Antimail : XBox, gaming

XBox 360 awarded Good Design Award... in Japan!

AdiOltean — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 04:25:07 GMT

This is surprising. I didn't know that the XBox 360 case was designed by a Japanese design lab.

The machine was designed by Hers Experimental design lab. in Japan, lead by Mr. Chiaki Murata and Astro Studio in the US, under the direction of Microsoft's Jonathan Hayes. From the start of the project to its final design, Microsoft constantly tested the design with users all over the world. With this technique, they have been able to create something that appeals not only to the Japanese consumer, but to people all across the globe. The simple, curved design contrasts starkly with the major processing power inside the machine, and gives a refined look that can be coordinated with any interior. Their words, not ours.

[source: 1up]

Render yourself in XBox 360 games

AdiOltean — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 02:19:33 GMT

Lately, there are several 3D photo technologies coming from Microsoft like Photosynth and Photo Tourism. A new one is 3D facial mapping in XBox 360 games. How does it work? Upload a few photos of yourself (using the XBox Live Vision Camera), and create a 3D model of your face. You can then use "yourself" in 3D games, in your XBox.

One of the best applications, in our opinion, is the Digimask Face Rendering system, where you can take your face and map it onto a real 3D model to use in games. Very awesome, and pretty damn accurate. But is it me or is this guy's mapped 3D face suspiciously similar to Frank West from Dead Rising? Or am I just playing that game way too much? – Jason Chen

Part of this interest in the 3D facial mapping techniques was also driven by the Vision Technology research group in MSR, which was working on this area for a while.

[source: gizmodo.com]

XBox 360 committed to HD-DVD

AdiOltean — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 09:42:00 GMT

There were some recent rumors that XBox 360 has some plans to offer a Blu-Ray external drive. However, I just read that the XBox team announced that they are fully commited to HD-DVD and have absolutely no backup plans for Blu-Ray.

The question of whether Xbox 360 has the flexibility to adapt to consumers’ needs is a different issue entirely. Xbox 360 is a future-proofed system – one that allows us to add features as consumers demand them - as evidenced by our offering of the HD-DVD drive as an accessory. Current reports indicating that we have a back-up plan, which includes Blu-Ray support are incorrect. At this point, we’re fully committed to HD-DVD and have absolutely no plans to support other optical formats."

My top 10 tech predictions for 2006

AdiOltean — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 14:32:00 GMT

Let's see how this game will play out:

1) Amazon will come up with more and more interesting stuff. I expect to be surprised.

2) Someone, probably Yahoo, will buy digg and memeorandum. These sites are hot.

3) In 2004, Google captured everyone's interest with GMail, GMaps, etc. In 2005, the tables turned the other way around: everyone surprised Google engineers with lots of funny rumors (Google PC, Google OS, Google Browser, Google secret datacenters-in-a-box, dark-fiber secret plans, etc). Ignore all that. The truth is that, right now, every other startup is busy imitating Google. The conclusion? Google will have a really hard time coming with something truly innovative in 2006. Probably their biggest 2006 news would be related with buying other companies or closing expensive deals with other partners. I am not blaming Google or anything like this - they will continue to do their excellent work as usual. It's just that these new startups will overshadow their contribution in the future, to the extent that Google will not be able to come in front with almost anything new.

4) Right now, people love to speculate that the fight for the first place will be between XBox 360 and PS3. Well, I don't think so. I personally believe that the real battle will be 360 and... Nintendo Revolution. And, not only that, but 360 might have a hard time beating Revolution.

5) While technologically very good, from the sales point of view I personally think that Sony PS3 will have a very slow start (read: a big flop). Too expensive, games not spectacularly good compared with 360, Blue Ray not in demand, etc.

6) Speaking of which, the BluRay vs. HD-DVD battle won't settle until 2007 (translated = low demand for media in both formats). PS3 will be impacted too.

7) I can imagine that, right now, Yahoo is pretty desperate in fighting with Google on all fronts. So I expect that Yahoo will surpass Google at the end of 2006 in several areas where currently Google is a leader. One of these areas? Search relevance.

8) MySpace.com will enter in a legal trouble or something. They will remain #1 blogging site for teenagers, though.

9) 2006 will be the year when we will see more nice desktops in the mini/micro form factor, in the lines of Apple Mini. These new PCs will be advertised as damn fast (not for a gaming machine, though) and reasonably cheap (around $500).

10) End of 2006 (maybe CES 2007). We will start to see cheap cell phones with incorporated flash-based media players (4-8 GB seems reasonable). However, it is unclear what would be the portal to get songs on these devices.

Disclaimer: This is just my own personal gut feeling, take it with a grain of salt. My opinion here is unrelated with Microsoft's official position. And, BTW, I have absolutely no insider knowledge on any of these - this is why I tried to avoid any predictions on Microsoft products.

