Xenon won't be ready for CES?

[Jov]

I think sega is a good example of how to do a tech demo . use tech your making for current engines .

Everything they showed on the dreamcast as demos were surpassed and that was in its short life of 2 years .

Sony and ms should take a page from this by making realistic demos

Well there is still life in the PS2, but I've not seen these said demos to comment. As for Xbox, I agree based on what I've seen.

 

[AzBat]

I think sega is a good example of how to do a tech demo . use tech your making for current engines .

Everything they showed on the dreamcast as demos were surpassed and that was in its short life of 2 years .

Sony and ms should take a page from this by making realistic demos

With the XNA Crash demo MS seem to went backwards. Made a really cool demo and then decided to turn into a game project. Or so they say. I'm expecting MS will much better in this department come announcement time. I believe they will show us they learned a lot of lessons from the first go round.

Tommy McClain

 

[PC-Engine]

MS will make an announcement about HD DVD and Xenon at CES...

 

[Jov]

MS will make an announcement about HD DVD and Xenon at CES...

And announcing they'll be buying Toshiba HD-DVD drives, just to cause more speculation and rumors of more Cell like IP in Xenon.

/rumor mode: off.

 

[Fafalada]

I think sega is a good example of how to do a tech demo . use tech your making for current engines

3rd party techdemos are usually like that - on PS2 many were based off slightly upgraded PS1 codebases (GT, Tekken etc.), and those that made it into a product were clearly better then the techdemo showing.
Either way, Sony didn't show anything on PS2 that wasn't improved upon within next few years either.

Don't really remember what XBox demos were, but the realtime version SheMale&Robot was certainly greatly improved upon by actual games, so aside for the FMV stunt, I suspect same holds for other demos too.

 

[Megadrive1988]

well it wasnt hard for Xbox games to surpass the realtime version of the Raven demo since that was running on a GeForce2 GTS, a GPU significantly weaker than the one in Xbox. I agree though, that the PS2 tech demos were surpassed by actual PS2 games.

it'll be very interesting to see PS3 demos, in March (hopefully)

 

[Martin Eddy]

I would think they have to launch at CES system done or not. They have to get hype building towards a launch. It is going to be fun to see if a bunch of off the shelf parts can compete with billions of dollars in propriatary chips.

From what we've heard, Xenon/XBOX neXt will not be made from "off the shelf parts" .
Microsoft have licensed IP from the likes of ATI so they can build Xenon from the ground up. Sure it'll be very similar to or derived from off the shelf parts but what can you expect from a company like Microsoft? PC architecture is what they know best, why build something completely different, that would be
extremely hard for them and game developers to code for?

 

[Magnum PI]

i think they could do something different, that is as easy for game developpers to develop for.

 

[DopeyFish]

Remember, when Microsoft showed off the Xbox casing at CES 2001, they were running Malice and Oddworld on the Phase1 XDKs (P3 1 GHz, 128 ram, GeForce 2 Ultra)

 

[AzBat]

Remember, when Microsoft showed off the Xbox casing at CES 2001, they were running Malice and Oddworld on the Phase1 XDKs (P3 1 GHz, 128 ram, GeForce 2 Ultra)

Thanks for the reminder. If MS does something similar with Xbox2, then can we also expect the use of Phase1 XDKs? I think it would be funny if they showed off demos running on the supposed Apple PowerMac G5 instead of close to final hardware.

Tommy McClain

 

[DopeyFish]

Remember, when Microsoft showed off the Xbox casing at CES 2001, they were running Malice and Oddworld on the Phase1 XDKs (P3 1 GHz, 128 ram, GeForce 2 Ultra)

Thanks for the reminder. If MS does something similar with Xbox2, then can we also expect the use of Phase1 XDKs? I think it would be funny if they showed off demos running on the supposed Apple PowerMac G5 instead of close to final hardware.

Tommy McClain

It's possible they could show something like that if the hardware isn't ready yet. The original Xbox XDKs (for the retail hardware) weren't in most developer hands until mainly just prior to E3 2001. (Though they had GeForce 3 XDKs in their hands at the turn of the new year)

I would personally consider a dual G5 + r420 to be a lot closer to the Xbox2 design than what they had with Xbox to start off with. So I'd probably still count on them showing something, at least.

 

[Evil_Cloud]

dunno.. i'm pretty sure about sony, but not so sure about nintendo. there was at least the infamous realistic zelda demo..

at least i don't see the same amount of unrepresentative screenshots on each system.

i mean screenshot taken at resolutions a lot larger than what is possible with the console, with massive amount of AA, then downscaled to 640x480. and sometimes photoshoped screenshots.

i guess than when the development platform is the PC is makes this so easier and therfore so tempting

Can you or anyone provide some links for these demos if they still exist?

Was out of touch with the entire 32bit era, thus also the lead up to this gen.

I am looking for these demos as well...GameCube and Xbox demo's.

I found this, but I would like to have the footage.

Wowing the crowds
Of course, an introduction to a new console wouldn't be complete without some technology demos of what the box can do. Microsoft didn't let us down, obliging the GDC audience with a great deal of eye candy all aimed at beating down the Playstation 2. Let's preface all this by saying the demonstrations were all very impressive - so much so that we questioned whether or not they were canned. We were reassured that everything we were seeing was indeed "real," and running off an NV15, which they claim only represents "10%" of what the final unit should be capable of. MS reps also kept stressing the short amount of time it supposedly took developers to create these demos because they're all done using regular DirectX tools.

