The Official XBOX360 topic

[Stormwatch]

Full transcript της video συνεντευξης του Gabe Newell της Valve στο 1up.com.

To κομματι στο οποιο αναφερεται στο Χ360 και στο PS3.

 

 

 

Gabe: I think what we have to do is continue to look for ways to make Steam more valuable to people, to solve problems for people. There are huge numbers of support problems that we can just make go away by proactively solving them.

 

We still aren't getting display drivers out to people automatically, which makes me crazy. It's like one of the biggest problems our customers have is the fact that they don't have an automatic update facility for display drivers, and it's been obvious for a couple of years that needs to happen, and yet we still don't have that...

 

Editor: Isn’t Microsoft trying to address that with Longhorn?

 

Gabe: Great!

 

Editor: I mean, have them been talking to you about this? I figure they’d probably be talking to game developers….

 

[…interlude: Steam is the Future... the next-gen headache…]

 

I’d be more likely to be excited about NVIDIA or ATI saying they were going to have solutions than expecting that Longhorn is going to wave a fairy wand over anything. They keep cutting and cutting and cutting, and I think expectations for sales of Longhorn are getting less and less…

 

But that's an example of something that would be clearly be valuable to customers, would solve problems for our customers, and would globally reduce everybody's support burden and yet we haven't done it yet.

 

…Like I had a conversation with people at Microsoft recently, and I said "I cannot point to a single feature in Longhorn that I care about. There is nothing in Longhorn at all that solves any problems for us at all.”

 

You know, I had the same conversation with the xbox 360 guys. It’s like “The xbox 360 doesn’t make my life any better, and in fact it makes it a lot worse and you’re telling me I can’t rely on having a hard drive.”

 

When I look at what I need to compete with, the most interesting game property right now is World of Warcraft. Huge retail sales and huge recurring revenue. Not only that, but they have a great experience wrapped around it, whether it’s their forums, or community art, or whatever, they’re not only getting their customers to play the game, they’re getting their customers to make the experience more valuable for other people who play the game. So I’ll go up and download music and watch the movies that people have created, and see fan art and do all these other things.

 

So when I look at, sort of, what a platform needs to help a software developer do right now, it’s figure out how to beat World of Warcraft, and when I look at the strategies that are being put forward by Microsoft on the system side or the xbox side, or Sony, or Nintendo, they’re not making my life easier.

 

Like the Playstation 3 makes my life as a software developer much harder. All of a sudden I’m supposed to figure out how to have this asymmetric multithreaded game, right? And I’ve never written a single line of multithreaded code, ever, right? It’s not like I was lying around saying “I need to re-architect every line of code I’ve ever written in order to get it to work.”

 

So one of my junior programmers, who’s writing game code (rather than system code), could slow things down by, in a real world case, by a factor of 80, because they’re doing something out in the AI, or in the game DLL, which used to be totally safe, and now all of a sudden the whole system just slows down. And the one of the really experienced programmers have to go in and say, “Oh, you can’t tell but you’re doing this, you ran out of register space, and this other thing happened, and no there’s no debugger that shows this to you.”

 

Writing for SPEs and writing in a Playstation 3 environment, there are incredibly few programmers who can safely write code in that environment. You make tiny little changes to code running on one of the SPEs and the entire thing will grind to a halt. You have no visibility into why that’s happening -- it’s just sort of magically running really, really slow. It’s also incredibly hard to architect things at the beginning so that you can distribute all of your functionality on all of these different processing units.

 

This was not a problem that we were lying awake late at night saying “oh we would really like to take this on right now.” You know, we were worried about little things like billing, and forums, and wikis and things like that.

 

I totally see why Sony wants people to write code that runs on 7 SPEs and a central processing unit -- because that code is never going to run well anywhere else.

 

They’re saying “make your code not run on anything other than one of ours and we’re betting that we’ll have market share that’s so high that everybody will have to write code for our platform, and other people, you know, “we’ll just starve the air from other platforms by absorbing everyone’s R&D budget and making their code less portable.”

 

[...edit?...]

 

Steam was essentially “here is this set of tools that software developers need, focused on solving the problems we have with these next generation of games”. You know billing, updates, product support, connecting our customers together, and things like that.

 

I would think that for a lot of developers, things like Steam are going to be more interesting than and solve more problems to them than this next generation of hardware and operating systems platforms.

