M2 news
Luc Arseneault
Finally, more M2 news. Some of them are a little disturbing though !
Take a look at http://www.utiweb.com/~igonline/features/m2new.html
NobodyClassic
In article <4mo7bd$e...@bmerhc5e.bnr.ca>, Luc says...
>
>Finally, more M2 news. Some of them are a little disturbing though !
>
>Take a look at http://www.utiweb.com/~igonline/features/m2new.html
>
Mark Annichiarico
NobodyClassic wrote:
Wait a second, Harlan. Months ago, didn't you viciously rip into NG
Online for perpetuating the M2/Sega rumors? If I recall, you nearly
had a stroke trying to quash all the excited posts here with your
immature and poorly reasoned counter arguments. Oh, I see: some media
reports are more equal than others. And if your record on predictions
is any indication of how M2 will fare, then we 3doers have nothing to
worry about.
Mark Annichiarico
PS: Want to buy some used 72-pin DRAM?
whok...@where.com
Luc Arseneault <lu...@bnr.ca> transmitted this semi-random stream of
electrons:
>Finally, more M2 news. Some of them are a little disturbing though !
>Take a look at http://www.utiweb.com/~igonline/features/m2new.html
Or just read it here:
INTELLIGENT GAMER NEWS FEATURE
The Current State of M2
Development
by Jer Horwitz
All has been quiet on M2's Eastern front, and that's enough to worry
many people who were just
beginning to gain confidence in Matsushita's chances to make their
machine a major contender in
the next round of system battles.
Why should a period of silence worry anyone before a new system
launch? Because we're not
talking about silence between Matsushita and the public -- developers
aren't getting any of the
integral technical support they routinely require to develop games for
a new system. To the
average person, this might mean nothing at the moment, but imagine
what sorts of problems are
caused when someone is supposed to program for a brand new machine
architecture, he comes
across a program-stopping bug in the chipset, and he's armed with only
pages of sketchy
documentation. Coding either ceases or the developer needs to spend
days figuring ways around
the problem. In a more organized corporate structure, specialists
would be manning telephones
every day and providing assistance and bug fixes to developers.
Why did this happen? The 3DO Company was handling all technical
support for M2 developers
up until the finalization of their contract with Matsushita, at which
point Matsushita assumed
responsibility for handling developer questions. Without a team in
place to do this, Matsushita has
left many developers in the cold for support. In response, some key
licensed developers have
apparently put a freeze on M2 development, notably including
Interplay's Descent 2 M2 team,
and 3DO is said to be waiting for Matsushita to sense enough
third-party problems to extend
3DO's contract to provide technical support.
Things do get worse, however, and it's not news that IG is happy to
hear. According to buzz out
of reliable sources, central development house Studio 3DO is suffering
from a bad case of the M2
blues, as many coders have convinced themselves that the M2 has no
chance of succeeding with
the communications vacuum that currently exists between Matsushita and
the 3DO Company.
While development is proceeding on many M2 titles, IG's sources note
that internal production
would have ceased altogether if it was not for binding contracts
between Studio 3DO and
Matsushita for the former company to provide software. Morale on M2
projects is said to be
low...
...all of which obscures the fact that several impressive game
concepts are underway at the Studio
in attempts to give the company a foothold in three key genres. The
first title, Army Men, is said
to be Studio 3DO's answer to the Command and Conquer craze, increasing
the arcade-style
action influences and focusing heavily upon where you place your men
on the field. The premise:
You spend part of the game driving an armored personnel carrier though
battlefields, dropping off
soldiers, giving them orders, and then allowing the game's AI to
create wartime interactions
between your men and enemy forces. As you let men out, you get to
cruise around the war zones
blasting at things in your truck.
Rush is the company's improved take on the Road Rash craze,
emphasizing (as did Sony
Interactive in one segment of their ESPN Extreme Games PlayStation
title) Rollerblading. More
exciting is an action title currently codenamed G3(after designer Greg
Gorsiski's third effort for
3DO behind Jurassic Park Interactive and Blade Force), which attempts
what many gamers
have anxiously awaited -- while still early in conceptual stages, the
premise is to take a solid 2-D
action-platform title along the lines of Elevator Action, Impossible
Mission and the like,
polygonize all of the characters and backgrounds, and then move the
camera around strategically
to improve the visual appeal of the world. A fourth title is the
variously named "IMSA
Racing"/"M2 Racing"/"insert-Ridge-Racer-sounding-title here", which is
progressing
nicely with an ovular track and a couple of cars laid out and moving
already. Based on a type of
racing largely unexplored in home console titles to date, IMSA's cars
are based on actual
high-performance designs pioneered by such automotive companies as
Porsche and Jaguar,
featuring bodies largely similar to the Acura NSX and single-passenger
aerodynamic transparent
enclosed cockpits.
