LMN8R
3307
Why is it ridiculous? It’s not just reasonable, it’s completely necessary if Sony wants to be able to perfectly pull-off features like live game streaming, constant game recording, quick-switching between different tasks, and all of the other stuff the PS3 is doing.
And don’t forget about the fact that Sony obviously doesn’t want to back themselves into a corner like they did with the PS3, where they couldn’t even add features like cross-game chat because the memory reserved for the OS was so limited.
Enough with all these extraneous features. I want faster and non-existent loading screens. I remember a survey a while back that asked people what feature they most desired, graphics, faster loading, multiplayer, etc and faster loading was number 1. While it may not seem like a big deal it’s something everybody can agree upon. Instead of having to wait to load up a level people just want to get to the action. Maybe the next generation will have this or maybe I can install a SSD into my PS4 and it will actually make it faster this time.
That being said, is the XBone HDD user replaceable or are they encasing it in their own enclosure again and selling it with a high markup?
LOLZ everything you list is what any modern OS does dude. Seriously this is hilarious.
LMN8R
3310
The PS3 didn’t have cross-game chat because of a lack of ram - that is a huge missing feature that millions of people use on the 360, regardless of whether it personally interests you.
Both the PS3 and 360 have massive load times and slow interfaces entirely because of the lack of ram. They both are extremely limited in how extremely common apps like Netflix work, again because of the lack of ram. Their store interfaces are slow, require a huge amount of loading, and other such limitations.
Setting aside a significant amount of ram on these new systems ensures that those problems never exist again. And it also ensures that there’s a huge amount of headroom for features 5 years from now that no one can probably think of right now.
From what we know right now, the HDD in the Xbox One is built into the system and isn’t user-replaceable at all.
Your OS records video and audio at all times, has built-in VoIP functionality, and can have many of its basic functions controlled with a phone without needing to resort to SSH or other methods that aren’t viable for the average end user?
Yes, a modern OS can do this stuff. Yes, you need to download it an install separately. Being able to choose not to install bloatware is one of the PC’s largest advantages over locked down systems.
I don’t know about desktop OS like windows 7/8, but on ubunto i can certainly use the remote to do everything. The problem is that you can’t easily replicate a mouse/keyboard with a phone. I do have one of those handheld keyboard/mouse things that i was using to setup my media box just fine though.
And somehow i doubt it would require quite so much dedicated ram to do this stuff on a modern OS.
LMN8R
3313
How much ram do you think it should require? And how did you reach that number? Please use as many comparisons as possible to other existing operating systems that can instantly switch between high-end games, real-time recording of gameplay at all times, and real-time streaming to the internet without affecting performance at all.
Oh good, the thread is turning into algebra homework. I’ll tune back in when more games are announced, I guess.
The problem is that none of this stuff is very useful at all to a console.
Task switching similar to a PC is nice, but you can also just save and close your game if you want use another feature of your console. Of course if you want to watch TV or have another bluray player, then it is indeed instant as you can just change the input.
What fraction of a percent of gamers would actually benefit from always on recording (oh yay, i’m away from my console making a sandwich but my console is still recording thankfully!)? I’d bet even less would benefit from real time streaming to the internet…
Basically, i don’t want my console to be like my phone where i have to deal with all of this shitty bloatware that bogs the damned thing down for no reason. People say there is no performance hit, but if these “features” are taking something like half of available physical ram, it sure doesn’t seem free to me.
Teiman
3316
Youtube will soon get a lot of visits from these devices. People will get stuck on level 3, tryiing to kill the “Captain Tuxedo”, and will multitask the game with youtuve, and will watch a walktrough of the game, to find how the hell you get unstuck and kill tuxedo.
Others gamers will watch a 15 seconds youtube vid about “How to play AP barbarosa” before joining a MOBA game.