 

You know the Saturn came out, and that was intended to take this previous generation of games, and create this super complicated chunk of hardware that would help you make the ultimate sprite oriented game. And Sony came along and said “no, no, no it’s not a sprite problem any more, it’s a 3D graphics problem”…

 

I think a lot of developers are going to say “that’s not the problem, it’s another Sega Saturn". It’s "how do we connect to our customers?", "get data from our customers, get updates to our customers?", "have closer relationships?", "how do we compete with the customer experience that you get out of being a WOW customer?” more than “how do we blast another set of pixels at what is essentially a 640x480 screen?”.

[privateer]

ATI's Xenos (360 GPU) to have "Fluid Reality"

Fluid Reality technology is hardware accelerated by the GPU, and will be able to recreate realisitc fluids, how a characters clothes rustle in the wind, how every hair on a characters face falls into place when their head moves, how an animal's fur shakes when running, and realistic facial expressions.

 

Granted, this isn't a complete physics package, it will work seemlessly with any other software based physics engines. Developers are free to use this to add that extra level of physics reality, without sacrficing CPU performance. Whether or not AGEIA offers it, the idea that the 360 won't have realistic fluids is wrong.

 

http://www.ati.com/developer/techreports/ATITechReport_EarlyZFlow.pdf

[privateer]

ATI's Xenos (360 GPU) to have "Fluid Reality"

Fluid Reality technology is hardware accelerated by the GPU, and will be able to recreate realisitc fluids, how a characters clothes rustle in the wind, how every hair on a characters face falls into place when their head moves, how an animal's fur shakes when running, and realistic facial expressions.

 

Granted, this isn't a complete physics package, it will work seemlessly with any other software based physics engines. Developers are free to use this to add that extra level of physics reality, without sacrficing CPU performance. Whether or not AGEIA offers it, the idea that the 360 won't have realistic fluids is wrong.

 

http://www.ati.com/developer/techreports/ATITechReport_EarlyZFlow.pdf

[privateer]

Unsigned Xbox 360 Developer Best Practices

 

Developers who are interested in writing games for Xbox 360 can be productive without having an Xbox 360 development kit. This paper describes hardware and software that can be used to emulate Xbox 360. It also includes recommendations for programmers wanting to get a head start on Xbox 360 development.

Hardware

 

The Xbox 360 console is composed of a PowerPC-based triple-core CPU and a custom ATI graphics processor. Neither of these processors is available in standard PC-based hardware. We recommend the following system for emulating Xbox 360 using a PC:

• Microsoft Windows® XP

• PC with multiple hardware threads (hyperthreads) or multiple independent CPU cores

• ATI graphics card with support for High Level Shading Language (HLSL) shader model 3.0 (when available)

• Widescreen HDTV monitor

Software

 

Xbox 360 games are programmed using the Microsoft® Visual Studio® development system. The Xbox 360 development kit (XDK) supports development using either C or C++. We recommend the following software for writing Xbox 360 code using a PC:

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Studio .NET 2003

• Direct3D 9.0 Software Development Kit

• Microsoft Cross-Platform Audio Creation Tool (XACT)

 

Xbox 360 Programming Recommendations

 

Developing for Xbox 360 has many similarities to writing games for other consoles, as well as some unique qualities. Following is a list of best practices for creating games for Xbox 360.

General Programming

• Multithread your game engine. Single-threaded games use only a third of the potential processing power of the system.

o Prefer using native Windows thread APIs and synchronization primitives. Xbox 360 supports similar APIs.

o A simple architecture for multithreading on Xbox 360 uses one thread for world updates and another thread for graphics processing. An additional CPU core can be used for audio, decompression, geometry generation or other game tasks.

o Another way to utilize additional cores is with OpenMP. OpenMP is supported in Visual Studio 2005.

• Ensure your game memory footprint fits within 512 MB. Xbox 360 does not have hard disk paging like Windows.

• Access memory carefully. As is typical with high-performance CPUs, memory latency can be a significant bottleneck.

o Optimize for the L2 cache. Xbox 360 has a 1MB L2 cache. Think of RAM as a fast hard drive rather than as infinitely fast memory.

o Avoid walking linked-lists or any other data structure that has nodes spread across memory. Avoid walking any large data structure more than once per frame. Prefer contiguous data structures, like arrays.

• Prefer calculating data to loading it. The Xbox 360 CPU is a mathematical monster. Avoid code thatʼs special-cased to skip heavy duty math. In particular, avoid floating-point comparisons and avoid converting or casting data from int to float or vice-versa.

