Developages - Development and Technology Blog

Filed under: Gaming

We’d already heard about a possible price cut to the Xbox 360, but it looks like that might not be all that Microsoft has in store, as TrustedReviews is now reporting that the 20GB hard drive in the standard Xbox 360 model is about to get the boot in favor of a more spacious 60GB one. That word apparently comes from a “rock solid source,” who says that Microsoft wants to get it out the door by the end of its financial year, which comes at the end of June. TrustedReviews also goes into a bit of speculation, saying that Microsoft is “toying with the idea of introducing a new 360 SKU,” and that a model with a built-in Blu-ray drive would seem to be “the most logical conclusion,” although they say an external drive “makes sense too.” While that possibility obviously remains up in the air, TrustedReviews is about as confident as can be with the 60GB Xbox 360 news, saying that you can take it to the bank.

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Original post by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Gaming

There’s certainly been no shortage of sad stories involving Xboxes, but when it comes to attempts to get the console repaired, this latest tale from a gamer known only as Nathaniel might have to take the cake. As you can see above, his console (one of the first to hit the market) boasted a good deal of personalization, including signatures from folks at Bungie and the Xbox 360 team, and a spiffy illustration by Rooster Teeth Comics artist Luke McKay. As with many other Xbox users, however, Nathaniel’s console eventually packed it in, and he was forced to send it to Microsoft for repairs. Needless to say, that’s when things took a turn for the worse. Despite calling ahead of time and getting assurances that his prized console would be sent back intact, and including a letter reiterating how much the console meant to him, Microsoft apparently took it upon themselves to clean it as best they could before returning it, leaving only a few faint smudges of permanent marker to ensure that it was, in fact, the same Xbox. There’s no word as to what Nathaniel plans to do next (other than weep), but given that Microsoft gave the royal treatment to someone that did nothing more than get a Zune tattoo, you′d think they could at least give the guy a few free points or something.

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Original post by Donald Melanson

Microsoft has sold 18m units of its Xbox 360 console worldwide, compared to sales of 10.5 million for the PS3.

Although it should be noted that the Ṕ has been around for a year less than the 360 and is showing signs of catching up faster than expected.

The figures came from John Schappert, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of LIVE software and services, speaking at last week’s Games Developer Conference. Here’s what he had to say to Eurogamer about Xbox 360 sales, Xbox LIVE and the possibility of a Blu-ray add-on drive, now that HD DVD is dead.

Xbox 360 sales
“I think that we’ve sold 18 million, the last time I′ve checked. 18 million hardware units worldwide.”

Xbox LIVE
“We don’t have [a projection for 2008] but here’s what I can tell you: we have 10 million LIVE members, which we hit six months ahead of schedule. We have 4 million added in the last six months. The majority are Gold [members]”.

Xbox 360 Blu-ray Drive
“What I′ll say is we have nothing to comment there. We have no plans to announce or anything like that right now. But I′d also urge you to look at the attach rate for the HD-DVD drive. It was a 3 per cent attach rate….it was a low attach rate. It wasn’t one of the high-selling accessories if you will. So again, when you’re saying ‘the obvious thing’, you also have to take into account how did the other accessory do when you look at the future.”

So, no Blu-ray add-on drive for the Xbox, eh? Considering Microsoft needs to introduce a new Xbox 360 in the coming year, don’t be surprised to see a Blu-ray drive on the inside.-Martin Lynch

Original post by Ryan

Une pluie d′annonces pour Microsoft en ce moment. Après un pas
de plus vers l’interop, une seconde annonce plus discrète a eu lieu hier pendant
le Game Developers Conference. Celle-ci concerne une extension XNA
pour Zune. Et? Pour résumer: à partir d’un même environnement de développement,
les développeurs de jeux vidéos pourront développer
un même jeu pour les 3 plateformes: PC, Xbox360 et maintenant Zune!

La fonctionnalité sans fil du Zune permettra de jouer avec ses amis à proximité à
un même jeu.

XNA permet un développement des jeux accéléré grâce à l’abstraction
d’un certain nombre de notions nécessaires pour le développement de jeux vidéos via
son framework. On estime pouvoir développer un jeu de 5 à 10 fois plus vite
en utilisant XNA, en plus de pouvoir le déployer sur les 3 plateformes.

Ressources:

• XNA Creators: http://creators.xna.com/ 
• Julien Ellie, développeur français sur XNA à Corp: http://blog.3deurope.com/ 
• FAQ Zune et XNA: http://forums.xna.com/ShowThread.aspx?PostID=46553

Original post by Benjamin Gauthey

Filed under: Gaming

It wasn′t all Zune gaming at Microsoft’s GDC keynote this morning — a lot of time was spent discussing Community Games, the new official name for XNA-based games. Amateur devs will get “creator identities” along with their gamertags, and Live members can rate, grade, and discuss your efforts. Of course, as we′ve heard, games can move from the 360 to PCs to second-gen Zunes, which is definitely pretty cool, but it’ll be interesting to see what that means for devs who want to try and take advantage of the 360’s horsepower — will they be restrict their code to a specific platform? While we wait for those answers, it looks like we′ll be able to get a taste of what Community Games have to offer right away — Microsoft announced that the first seven XNA-based games are available immediately, with an open beta to begin in spring and full-on launch by the end of the year. List of games after the jump — but what are you doing reading this when you could be playing?

Update: We just tried downloading RocketBall and the process is totally different than you’d expect. First you have to download the XNA Launcher, which is under New Arrivals in the Marketplace blade — but you don’t need a membership, so skip that, and the XNA ad that displays points you to the wrong thing, so ignore that as well. Then head over to the Games blade and select Games Library, but don’t open the Launcher, cause it’ll just kick you out. Instead, press Y to view the list of games and download one. So far the “YouTube of games” seems a bit convoluted — hopefully the next Dashboard update makes this all a bit simpler.

