Next Next-Gen Consoles Thread

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univbee: Jun 3, 2004

TheScott2K posted:

I'm not going to deny that the PS1 had a lot of great games. That tends to happen to the dominant console of each generation. But the hardware in it was trash. Textures couldn't sit still, draw distances were terrible, no bilinear filtering at all - the interlaced CRTs of the time hid some of that but god drat it was still nasty, especially if you had access to a PC with a 3D card.

You're talking about hardware which launched in December 1994. PC 3D cards didn't even come on the market until mid-to-late 1996 and pretty much needed a Pentium, which if you bought one in December 1994 would have cost you $2500.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=PI...20guide&f=false

The PS1 gave you CD-ROM storage (including multi-disc games), good-enough 3D if the game devs knew what they were doing (and most did, it was way easier than Saturn or other consoles), and non-murderous load times.

# ? May 17, 2016 19:08

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# ? Apr 19, 2024 01:23

TheScott2K: Oct 26, 2003; I'm just saying, there's a nonzero chance Trump has a really toad penis.

At what point did I dispute that the PS1 was a successful console?

univbee posted:

You're talking about hardware which launched in December 1994. PC 3D cards didn't even come on the market until mid-to-late 1996 and pretty much needed a Pentium, which if you bought one in December 1994 would have cost you $2500.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=PI...20guide&f=false

Launched in 1994 (in Japan) but whose zenith was 1998 - the same year PC gamers were running Quake II, Unreal, and Half-Life on their 3Dfx cards.

This whole bitchfest over the PS1's abilities is tangential to my original point - that successful console manufacturers tend to follow up their success with bad, overreaching decisions. The only clear counterexample is the PS1 to PS2 handoff, which was an eternity ago.

TheScott2K fucked around with this message at 19:13 on May 17, 2016

# ? May 17, 2016 19:08

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

You said the PS1 hardware was trash despite running circles around PC offerings for its first 18+ months while costing 1/5th to 1/10th of the price of a PC. Like yeah, it had those 3D problems you mentioned, but remember this was well beyond any other offerings at that time.

# ? May 17, 2016 19:11

Bass Bottles: Jan 14, 2006; BOSS BATTLES DID NOTHING WRONG

TheScott2K posted:

At what point did I dispute that the PS1 was a successful console?

my crystal ball says you will regret making this post when stux replies to it no matter what he says

# ? May 17, 2016 19:11

Instant Sunrise: Apr 12, 2007; The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

The N64/PSX era is interesting in hindsight because it's the last time that there's a significant difference in how games look between the major platforms. It's also the last generation where multiplatform games aren't the norm.

Once you get into the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox era, games look much more consistent between platforms, and the big 3rd parties like EA and Activision start publishing multiplatform games as the rule, and that's really the start of modern gaming.

But I do remember the fights about which system looked better, with people preferring the blurry low-res textures of the N64 or the jittery, pixelated images on the PSX.

# ? May 17, 2016 19:13

TheScott2K: Oct 26, 2003; I'm just saying, there's a nonzero chance Trump has a really toad penis.

Bass Bottles posted:

my crystal ball says you will regret making this post when stux replies to it no matter what he says

What happens to Stux has happened to Stux

# ? May 17, 2016 19:13

Nierbo: Dec 5, 2010; sup brah?

Another consideration is back in the ps1/ps2 days, very few of those games were coming to PC whereas now basically all console games come to PC, so the console vs pc landscape is totally different. Also the ps1 wasn't trash, wtf are u talking bout

# ? May 17, 2016 19:32

TheScott2K: Oct 26, 2003; I'm just saying, there's a nonzero chance Trump has a really toad penis.

Genesis also looked bad and sounded bad compared to SNES but had good games and found success by being less of an rear end in a top hat to third parties and retailers while charging customers less.

