Xbox: This is the Jan 6th of gaming.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Xbox: This is the Jan 6th of gaming.

tango alpha delta: Sep 9, 2011; Ask me about my wealthy lifestyle and passive income! I love bragging about my wealth to my lessers! My opinions are more valid because I have more money than you! Stealing the fruits of the labor of the working class is okay, so long as you don't do it using crypto. More money = better than!

Quantum of Phallus posted:

been saying this. RT is a scam pushed by Nvidia and Digshitshill Floundry

Lol, Quake2 RTX is the only good implementation of ray tracing. Plus, it�s fun to play.

Unfortunately you can only do that on a pretty beefy PC.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 03:24

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# ? Apr 28, 2024 04:03

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

Descent Raytraced would be good if the mouselook in modern descent source ports worked well.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 03:26

SCheeseman: Apr 23, 2003

RTGI (including anything that uses Lumen) and full blown path tracing are great, everything else is mostly a waste of time.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 05:16

John F Bennett: Jan 30, 2013; I always wear my wedding ring. It's my trademark.

https://x.com/tomwarren/status/1772666364731224164?s=20

Next Xbox will be a PC/Console hybrid?

# ? Mar 27, 2024 08:00

External Organs: Mar 3, 2006; One time i prank called a bear buildin workshop and said I wanted my mamaws ashes put in a teddy from where she loved them things so well... The woman on the phone did not skip a beat. She just said, "Brang her on down here. We've did it before."

Steam on Xbox, sure.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 08:20

veni veni veni: Jun 5, 2005

Not sure, but to me it seems more likely to serve as more of a cross-buy feature. Like you can buy/play a game on Xbox with Epic but also you own it via epic so you can play it on PC too. But if you play it on Xbox MS takes a %.

Notice it doesn't mention Steam. If they made the exact same announcement with Steam instead of Epic people would have gones nuts. But it's epic lol.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 08:20

Sywert of Thieves: Nov 7, 2005; The pirate code is really more of a guideline, than actual rules.

TheScott2K posted:

Descent Raytraced would be good if the mouselook in modern descent source ports worked well.

I played through Descent 1 and 2 again a few years back by way of Descent Reborn or something. I think it did the lighting rework pretty well, I remember staring at the flare bullet that the first enemy in the game fires at you, float by me and light the corridor real nice.

And yeah from the last page: gently caress raytracing, just give me 60fps. I didn't know I needed that before I had a XSX and now I never want to lose it again. :allears:

# ? Mar 27, 2024 10:54

John F Bennett: Jan 30, 2013; I always wear my wedding ring. It's my trademark.

Planet Zoo is a lot of fun.

It's the same game as Planet Coaster, the UI/UX is identical. It just has animals instead of rides, and much nicer graphics.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 11:03

SCheeseman: Apr 23, 2003

veni veni veni posted:

Not sure, but to me it seems more likely to serve as more of a cross-buy feature. Like you can buy/play a game on Xbox with Epic but also you own it via epic so you can play it on PC too. But if you play it on Xbox MS takes a %.

Notice it doesn't mention Steam. If they made the exact same announcement with Steam instead of Epic people would have gones nuts. But it's epic lol.

The main draw of getting Epic's catalog is Sony's games. Sony isn't going to port jack poo poo specifically for Xbox, so to play them an Xbox would have to run the win32 binaries.

Perhaps they'll keep it locked down in some ways, but once they start allowing the running of standard windows applications on the Xbox I think it's fair to say it's basically a PC.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 11:14

Quantum of Phallus: Dec 27, 2010

That�s not happening

# ? Mar 27, 2024 11:20

SCheeseman: Apr 23, 2003

So Microsoft expects Epic and other third party stores to port their software to the Xbox? Maybe, but that's a lot of extra money, work and would leave a bunch of gaps where publishers refuse, like anything by Sony. It doesn't really fix anything, it doesn't stop the fleeing of publishers from the ecosystem to PC or solve the inbalance between the PS/XB libraries.

Granted, half-measures are Microsoft's thing so you're probably right.

