Gamespy leaks Xenon specs (?)

I'm kinda torn on the whole FMV CGI issue.

I mean, when you watch the Onimusha 3 intro or Tekken 5 intro or the endings, you see just how far ahead that is from anything realtime and how incredibly good it can look. I guess it just depends from game to game. Sometimes FMVs fit well and sometimes they don't.

 

How about using paletted (or otherwise vector quantizesed) textures? Wouldn't it be relatively simple to just ad the appropriate palette after decompression of the indexed picture?

 

Intros are cool, but watch them once, wathc them twice, and they're usually forgotten and skipped all the time.
A carefully structured realtime intro would be just as effective and occupy MUCH less space than any video file.
Next gen graphics will be good enough to fool us to believe they're prerendered, sometimes they already do...

It seems movies and animation movies will remind us very often just how far CGI has come in the last years, so we'll still see CGI everywhere.

Now, anyone remember the LIVE FMV (as in with live actors) videos in PC/3DO games? :? Now THAT was J-movie material.

 

True such a game might fit on two dvds, but I'm not sure HOW high the levels of detail/model complexity can go, especially for things like realtime cutscenes. Regardless, this is but one type of game, as said many other genres with a more open structure require more.

I've seen a few of the demos(through low-res vids, mind you), and I've seen the pics. There are places were some of those models had a few rough edges, some of the world pics shown also require some improvement. And judging by their own info, I mean a small outdoor scene(I'm estimating size) still requires .5M polys + texture data...

http://www.unrealtechnology.com/screens/p_beast.jpg
look at the gun-thingie(nozzle?) and the chains.

http://www.unrealtechnology.com/screens/p_embry1.jpg
Look at the archs.

http://www.unrealtechnology.com/screens/HDRGlow.jpg
You can see that in some areas it could still use a healthy dose of verts/polys

 

Yep, CG quality is a moving target. As fast as realtime 3D is advancing, it still has too many constrains and prerendered stuff will look better for quite a few more years. For example, I doubt that we'll see true displacement mapping on characters and scenery, all the stuff will still have lowpoly shiluettes. And you still can't do crowd scenes, realistic hair, etc. etc. in realtime yet.

As an example Blur studio is working on three(!) cinematics projects concurently at the moment, all for E3. And Blizzard hasn't dismantled its Cinematics department either...

 

Can real-time cinematics on next-gen consoles look better than the Namco prerendered content in this generation?

If not, some people may prefer some prerendered content, as long as it's not the focus of the gameplay. On the Namco games, they aren't.

 

#1 I was misquoted here because you only quoted the bottom paragraph. I said ALL of the next gen. consoles are being rushed, and they should have waited for 6X + BD/HD-DVD drives to be available.

#2 Those very drives could bring MORE SPEED than a 16X DVD drive with less speed/noise needed.

Consoles have always skimped on ram/storage. But in this next generation they are going to be worse than ever.

 

Laa-yosh I think the next Direct X will have support for displacement mapping. MS even had it one some of their slides at this GDC. No idea if Xbox 2 or PS3 will support it though. I think it's even simple things like how many polygons, textures and particles can you use with what kind of physics in FMV versus the realtime. Not to mention shaders.

Yeah, well, all the intros eventually get skipped. I just can't escape the feeling that FMV fits better with some games though. Realtime cinemas are best used when they are actually interactive (RE4 good example, also some parts of MGS3, particularily the ending)

 

Microsoft is sure going to keep the cost down and they're aiming to overtake Sony in terms of installed based initially.DVD drives are much cheaper to produce and they're are widely available today unlike BD.If you think of it,MS is trying to play safe by going to components which are easy to manufacture(mass availability) and economically viable.By doing so they can achieve their installed base/profitibility targets much faster than Sony which is their main concern.

 

I think what you will see if that the xenon wil lbe very close to the 300$ mark to produce +/- and the ps2 will be more expensive mabye about 400$ to make .

Then take in time diffrences . hd-dvd may launc this year but its not like the 2or 3 years lead time on the systems like last gen . Bluray will have been out much longer though will still be a cost burden at first

So i think ms is making the right choice. Though i wish they put in 512megs of ram

 

Right decision for Microsoft. But it would undoubtedly be a better deal for consumers if it had a blue-laser drive.

 

well if it had hd dvd would it have the hardware that is currently in it ?

