OT: Bad news for next generation video game consoles

[DivotMaker]

The next generation consoles will suffer from the dumb blonde syndrome. The games will look great like a beautiful blonde but the AI and physics will be subpar compared to current generation console games. Beautiful and dumb.

While you are certainly entitled to your opinion, I prefer to hold off stating an opinion regarding the next generation of consoles until the hardware AND games are actually released. Basing an opinion on what a single negative article says can be very misleading. Who knows what agenda the author has....

[mobiggins]

The next generation consoles will suffer from the dumb blonde syndrome. The games will look great like a beautiful blonde but the AI and physics will be subpar compared to current generation console games. Beautiful and dumb.

Where do you get these prophetic skills? You know all kinds of stuff about the end of the world, and now about next gen consoles. Preach on.

[kevinpars]

Hey, my wife is blonde and this whole 'syndrome' s*** is starting to piss me off!!!

BTW, speaking of novel ideas, I wonder when Video game makers will remember that half of the people in the world are female and instead of pushing T&A at E3, they might want to make games that cater to both males and females. Oh, and making games for adults doesn't just mean including obscene language and ultra violence. Just a thought.

[Brando70]

The next generation consoles will suffer from the dumb blonde syndrome. The games will look great like a beautiful blonde but the AI and physics will be subpar compared to current generation console games. Beautiful and dumb.

Not only that, but I read that the 360 controllers will give you genital warts.

[davet010]

BTW, speaking of novel ideas, I wonder when Video game makers will remember that half of the people in the world are female and instead of pushing T&A at E3, they might want to make games that cater to both males and females. Oh, and making games for adults doesn't just mean including obscene language and ultra violence. Just a thought.

I think I've been reading that, or variations on it, since about 1985.

And games are usually earmarked as 'adult' because of their T&A content, language and/or violence, in order to market them to those who feel that their lives might be enlightened by electronic versions thereof.

[pk500]

Dave:

And you've touched upon one of the aspects of the hobby that I consider incredibly "geeky," even if I'm a semi-hardcore gamer: Lust over female videogame characters.

It always has blown my mind how guys can get their rocks off on a videogame character such as Lara Croft or one of the female fighters in Soul Calibur. It's a f*cking figment of a programmer's imagination, for Christ's sake, not a real woman.

Yet posts salivating over Lara Croft or stories at Web sites about the "hottest videogame heroines ever" are about as certain as U.S. deficit spending during Republican administrations.

I can understand dudes getting frothy over the Hollywood version of Lara, Angelina Jolie. But the actual character in the games? That's just strange.

Take care,
PK

[davet010]

It always has blown my mind how guys can get their rocks off on a videogame character such as Lara Croft or one of the female fighters in Soul Calibur. It's a f*cking figment of a programmer's imagination, for Christ's sake, not a real woman.
Take care,
PK

Hey, the electronic Lara has unfeasibly large norks and very brief shorts, responds to your every command at the press of a button, doesn't answer back and doesn't store your every off-the-cuff remark for use in an argument 3 months from now.

Oh, and a proper British accent and realistically sized lips, unlike her non-virtual counterpart.

And the first version cost me £20, with one £25 update since.

What's not to like ?

[thejake]

posted by someone named bigAl on teamxbox:

Well, I'm going to take a stab at explaining my criticisms with this Arstechnica series of articles again. Personally, I find that this two part series overemphasizes procedural synthesis and misrepresents the Xenon CPU.

The first article makes it sound almost as if Microsoft single-handedly created the notion of procedural synthesis or that they have otherwise somehow "cornered the market" on procedural synthesis techniques. Both ideas are gross mischaracterizations in my view. The overemphasis on procedural synthesis leads many console gamers to have visions of Xbox 360 graphics that are crappily drawn, unartistic, unnatural, cookie-cutter w/ minor randomization effects.... or to otherwise get people to have misplaced expectations. The fact is that procedural synthesis, in one form or another, has been a staple in the bag of tricks for the computer graphics industry for probably some 20-25 years, at least. The associated algorithms for artfully creating realistic depictions of natural landforms and foliage have been research topics for some individuals for most of their professional careers. The impression the article mistakenly leaves is that Microsoft is creating, in a span of a couple of years, a device that solely specializes in realtime procedural synthesis and that they are virtually forcing such a technique upon the gaming industry whether wanted or not. The article clearly implies that procedural synthesis is purely a cost driven measure that will replace skilled artists with the power of the Xenon CPU. None of these characterizations are true, IMHO. Procedural synthesis is simply another tool, that may be increasingly used as the CPUs in consoles become increasingly powerful enough to handle the fairly complicated procedural synthesis algorithms that do result in realistic and natural looking representations. Game developers will not be forced to use the technique or otherwise be compelled to use it by cost concerns in such a manner that results in a bunch of repetitive looking, crappy games.

