[Flipside]

I'm going to unlock this topic on request, because the conversation seemed to be heading back where it was supposed to be, however, this is not a thread to discuss the relative merits of consoles, those always end in disaster.

[spartan_0214]

If FS2 somehow made it onto PS2, the SCP programmers would go on strike.

[Unknown Target]

Since the SCP programmers would be the ones putting it on there, I doubt they'd go on strike.

[Inquisitor]

Spartan: Knock it off.

[WMCoolmon]

You don't necessarily need all that power for porting over just the engine, actually. You can run the engine with practically nothing now; the only limitation is that the GUI etc is based on graphics, so you sub in a scripting.tbl and a fontset and make your own interface. You could basically make a 2D lua game.

I don't think that'd have much practical appeal but it might be something to do if you were bored.

[bonusbartus]

Hmm I don't really understand how it is possible that the xbox 360 couldn't handle the scp engine, which runs great on my older pc,
Especially when I look at games like Call of Duty 4, that won't run very well on my new pc..

someone care to expain?

[Nuke]

it doesnt have the memory. youd have to scale back the graphics abit. reducing the textures down to the previous power of two would be a start.

[bonusbartus]

I've understood that part, but how is it possible that that xbox could run a game like cod4, which is very Graphic Memory sensitive?

[jr2]

Umm.... guys, how about port to XBOX instead of 360?  Then, you get 360 support through backwards compatibility.  XD

[WMCoolmon]

That's only for some games, IIRC, and emulation as a rule is generally less reliable.

@bonusbarbus: It's very possible that the XBOX360 is optimized for lots of little textures being used, rather than a few slow ones like Freespace 2 is optimized for. For instance, the XBOX360 might have wicked fast pipelines for getting graphics to the processor, but once it gets to the processor, the accessible memory and algorithms might be set up for a very small texture. Think of having a GeForce 8800GTX with 8MB of video memory while running FS2 off of a ram disk.

[caibrenden]

Umm.... guys, how about port to XBOX instead of 360?  Then, you get 360 support through backwards compatibility.  XD

You know that might just work apart from the 64 Mb Limit

Code: [Select]

Shared memory subsystem

    * 64 MB DDR SDRAM at 200 MHz; 6.4 GB/s

[jr2]

How do the XBOX games handle it?

[Nuke]

rather than creating the whole scene by working on the source data, creating the world, and storing it till its prepared to be worked on by the gpu, and then passing the whole load of data as a batch to the video card to be rendered like pc games do. the newer consoles pass the work from cpu to cpu, and drawing the scene as smaller manageable sections which are overlaid directly in the frame buffer. there is more time to prepare the frame (slower refresh on tvs) so theres extra time to allow the drawing of the scene as layers. essentially using its brains and not its memory to do the same job.

[jr2]

I thought the XBOX was a hotrodded PC??

[Nuke]

it is it just aint got no memory.

[Marcus Vesper]

I thought the XBOX was a hotrodded PC??

Common misconception, most components in the original XBox are quite a bit slower then equivelant parts in PCs from that era.  That didn't work against it though because it's not running all the additional overhead your computer has to handle.  If your average PC only did one thing, it wouldn't need nearly as fast innards to achieve the same performance.  There's something to be said for simplicity of function. 

What ticks me off though is when developers design multiplatform releases with the XBox as the starting point, and then don't bother to differentiate it in any way on the PC, which isn't subject to the XBox's limited memory and thus can use textures that don't look like crap on our monitors.  Invisible War is something of a sore point still (Thief 3 had the same problem, but at least it didn't suck in every other way).

[Inquisitor]

If someone with console development experience wants to contribute to this thread, let me know, but I think I have read enough rants on the "what ticks me off about consoles" theme.