If I Did It, third party stores would be given their own VM sandbox and limited Windows environment isolated from the Xbox side. Game libraries and store could be brought over relatively easily, while keeping the security of the Xbox intact (though being able to run arbitrary software, even in a VM, is admittedly an attack vector). Microsoft still has control over the stores and can enforce rules, take percentages or whatever. That way, the Xbox can play Spider-Man.

SCheeseman fucked around with this message at 11:41 on Mar 27, 2024

# ? Mar 27, 2024 11:35

yung lambic: Dec 16, 2011

How is mouse and keyboard on cloud? My work productivity is going to plummet with AoE II and Halo Infinite...

# ? Mar 27, 2024 12:17

John F Bennett: Jan 30, 2013; I always wear my wedding ring. It's my trademark.

I hope they will name the Xbox handheld the Xboy.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 13:30

kri kri: Jul 18, 2007

Planet Zoo is fun but complicated. Never played planet coaster.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 13:41

ColdPie: Jun 9, 2006

SCheeseman posted:

So Microsoft expects Epic and other third party stores to port their software to the Xbox?

I don't know but I sure am excited to spend the next 20 pages building a whole alternate reality universe based on one poorly worded tweet from some idiot.

Timdog was right.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 14:06

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

Don't Epic and most third-party console publishers already publish for Xbox? Sony is kind of a special case here.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 14:07

SCheeseman: Apr 23, 2003

ColdPie posted:

I don't know but I sure am excited to spend the next 20 pages building a whole alternate reality universe based on one poorly worded tweet from some idiot.

Timdog was right.

There's quotes in the article from Phil Spencer openly questioning the continued relevance of the console sales and marketing model. Once they get rid of that, things get pretty weird and it's fun to speculate how.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 14:31

PriorMarcus: Oct 17, 2008; ASK ME ABOUT BEING ALLERGIC TO POSITIVITY

kri kri posted:

Planet Zoo is fun but complicated. Never played planet coaster.

I enjoyed what I got to play of it last night (basically the first campaign zoo) but I can't help but think it would be a lot less complicated if they just let me use the analog sticks like a mouse cursor, the D-Pad could also be much better utilized.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 14:42

John F Bennett: Jan 30, 2013; I always wear my wedding ring. It's my trademark.

PriorMarcus posted:

I enjoyed what I got to play of it last night (basically the first campaign zoo) but I can't help but think it would be a lot less complicated if they just let me use the analog sticks like a mouse cursor, the D-Pad could also be much better utilized.

I'm a bit used to it because of Planet Coaster, but the controls have always been weird and cumbersome. You'll mostly be juggling with the bumpers, Dpad, and lots of nested menus.

The tutorial doesn't always tell you where the button you are supposed to click can be found, which can be frustrating when it's hidden in a menu that will only be visible using a certain key combo you might not know about yet.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 15:23

Sywert of Thieves: Nov 7, 2005; The pirate code is really more of a guideline, than actual rules.

John F Bennett posted:

I hope they will name the Xbox handheld the Xboy.

Yboy

# ? Mar 27, 2024 15:54

The Kins: Oct 2, 2004

SCheeseman posted:

There's quotes in the article from Phil Spencer openly questioning the continued relevance of the console sales and marketing model. Once they get rid of that, things get pretty weird and it's fun to speculate how.

There were also a couple of other articles from talking with Phil at CES that were helpfully not linked in that article. One on the portable Xbox rumors (TL;DR: He wants Windows to be Xbox-ier on the new form factor of handheld PCs like the Steam Deck), and one on the current industry messiness and the exclusivity situation.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 15:58

hatty: Feb 28, 2011; Pork Pro

Game budgets too big

# ? Mar 27, 2024 16:03

Soul Glo: Aug 27, 2003; Just let it shine through

theyre going to make the next xbox a prebuilt windows pc with a custom os skin, it will run whatever runs on windows within spec

possibly portable. think an xbox branded lenovo go.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 16:05

Seltzer: Oct 11, 2012; Ask me about Game Pass: the Best Deal in Gaming!

I saw this comment on a thread about RT on reddit. This guy could be completely making all of this up, but it confirms all the suspicions I've had about RT so I'm gonna post it and half believe it until someone in here who knows about this stuff can say the opposite

quote:

"So here's a dirty secret about raytracing, speaking as someone who has been building graphics engines since the late 80's and has written a handful of raytracers -- it'll never really happen.