In the second part of the article, the author leaves the reader with the impression that the Xenon CPU is just a graphical powerhouse, essentially designed for and basically only good for streaming media applications and geometry calculations. Reading the article, it's almost as if Microsoft perhaps shouldn't have even bothered working with ATI so diligently on a powerful GPU for such tasks for the past 3 years or so. Furthermore, if you bother to read the Chris Hecker rant that the author refers to, one might even clearly be left with the impression that the 3 core 3.2 GHz Xenon CPU is less suitable for physics, AI, and gameplay code than the single core 733 MHz Xbox CPU! All of these impressions are gross mischaracterizations and rather shamefully implied by the author, IMHO. There is no excuse for leaving gamers shaking their heads wondering why Microsoft could have made such blunders.

At the end of the day, upon delivery of final hardware and final compilers, toolsets, and libraries, the Xenon CPU will clearly be a far superior processor to the Intel x86-based Xbox CPU. To imply otherwise is simply irresponsible journalism. Even a single Xenon core, albeit constrained by IOE, will be much more powerful and more useful in tasks such as physics, AI, and gameplay code. Contrary to what the author would like you to believe, and unlike the Cell processor the Xenon CPU was not designed or optimized primarily for streaming media applications; and was, in fact, design with game control and AI code in mind as well. That is the most significant difference between the architectures, in fact. And it is one difference that the author glaringly glosses over. The layout of the SPEs in the Cell are not simply representative of a slightly modified rearrangement of the Xenon's vector units. To compare the two arrangements that directly is verging on the absurd, IMHO. I would expect that the programming and use of the SIMD units on either architecture will be fairly radically different from the programmer's perspective.

Lastly, there is a very clear difference between having 3 generalized cores versus 1 generalized core, or that SPE code is very distinct and different than PowerPC core thread code.The author almost waves his hand at that as but a minor difference... leaving one with the impression that the PowerPC based cores aren't very generalized at all. True, they aren't as generalized as a traditional x86 core, by any means, but they are far more generalized than an SPE! Nor do they have to be as flexibly designed as an x86 architecture given the fixed nature of the console design and the opimization of toolsets that can occur. Overall, I just believe that this article leaves many misrepresentations in gamer's minds.

someone who is a game developer

I get the feeling your maybe not really understanding what in-order vs out-order execution is (if you do, my apologies...)

They execute the same code, so can do the same things. The only difference is that potentially out-of-order runs 'bad' code faster, as the CPU looks to see if there are instructions further ahead that it can do now.

Potentially you have to be a bit more careful in how you write the code in an in-order processor. Good in-order code is as fast and can do everything out-of-order does, is just a bit harder to write.

One way of looking at it, is that PC processor (OOOE) makes you a bit lazy, whereas to get maximum performance out of XeCPU or Cell you have to be a bit more careful if you want absolute maximum performance.

To be honest though AI takes so little total CPU time, nobody is going to care. If it takes 5% of a P4 or 8% of a single XeCPU core, who's really going to care when have 2 extra cores and a good GPU? Sure its 3% slower (thats just an random figure BTW) but you still have 2 other cores. Thats why we got in-order, they are smaller, so we could get extra cores.

Most console devs, are happy to have in-order with more cores. Its only really a few PC devs who complain loudly about the fact. Except Gamecube and Xbox (which both basically used desktop CPU) have been in-order, so we are used to it.

Hope that helps explain why its not a big problem IMHO

i got these from OS

[DivotMaker]

i got these from OS

Thanks for posting this as it confirms that there is truly nothing to worry about as the title of this thread prematurely and inaccurately suggested....