Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) has specific place among my friends. It has huge background from the year of 2006where a bunch of people known to me started IRC channel #e3-pl (IRCNet) to comment live what was happening overseas. Many of these guys you know as current and past journalists of community blog called Polygamia.pl, which is now one of the mainstream online media about gaming culture in Poland. In 2006it was just a bunch of underground-geeks who joined forces for creative synthesis written by some on currently well known pages.
It was the year where Microsoft showed quite impressive Xbox 360 coverage and Sony embarrassed themselves with “if we don’t say that’s Next Generation, it’s not Next Gen yet”. With huge announcements and living sense of community that tradition lasts to the very day and believe me it was really interesting to sit on the channel yesterday evening and chat with the angry mob of hardcore players who complained how boring message Microsoft has brought to them.
And that’s it, my first comment, I’m surprised that many people are surprised by current course both from Microsoft and Sony.
I’m waiting for today’s conference of Japanese giant but I’m not expecting much more than crazy MOVEs with their new controller.
This year the most exciting news as for games for its core audience I’m expecting from 3rd party. This thesis I’ve been spreading around my friends for a while. Why? Well casual, social gaming is a huge slice of the cake that corporate giants want to address immediately. Biggest, current winner in most common gaming media – game console – is obviously Nintendo. So both MS and Nintendo are looking for new opportunities through own innovation but a door opened by the competition.
Hardcore gamers might be disappointed but for most of all what’s left in this actually current generation is new games crossing boundaries. As for new hardware and hardware changes it’s obvious that message is directly pointed at new customers (the Wii-type) or to extend gaming family at household to other members under the same roof.
I’m curious how it will end up after a year or two, as for Microsoft itself I see big chance for it in countries like Poland, where Nintendo has no subsidiary and there is no real distribution of Nintendo related goods. With good business plan next years can reveal Kinect as synonym of casual gaming in such countries. The trick is that not every plan is good.
I’m excited to see the near future, especially that Xbox Live has been indirectly announced to come to Poland. Probably at the end of the year. I hope that with it Xbox Live Indie Games chapter will have also become available to Polish Indie developers. We have many talented guys who will use that chance to test their skills against commercial rules.
Last but not least, Xbox 360 Slim. It looks cool but most of all it will matter only to attract new customers. I presume not so many will replace old ones beside those frustrated by the noise or crash of the system (by whatever reason).
Summarizing my MIX10 experience, main thing I was focused on is of course Windows Phone Series. This is huge thing for Microsoft, long expected inside the company to show that we haven’t overslept the deal totally. Device and OS shows some opportunity and I can’t wait to see how it will it shape and break into the market.
For developers it’s another chance to shine. As I recall, I think one of Capcom’s managers said that new platforms’s begining of the lifecycle is the best time to introduce new brands, IPs and products. Best time for Indies if we reffer it to game development. Best time to introduce new crazy apps if we say – any application is at stake. Microsoft promises to reveal some tools for apps promotion on its marketplace but let’s be honest. Looking at Xbox Live and PSN stores, looking at Apple’s Appstore, when you have countless number of applications it’s just not that easy to highlight yourself as at the beginning.
If you consider to start coding a few things may be important to you. First, hardware specification can help you estimate Windows Phone’s capacities:
Symmetric multi-touch of Capacitive type with at least 4 or more contact points.
Sensors – A GPS, Accelerometer, Compass, Light, Proximity
Camera with 5 megapixel or more , flash and a camera button
Multimedia – Codec acceleration
Memory – 256 MB RAM or more , 8 GB Flash or more
GPU – DirectX 9 acceleration
CPU – ARMv7 Cortex/Scorpion or better
Optional keyboard
3 Hardware buttons – Back, Start, Search is a must and other buttons like buttons for Volume and Power.
Phone will support two native screen resolutions:
If I understood the message correctly it seems that MS and its partners prepare to launch two types of devices. Full with 480 x 800 and some mini/small (and presumably cheaper) device with 320 x 480. That still has to be confirmed.
Screen resolution is important for designers and graphicians. As you can easily measure screen proportions are not standard, that’s what you have to mind while preparing graphical content. Zune HD for example supports 240 x 320 and 272 x 480 which means 16:9 and 4:3 proportions (just like TV sets support). On Windows Phone it’s equivalently 5:3 and 3:2.
