http://seattle.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2003/06/02/story7.html
I’m sure many of you have already seen the news. I can understand the anomosity between MS and EA regarding Live! support but what on earth could be the issue here? “Valve is sending us mixed messages” doesn’t explain a whole lot.
Anyone want to take a shot at deciphering that cryptic remark?
-Hump
No idea, but if it’s a direct quote from an MS employee, it doesn’t sound good. Maybe Valve isn’t interested in making it work with Live but it will still be on the Xbox? Maybe those are the mixed signals?
My guess is that Valve wants to try to better monetize the online side of Half-Life 2 (or whatever online game they will deliver with the Half-Life 2 engine). If they are planning something like that, why give away online play on the Xbox and be shut out of that revenue stream?
Has Sony released a price for the PS2 with the built-in hard drive? I wonder if the PS2 will drop to $149 by Xmas, giving the $199 price point to the PS2 w/hard drive unit?
I can’t figure out if the writer is goofing or if Hufford is, but I wouldn’t take any article that claims that “The old version of Xbox Live only allowed gamers to talk to one another in a central online portal area, but the new version enables them to communicate while actually playing games” seriously. With such a dorky-ass error there (and the EA/XSN Sports mistake), the accuracy of everything else in there is questionable.
If you own a PC, though, I can’t see why you’d care about Half-Life II coming on the XBox. Unless said PC is still running with an overclocked Celeron with a Riva TNT video card, at any rate…
Another doom and gloom article by someone that does not understand the industry. The fact that he thinks the PSX having a hard drive for PVR purposes is the same as the Xbox hard drive proves that.
As far as I know there isn’t one, unless you mean the PSX, that platinum console that comes out next year. This year they’ve got a newer PS2 that looks the same as the original but comes with the network adapter, a quieter fan, progressive scan DVD playback, and an IR receiver for the DVD remote. That will sell for $200 and be out sometime later in the summer (proabably after they clear out remaining inventory).
If you were talking about the PSX then no, they have not announced a price yet.
Are they really calling it the PSX? Don’t we already use PSX to refer to some version of the Playstation pre PS2?
PSX was the code name for the original Playstation, so a lot of people call the original PS the PSX. Sony is doing this to piss us off, as far as I can tell.
GamespyDaily is reporting that a Valve rep has affirmed that there will be an Xbox version of HL2, and that they will announce the release date later this year.
asjunk
If I had to guess at the reason (although there may be several) that MS made such a statement is that they may have been counting on lulling Valve into an Xbox-first release with the PC version to follow shortly after. I think that tactic that had worked with Bungie for Halo sold quite a bit of units to the PC crowd who would’ve otherwise never touched a console at all (if worked for me anyway).
After recent fiscal reports It doesn’t seem very wise of any MS exec. to be baiting the developers of a game that could help staunch the flow of its financial hemorrhaging.
According to an MS employee on another board, Hufford was misquoted in the initial report. The quotes from today are pretty explicit.
Lombardi today told GameSpy Half-Life 2 is certainly in development for the Xbox. “Half-Life 2 is planned for the PC and Xbox. We’ve announced the shipping date for the PC version [September 30, 2003 - ed.], and we’ll announce a shipping date for the Xbox version later in the year.”
PSX was the Japanese name for PlayStation. PlayStation was just… well, PlayStation here.
In fact, it has not yet been established that you can use the built-in hard drive on the PSX for PS2 games that need a hard drive (not that there are many of those).
For instance: what happens when I’m playing a game that tries to stream some stuff off the hard drive while my PSX is trying to record a TV show? Does it not let me record? Does the game stutter? It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the PSX’s hard drive could not be used as a PS2 hard drive and was for PVR purposes alone.
PSX was the Japanese name for PlayStation. PlayStation was just… well, PlayStation here.
It was just PlayStation there, too. PSX was the code name when it was in development, like Mike said below.
I think the misunderstanding here is that there is no actual publishing contract yet for the Xbox version, perhaps. Valve might be planning it, but it’s possible that Vivendi Universal doesn’t have the right to console versions (MS is publishing Counter-Strike, after all, not VU). Or more likely, that Valve is still negotiating the details of the Xbox version with Vivendi, similar to how they were negotiating the terms of the PC publishing contract up until like March or something. And until the ink is dry, the MS execs can’t say “it’s an Xbox game.” These quotes from financial meetings get taken out of hand because those guys have to be VERY careful about what they tell the financial community. They have to be incredibly strict on what’s coming and when, and not dish out “maybes” and “probablys” (probablies?). The SEC is pretty strict about that stuff.
Anyway, maybe Adam can clear this up. Dude, can you say if the ink is dry on the Xbox version deal?
Shouldn’t be an issue. Your Tivo is perfectly capable of playing back a program stutter-free while you’re recording something else.
Vivendi Universal Games owns all the publishing rights for Half-Life 2 and has for quite some time. There was never any question who would publish the game (it was always us).
We sold the publishing rights for Counter-Strike on Xbox to Microsoft last year.
For instance: what happens when I’m playing a game that tries to stream some stuff off the hard drive while my PSX is trying to record a TV show? Does it not let me record? Does the game stutter? It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the PSX’s hard drive could not be used as a PS2 hard drive and was for PVR purposes alone.
Based on my experiences with WinXP MCE and the PVR-179 PCI MPEG2 encoder/tuner card, real-time hardware MPEG2 encoding is extremely efficient; it only uses maybe 5% CPU time on an Athlon 1700+.
Real-time software MPEG2 encoding, on the other hand, is a friggin’ nightmare. ATI is making a lot of noise about their Radeon R3xx series MPEG2 encode assist when used (and ONLY when used) with Intel CPUs with hyperthreading. They were really pissed that MS made hardware MPEG2 encoding a requirement for MCE; it’s a natural sales pitch for their (software encode only, basically) all-in-wonder video card series.
The problem with real-time software MPEG2 encoding of video is the massive amount of CPU time it takes, and at somewhat reduced quality over hardware encode. For example, even with the limited (but currently optimal) assistance of the Radeon + new drivers, and on the fastest available Intel CPU with HyperThreading, I’d expect real time MPEG2 encoding to take fully 50% of CPU time. It begins to impact system performance in a major way, putting your recordings at risk if anything interrupts the CPU. Hyperthreading could be nice for this, though; if one virtual CPU is dedicated to encode, it might be less risky.
All that, plus, do you really trust ATI’s driver team for a task this complex? I don’t.
Shouldn’t be an issue. Your Tivo is perfectly capable of playing back a program stutter-free while you’re recording something else.[/quote]
Yes, but streaming TV is a predictable thing. The data rate would be fairly constatn so you could design a system to deal with that. Playing a game is a completely different story.
Not really. The game is just guaranteed the same amount of disk bandwidth that an MPEG stream would get.
From shacknews last night:
Forget what you may have heard earlier today, as GameSpy Daily has confirmed that Half-Life 2 is still coming to the Xbox. The quote they received from Valve’s Doug Lombardi says that they will be announcing an Xbox release date later this year.
I was thinking more of the issue of hard disk access, not CPU power usage.
You’re constantly writing to the hard disk in one location to record a program, and your game needs to stream data from another part of the disk. Which gets priority? Can they guarantee that neither one will see an interruption in data flow? Are the characteristics of the drive access (MB/sec, seek speed) for a game on the PSX, WHILE recording a TV show, going to be equal or better than that of a PS2 with hard drive add-on? And if not, do developers have to make sure they don’t stream more data off the hard drive than the PSX can support while recording TV?
Can of worms, indeed.