Xbox 2 Development Secrets Revealed
By: César A. Berardini - "Cesar"
May. 19th, 2004 05:42 pm
J Allard had the following words before introducing the latest XNA advancements at the Microsoft Pre-E3 press briefing held in Los Angeles last week: "Now, every time I talk, people ask me why I don't say a little bit more about hardware. It's always software, software, software, software. So tonight you guys win. Let's talk about hardware."
And to the disappointment of the crowd expecting Xbox 2 related information, the Saleen S7 featured in the second Crash demo made by Pseudo Interactive was unveiled. It is not that the XNA demos aren’t impressive, but it isn’t exactly the Xbox 2 hardware specs everyone was anticipating. In this first interview, J Allard confirmed to Computer and Videogames (CVG) that although the Xbox 2 hardware is “locked downâ€, Microsoft has decided not to talk about next generation hardware this year.
Luckily, CVG caught J Allard the morning after the Microsoft briefing in an effusive moment, in which the Corporate Vice President and Chief XNA Architect revealed some information about the Xbox 2 development.
"There's some stuff that's just knocked my socks off," stated Allard. "The thing we're looking at in the next generation is just an unbelievable amount of raw computing power - the architecture will be much more specialized."
Showing his excitement, Allard continued: "Right now you have your audio chip and you graphics chip and your CPU, and you're constantly trying to figure out the balances. In the next generation we're going to have so much silicon, so much raw computing horsepower - developers are going to be able to use this in interesting and exciting ways."
By now it was too late for Allard to stop talking and he continued to reveal additional details to CVG: "I've seen demos of terrain and worlds, with no textures in them whatsoever and no geometry - it's just a program that's creating a scene for you," and then Allard had to explain what procedural synthesis is all about:
"Art is the highest cost component of game development, and so much of the art is really repetitive and really intensive, and then doesn't come out to be very realistic. You know, bricks in a wall - very repeated textures."
"Let's go write the brick program and run the brick program to make a room full of bricks, lose the art expense and gain a more realistic looking room, because now we can focus on having the bricks there in a really realistic way. I get really excited about that kind of stuff."
"There are a lot of new techniques," Allard continued. "Like what shaders have done for 3D, there are a lot of new next-generation techniques for procedural synthesis that's really going to change how game construction is done, but also what the environment looks like so it feels a lot less 'cookie cutter'."
Sounds cool, eh? Coincidently, the latest issue of MIT’s magazine, Technology Review, has an article on Microsoft Research Asia’s Beijing lab. A division launched late last year that works on the Xbox and Longhorn (next version of Windows) is the focus of the article with some juicy quotes from experts around the world:
"Microsoft Research is by far the biggest contributor to graphics in the corporate world. It’s a powerhouse," says Paul Debevec, a graphics expert at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. "The Beijing lab, in particular, has achieved “some amazing results,†he adds. “It’s not just, ‘How can we make a better Xbox?’"
Then the article continues: "But in fact, a better Xbox is ultimately part of the lab’s mission. Reminders that this is a business, not a researcher’s playground, are never far away. In an adjoining hallway, a large corner room has its windows plastered over with opaque sheets of paper. The sign on the locked door reads, “Xbox: Confidential.†Baining Guo, a former Intel researcher and now Microsoft Research Asia’s graphics research manager, isn’t allowed to talk about what’s going on inside. “Some of our best people work in there,†is all he’ll say."
Could this be the place where the latest developments in “procedural synthesis†are being conducted? We’ll have to wait a few months to find out the truth, but the excitement J Allard expresses while talking about next generation technology is easily contagious when you read information such as this.
For the entire Beijing lab article, click here. Stay tuned; we’ll have much more on the next wave of gaming technology as it becomes available.