As you see keyboard is optional so definitively prepare yourself to design touch-screen supported user interface. The only buttons you will have are below three (Back, Start and Search):
Sensors have their equivalent APIs accessible from Silverlight and Xna frameworks. These two technologies are the only ones you can pick up for your development. Positioning is as follows: Xna – strong focus on gaming, SL – any other type of application. Screens and sensors can obviously be used for application control, but interesting thing is that WP7 will have speech recognition module that you can also consider in your development. WP7 will have Push notitication service that will allow you to communicate and send messages to Phone on battery consumption efficient way. As for APIs mentioned already, Windows Phone will support Silverlight 3.0 and Xna 4.0. For gaming, if you invested your time in WritableBitmap based engine written in Silverlight and targetting Web – you can easily port it to Phone without any Xna consideration (as this feature is in SL3).
After Shawn’s lecture I found that most of buffers important in graphics (Xna) are 16bit. So we can predict how many colors will WP7 support and how big structures we can render (as for vertex/index buffers in 3d world). It also matters for texture size so putting it all shortly how much detail we can show on the screen. Xna 4.0 on WP7 will be DX9 compatible but at initial stage and release timeframe we won’t be able to develop shaders freely in HLSL. Instead Xna exposes five customizable Effects for Shading, Environment Mapping, Alpha Testing, Multi Texturing and Skinning. It’s said that future versions of OS/Xna will presumably support HLSL but it’s not said when. Shawn has released very cool demo from his MIX10 presentation where all these effects are presented (with source code). I recommend to check it out, and generally to follow his blog, currently it’s best updated and most accurate resource on anything new in Xna 4.0
Last week I spent in “The Fabulous” Las Vegas. It was my first trip to the Sin City. I believed it might become crazy and it was, both in my private time as well as on MIX10 conference.
I’m quite often attending major Microsoft conferences (those that attract global audience). I thought that PDC is the place to go. MIX is definitely an equalizer. Major announcements and keynotes not to forget long is one thing, huge content as for sessions and topics covered is the second. Add great people both from Microsoft and partner + customer space. Head can literally blow up, add Vegas to it – first trip of mine and here we go with my memories
(learning a lot from my friends whispers I didn’t take a camera. “Whatever happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” they said :>)
I’m used to perceive huge events by its major theme. PDC08 was about Visual Studio 2010, Windows Azure and Windows 7. PDC09 was little bit unclear to me, but with great Silverlight 4 announcements that made the conference worth its time. MIX10 all about WP7 at least for me, second message worth coming was IE9. These two products showed that even though Microsoft overslept many years in Mobility and Internet standards now was the time to show that it was just because dreams were huge and company showed truly that it can provide features audience demands. It’s not a victory yet but good pair of trainers to run after all again at full speed.
As for technologies behind products, Silverlight and Xna grow really fast to become a mainstream focus for Microsoft oriented developer. Both started as some tiny projects with portable aspirations in their specialties: Silverlight in RIA space, Xna to become the gaming primer. Both still have to win their developer audience but with extension to Windows Phone Series and features coming in version 4.0 of these two technologies I’m expecting fast reach and aspiration growth for other application types and scale utilizing these technologies.
To add more, Scott Gurthie and his wolf pack announced that tool-set to address these apps will be free and stay free forever. This includes SL and Xna projects and also (most importantly) includes Blend to keep designers busy with the company. That’s really great move.
Second day showed that under good and strong reign weak performers can go back to the good track. Most sessions I remember with Dean Hachamovitch speaking were rather subtle arrogant rather a visionary. Since Steven Sinofsky took the team over I see what I’d seen with Windows 7: a reasonable path from unfinished Windows Vista to Windows 7 we all love.
IE’s Platform Preview is first touchable proof that Steven has meant what he said during PDC keynote. Four months later and we have CSS3 selectors test passed and Acid3 at the mid point. Still much more to do but Html5 and CSS3 looks indeed like a priority. IE’s Platform Preview is in fact a technical demo to show current stage of IE’s rendering capacities. It’s hosted on an developer ready rather a consumer ready window, which suggests also (but it is only my assumption) that maybe they have rewritten IE9 from the scratch. If they switched only renderer from IE8 to IE9 version why not to use host windows, tabs and all else from previous version’s architecture. IE9 PR dropped it all, I hope for a reason. If all that’s true and 8 weeks release promise will be kept we should expect IE’s comeback very soon.
Can Silverlight be used for serious game development?
Some time ago I found interesting project, C# port of Quake engine optimized for Silverlight. Demo published by authors currently doesn’t work (dunno why), but videos show that they achieved fair 60fps with it.
I started wondering how was it done. Quake uses it’s own 100% software renderer. No hardware acceleration was supported at that time. So, to port it to C# and Silverlight developers needed just very fast blitter and/or access to frame buffer (window pixel table or memory pointer equivalent).
