Yet another NYC Press Conf. review (long)
Charles Anstey
Here is my review and comments of the M2 press conference held in
NYC May 2nd.
The first section just tells what Trip showed and said with no
comments. The second section is my opinions of what I saw and what
was said (and not said).
The conference
--------------
The conference was held in a cinema and Trip Hawkins stood up on stage
and told everyone about M2 and how 3do was doing. The conference started
off with Trip showing a videotaped demo of a game which was not named.
It looked like what I would expect Crash N Burn II to look like. The
demo showed a 'hover car' that floated above a race track with jet
engines on the back that rose up off the ground and then started racing
down the track. The graphics were better than Daytona in the arcades.
The race track was like a raised highway going through a city with lots
of billboards and tall buildings for scenery. Everything moved very
smoothly and had several nice effects like a hazy smoke and a rotating
beacon that cast a proper shadow as it rotated. The whole
demo lasted about 40 seconds.
Trip then proceed to tell how well 3do was doing. He said that there
were many titles among Babbages top sellers like GEX, Myst,
Return Fire, NFS, Fifa Soccer, Slayer, Shockwave, and others I didn't
have time to write down. He also listed a few titles that were coming
in the future like Primal Rage (fall), EA Baseball, Foes of Ali, and
EA NHL 96. He also showed a stat that said that the 3do unit had
30% of the video games sales in Japan for February. He then showed
a slide that showed the current 3do on par with the PSX, Saturn, and
U64.
Now for the M2 details. The M2 will be made up of 3 main chips
PowerPC 602: 66 MHz, 132 MFLOPS max, SpecInt92=45.
CDE chip: I don't have what this one does.
BDA chip: I don't have what this one does.
4 million transistors total using IBM patented 5 layer manufacturing
process.
>1,000,000 polygons/second
7-10x performance over competition.
48 Mbit SDRAM/ROM
MPEG 1 builtin
System comparison
Data Separate MFLOPS Int
width FPU
--------------------------------------
PSX 32 No - 14
Saturn 32 No - 14
U64 32 No 15 45
M2 64 Yes 132 45
He then showed a chart of necessary bus bandwidths for different aspects
of games which I was unable to copy all down but the final number said
you needed at least
467 MBytes/second bandwidth for games.
The M2 has
528 MBytes/second bandwidth and
4 Meg DRAM.
He then showed a slide with all of M2's graphical features
Texture Mapping
Gouraud Shading
Filtering
Transparency
Mip Mapping
3D perspective correction
Z-buffering
MPEG 1 builtin
Trip showed demos of each feature by showing pictures/game sequences
with and without the feature to show how each one improved the graphics.
I can't remember exactly what was shown for each of the features but
the ones I do remember
Filtering: 2 pictures of the 3DO logo side by side. The one without
filtering looked pixelated. The one with filtering has less
pixelation but was blurry (personally I thought the one without
filtering was easier to read).
Transparency: There were two slides. The first showed the polygon traces
of 2 palm trees and Trip explained that with transparency
you can use simpler polygon definitions and make the tree
look more realistic. The next slide showed the palm tree
without transparency, all you could see were 4 palms and
no tree trunk, and the palm tree with transparency, you
could see many palm leaves at different levels and part
of the tree trunk that wasn't hidden by the leaves.
Mip Mapping: MIP mapping prevents the T-map stretch and enlargement
as an image moves closer. To demonstrate this, a picture
of a Holstein cow behind a fence in the distance was shown
without MIP mapping. The grass had the same texture blocks
for the entire distance away from the viewer. Basically the
grass looked the same size right in front of the viewer and
down by the cow. As the picture zoomed
into the cow, the T-map that made up the cow's black spots
became large and blocky.
The same picture was shown with MIP mapping. The grass looked
the same as the previous picture only right in front of the
viewer. The grass farther in the picture got smaller and then
fuzzy. As the picture zoomed into the cow, his spots did
not become large and blocky. They remained detailed just
like in real life.
3D perspective correction: Two still pictures side by side of Wolfenstein 3D
(I think) on the left and two brick walls going into the
distance on the right. The Wolfenstein picture had the
'wall warp' on the closest walls and the corrected brick wall
picture did not.
MPEG 1: This just showed a FMV sequence with regular software compression
that had the usual artifacting and then the same FMV sequence
with MPEG and Trip claimed that MPEG was VHS quality.
Everyone then got to see a videotaped demo of some recent video game
history and demos created for M2 using an M2 emulator.