# ? May 17, 2016 19:40

fivegears4reverse: Apr 4, 2007; by R. Guyovich

TheScott2K posted:

Genesis sounded bad

motherfuckaaaaa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KC-B3Q0cRrY

(actually I agree here the Genesis sound chip was demonstrably inferior to the SNES on pretty much every level that matters, but you could still get some amazing poo poo out of it)

# ? May 17, 2016 19:44

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

TheScott2K posted:

Genesis also looked bad and sounded bad compared to SNES but had good games and found success by being less of an rear end in a top hat to third parties and retailers while charging customers less.

Genesis' graphics and sound weaknesses could be worked around by someone competent, and again, you're talking about 1988 hardware, which was released before PC games even let you use anything better than PC speaker. The Super Famicom wasn't released until over 2 years later in Japan. Remember that the release timing of consoles in North America was all kinds of hosed until post-PS2 and that throws off perception of value since we got a lot of early consoles "late", and we're talking by a factor of years.

# ? May 17, 2016 19:48

TheScott2K: Oct 26, 2003; I'm just saying, there's a nonzero chance Trump has a really toad penis.

So?

# ? May 17, 2016 19:49

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

TheScott2K posted:

So?

You're taking a highly revisionist stance on the hardware's capabilities, and likely experienced specific consoles years after their launch making them look lousy in comparison. "This system is weaker than this other system released two years later" is about as worthless a statement as one can make, and your "the $299 PS1 is a piece of poo poo for 3D compared to this $1700 PC I bought 2 years later" is even more worthless.

# ? May 17, 2016 19:54

TheScott2K: Oct 26, 2003; I'm just saying, there's a nonzero chance Trump has a really toad penis.

When they're in stores at the same time competing for the same customers it doesn't really matter when they came out.

# ? May 17, 2016 19:56

Avail: Jun 27, 2005; the internet? what the fuck is the internet?

Spends hundreds if not thousands of hours on his ps1 as a kid, loving it.

Grows up, bitches about how terrible it was. Ps1 ruined my childhood.

# ? May 17, 2016 19:59

TheScott2K: Oct 26, 2003; I'm just saying, there's a nonzero chance Trump has a really toad penis.

You guys realize the PS1 can be a shambling pile of jank but you're still allowed to like it, right?

# ? May 17, 2016 20:01

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

What is even your argument? All electronics become piles of jank eventually, you sure as poo poo weren't going to do any better for $299 in 1994 though.

# ? May 17, 2016 20:04

TheScott2K: Oct 26, 2003; I'm just saying, there's a nonzero chance Trump has a really toad penis.

My argument was that the PS1's success was thanks more to smart pricing, putting effort into third party relationships, Sega making the world's most expensive vessel for bad arcade ports, and Nintendo building a late to market system that used the wrong storage medium. The PS1's success was for a whole host of reasons that existed in spite of its rendering abilities, not because of them.

You don't seem to disagree but you also seem intent on arguing with me as if you do.

# ? May 17, 2016 20:08

Nierbo: Dec 5, 2010; sup brah?

Man, naughty dog of ps1 fame were absolute fuckin wizards too. Really makes me pine for games that are made for one console and get very well optimized for it.

# ? May 17, 2016 20:08

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Was there even a non-janky system before like the Dreamcast? I think every console up to that point was really scrub-tier hardware with really obvious deficiencies if you kept an eye on its lazy shovelware devs, but that would come together in such a way that super-nerds (e.g. Naughty Dog on PS1) could perform what was basically magic with it.

# ? May 17, 2016 20:16

bring back old gbs: Feb 28, 2007; by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

oohhboy posted:

LOL if anybody still thinks P4K does 4K. New King of the hill, the Nvidia 1080 still isn't good enough for 4K. It rips poo poo up at 1080 and 1440 though quite nicely.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-review

ps4k plays 4k videos, not games. anybody who thinks otherwise is a silly billy

# ? May 17, 2016 20:42

CrashCat: Jan 10, 2003; another shit post

univbee posted:

Was there even a non-janky system before like the Dreamcast? I think every console up to that point was really scrub-tier hardware with really obvious deficiencies if you kept an eye on its lazy shovelware devs, but that would come together in such a way that super-nerds (e.g. Naughty Dog on PS1) could perform what was basically magic with it.