One of Silverlight MVPs, Bill Reiss , actually has developed a library that solves all of these problems. Library is called: SilverSprite and you can check its sources on Codeplex. It’s really interesting project, because its API is very close to Xna API developed by Microsoft. Bill gives several examples how to easily port Xna game to Silverlight. He also spoke for Channel 9 on this topic. Whole that coverage is really awesome.
I checked above resources by myself and Silverlight triggered my curiosity as for serious game development. I wanted to investigate and find answer to that original question on blitter/frame buffer. I’ve written a simple implementation of WriteableBitmap based routines to build some benchmark.
I used direct pixel table access to clear the screen and it does not slow down Silverlight a bit. I added also a Blit method that is able to render any UIElement that Silverlight supports (or you create). This is first bottleneck I found. Rendering UIElements can slow down Silverlight heavily. Mixing these two techniques (Pixel Table and UIElements) is definitely an area for further analysis and optimization, but WriteableBitmap looks like a direction, where you can go and check if you can make software renderer (real-time ray-tracer) by yourself. Another interesting aspect of this simple test is performance comparison between SL3 and SL4. Silverligh 4.0 seems to work faster so I assume that SL team might have actually optimized WritableBitmap.Render() routine between these two versions.
Term Project Natal should be recognized by many of you. Many more were totally astonished by this announcement coming from Microsoft at last E3 conference. Since that moment, not only gamers and game developers have started thinking on new challenges and opportunities, but also regular, little geeky gadget boys and girls sometimes outside gaming community. I’ve seen also many innovators in different areas of technology who started asking questions. If you anyhow missed the announcement, below clip should explain the technology itself:
If you’re interested in Project Natal and you’re a developer, you cannot miss next Microsoft Gamefestconference. In February, 2010 in Seattle’s edition, I spotted two very interesting session tracks covering Natal from design and technological perspective. I think this is first time, when technical details of Natal will be presented to broader audience. As far as I know, up to the moment only internal Microsoft teams and studios have access to this information. Some chosen 3rd party developers with interesting project opportunities probably were also invited for testing.
Broad communication means that Project Natal is closer and closer to gamers. I hope that post Gamefest 2010 era will also show some critical improvements in Xna to allow community developer check it out too. Track details are below (taken from the conference pages):
“Project Natal” – Design
“Project Natal” not only revolutionizes the way people play games, but also changes the way games are designed and created. The “Project Natal” Design track will present innovative thinking and ideas to help you take your game from office to living room—creating new ways to work, building showcase experiences, divining user intent, and designing gestures for UI versus game interactions. Discover best practices and what makes the “magic” in a “Project Natal” game.
“Project Natal” – Technology
“Project Natal” provides a groundbreaking new way for games to use natural user motion to interact with the Xbox 360. Experience the future now, with this cutting-edge technology! Join us to learn how to develop world-class titles using “Project Natal”, which provides many exciting new features that can be challenging to programmers. In the “Project Natal” Technical track, we will walk you through how to overcome these challenges with a combination of classic techniques and new thinking. We will explore the depths of this exciting technology and dive deep into gesture recognition, avatar retargeting, speech recognition, advanced raw stream processing, handling different player environments, and many other topics. No controller required!
I’m a blogger for a while, millions of people can say the same. It’s good to see that not so well known Internet contributors try to find their space in the Web. It’s even better to see that people who shape various disciplines of our life joined the team.
In Poland we have about 16 milion out of 38 milion people with stable internet connection. From this number, many of course do blog also. We have success stories of people who actually started living out of online journalism. On that wave, many Polish politicians joined blogosphere too several years ago. Lech Wałesa, one of most famous Polish citizens in the World is among them. You can also reach him over local Instant Messenger called Gadu-Gadu (GG#1980).
That’s a proof that we as a nation are growing fast in maturity of Web 2.0 adoption. I haven’t seen though many businessmen contributing to Web 2.0 ideas this way.
I’m proud to tell you that Jacek Murawski, General Manager at Microsoft Poland is presumably first senior corporate executive at subsidiary level, in Poland, who started blogging a month ago. His posts mainly touch Microsoft’s daily business. Jacek is also big enthusiast and curious observer of macro economic changes we experience all the time. That’s second topic of his choice as I observe. He also writes about some trivial aspects of being global citizen (like European Union integration). He writes in Polish language, so without good translator or Polish language proficience you might not understand much. Still – Jacek is the first senior corporate blogger in Poland and I wish him all best to find his own space in this very brutal world of flame wars, devoted commentators and competition tracking your every move.
courtesy of David Longo. Click the image to see more of his amazing works.
I read an interesting article about future platforms in gaming. Square-Enix Executive Yoichi Wada says nothing new, but reminds that “Cloud Computing” will impact heavily also Game Industry.