Basically 3do created an emulator for M2 based upon what they believe
M2 will be able to do. Trip said there would be an actual M2 with demo
at E3.
This was the part that everyone wanted to see. The demo showed older
games with slower frame rates (MK I), and then showed polygons without
shading (VF I), and then today's other systems (Ridge Racer and Toshinden
for the PSX, Daytona for the Saturn).
AND NOW M2.
The demo showed what I guess should be a DoJo in Japan. It smoothly
zoomed in, moved into the doors and inside the house. Inside was
a female fighter moving super smooth and no noticable polygons. I can
see the polygons in VF2 clearly but I couldn't see any on this fighter.
She was moving very slowly, similar in speed to someone who is practicing
moves in slow motion. Trip said that her movements were using about half
of M2's power.
The next demo showed a sailboat sailing around a small island with
a palm tree on it and a dolphin jumping in and out of the water along
side the sailboat. This was very impressive. It showed M2's ability
to show a scene from any camera angle, transparency (water), and
other features.
There were other demos I don't remember exactly but the one demo
that I thought was the absolute best was the 'fog effect'. The camera
started up high with fog covering the entire scene. The camera zoomed
in and images appeared out of the fog. The camera zoomed into the
female fighter next to a Raptor dinosaur. She was doing her moves
and then the camera turned to show the Raptor moving his head and arms.
After about 10 seconds of close in, the camera backed away and the
two characters disappeared into the fog. The fog effect was _EXACTLY_
the way real fog looks and acts.
Trip's final comments were that they would have a meeting of the partners
this summer and hopefully then he would have release dates and prices.
A Q&A session started with Trip, an EA representative, someone from
IBM, Motorola, and LG Electronics (formerly Goldstar). This Q&A session
basically was a 'ask your question and not get an answer session'. Everyone
wanted to know release dates, upcoming titles, prices, etc and no one
would say anything about them.
One person asked "I know that you don't know exactly when M2 will be
released, but will it be out by Christmas."
Trip said that they want to release M2 right this time with enough
great games available at the time of release. He said that 3do does
not have a particular month to release M2 by and that most of their
advertising and promotion will be for the current 3do.
One retailer asked the EA representative (paraphrased here)
Retailer : "When will EA be releasing some of its sports titles for 3do."
EA rep : "Our policy is not to say anything about our projects until
they are about to be released."
Retailer : "The reason I ask is because many of my customers are returning
their 3do's to get money for the other systems because they
will have the sports titles and I can't say 'Wait, the
sports titles are coming'."
At this point the retailer was also indicating he wanted a response from
Trip and neither gave any response to reassure the retailer that he
should tell his customers to hang on to their 3do.
When the Q&A session was over, everyone was shown the way out. No after-
mingle of any kind.
Section 2: Complete personal opinion time
What the conference was: It was an investors conference.
What the conference wasn't: It was not a 'true unveiling' of M2.
They didn't even have one there.
I am quite sure that Trip was in NYC for some other reason and this
press conference was an after thought. This was not a very good
forum or presentation for the 'unveiling' of a new system. It was a
decent pitch for new investors. I'm not saying that they didn't put
in time and effort into this press conference and that it wasn't
professional. It just wasn't what I would expect for an unveiling
of a new system.
The conference could basically be broken up into 2 'halves'. The first
half, which took up most of the time, was the showing of M2. The second
half was the Q&A session. The first half was great, everyone was excited
to see M2 and what it could do. The second half was a real let down
because people kept wanting to know when M2 will be available and for
how much and made absolutely no speculation.
The demo of the racing games was awesome. It was definitely better than
Daytona in the arcades. The game looked a little pixelated and fuzzy on
the large movie screen because of the projection unit, but if you looked
at the TV monitors they had set up, it was not pixelated at all. It was
smooth and clear. The demo of the fighter was excellent. She moved very
smoothly and looked very real but definitely generated by a computer.
What I mean by that is computer generated characters look like they were
generated by a computer, not recorded by a camera. There is absolutely
no doubt that M2 is better than every other system in every area.
Trip used the usual tactics to make things appear better for 3do and
worse for other systems. One comment was why home systems will
survive and won't be wiped out by computer games. He said that about
15 million PC games are sold a year and averaged for the 30 million
computers, each household buys 1/2 a game a year. Home system owners
buy an average of 5 to 10 games a year. But wait, not every PC is in
a house and for 3do to sell 15 million games in a year, each owner would
have to buy 20 games.