Spark, water
Seamus Blackley, the director of X-Box development, came on to show off a couple of small demos. The first was the familiar fountain of sparks that many saw at the initial Playstation 2 announcements. The X-Box version was able to spew out different colors of sparks, as well as rotate real time around the fountain, a trick which Blackley lovingly called "The Gap mode," in reference to the swing dancing Gap commercial that was so popular a couple of years ago. Next up, an eye opening simulation of a pool of water with realistic ripples, transparency, reflection, and refraction properties.

Desktop Toys
The desktop toys demonstration showed off even more of the lighting and shadowing capabilities of the X-Box. Simulated was a desk with a shiny wooden veneer, situated in a dimly lit room. Off on the right side of the desk rested a computer monitor whose image reflected faintly in the wood varnish. Different mobiles and desktop tchotchkes littered the rest of the table, all in motion. The complex, soft shadows cast by the objects overlapped and danced in and out of each other on the table in very realistic fashion. Shadows cast across angled surfaces were simulated correctly as well. It's a shame that we don't have any screenshots to show because this was one of my favorites.

Ping Pong
The ping pong demo was meant to show off the ability of the X-Box to simultaneously render and keep track of hundreds of on screen objects. How to describe the demo…Imagine a room with dozens upon dozens of set mouse traps. On each mouse trap is a ping pong ball. It's almost like a scene from a Tom and Jerry episode. Now, drop a ping pong ball randomly into the room to create instant and utter chaos. Hundreds of motion blurred ping pong balls bouncing off the floor, off one another, and the wall, setting off more and more of the mousetraps. Seeing all of the onscreen action rendered without so much as a hiccup gave us a warm and fuzzy feeling. We'll certainly keep it in mind the next time we see an RTS game choke under the strain of just a couple dozen units and particles on screen.

Koi pond
The last demo was the most impressive of all. Shown: A small Japanese garden with a square pond in the center. Koi fish are swimming in the pond underneath a layer of water lilies and other foliage. The water and reflections from above mixed with the refracted images of the fish swimming in the pool were most impressive. Then comes the kicker - Blackley "releases" hundreds of rendered butterflies into the garden, each flapping wildly and casting its own shadow onto the ground and reflecting off the surface of the pool. All the motion, polygons (550,000 to render the scene), real time reflection, refraction, and texture detail (a reported 4MB for the garden itself) put together truly underscored the potential of the X-Box.

http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=1432
-> Too bad the links are all down. I only have the Raven and Ping Pong demo's...

 

[Jov]

Evil - Thanks, I'll read thru it tomorrow and do a few searches.

 

[Evil_Cloud]

http://www.pipeworks.com/oldgallery.html

Look what I just found!

Just to add:

http://www.activewin.com/xbox/shots_videos.shtml

Although the links are down, you could use the names of the files to look for them.

IGN has the movies but it's Insider Only... :/

http://xbox.ign.com/articles/078/078793p1.html

 

[Qroach]

All of thsoe demos were originally nvidia demos

 

[FatherJohn]

All of thsoe demos were originally nvidia demos

Say what? The "Sparks" demo was a stock out-of-the-box Microsoft DirectX 7.0 SDK demo, and the rest were all custom developed for Xbox. (At the time the external companies that did the demos even advertized this fact on their web sites.)

Sparks was pretty lame, but it was shown because it countered one of the PS2 tech demos. (Which also showed sparks. Ken Kutigari was saying that alpha blended sprite technology was an inherent strength of the PS2 architecture, which is true, but even the Geforce 2 had enough fill rate to do a fine spark demo.)

Or did you mean to say that the demos all ran on the "big chrome X" PC-based Xbox kits that had GeForce 2s?

 

[Qroach]

Yup basically. They were all created for xbox but were all PC geforce 2 demos.

Btw, years back I was told by someone that worked at nvidia (who once liked to post in these forums) that Nvidia had created a girl/robot demo that was MUCH closer to the pre rendered version MS first released. The only thing was that MS wasn't interested in showing that demo any longer, and they felt they needed to only show games.

 

[jvd]

I think sega is a good example of how to do a tech demo . use tech your making for current engines

3rd party techdemos are usually like that - on PS2 many were based off slightly upgraded PS1 codebases (GT, Tekken etc.), and those that made it into a product were clearly better then the techdemo showing.
Either way, Sony didn't show anything on PS2 that wasn't improved upon within next few years either.

Don't really remember what XBox demos were, but the realtime version SheMale&Robot was certainly greatly improved upon by actual games, so aside for the FMV stunt, I suspect same holds for other demos too.

Yes some where like thta . But the ones grabbing headlines were the final fantsy movie real time graphics one , which looked horrible and they have yet to make a game even close to that . (horrible comparing it to the film before i get flamed)

 

[DopeyFish]

Yup basically. They were all created for xbox but were all PC geforce 2 demos.

Btw, years back I was told by someone that worked at nvidia (who once liked to post in these forums) that Nvidia had created a girl/robot demo that was MUCH closer to the pre rendered version MS first released. The only thing was that MS wasn't interested in showing that demo any longer, and they felt they needed to only show games.

The Raven/Rex demo was not made by Nvidia. It was made by Pipeworks (same dudes who made the Godzilla game for Gamecube/PS2). Though it is true they did eventually make an NV20 version of the demo but it never got released. Only the NV15 and pre-rendered CG version got released. Pipeworks was working on the game as a Microsoft property but it eventually got canned (they ended up making the chick hot lookin! i have a picture on my computer somewhere).

Oh well. no big loss i say.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

Yes. Raven is actually an unlockable boarder in Amped.