Yeah, getting around a badly designed console's limitations with clever development has been a thing from the first consoles probably clear up through the PS3. Even the Dreamcast probably only seems easier because it ran Windows CE. And for what it's worth, the popular PC titles that came out in 95 are things like Descent and X-Wing vs Tie Fighter which are great games but wouldn't shame a PS1 in the graphics department.

# ? May 17, 2016 22:05

Guy Mann: Mar 28, 2016; by Lowtax

The Xbox 360 did lead most of the last console generation in sales but Microsoft basically lost all the money they made due to the costs of the RROD and the legal action/extended warranties/huge amounts of repairs and replacements that followed. And by the end of the generation the Xbox 360 and the PS3 were basically even because as time went on the PS3 got cheaper and was both more powerful and had larger storage space both on disc and built-in (remember how for an embarrassing amount of its lifetime the 360 required everything be small enough to fit on a memory card because they made HDDs optional and proprietary? and how multi-disc games were already a thing just a few years into the console's life because it used DVDs?) so multiplats ran better on it once people were able to use the Cell processor better.

# ? May 18, 2016 02:05

Real hurthling!: Sep 11, 2001

Guy Mann posted:

The Xbox 360 did lead most of the last console generation in sales but Microsoft basically lost all the money they made due to the costs of the RROD and the legal action/extended warranties/huge amounts of repairs and replacements that followed. And by the end of the generation the Xbox 360 and the PS3 were basically even because as time went on the PS3 got cheaper and was both more powerful and had larger storage space both on disc and built-in (remember how for an embarrassing amount of its lifetime the 360 required everything be small enough to fit on a memory card because they made HDDs optional and proprietary? and how multi-disc games were already a thing just a few years into the console's life because it used DVDs?) so multiplats ran better on it once people were able to use the Cell processor better.

also after around 2010 the 360 became an ad machine with much diminished exclusive support while sony's exclusive software never seemed to slow down or at least that's my impression of it.

edit: just eyeballing the charts on wikipedia for 7th gen exclusives, ps3 is about 1/3rd the size of xb360 through 2009 but over twice as large afterwards.

Real hurthling! fucked around with this message at 03:15 on May 18, 2016

# ? May 18, 2016 03:10

GB_Sign: Oct 9, 2012

When people throw around the 80+ million number for the 360 is that including the replacements for the RRODs?

# ? May 18, 2016 04:12

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

GB_Sign posted:

When people throw around the 80+ million number for the 360 is that including the replacements for the RRODs?

Likely, not sure if in-warranty replacements are formally counted, but I've seen a few posts from people who actually paid for replacement Xboxen and that definitely would have counted as extras.

# ? May 18, 2016 04:31

Wheany: Mar 17, 2006; Spinya^{ha^{ha^haha}ha}ha_{ha_{ha_haha}ha}ha!; Doctor Rope

univbee posted:

Was there even a non-janky system before like the Dreamcast? I think every console up to that point was really scrub-tier hardware with really obvious deficiencies if you kept an eye on its lazy shovelware devs, but that would come together in such a way that super-nerds (e.g. Naughty Dog on PS1) could perform what was basically magic with it.

Naughty Dog continues to be quite wizardly to this day.

# ? May 18, 2016 14:04

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Wheany posted:

Naughty Dog continues to be quite wizardly to this day.

True, but back in the PS1 days it was a lot more doing stuff like having the console render at resolutions that were meant to be impossible, and finding data-corrupting bugs caused by electromagnetic interference in the console because they were running the system that hard.