• For best performance, prefer native Windows functions to C runtime functions. For instance, prefer ReadFile over fread.

• Delay low-level engine tuning until you have an official Xbox 360 development kit. Over-optimizing can be counterproductive, but on the other hand, plan to spend time optimizing for the platform once you have a development kit. Xbox 360 has a ton of power, and time spent on optimization can have a huge impact on your gameʼs performance.

Graphics

• Target the Direct3D 9.0 interface. This interface forms the basis of the Xbox 360 graphics API.

• Donʼt rely heavily on Direct3DX (D3DX). D3DX utility functions are not tuned for Xbox 360—there are almost always faster ways to accomplish the same task.

• Support a 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio. Support a minimum frame buffer size of 1280 × 720.

• Use HLSL for shaders. The Xbox 360 GPU has an extremely efficient shader architecture. HLSL shader model 3.0 programming is the right way to harness the GPU.

• Using a Z-only pass to build the Z-buffer is a technique that works well on Xbox 360.

• Avoid using the fixed-function pipeline. It is not supported on Xbox 360. Use custom shaders instead.

• Use PIX, a performance-analyzing tool for game and graphics tuning. PIX is available in the DirectX SDK.

Audio

• Use XACT. XACT is the preferred way of creating and playing audio content on both PC and Xbox.

• Source material should be sampled at a minimum rate of 48KHz. Author dry source and plan for real-time effects.

• XMA is the native audio format for Xbox 360. Plan to take advantage of surround sound and XMA compression.

Networking/Live

• Use basic sockets or Winsock for network programming. Xbox Live libraries are currently available only in conjunction with the XDK.

• Prefer UDP as the network protocol for most games.

• Plan for voice chat within your game. Architect your network engine with the assumption that you will send voice data as well as game data.

Content

• Update your content pipeline to support big-endian hardware. Intel-based PCs are little-endian, while Xbox 360 is big-endian. We recommend that all content on the Xbox 360 game disc be in big-endian format for best performance.

• Ensure the game art pipeline supports features like vertex compression, texture compression, and triangle stripping.

• Consider DirectX effects (DX effects), commonly authored using .FX files. A modified version of DX effects are supported on Xbox 360.

General Console Programming Recommendations

Developing console games is very different from writing PC games. With this in mind, the following list provides some general recommendations for making an effective console game.

• Design for controller input, not for keyboard & mouse input. Console players press simple buttons—they donʼt move the mouse or tap a keyboard.

• Design for the ten-foot experience. Use fonts that are readable on televisions. Use simple menus; avoid long scrolling lists.

• Consider using a television as an output device during development. PC-to-TV video adaptors are widely available.

• Minimize load times. Console games donʼt install to a hard drive—they run directly from the game disc, so using the game disc effectively is important. Plan to stream data from the disc throughout the game, plan to compress game data, and offload decompression to a separate thread. Consider replicating data to avoid unnecessary seeking.

• Donʼt assume the console player has a memory unit or that the hard drive is always attached. A game should have playable modes even if the detachable drive is removed.

• Be aware of the title-safe region on televisions—that is, avoid displaying critical UI elements or text in the outer edges of the screen.

References

Xbox 360 system specifications: http://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox360/factsheet.htm

Xbox 360 consumer site: http://www.xbox360.com/

Visual Studio: http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/

DirectX Software Development Kit: http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/

XACT for Windows is currently in beta. You can apply for the beta at http://beta.microsoft.com/ using the Guest ID: XACTBeta.

OpenMP: http://www.openmp.org/

[iSpO_fAcTo]

Xbox 360 vs. PS3 (Part 1 of 4) http://www.majornelson.com/2005/05/20/xbox-360-vs-ps3-part-1-of-4/

 

Xbox 360 vs. PS3 (Part 2 of 4)

http://www.majornelson.com/2005/05/20/xbox-360-vs-ps3-part-2-of-4/

 

Xbox 360 vs. PS3 (Part 3 of 4)

http://www.majornelson.com/2005/05/20/xbox-360-vs-ps3-part-3-of-4

 

Xbox 360 vs. PS3 (Part 4 of 4)

http://www.majornelson.com/2005/05/20/xbox-360-vs-ps3-part-4-of-4/

[iSpO_fAcTo]

Xbox 360 vs. PlayStation 3: A Technical Comparison

 

http://winsupersite.com/showcase/xbox360_vs_ps3.asp

[nestorn]

Xα χα έχει πολύ γέλιο η υπόθεση....

