The Big Bad Console Thread - Sway your Station with an Xboner !

Call Of Duty Ghosts next-gen engine explained: ?We?re talking about upgrading significant systems, not starting from the ground up?
Another claim bites the dust, the presentation was a straight up lie.

All the TV stuff is really awesome because all I ever watch anymore is Netflix and Hulu!

The overhyped and overexposed TV features of the Xbone aren't really that great or revolutionary. In fact, its the same old crap that has yet to work anywhere else its been tried.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/21/43...from-google-tv

Google TV is awesome in theory but they got fucked over by content providers. If Microsoft has deals with said content providers, I don't see why their system can't excel where Google's failed.

Lenas_sl said:

Google TV is awesome in theory but they got fucked over by content providers. If Microsoft has deals with said content providers, I don't see why their system can't excel where Google's failed.

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What is MS offering to induce content providers to make deals?

I'd assume tons of valuable user-data metrics, an anti-consumer but pro-provider ecosystem that helps lock down their out-dated and dying industry model, and finally lots of plain old cash.

The problem with google products (and not just Google TV) is that they have a great idea and then seem to get bored with it. You'd think we could have something as simple as adding events to Google Calendar in offline mode, for example... never mind offline editing documents on Drive. (Even where offline support exists, like in Gmail, I have at times been unable to launch it in offline mode without first being online.) My point being that just because Google failed doesn't mean Microsoft can't succeed.

As for this whole media integration thing... wasn't that already the idea with the 360 and the PS3? They're all nice features, but I find it worrisome that they take center stage. But with the focus on media, sports games, and sharing your "cool scenes" from games, maybe I'm just not the target audience for these things anymore. I honestly don't see myself looking at videos of my friends playing any video game. Chances are 99% of the uploads are really boring and make it not worth playing them to find the 1% that was actually worth the bandwidth it took to upload it.

I'm sure I'll still buy one of the two, because $500 every 5 years isn't a major investment for what it is. But I can't say I'm all that excited about what's coming up.

Gaming is by far the cheapest hobby i have, i really don't where people say how expensive it is. $60 bucks for a new game that gives me 10 hours of enjoyment? That's great! A night out with the wife or friends is $100 bucks bare minimum, a day at the range is $100-200 in ammo, hell a movie for 2 is $40 bucks these days.

I am sure i am going to end up with both new consoles at some point anyway. I will wait till after E3 and launch to decide, its all about the games after all. Actually its not anymore, its about the entire package. I just want to see what each system will offer at launch, then i will decide.

Xbone - Yes they showed a media device that doesn't really offer anything new that you can get out of 4-5 other devices.... BUT, if it really does what all of those other devices does, and does it WELL, and plays games as good or slightly below a PS4 i would be interested. If all of the shit they are touting ends up in a hacked together clunky DMR fueled device that has no game, then yeah fuck that.

PS4 - Plays game really well and has some cool IP's i am interested in. Great! ill buy it!

Im not going to sit around and get mad at something until i know what it fully is/does.

When asked if Xbox Australia had anything specific to add for gamers in this country, Pollington said, ?We don?t have any specific Australian announcements to make, but one thing that I do think is particularly exciting for customers of the Xbox One in general, and also to Australians, is the power of the cloud. We touched on it briefly in our press conference, and I think it?s a really important point and a key differenciator for Xbox One. Essentially, no longer are we constrained to the processing power of Xbox One in terms of hardware; we?re able to do a lot of processing that was traditionally done on the box, in the cloud.

?It?s also been stated that the Xbox One is ten times more powerful than the Xbox 360,so we?re effectively 40 times greater than the Xbox 360 in terms of processing capabilities [using the cloud]. If you look to the cloud as something that is no doubt going to evolve and grow over time, it really spells out that there?s no limit to where the processing power of Xbox One can go. I think that?s a very exciting proposition, not only for Australians, but anyone else who?s going to pick up the Xbox One console.?

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http://stevivor.com/2013/05/microsof...one-questions/

Err.. Ok..