# ? May 18, 2016 14:29

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

univbee posted:

True, but back in the PS1 days it was a lot more doing stuff like having the console render at resolutions that were meant to be impossible, and finding data-corrupting bugs caused by electromagnetic interference in the console because they were running the system that hard.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DaveBaggett/20131031/203788/My_Hardest_Bug_Ever.php

And also

quote:

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/04/making-crash-bandicoot-part-3/

The secret to Crash�s success was its Art. And the secret to its Art was its Programming. [ Andy NOTE: well, and the F-word ]

Andy and Dave broke a lot of rules. First and foremost, they didn�t follow PlayStation�s library restrictions. Other developers often complained that Crash was using some sort of secret Sony library. That is the exact opposite of the truth. The truth is that Crash used as little as it could of Sony�s library and the programmers basically hacked everything right to the hardware.

Years later Sony tried to create a game called Harry Jalape�o to compete with Crash. No, I am not making that up. Besides the name fail, the internal team in San Francisco also utterly failed to create the complex worlds and characters that we created in Crash. Let me repeat � an internal Sony team couldn�t create Crash. Let the rumors of �insider information� forever rest.

Hitting the hardware directly was against the rules. But by the time Sony saw the results they needed a Mario killer. It was too late for them to complain.

It is easy to underestimate the value of the pre-occlusion and vertex animation hacks. But let me tell you, this was everything.

The occlusion meant more polygons in the background, and more polygons meant we could do the levels. Without it we NEVER could have made the world look as good as it did.

Our occlusion worked on a texture level. That is, if we had a giant polygon with a fern texture on it (think many leaves but lots of empty space) the occlusion could actually get rid of polygons behind the leaf part of the texture but leave the polygons seen through the alpha channel holes. No other game had that kind of detail in occlusion, and it paid off immensely. Given how small ground polygons could be in the distance, a little fern action went a long way.

We were up against the polygon draw limit at every twist and turn in the game. We wanted to have as much distance and detail visible as possible, but the minute we went over that limit the game started getting �hitchy.� We�d build a level over night (really 4am-11am, the only times the office was ever empty) and come in to see the results. Wherever we had too many polygons we�d add some leaves or whatever to occlude some distance. Wherever there were more polygons available to draw we�d pull leaves out.

And remember, more foreground (boxes, enemies, platforms) meant we had to have less background. So just when you had a level perfectly balanced, someone (usually me or Mark) would determine that the level was too hard or easy and we�d have to add a platform or enemy and the level builder (usually Bob Rafei or Taylor Kurosaki) would have to start balancing the background poly count over again. It was so cruel.

We couldn�t see the result of any change for at least 12 hours, so if we made a mistake we�d make a tweak and then we�d have to repeat the process. No level was �done� till the game shipped.

Crash was 512 polygons in the first game, with textures only for his spots and his shoelaces, and his model didn�t change much through the 3 platform titles. It took me a month to settle on the perfect 512. As Andy said, we went with non-textured polygons instead of textured ones on most of the characters. Instead of texture, we used corner colors to create the textures that seemed to be there.

There were many advantages to this strategy. The simplest was that we got more polygons. But we also solved a texture stretching and warping issue inherent in the PlayStation�s renderer that tended to make textures look terrible. Since you spent most of your time looking at the character, and he could get quite close to the camera, avoiding texture mess meant a lot for visual quality.

And there was another important issue solved by using polygons instead of textures. The PlayStation tended to render every polygon as a pixel, no matter how small it got. Had Crash�s pupils been texture, they might have disappeared when the got smaller than a pixel. But by making the pupil 2 polygons (a quad), they almost always showed up as long as the total eye, including whites, was more than a few pixels tall.

# ? May 18, 2016 15:52

bring back old gbs: Feb 28, 2007; by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Rastor posted:

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DaveBaggett/20131031/203788/My_Hardest_Bug_Ever.php

And also

this is an awesome article, i read it a while a go and it 100% explains why cerny was able to make the ps4 amazing. the guy just understands games, how to make them, and how to use the hardware. literally the exact perfect guy to run your division. contrast to microsofts rotating platform of MBAs

# ? May 18, 2016 20:23

limaCAT: Dec 22, 2007; il pistone e male; Slippery Tilde

Google shits out a new "standard" software platform everyone will forget about in a couple of months.