Πάντως το πιο μεγάλο ΑΝΕΚΔΟΤΟ είναι το δήθεν σημαντικό :

"Total Memory System Bandwidth"....278.4 vs 48 Gb/sec....

To νούμερο αυτό εκτός του οτι δεν έχει καμία σχεδόν υπόσταση ως σύνολο

ωφείλεται στο 360 στα 10Μb embedded RAM που έχει το τσιπάκι γραφικών του

η οποία είναι πολύ γρήγορη....Να θυμίσω οτι πρώτο το playstation2 είχε 4Μb

embedded RAM στη GPU και ετσι αν αθροίσουμε το ίδιο νούμερο στα xbox και PS2

έχουμε: 6,4+6,4=12.8GB/sec στο xbox και 3,2+48+κατι άλλα ψιλά=52+ Gb/sec

στο PS2....Δηλαδή το PS2 είναι κανα πεντάρι φορές πιο δυνατό απο το xbox....AΣΤΕΙΑ ΠΡΑΓΜΑΤΑ

[Slay]

Oi sygkriseis toy majornelson einai palies kai exoyn hdh apaxiothei apo sxedon to synolo ton fan kathe platformas kyrios logo ton anakribeion, psematon, kai eikasion poy periexei, an kai den einai diko toy ergo h sygkekrimenh sygkrish, einai ths M$ kai thn ekane amesos meta thn E3 otan eidan ta specs toy PS3, klassikh politikh ths M$ na xrhmatodotei anexarthtes meletes kai ereynes ;-)

 

Edit:

To deytero sygkritiko apo to winsupersite einai akoma poio pathetic, kai pseydete katafora , ta "lathh" toy einai ta exhs:

Leei san mnhmh 512mb video ram kai 512mb system ram gia to 360 alla kanei ton diaxorismo 256 kai 256 gia to ps3, eno einai gnosto oti kai h gpu kai h cpu sto ps3 mporei na dei h mia thn mnhmh ths allhs, kai bebaia to 360 DEN exei 1gb mnhmh, 512 exei poy ta moirazontai cpu kai gpu.

Leei oti to 360 exei 1 Gigabit ethernet, eno sthn pragmatikothta exei 100mbit.

Leei oti einai Wi-Fi ready eno DEN einai, apaiteitai h agora toy adapter poy kanei 100$.

Leei oti exei standard sklhro disko eno DEN exei.

Pragmatika pathetic kai ayto to sygkritiko.

[DIMERR]

Oi sygkriseis toy majornelson einai palies kai exoyn hdh apaxiothei apo sxedon to synolo ton fan kathe platformas kyrios logo ton anakribeion' date=' psematon, kai eikasion poy periexei, an kai den einai diko toy ergo h sygkekrimenh sygkrish, einai ths M$ kai thn ekane amesos meta thn E3 otan eidan ta specs toy PS3, klassikh politikh ths M$ na [b']xrhmatodotei anexarthtes[/b] meletes kai ereynes ;-)

 

 

Kala re file esi ola ayta pou ta ksereis?exeis milisei me tous funs h ksereis proswpika ton Bill Gates kai sou ta eipe apo prwto xeri??eleos...... :roll: :?

[Slay]

Kala re file esi ola ayta pou ta ksereis?exeis milisei me tous funs h ksereis proswpika ton Bill Gates kai sou ta eipe apo prwto xeri??eleos...... :roll: :?

thes sxolia apo toys fans? oriste ena thread apo to beyond3d , to sobarotero forum gia konsoles http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=20059&highlight=major

 

epishs gia to poso antikeimenikh einai ayth h analysh.

With Sony's specs out, Microsoft has sent us its a comparitive analysis. What's the outcome?

Make of it what you will, but be clear we know Microsoft has clearly slanted this info

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/617/617951p1.html

h analysh poy esteile sto IGN einai bebaia h idia me toy majorneslon

[BlizardBill]

Kala re file esi ola ayta pou ta ksereis?exeis milisei me tous funs h ksereis proswpika ton Bill Gates kai sou ta eipe apo prwto xeri??eleos...... :roll: :?

Πάντως υπάρχει ένα "forum" (pvc.com) που είναι καθαρά χρηματοδοτούμενο και πλήρως ελεγχόμενο από την Microsoft ,χωρίς να το λέει πουθενά.