Trip also said that the average age of the consumer has been going up
and that older players want more realism in games. Young kids may
be happy with bad graphics but older players are much more demanding.
Gee, do you think that the reason the average age is going up because
the 3do is more powerful or the fact that only older consumers can
afford it.
He also was trying to imply that M2 could do real-time 3D rendering
without actually saying that it could (because no system can).
By the end of the M2 demo, I and everyone else was all set to buy one
and wanted to know when it would be available. Then came the Q&A
session.
The question and answer session, in my opinion, was a real downer.
Trip constantly said that 3do would not know anything about price
or availability until at least this summer when all the partners
get together. Someone later asked simple 'Will M2 be available
before Xmas.' and Trip again didn't say yes or no.
The one retailer was telling Trip that people were returning their
3DO unit because there was no mention of future titles and the
M2 unit and Trip didn't even bother to give him a reason to try
to tell his customers to keep hanging onto their 3DO. This, to me,
was the biggest mistake of the conference. Here is a person trying
to tell Trip what is going on at the consumer level and that he
better do something about it and Trip just blew him off.
Trip also said that they are going to concentrate their marketing
efforts on the current 3do against the other new systems. Unless
they drop the price of the FZ-10 to $200, they aren't going to be
able to compete because the other systems are better.
------Opinion/Speculation-----------
Reading between the lines of the whole conference, my guess is that
M2 hardware will be ready by Sept/Oct but that 3DO is waiting for the
software to be finished. Trip said that 3DO hopes that the game
writers will be able to write M2 games faster because of their
familiarity with the 3DO OS which hasn't changed. In other words,
the game writers just got the M2 developer kit and 3DO is really
hoping that they can write the games in 6 months so M2 will be
able to be released for Christmas. 3DO will not be releasing
M2 without several great titles, even if it means waiting until
next year. Can you say 'Commodore Amiga'.
Final thoughts
--------------
The M2 will be unarguably the best system when it gets released either
the end of this year or the beginning of next year. It is amazing.
I can't wait to own one and play those awesome new games.
The biggest problem for 3DO is that no one in the industry takes them
seriously (trade rags and stores) and many people still don't know
what a 3DO is. If 3DO doesn't start playing the hype game like
every other company such as saying M2 will be available by Xmas, even if
they aren't sure, 3DO is going to lose alot of customers to the other
systems.
3DO must also advertise in magazines and on TV. People must know
who 3DO is and what they have. If they wait too long to advertise,
consumers are going to think that 3DO is a brand new company rather
than the one that has had a next generation system the longest. Trip
says that 3DO wants to release M2 'right', well releasing M2 'right'
(with lots of great software) in Feb 96 isn't as good as releasing
M2 wrong (2 or 3 titles with lots of hype) in Nov 95.
Charles Anstey
cda on IRC #3do
Charles Anstey,B22CH,3883,
> Charles Anstey (ans...@sun.soe.clarkson.edu) wrote:
>
> : Here is my review and comments of the M2 press conference held in
> : NYC May 2nd.
>
> Thanks, I for one appreciate it.
>
>
> Do you really mean SHADOWS, or do you mean that the "lighting" changed on
> the surrounding objects as the lightsource illumunated them. I've heard
> no mention of the M2 even being able to "fake" shadows.
I guess I mean lighting, not shadows.
: He also was trying to imply that M2 could do real-time 3D rendering
: without actually saying that it could (because no system can).
> What! What the heck are you talking about? My Apple II could "real
> time" render. Sure it was wire-frame and not terribly smooth. Are you
> talking about ray-tracing or radiosity modeling or something?
The way he was talkin about how scenes could be rendered, it sounded
alot more like ray-tracing than just polygon rotation and camera
view changes.
; I guess the fact that developers have been WRITING for "simulated" M2's
; for quite a while means that 3DO is quite confident in the accuracy of
; this simulation. Either that, or we're all horribly screwed. :)
If companies have been working on games for 4 or 5 months already, you
would think that he would have at least had a demo of a real game there.
My impression was that it will be the games that will hold up M2, not
the hardware.
; : 3DO will not be releasing
; : M2 without several great titles, even if it means waiting until
; : next year. Can you say 'Commodore Amiga'.
; Yes. What's your point? That the Amiga's problem was that it was
; released too late? Hardly. Too early?
My point is/was that here is a company with the best hardware and they
could screw up the marketing just like Commodore did. The Amiga would
have been a much better success if another company made it, one who
knew how to market it and I worry that 3DO will have the same problems.