Social and browser based games will grow dramatically Mr Wada says and Polish Gaming Magazine “Polygamia” fears that if it becomes true, real hardcore gamer related genres will unfortunately die unpopular to all these 10-minutes long game-play browser,facebook, mobile alike alternatives.
I fear not such a thing. Today proves that RIA (Both in Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s Flash applications) can handle sophisticated 3D engines. What they mostly lack is hardware acceleration and good tool-set back-end for game industry. But still I can play Quake in a browser. Browser, mobile and other you’d think small games grow in size and maturity. I can’t imagine how far it can go in the future but for sure I’m not expecting another Mafia or Farmville clones from Facebook as dominant examples in Cloud Gaming AD 2020.
What I expect is usage of local hardware (GPU, CPU) in some Internet aware device where 100% of the content will be streamlined from the Web. Natural, further evolution of what we have now, don’t you agree? I’m expecting that not hardware capacities but social networking power can be major trigger for new customer acquisition and that’s what have already started, big time!
Today’s hardware and technologies allow us to make it all what Square-Enix’s executive says even now. RIA games grow in size and maturity in amazing speed. Blocker is market readiness to accept dramatical shift in mindset (own versus use) so fast. Industry leaders need to evangelize consumers on that and in fact that are Mr. Wada’s motives in my opinion.
I’m personally not that afraid of shift itself. I’m afraid of equal offer available globally. I do not live in US and I perceive that many services are US and at general a particular country centric. Well educated consumer in Web 2.0 era thinks globally and gets benefits from that.
If a local store cannot offer good price and Dollar is cheap, I make a decision to import something even from Australia. It sounds absurd to my parents but to friends in my age that’s natural decision making.
If service is not available and it is definitely attractive people start cheating. That’s the case of Xbox Live in Poland. That’s the business of all commercial VPNs who allow people to freely utilize treasures of Netflix and have Sky TV over Internet.
As a vendor you can’t possibly block motivated user from evaluating you. They’ll bitch at you (as Polish Xbox users do every time they have good ground to speak), but still they will use it. In Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing era there is no such thing like “not available to you” for whatever reason.
Another “Hello world” in the blogosphere. I feel like I had already done that before. I’ve been blogging since 2004 or 2005 if I remember correctly. Many initiatives with different scope and content maturity. Once in Polish (my native), once testing international reader. Language proficiency in this history has taken also a very crucial part.
I remember very well that first post on MSDN Blogs in English. I tried to make my first professional blog on that platform, sharing my thoughts on Microsoft technologies with local and international readers.
For the moment, idea was not bad, but I quickly realized that with every post written, I’d been more and more interested in local only reader. Reasons were many. In Poland, I was presenting at conferences, trainings and other events for local developers. Language itself was not the problem, but if two Poles do talk, why use English in the background when I referred to something online.
So my English Posts category is long dead there. Quite recently I stopped marking Polish posts with [PL] prefix in the title. I realized that I’m not going to post any more English posts on that site. Not since that blog is cross posted on http://www.msdn.pl pages. [PL] prefix was nice, because I noticed that many other Polish bloggers used that prefix style to highlight their rare English postings (with [EN] for a change). Really interesting observation in social context and unspoken netiquette growth.
With growing popularity of that blog (as for my own acceptable scale), I realized that those pages are more official, regardless of my own statement.
Redesigning my private pages is the reaction. More and more I needed something rather private, something not so strongly branded with “MS only” label. Some place where I could start discussing and examining different topics. Some place where I could tell my international friends and colleagues that this is the place where they can follow my progress.
So I started with this entry. There will be more soon, that’s the blogging idea, right?
To give you short introduction what you can find here in the future, I’m going to explain basic content categories:
Home – this page obviously gets everything
Game Industry- My thoughts in this area from tools to design, from trends in business models to simple demands on the market. Definitely an industry worth watching.
Labs – I’m a creative soul. So I want to share with you some news with my current developments and investigations.
Microsoft – I work there, so I presume I’ll sneak in some MS-related information too.
Polish Software Industry – I’m paid to know well what’s going on in my local software market. I’m proud Polish by the way, so why not to promote my country and software from it? Regardless if MS or not, Polish brilliant minds are worth international awareness.
Programming – Yeah I know.. I’m addicted. From time to time I presume I’ll paste here some source code too.
Various Rants – Isn’t it what are you reading just right now?
Cheers,
Daniel Biesiada
PS. As it’s fresh, greetings to all of you guys, whom I met in Los Angeles, CA at PDC 09 this month. It was great time, and Carl Franklin was my best surprise.