I don't see either bluray or hd-dvd being cheap enough to be put into a console anytime soon and i think sony is going to eat alot of money because of the bluray drive

 

There are many possible uses for displacement mapping.
For example you can take a very large, averagely tesselated flat plane for outdoor terrain and displace it with a heightmap to get hills and stuff. Or you can take a character and use displacement mapping to create wrinkles, folds, scales, and whatever, instead of bump mapping.

Now, I was talking about the later... and I doubt that X2/PS3 will be able to tesselate the models to a level where displacement becomes practical. They'll do 'virtual' displacement mapping, which is beefed up normal mapping, and thus it'll never look as good as the real thing.

 

It's a possibility, but not garaunteed. Part of incorporating the device into a console is for the engineering teams to reduce manufacturing costs for things like a BD-ROM drive (developing a low-cost optical block for the PS2 was on of the internal engineering achievements in it's design process), and it's quite possible that low-cost BD-ROM drive components are a possible design goal of PS3 hardware engineers...

 

perhaps but what is a low cost blueray ? 100$ a drive ? 200$ a drive ? 10$ a drive ?

I can go buy a 12x dvd drive now for 20$ usd in a packaged box with a manual for my pc . So i'm going to go out on a limb and figure that it costs much less to make as you have to figure the store needs to make money , the shippers need to make moeny and the manufacturers make money .

 

It is known that Sony will hit a loss with the Playstation 3 console. The question is how big a loss will it be and how will they recuperate from those losses.
Some money might come from licensing the Blu-Ray technologie to other companies, that is if it turns out to be the next standard.

As far as the price for a Blu-Ray player will be, we still have no indicators to make a decent judgement. Only Blu-Ray recorders have been released, dated from a few years back. Untill some more news about the subject is released, we can't make a fair estimate.

 

Too difficult to say at this point in time. Even a PC BD-ROM drive wouldn't tell you a whole lot 'cause the device would likely have premium pricing because of it being new technology targetted at early adoptors, and the vendor would likely want decent margins on the hardware (plus they would not be getting royalties from software as well). The currently available Blu-Ray recorders certainly don't cost anywhere near their sales costs to manufacture (I know the Sony recorder has some pretty high margins)...

Actually, you would be hanging off that limb... Profit margins for everybody in the PC component market is pretty baren... Is that a white box drive? Retail? Does it come bundled with software?

 

retail , no software . Just a dvd drive with manual and packaging .


But i can tell you the diffrence between a bluray and dvd drive for the next few years will be very very big

 

I think people have to remember though that for Sony to be including blu-ray drives with the PS3 does something major to the costs of those very same blu-ray drives. THEY are the ones manufacturing them, first of all - so no mark-up whatsoever. The use of the blu-ray drive in the PS3 CREATES the demand needed to utilize expanded production capacity. Not only does this allow economies of scale to start coming into play, it ensures Sony that when they start selling commercial Blu-Ray units, their cost to manufacture those, per unit, is less relative to that of their competitors, allowing higher eventual margins.

Blu-Rom media for the games? Start up the factories! Manufacturers having a more or less determined market to sell the media into means the cost of the media in general comes down, which means the cost for Hollywood and the consumers comes down as well, increasing it's likelihood of adoption, etc....

I personally think Blu-Ray inclusion is a brilliant move by Sony; regardless of the immediate costs up front, it's a sound investment for the future.

Playstation has basically become, I feel, the launch platform for several consumer technologies. Cell is cool, above and beyond the Playstation, and will save Sony money in other areas by subbing in as the controller chip for a few ranges of eletronic devices. But it NEVER would have made sense to invest in it's creation, if it couldn't also have been the key chip in the next, guaranteed to sell miullions, console. Technologies that in and of themselves would carry extreme risk to launch seperately, but have that risk mitigated entirely by the almost guaranteed volume PS3 will ship.

Who else could say - 'this year, we launch a new optical format,' and build out capacity for millions of units KNOWING that they will all be sold?

Ken Kutagari, I salute you. You and your division are your parent corporation's last, great hope.

 

a bluray drive willl still cost more than a dvd drive. Less of them being made = higher cost

Newer tech = more problems in production and other sectors

No one is saying the drive will cost 10 thousand dollars to make . But the drive will most likely cost 2 to 3 times more than a 12 dvd drive . Which i dunno could be 20-40$ to include ? Which may not seem like alot ot us , but that is what a 7th of the cost of the console ? Most likely you could have put in more ram than that .