I am really hoping that they don't but with the U64 being delayed, it
would allow 3DO to put off M2 until Feb/March of next year if they
advertise all through Xmas that it is coming and that the current
3DO is <$250.
> Dave Nagy
Charles Anstey
David Nagy
: Here is my review and comments of the M2 press conference held in
: NYC May 2nd.
Thanks, I for one appreciate it.
: of billboards and tall buildings for scenery. Everything moved very
: smoothly and had several nice effects like a hazy smoke and a rotating
: beacon that cast a proper shadow as it rotated. The whole
: demo lasted about 40 seconds.
Do you really mean SHADOWS, or do you mean that the "lighting" changed on
the surrounding objects as the lightsource illumunated them. I've heard
no mention of the M2 even being able to "fake" shadows.
: 4 million transistors total using IBM patented 5 layer manufacturing
: process.
Jeez...
: Data Separate MFLOPS Int
: width FPU
: --------------------------------------
: PSX 32 No - 14
: Saturn 32 No - 14
: U64 32 No 15 45
: M2 64 Yes 132 45
This doesn't seem kosher...
: Transparency: There were two slides. The first showed the polygon traces
: of 2 palm trees and Trip explained that with transparency
: you can use simpler polygon definitions and make the tree
: look more realistic. The next slide showed the palm tree
: without transparency, all you could see were 4 palms and
: no tree trunk, and the palm tree with transparency, you
: could see many palm leaves at different levels and part
: of the tree trunk that wasn't hidden by the leaves.
Huh? Could you explain that to me again?
: One person asked "I know that you don't know exactly when M2 will be
: released, but will it be out by Christmas."
: Trip said that they want to release M2 right this time with enough
: great games available at the time of release. He said that 3do does
: not have a particular month to release M2 by and that most of their
: advertising and promotion will be for the current 3do.
You'd think that if Tripp was out to "lie" to investors about the M2,
that he would also pull a release date out of his sleeve also. Perhaps
the specs are to be believed.
: At this point the retailer was also indicating he wanted a response from
: Trip and neither gave any response to reassure the retailer that he
: should tell his customers to hang on to their 3do.
They merely need to wait one week and they'll get their reassurance...
: Trip also said that the average age of the consumer has been going up
: and that older players want more realism in games. Young kids may
: be happy with bad graphics but older players are much more demanding.
: Gee, do you think that the reason the average age is going up because
: the 3do is more powerful or the fact that only older consumers can
: afford it.
No, actually I think the situation is pretty much as he describes. The
population is aging, and there is now a generation of 30-something-ers
who grew up with video games. This has never been true in the past.
: He also was trying to imply that M2 could do real-time 3D rendering
: without actually saying that it could (because no system can).
What! What the heck are you talking about? My Apple II could "real
time" render. Sure it was wire-frame and not terribly smooth. Are you
talking about ray-tracing or radiosity modeling or something?
: Trip also said that they are going to concentrate their marketing
: efforts on the current 3do against the other new systems. Unless
: they drop the price of the FZ-10 to $200, they aren't going to be
: able to compete because the other systems are better.
Well, there you go. You must be psychic. :)
: Reading between the lines of the whole conference, my guess is that
: M2 hardware will be ready by Sept/Oct but that 3DO is waiting for the
: software to be finished. Trip said that 3DO hopes that the game
: writers will be able to write M2 games faster because of their
: familiarity with the 3DO OS which hasn't changed. In other words,
: the game writers just got the M2 developer kit and 3DO is really
: hoping that they can write the games in 6 months so M2 will be
: able to be released for Christmas.
Not! Availability of M2 development kits for "chosen" developers was
announced/leaked long ago. What was it, 6-7 months ago? This was before
the hardware was even finalized. And stuff like tweaking existing titles
so that they take advantage of SOME of the M2's talents could (I assume)
be easily done in 6 months.
I guess the fact that developers have been WRITING for "simulated" M2's
for quite a while means that 3DO is quite confident in the accuracy of
this simulation. Either that, or we're all horribly screwed. :)
: 3DO will not be releasing
: M2 without several great titles, even if it means waiting until
: next year. Can you say 'Commodore Amiga'.
Yes. What's your point? That the Amiga's problem was that it was
released too late? Hardly. Too early?
Thanks again. Don't think I'm disagreeing with your whole post. I just
didn't want waste bandwidth by quoting the vast majority I agreed with
and fully understood.
Dave Nagy