Banned XBox 360 ad

AdiOltean — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 13:41:00 GMT

I saw this a while back and I thought it was a damn good ad. In case you haven't seen it, it's worth a click:

http://microsoft.blognewschannel.com/index.php/archives/2005/11/22/banned-xbox-360-ad-best-ad-ever/

P.S. By the way, while are on 360-related topics. Sega offers a free XBox faceplate bundled with their Full Auto preorders. That's a nifty move. I would even venture to predict that free XBox faceplates bundled with games will become quite common one year from now...

Pure Gold XBox 360 faceplate

AdiOltean — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 23:05:00 GMT

I am amazed too about the eBay XBox 360 mania (as noted in my previous post). But I didn't thought that I've just barely scratched the surface here. How about a XBox face plate made from pure gold?

It's yours for only $36,000.00 on eBay. (yes, I correctly counted all the zeros)

[via cozydozer]

Home-made XBox 360 auctioned on eBay for $611

AdiOltean — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 11:20:00 GMT

OK - this is getting out of hand... :-)

"I never (actually) thought people would bid on this," wrote the seller, who goes by the eBay screen name "silentbarrel," in response to an e-mail inquiry Friday. "I thought most people that were spending any money on anything would read what they are buying."
"Silentbarrel" wasn't even offering a real Xbox box, but rather a homemade one. He explained that he had alerted the buyer to the ruse after the auction ended, saying not to send the $611 payment.

[...]
"I Cannot be more clear! This is not even a factory made xbox 360 box. I made it myself, just a few minutes ago," read one of the disclosures in the listing, surrounded by pictures and descriptions of the actual console. "It does not contain an Xbox 360 console, just the Xbox 360 home-made box."

Check the reality: What most gamers use as their gaming PC?

AdiOltean — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 19:33:00 GMT

I just got prompted today for a survey on what most gamers use as their gaming PC. Very interesting results:

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

A few notes:
1) Most peope are still in the ATI 9600/9800 ballpark. Hmmm... now this is interesting. I do not feel that outdated anymore with my 9600 XT. Also, the most common NVidia card seems to be FX 5200 series. An antique type of card (if you ask me) but, hey, that's what most people have.
2) Memory seems to be eithyer 512 MB or 1 GB. Not a surprise here.
3) AMD Processor speed - between 2 and 2.29 GHz. Keep in mind that an Athlon64 3000+ is around that numbers... (2200 MHz if I remember correctly)
4) Most machines are now upgraded to XP SP2 (73%). The XP SP1 percentage is around 13%, and XP RTM is just 7%. The Windows Update team did a good job :-)
5) Wow - with almost 90%, NTFS rules as the dominant file system! Congrats to the NTFS team (Neal, Molly and others - you know who you are!). FAT/FAT32 is now history.
6) There is an interesting distribution on the free storage space. If you draw the "free space" distribution histogram, you see a growth p to about 20 GB, and then a nice exponential decrease. The max is around 20 GB. And the next picture shows what most people use 80 GB harddisks. This, correlated with the previous distribution suggest a 75% average space utilization, and 25% free space. Very interesting data.

Day of Defeat: Source - released!

AdiOltean — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 11:49:00 GMT

A few hours ago (one hour later than expected, at 4.00 PM PDT), Day of Defeat: Source was released in the wild. This is the first product from Valve that benefits from the HDR technology. The Valve engineers went to interesting challenges to make HDR work on both ATI and NVIDIA cards, as described in this ArsTechnica article (and another link here).

I took a quick look at the game a few hours ago, and it looked great. However, right now I cannot play it apparently:

Well, maybe another day...

Virtual disease affecting World of Warcraft characters

AdiOltean — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 05:20:00 GMT

We are living in interesting times. First, WoW created the possibility of virtual economies. Now we have virtual diseases...

Players of Blizzard's incredibly popular World of Warcraft are reporting the outbreak of a virtual plague that is spreading across major cities in the virtual land of Azeroth, infecting player characters at an alarming rate.

The trouble started when Blizzard programmers added a new instance, which is a separate area connected to the outside world that players can enter and attempt unique quests. One of these instances, Zul'Grub, contained the god of blood, Hakkar. Hakkar was a powerful foe that could cast spells of his own, including a spell called Corrupted Blood. This spell did a large amount of damage to any player within the vicinity of the casting, and the effects lingered on after the spell was over.

What happened next was something Blizzard did not expect. Some of the players who had gone into the instance emerged back into the main world of Azeroth, and started spreading the Corrupted Blood disease to others who they came into close contact with. The infection soon spread into many of the cities and towns in the virtual world. Since the disease was intended to be a danger to powerful players, it tended to kill those less than level 50 almost instantly.

Here is a video with the disease in action.

[via]

Age of Empires III

AdiOltean — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 08:57:00 GMT

I can't wait to get it.

In the meantime, interesting things on http://ageofempires3.com. AOE3 will use Havok physics engine, the same middleware component that powers Half-Life 2 (there is a link mentioning Havoc in this page, however, the link points to a "in construction" page). But in the introduction video you can see some real physics effects: soldiers that are thrown away by a cannon's fire, etc.