One exceptional title under development off site is what is being
described by IG sources as the
first-ever virtual reality RPG, Power Crystal. According to those who
have witnessed the game
in motion, the early version of the graphics engine is blazingly fast
despite its use of beautiful visual
effects: You can walk up to the shore line of a river or lake and see
glimmering translucent water
splashing the shoreline without polygon breakup, and you can then look
into the water and see
pebbles and sedimentary rocks in the basin. Early versions allow the
player to fully walk around
and explore a village.
Totally unconfirmed save active rumors: Word has it that Capcom is now
involved in a clandestine
pact with Matsushita to develop Street Fighter 3 for the M2 -- as
mentioned in IG's Fusion issue
10, Capcom supposedly has been working on a 3-D fighter for the
machine, but would they give
the M2 the sequel to the company's flagship? We find it extremely
difficult to believe, but feel
obligated to report on the existence of such a rumor regardless.
Other M2 news of note:
Continuing to refine their
controller design, Matsushita
has added several new
features to the controller we
revealed some months ago,
planning for future M2 use as
a DVD machine. Rather than
opting to have less buttons
anywhere than Nintendo 64
controllers possess,
Matsushita has gone back to
having a six-button spread on
the controller's right face and
has added new OS
instructions to deal with the
newly standardized features. In addition, the company has placed a
"jog shuttle" under the six
buttons, flush with the face of the controller -- jog shuttles are
routinely used on modern VCRs to
do precise fast forwarding and rewinding, and the shuttle on the M2
controller will help to
eliminate the need for an additional DVD remote control. A trigger has
also been added to the
underside of the controller's center, allowing the analog thumbpad to
have its own flightstick-style
fire button.
In hardware news, discussion continues to persist on the subject of
whether or not the final
version of the M2 will include dual PowerPC 602 chips in an effort to
minimize the hardware's
current polygon processing bottleneck. As prices on the chips have
fallen to $15 and a
"piggyback" mode is said to be possible (whereby two 602 processors
are placed directly on top
of each other), Matsushita is said to be seriously considering the
option.
Two interesting twists relating to 3DO's M2 and MX chipsets: Rumor has
it that 3DO's recent
agreement with Cirrus Logic may have helped to put the M2 chipset in
line for inclusion in
upcoming releases of Intel-manufactured PC motherboards, as Intel is
readying to bundle 3-D
accelerators of some sort with their machines. The M2 chipset is said
to be both economical and
adequately powerful with 3 Megabytes of on-board RAM, helping to
increase Intel's interest in
choosing 3DO's technology as a bundle. As for MX (see IG's Fusion
issue 10), the current
concept being tossed around is the idea of actually including the
video RAM frame buffer within
the actual MX chipset rather than externally -- as transferring data
from separate RAM chips to
the math processors is one of the most vital time delays in any
computer or game console, having
the RAM bundled with the fast MX chipset would mean incredible
speedups in processing.
Developers claim that such an MX chipset could deliver -- believe it
or not -- 15-20 million
polygon per second performance.
The drawback? The failure rate of such combined chips could be
prohibitively high -- between the
RAM and the high-intensity math processor, the chips could fail in
production at a rate of 20% or
greater depending on how much RAM was included on a chip.
Additionally, the heat generated
by such a configuration would mandate special cooling measures.
Regardless, the premise is food
for thought and some additional RAM may well wind up in the final MX
design.
Finally, 3DO's pet project at the moment is "Wintergreen," their
Internet exploration group, which
has been evaluating various measures to get involved in online gaming
and find ways to charge for
online service. What's the best business model? Set up a server and
charge for usage? Sell a game
and charge per play? Set up an entire network? That's the company's
newest pursuit, and they're
hiring 40 people to develop their next generation of entertainment.