Other people will check a wiki, while playing Cube Craft: Skyrim, to check how to make a eggs homelet, and if you can use raw zombie food in the recipe. *
The people that has uploaded the recipe of eggs homelets with zombie raw meat will receive after 10.000 visit a email from youtube asking for sharing revenues. $$$$$. **
The console that shows on the screen the message “To open the app Youtube we have to close your game Call of Duty 30: Manshooters” will be hated by gamers.***
notes:
- Console gamers reading a wiki while playing a open sandbox game? possible? obligatory?
** I dont think this will replace the current crop of youtube celebrities. They put more trough on it, and the result has quality. But a few of the [console kids] are going to receive a fat paycheck from Google, and this will cool enough for a lot of kids to have ($) ($) eyes.
*** So ram matters, and your OS not being shit, matters. And how good is your youtube app, equally important.
Canuck
3317
How will these videos work anyways? Will you be able to record commentary as you play? Can you edit videos into decent let’s plays? If they’re just a bunch of 15 minute videos of gameplay I can see myself watching almost none of them.
I would imagine that the replays would have limited editing capabilities on the console.
Great questions. And I can’t wait for the answers. My guess is that we’ll get something out of Cologne. When Xbox One announced that self publishing was coming to Xbox One, Major Nelson put out there “now you know one of the reasons I am looking forward to GamesCom.”
My guess is that both Sony and Microsoft will allow some commentary VO work. But that’s just a guess. While Microsoft is a software company (and thus I give them the edge on most interface stuff), Sony came to this idea first (or at least was talking about it first). So it will be interesting to see who puts out a more robust sharing toolset.
Look, we get it - these consoles are just not for you. That’s especially apparent when you say things like “you can also just save and close your game if you want use another feature of your console”, or “bloatware that bogs the damned thing down”. The whole point of setting aside RAM for these features is so that they don’t bog the system down. Just stick to your PC, like we all knew you would anyway.
Linux and FreeBSD can run modern windowing systems capable of running OpenGL games in less than 512MB RAM. The PS4 is based on freeBSD. Of course the games themselves consume memory also, but the OS and UI are very tight.
Game recording is all done in hardware. The pokey AMD general-purpose CPUs in these consoles are nowhere near capable of encoding h.264 1080p in realtime-- even high-end intel core CPUs have trouble doing it. Streaming is just uploading that data and not particularly memory intensive.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe either console can quickly switch between games. That would entail keeping multiple games’ active states in memory simultaneously. They can switch between the one game you’re currently playing and the web, netflix, pandora, skype, etc, but not multiple games.
Not surprisingly, chat between Xbox One and Xbox 360 will not work.
They could do it easily enough, they just chose not to bother. Shame.
But the tubes, they’d be full … (or, just as likely, it serves as somthing to push people to buy the new platform ;)
LMN8R
3325
I’d rather consoles not be limited by past precedent of what might be acceptable. You might not like it, but the fact is that gaming consoles are for a lot more than gaming today. And for the tens of millions of people who use those consoles for purposes outside of just gaming, load times to switch between tasks are incredibly annoying.
And again, you might not be interested in game streaming, but tens of millions of gamers are interested in it.
Do you have any idea how popular and widespread game streaming is today? In the past week or so, 19 million people have tuned in to watch people speed run classic games: http://www.twitch.tv/speeddemosarchivesda
Tens of millions of people watch hundreds of thousands of people stream games every month. Having these features built into both consoles is absolutely killer
By definition, it’s not “bloatware” if the consoles are inherently designed to support these features from the ground-up. If these features didn’t exist, the consoles would probably come with less memory.
The Xbox enables quick-switching between games through virtualization and loading VM snapshots as saved states.
Regardless, it doesn’t matter how much ram is required to launch a game on Linux or other operating systems. I want you to show me the footprint required to execute the features as described for both the PS4 and Xbox One, while leaving enough head room for 5+ years of feature expansion for the future.
OK, but those VM snapshots have to be stored on disk, right? So you need to read 5GB of data from the hard drive to switch, which probably takes around 45-60s. It’s not a memory thing at all, because the non-active game is not stored in memory.
2.5GB of RAM is more than enough to run a full desktop PC. It’s excessive for a console OS, which traditionally have been very thin.