People have been talking about real time raytracing since the mid 90's, when it became clear CPU (and later GPU) power would eventually enable it. And to be clear, what people are calling ray tracing today isn't what was traditionally called ray tracing... mostly for marketing purposes. Real ray tracing runs some number of rays per pixel on the screen, running a physics engine on surfaces and handling reflection, refraction and bounces, whereas what games like this are doing is running a subset of rays as input to shaders and other rendering techniques.

When CPUs first got to the point where you could do real-time "real" raytracing in the late 90's, it didn't get implemented because people wanted more resolution or more detailed geometry and textures. So that's where the compute went. And with every increase of processing capability, the same thing has happened -- compute went to higher resolutions, or later higher framerates, or more detailed geometry and textures.

And the why is simple -- its always cheaper to use rendering tricks than to run the physics of a light ray. For a 4K image with real tracing, you'd be running hundreds of millions of casts per frame, tens of billions or more per second, east cast using a not-inconsequential number of floating point operations.

So a bunch of years ago some marketing yahoo decided they could implement the hardware needed to do it more efficiently and use the output of them to provide better shadow detail, or to do limited simulation of reflections and refractions, and call it ray tracing.

And what happened? Same thing as before -- developers realized they could use that compute time to get faster framerates, or process more geometry, or run more compute-intensive shaders with far more bang-for-the-buck. So ray-tracing (or, ray-traced inputs to shaders) is only really done as a marketing thing in games these days -- because it sounds fancy and sites like DR can post videos about how such-and-such game has slightly better bounce lighting and shadows, etc.

And next generation the same thing is going to happen -- games will use that compute time on the GPU for LLM processing. Or even greater framerate, or 8K rendering, or real-time re-encoding for streaming, or any of a thousand other things that have a higher bang-for-the-buck.

Raytracing isn't going to happen until rendering is happening at or beyond the limit of human vision at framerates higher than people can perceive, and geometry has reached the point of absolute realism. Then the GPU performance gains will be spent on it."

I assume he means DF when he says DR.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 16:41

Kevyn: Mar 5, 2003; I just want to smile. Just once. I'd like to just, one time, go to Disney World and smile like the other boys and girls.

I don�t know who this Ray Tracing is, but it sure sounds like he�s up to no good.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 16:47

Macdeo Lurjtux: Jul 5, 2011; BRRREADSTOOORRM!

He was one of the Ghost Busters, wasn't he?

# ? Mar 27, 2024 17:02

Saoshyant: Oct 26, 2010

Timdog died for this? So this Ray Tracing wanker could get away and do whatever he pleases??

# ? Mar 27, 2024 17:02

Vikar Jerome: Nov 26, 2013; I believe Emmanuelle is shit, though Emmanuelle 2, Emmanuelle '77 and Goodbye, Emmanuelle may be very good movies.

Love putting RT on in things. I love cinematic modes. Skill issue if you dont

# ? Mar 27, 2024 17:47

hatty: Feb 28, 2011; Pork Pro

Destroy your frame rate brain. If you grew up with the N64 this should be second nature. Anything above 20fps is fine

# ? Mar 27, 2024 17:50

Vikar Jerome: Nov 26, 2013; I believe Emmanuelle is shit, though Emmanuelle 2, Emmanuelle '77 and Goodbye, Emmanuelle may be very good movies.

hatty posted:

Destroy your frame rate brain. If you grew up with the N64 this should be second nature. Anything above 20fps is fine

# ? Mar 27, 2024 17:50

Professor Beetus: Apr 12, 2007; They can fight us
But they'll never Beetus

I like ray tracing so I simply play dragons dogma 2 on PC and get 60+ frames most of the time because I am not playing on a 6 y/o PC or whatever

# ? Mar 27, 2024 17:51

Volte: Oct 4, 2004; woosh woosh

Seltzer posted:

I saw this comment on a thread about RT on reddit. This guy could be completely making all of this up, but it confirms all the suspicions I've had about RT so I'm gonna post it and half believe it until someone in here who knows about this stuff can say the opposite

I assume he means DF when he says DR.