It's the brand new Android-VR, or better said "Daydream".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo3GTYSFhzw

# ? May 19, 2016 17:37

limaCAT: Dec 22, 2007; il pistone e male; Slippery Tilde

Sorry, wrong thread.

# ? May 19, 2016 17:46

CrashCat: Jan 10, 2003; another shit post

limaCAT posted:

Sorry, wrong thread.

Hey, an Android is sort of like a console...

# ? May 19, 2016 18:32

A good poster: Jan 10, 2010

They're never going to make one of those VR cases able to hold a Nexus 7 tablet, are they?

# ? May 19, 2016 23:26

limaCAT: Dec 22, 2007; il pistone e male; Slippery Tilde

CrashCat posted:

Hey, an Android is sort of like a console...

There was a post I meant to make on Univbee's other thread.

# ? May 20, 2016 08:23

CrashCat: Jan 10, 2003; another shit post

A good poster posted:

They're never going to make one of those VR cases able to hold a Nexus 7 tablet, are they?

Oh man, it would be huge and awkward but I would like that way more than my lovely phone, my phone fits the Viewmaster goggle but it's such a piece of garbage to look at that I never picked it up again

# ? May 20, 2016 09:02

Rastor: Jun 2, 2001

A Nexus 7 tablet doesn't have a higher resolution than a phone so it wouldn't look any better. It will be interesting to see what the resolution specs are in the Daydream stuff Google is working on.

# ? May 20, 2016 12:26

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Rumors are flying now for Microsoft's plans.

Xbox Nano - will be a streaming device similar to Chromecast and Amazon's Fire TV. Pricing point may be around $100.

Xbox Slim - Slightly bigger. He does not use the name slim, but from what it sounds like that would be the case

Xbox 106ish TFlop - looks to be in the works, but doubtful to be announced at E3. Instead he is hearing Spring 2017 as a release date. Virtual Reality and 4K Video playback will be a thing. He says this leak comes outside of Microsoft so its no guarantee.

Xbox Interface coming to PC, and Xbox + PC will be a big theme at E3 as more stuff is coming to PC.

# ? May 25, 2016 21:43

CrashCat: Jan 10, 2003; another shit post

gently caress this smaller Xbox poo poo, embrace what you're good at. Make an Xbox that ships with its own flatbed trailer

# ? May 25, 2016 21:48

Real hurthling!: Sep 11, 2001

univbee posted:

Rumors are flying now for Microsoft's plans.

Xbox Nano - will be a streaming device similar to Chromecast and Amazon's Fire TV. Pricing point may be around $100.

Xbox Slim - Slightly bigger. He does not use the name slim, but from what it sounds like that would be the case

Xbox 106ish TFlop - looks to be in the works, but doubtful to be announced at E3. Instead he is hearing Spring 2017 as a release date. Virtual Reality and 4K Video playback will be a thing. He says this leak comes outside of Microsoft so its no guarantee.

Xbox Interface coming to PC, and Xbox + PC will be a big theme at E3 as more stuff is coming to PC.

xbox is the new zune.

# ? May 25, 2016 22:00

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# ? Apr 19, 2024 01:23

Corvo: Feb 5, 2015

univbee posted:

Rumors are flying now for Microsoft's plans.

Xbox Nano - will be a streaming device similar to Chromecast and Amazon's Fire TV. Pricing point may be around $100.

Xbox Slim - Slightly bigger. He does not use the name slim, but from what it sounds like that would be the case

Xbox 106ish TFlop - looks to be in the works, but doubtful to be announced at E3. Instead he is hearing Spring 2017 as a release date. Virtual Reality and 4K Video playback will be a thing. He says this leak comes outside of Microsoft so its no guarantee.

Xbox Interface coming to PC, and Xbox + PC will be a big theme at E3 as more stuff is coming to PC.

They should bring Xbox 360 backwards compatibility to PC since the emulator is a Windows app anyways and being able to buy & play digital 360 games on PC would be awesome. Well, apart from the whole needing to install Windows 10 thing anyways.

# ? May 25, 2016 22:48

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