Considering latency and transfer rate, what kind of task could be asked from a video game to a cloud? The only thing that comes to my not enough educated mind would be AI for turn based games. You could make a very fast yet very strong Chess game for instance, but what else?

Well yeah, its obvious MS is going the fully digital route now. You can see that in their entire product line. From Office 365 to Azure and everything else they have. I just went through an Outlook 365 deployment for our company, we went with their cloud based Exchange service and so far it is pretty amazing. We saved a ton of money and i dont have to manage an exchange server anymore. win/win.

Yeah it sucks for people that just want to have an offline gaming box, Hopefully Sony will be there for that.

I have a question for the software engineer types.

Is it really possible to leverage cloud computing to increase software/hardware performance in gaming? Are there ways to get around what i think would be huge latency issues? As someone who doesnt believe in marketing hype and PR campaigns, i just want to know if this is really could be an advantage? I do know that the MS Azure service has done some insane things for some of our .NET based stuff and i hear the software guys talk about it at tech shows but that stuff is way over my head.

Can it really be used? Or is it 100% marketing BS?

Szlia_sl said:

Considering latency and transfer rate, what kind of task could be asked from a video game to a cloud? The only thing that comes to my not enough educated mind would be AI for turn based games. You could make a very fast yet very strong Chess game for instance, but what else?

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Exactly, that's what i want to know! What could it REALLY do? Or better yet, what could it do in the hypothetical world of every gamer having Google Fiber?

FFS, I thought we dropped all this "cloud" shit already. It is not new, it is not revolutionary and it does not make sense for many, many of the use cases where it is being deployed. I'd include gaming here for damned sure and especially sincedistributedprocessing makes more sense andlocaldata access is imperative. Want to save data files for backup? Go ahead, that makes some sense. Offload graphics processing to a central server farm? That's idiotic.

It is a goddamned marketing buzzword and a lousy one at that.

It's MAGIC. The Xbone will be 40 times greater than the 360 by the power of MAGIC.*just trust us on this.

Szlia_sl said:

Considering latency and transfer rate, what kind of task could be asked from a video game to a cloud? The only thing that comes to my not enough educated mind would be AI for turn based games. You could make a very fast yet very strong Chess game for instance, but what else?

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To be honest, there are some cool possibilities with cloud computing.

Simulating hundreds of AI characters, crowd simulations (for sports games and racing games), AI bots in multiplayer games, improved physics - it is possible to do some pretty damn cool stuff.

In the future, cloud computing will, obviously, be a big deal, but that's not going to happen until fiber becomes commonplace. That might take, what, a decade or so? Maybe longer? Hrm.

Not sure why you guys think we'd need fiber-level bandwidth. The data transfer itself is minuscule, it's the calculations that are large - calculations that would be handled by the cloud computing.

If OnLive can stream an entire game plus its controls to my Kindle Fire with hardly any lag, what makes you think the X1 couldn't offload some background processing to the cloud without anyone noticing? The only lag you notice with OnLive / Gaikai are controller response, you're not going to notice milliseconds of difference in AI decisions.

I meant for graphics rendering. We'll need fiber for that.

Lenas_sl said:

Not sure why you guys think we'd need fiber-level bandwidth. The data transfer itself is minuscule, it's the calculations that are large - calculations that would be handled by the cloud computing.

If OnLive can stream an entire game plus its controls to my Kindle Fire with hardly any lag, what makes you think the X1 couldn't offload some background processing to the cloud without anyone noticing? The only lag you notice with OnLive / Gaikai are controller response, you're not going to notice milliseconds of difference in AI decisions.

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But why do this for a console? For a phone game or a handheld or something there is a constraint on size and hence on processing power so offloading some of that makes sense. It is an expensive trade but one that solves a problem.

For a console there isn't a restraint other than cost and in terms of cost, monolithic server farms are much more expensive. Hell, we spent most of a decade getting away from consolidated architectures and I just don't see the need to go backwards.