Also, a funny bug mentioned in the AOE3 developer's blog:

The AI and Walls (Cue Laugh track): Programmer Jeff Ruediger is leading the artificial intelligence (AI) team for Age 3 and recently reported the fix of a humorous bug. His group had recently given the AI the ability to build Walls, but hadn’t thought the new capability out completely because the AI was walling itself in with no gates. It could build a big army but was trapped inside its own walls. Artist Brett Briley found the problem while testing and Jeff reports it now fixed, although he pointed out the AI was not pleased to hear it now costs resources to insert Gates.

This bug is a good example of the stuff that happens when programming games. Decisions are made in hallway meetings, or changes in one part of the game require changes elsewhere, and new programming/art/design is called for with minimal documentation, tracking, etc. It happens very fast, but that often means some obvious things fall through the cracks. We rely on extensive testing to find those oversights and almost always it does.

P.S. Wait a minute - the AOE3 blog doesn't have a RSS feed. How uncool is that? :-)

XBOX 360 Graphics Demystified

AdiOltean — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 04:20:00 GMT

Beyond3D has a very detailed article about Xenos, the GPU provided by ATI in XBox 360...

http://www.beyond3d.com/articles/xenos/

Ageia's PhysX: Hype or Revolution?

AdiOltean — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 12:00:00 GMT

There is more and more excitement building up on an upcoming physics hardware acceleration engine. If this thing succeeds, it's going to be big. Anyone remembers 3dfx that revolutionized the game industry with their cards?

But, anyway, I just read three consecutive articles in ExtremeTech about Ageia, and I think it's interesting to see how the overall tone is changing over time. The first article is generally positive, but the next article ends up with a sarcastic remark:

Ageia claims that when add-in boards go on sale this fall, there will be 10 to 12 titles optimized for it. They may have great technology, and the PhysX chip might be the next "gotta have it" PC component, but boy, does the company not know how to make a launch in the game industry. To make a splash with gamers, you've got to show real-time demos that make people say "Wow!" You have to give them lists of AAA titles that will use your technology, quotes from rock-star developers about how it's going to revolutionize gaming. You've got to tell gamers how much it'll cost them. There should be before-and-after AVIs of a hot upcoming game all over the web, showing just how incredible it looks and reacts with the PhysX chip.
Ageia has done none of this, and a gaming public already staring down expensive video-card upgrades and next-generation console systems is understandably jaded.

The third article was written after E3, and the overall tone is different now. This time, the article starts with the fresh facts:

So far, ASUS is the first to announce a partnership with AGEIA. They'll have a PPU board with AGEIA's chip on the market in the fourth quarter of this year, with 128MB of GDDR3 memory, for roughly $249 to $299. Initially, it will only come only in a PCI card, with PCIe cards expected further in the future.

And some game vendors that signed up:

AGEIA was able to name some software titles that will enjoy physics acceleration, too. Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends from Microsoft, Ghost Recon 3 from UbiSoft, City of Villians from NC Soft, and Atari's Matrix license Path of Neo are some of the highlights they told us about.

And, finally, the first live demos:

The first demo was graphically simple, but still fairly impressive. A large rocky hillside had about 4,200 boulders dropped at the top, which all bounced, tumbled, and interacted in a realistic (and speedy) fashion. AGEIA claimed that a dual-core CPU can handle maybe 800-1,000 in a demo like this, but was quick to note that 4,200 boulders was nowhere near the capability of their chip. There's a driver issue right now where a lot of the timings need to be worked out between the massively parallel math units in the chip. Within a couple of months, the company will have a new driver which will enable them to raise the boulder count to 32,000. They're confident they can reach that number, but even if they can only get halfway there, 16,000 to 20,000 boulders is a lot better than a CPU can do.
The other demo was somewhat less impressive, showing particle-based fluid dynamics by displaying a shiny car that had fluid streams "sprayed" on it, like a primitive car wash. The particles could be change to plasma, soap bubbles, water, or whatever, but it honestly didn't look that great. Chalk it up to having programmers make demos, and not having real artists involved. The demo involved 6,000 particles, but again, that's the driver timing issue rearing its ugly head. The fixed driver in a couple months should be able to handle 40-50,000 particles.

I am not sure how things will evolve over time, but one thing is clear. Sooner or later, everobody will need physics hardware acceleration in their games. We'll see how this works out...

The Art of Viktor Antonov

AdiOltean — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 12:16:00 GMT

This type of art that leaves me in complete amazement. A fantastic place, an atmosphere close to what us, eastern-europeans were so used to.

Viktor (who spent his childhood in Sofia, Bulgaria) is the art director/conceptual designer at Valve. His influence in Half-life 2 is very visible through the whole game, probably not only in terms of conceptual design, but also in the overall HL2 intense immersive experience, as Rory said once. If you are a HL2 fan, check the site above and you'll understand. And, by the way, when you will see the Vulcan Junction, you'll probably recognize where the seeds of the Citadel design comes from...