Το τι γίνεται εκεί είναι απίστευτο , και αν παρακολουθήσεις λίγο θα καταλάβεις ότι η παραπάνω τακτική είναι χαρακτηριστική της Microsoft.

[nestorn]

Kαλά το οτι θα υπάρχουν forum και ατομα που πιστεύουν τα λεγόμενα αυτά

δεν είναι απίθανο, ο καθένας έχει δικαίωμα στις παρωπίδες.....

Το θέμα για εμένα είναι πως με το να βγάζει η micro$oft τέτοια αστεία στοιχεία

και συγκρίσεις δεν νομίζω οτι τελικά κάνει καλό στο xbox360....

Mπορούσε να βρεί εναν τομέα που να μην είναι τόσο γελοίος και να στηριχθεί

εκεί(π.χ. unified shaders)....όμως με στοιχεία ανούσια όπως general purpose CPU

performance(λές και το 360 θα τρέχει excel και powerpoint) δεν νομίζω οτι

καταφέρνει να στηρίξει το μηχανημα της....

Αντίθετα η Sony σου πετάει ένα νούμερο 2ΤFlops και αντε εσύ να δεις απο που

το έβγαλε και πως????...

 

Πάντως να σημειώσω οτι σε όλες τις συνεντεύξεις ανεξαρτήτων developers

αναφέρεται οτι το PS3 είναι απο ελαφρώς έως αρκετά πιο δυνατό απο το 360

ενώ πουθενά δεν αναφέρουν το αντίθετο....

[dsp]

Simera poylisa to xbox kai perimeno me agonia to xbox 360 !!!!!!!!!!

[jimbrav]

Simera poylisa to xbox kai perimeno me agonia to xbox 360 !!!!!!!!!!

 

 

 

kai ego perimeno to 360!!!!!!!

 

kai afiste toys alloys na lene kai na ksanalene!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[privateer]

Japanese publication reports Xbox 360 titles Ridge Racer 6, World Air Force, and Kameo: Elements of Power to be playable at next week's event. With the Tokyo Game Show only one week away, game publishers are beginning to announce their line-up for this year's event, which is expected to be as big (or bigger) than the TGS that took place right before the PlayStation 2's debut. The focus of TGS2005 is the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and it's been anticipated that some of their games will actually be playable at the show. The latest issue of Famitsu has unveiled a preliminary line-up of next-generation titles for the show, and it confirms that a number of them will be playable.

 

The biggest surprise by Famitsu is that Namco's Ridge Racer 6 for the Xbox 360 will be playable at the show, even though no screenshots or trailers for the game have been released yet. The magazine also reports that the general public will get their first chance to try out Kameo: Elements of Power, created by Microsoft-owned, UK-based development studio Rare. Another Xbox 360 game to be playable at the show is Taito's jet combat simulator World Air Force, which fully takes advantage of the console's calculation capacity for real-time physics. A number of other Xbox 360 titles will also be on display at the show, although they've only been confirmed in trailer form for now.

 

On the other hand, the lineup of PlayStation 3 games for Tokyo Game Show 2005 is still looking small. Only two games have been announced so far--Konami's Metal Gear Solid 4 and Koei's Ni-Oh--and both will only appear in trailer form. However, it's expected that more PS3 games will be at the show, as Sony Computer Entertainment hasn't announced any of the games that will be at its booth yet.

 

The Tokyo Game Show will take place at the Makuhari Convention Center in Chiba prefecture from September 16-18. The first day is open to industry affiliates only, but day two and three will be open to the public. Tickets are available for advance sale at 1,000 yen ($9) and can also be purchased at the show for 1,200 yen ($11). The current list of next-generation console games at TGS 2005 is below.

 

Xbox 360:

(Title / Publisher, exhibit format)

Dynasty Warriors 5 Special /Koei, TBA

Dead or Alive 4 /Tecmo, Trailer

Frame City Killer /Namco, Trailer

Kameo: Elements of Power /Microsoft, Playable

Pro Yakyuu Spirits /Konami, Trailer

Ridge Racer 6 /Namco, Playable

Rumble Roses XX /Konami, Trailer

Shutokou Battle /Genki, Trailer

Tengei Makyo Ziraia: Haruka Naru Jipang /Hudson, Trailer

World Air Force /Taito, Playable

 

PlayStation 3:

(Title / Publisher, exhibit format)

Metal Gear Solid 4 /Konami, Trailer

Ni-Oh / Koei, Trailer

 

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/09/07/news_6132662.html