No, it's a nonsensical claim based on a misunderstanding of what raytracing is, or at least what the goal of real-time raytracing is. Not only are there already examples of games that are actually fully ray-traced (Quake II RTX for one), that's not even relevant. There's nothing wrong with a traditional rasterization pipeline, it just isn't set up in a way where the GPU can efficiently have access to much spatial information about the scene. It turns out spatial information is pretty important when calculating lighting, so devs have to come up with increasingly elaborate ways to encode what they need in advance so that the rasterizer can sample it on a per-pixel basis. Raytracing opens up the possibility of sampling the environment in real time as part of the rendering pipeline. It's up to individual developers what they want to do with that ability. There are a lot of cool possibilities, as well as a lot of ways to misuse it. It's not a magical "light bounces around and makes stuff look better" checkbox that devs check off, contrary to popular belief.

quote:

And what happened? Same thing as before -- developers realized they could use that compute time to get faster framerates, or process more geometry, or run more compute-intensive shaders with far more bang-for-the-buck.

Yes, exactly. Why would you waste frames using raytracing to compute something that you could do more quickly without raytracing? The only thing that matters is what goes on the screen, and if your final image can be separated into (Cheaper Rasterized Contribution + Expensive Raytraced Contribution) with only a limited loss of quality then why not? There's no purity test for what qualifies as raytracing. Even production renders use compositing and post-processing to achieve the desired result. Not every pixel has to exclusively be the result of an accurately modelled light-transport calculation to qualify as raytracing.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 17:53

acksplode: May 17, 2004

Professor Beetus posted:

I like ray tracing so I simply play dragons dogma 2 on PC and get 60+ frames most of the time because I am not playing on a 6 y/o PC or whatever

Yeah same. And its ray traced global illumination is pretty good, first RT feature I've seen in an RE engine game that wasn't optimized into garbage. Kinda saves it from looking like a PS4 game

# ? Mar 27, 2024 17:54

Professor Beetus: Apr 12, 2007; They can fight us
But they'll never Beetus

acksplode posted:

Yeah same. And its ray traced global illumination is pretty good, first RT feature I've seen in an RE engine game that wasn't optimized into garbage. Kinda saves it from looking like a PS4 game

100%, some of the textures would look like dog poo poo without the frankly incredible lighting and shading, which looks much better with rt turned on

# ? Mar 27, 2024 18:00

The Kins: Oct 2, 2004

Ray-traced audio is the real cool feature. More games need to do stuff like that.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 18:01

Lammasu: May 8, 2019; lawful Good Monster

John F Bennett posted:

I hope they will name the Xbox handheld the Xboy.

They can't. It has to be Vert's little sister.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 18:04

Quantum of Phallus: Dec 27, 2010

I don�t give a dog�s dick about graphics if da game isn�t fun. Nintendo are still the only big company to understand this but Xbox seem to be turning toward the light with stuff like HiFi Rush and Pentiment

# ? Mar 27, 2024 19:23

1glitch0: Sep 4, 2018; I DON'T GIVE A CRAP WHAT SHE BELIEVES THE HARRY POTTER BOOKS CHANGED MY LIFE #HUFFLEPUFF

Seltzer posted:

I saw this comment on a thread about RT on reddit. This guy could be completely making all of this up, but it confirms all the suspicions I've had about RT so I'm gonna post it and half believe it until someone in here who knows about this stuff can say the opposite

I assume he means DF when he says DR.

It sounds like they just renamed something "ray tracing" just like they renamed auto correct as "AI" and putting a box on your head and playing Second Life is "virtual reality".

# ? Mar 27, 2024 19:50

ErrEff: Feb 13, 2012

I don't have time to test it but it looks like Diablo IV is now out on Game Pass PC, one day early. It asked me to connect a Battle.net account and clicking the Install button opens its own Blizzard installer instead of the Xbox App default. 94 GB size.

https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/store/diablo-iv-pc/9N0H62KZ3BXV/0010

Doesn't look like the Xbox version has been flagged for Game Pass yet, at least not on the web store.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 19:57

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# ? Apr 28, 2024 04:03

Haptical Sales Slut: Mar 15, 2010; Age 18 to 49

Rise of the ronin, a ps5 console exclusive, has a �ray tracing� option. It seems to just make it run at 25fps and look even more like an early ps4 title.

# ? Mar 27, 2024 20:03

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