titles).
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