Continue reading First Xbox 360 Community Games to hit Live “immediately”

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Original post by Nilay Patel

Filed under: Gaming, HDTV

Two years ago today we saw the kibosh come down on the Xbox 360 Blu-ray player rumor. This morning it returns with the prospect of a Microsoft player as early as May. According to Smarthouse, their “insiders at Microsoft” claim that a standalone Blu-ray player is already working in-house. With the appropriate approvals it could be on sale within 3 months. A built-in 360 with Blu-ray is also being worked on although the possibility of moving it out to retail is less clear with HD downloads on the horizon. Not that any of this is unexpected given the circumstances. We never expected Microsoft to go down with the HD DVD ship — they’re just passengers on this ill-fated voyage, not the captains.

[Thanks, Oakie]

 

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Original post by Thomas Ricker

Filed under: Gaming

Although word on the street is that Microsoft is planning to release the successor to the Xbox 360 in 2010, the company is still apparently planning on updating the 360 design several more times in the next couple years. Just like the “Falcon” motherboard now on shelves updated the original 360 design with a 65nm CPU, the upcoming “Jasper” revision should take the GPU to 65nm as well — but that’s more or less common knowledge. What we’re hearing now is that all those RRoDed 360s sitting in warehouses are going to be retrofitted with the same 65 / 90nm CPU / GPU combo as Falcon, but on a mobo design called “Opus″ that fits the original Xbox case molds. That means no HDMI, since pre-Falcon cases didn’t have the openings — but apparently MS is only planning on sending these out as warranty replacements. The real action, however, appears to be “Valhalla,” a supposed final rev of the 360 that integrates the GPU and CPU into a single “superchip.” Details on that are more than sketchy, and we’re definitely skeptical — especially since we’d been hearing chatter about 45nm CPUs, but nothing about a unified architecture. We′ll see when we see — as long as all these boxes play Coʬ, we′ll be happy.

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Original post by Nilay Patel

Filed under: Gaming

Those pesky analysts are at it again, and this time it’s serious: Evan Wilson of Pacific Crest Securities says we can expect a sequel to the Wii in 2010, to be followed by a new Xbox later that year. Obviously it’s something on the minds of all three of the gaming hardware giants — in fact, Gizmondo probably has 2010 in its sights as well — but there’s really no telling at this point how accurate this rumor is. What we have heard are some conjectures before now that Nintendo has a shorter life cycle in mind for its graphics-impaired Wii. Also, Microsoft obviously made a huge bet this generation on hitting a year before the competition, and has done alright for itself in the process, so Microsoft might be looking for a repeat. There’s no rumor yet on Sony’s PS4 plans, but while the company has its hands full at the moment with its purported 2008 comeback, we′re sure they’re keeping this all in mind. Wilson also predicts a new Nintendo DS and PSP in 2010, meaning any way you slice it youre′re going need a second mortgage.

[Via Joystiq]

 

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Original post by Paul Miller

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Wireless

We already knew that pigskin fanatics in 223 countries would be able to catch Super Bowl XLII this Sunday, but thanks to Raytheon’s Global Broadcasting Service (GBS), even sailors and Marines stationed aboard ships in the Pacific Ocean will be able to catch the Giants attempt to mar the Patriots′ currently unblemished record. The aforementioned technology has been in use for over a decade delivering “high-speed, multimedia broadcasts of mission critical information to military and government decision makers,” but this weekend, it’ll be used to bring home entertainment to folks far, far away from home. Sadly, it doesn’t sound like the broadcast will be in HD this go ’round, but we suppose any football is better than none at all, right?

[Via DailyWireless, image courtesy of ProJo]

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Original post by Darren Murph

An anonymous reader writes “The worlds most powerful functional rail gun capable of delivering projectiles at up to Mach 8 has been delivered to the Navy. The new rail gun is a 32-megajoule Electro-Magnetic Laboratory Rail Gun. The Navy eventually hopes to have 64-megajoule ship mounted rail guns. ‘The lab version doesn’t look particularly menacing — more like a long, belt-fed airport screening device than like a futuristic cannon — but the system will fire rounds at up to Mach 8, drawing on tremendous amounts of electricity to generate the current for each test shot. That, of course, is the problem with rail guns: Like lasers, they’re out of step with modern-day generators and capacitors. Eight and 9-megajoule rail guns have been fired before, but providing 3 million amps of power per shot has been a limitation.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by ScuttleMonkey

belmolis writes “If the CIA is right to attribute recent blackouts to cyberwarfare, cyberwarfare is no longer science fiction but reality. In a recent op-ed piece and a detailed scholarly paper, legal scholar Duncan Hollis raises the question of whether existing international law is adequate for regulating cyberwarfare. He concludes that it is not: ‘Translating existing rules into the IO context produces extensive uncertainty, risking unintentional escalations of conflict where forces have differing interpretations of what is permissible. Alternatively, such uncertainty may discourage the use of IO even if it might produce less harm than traditional means of warfare. Beyond uncertainty, the existing legal framework is insufficient and overly complex. Existing rules have little to say about the non-state actors that will be at the center of future conflicts. And where the laws of war do not apply, even by analogy, an overwhelmingly complex set of other international and foreign law rules purport to govern IO.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by Zonk

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Israel is reportedly developing a sophisticated piece of software meant to help troops make quick decisions during battle and, under the right conditions, autonomously manipulate the nation’s defense systems. First reported in Defense News (subscription required), the unnamed system would primarily be used for tactical decisions during periods of heavy bombardment, although in a worst-case scenario, the complex algorithm would supposedly be capable of taking over total military control. Yes, we know what you’re thinking, but don′t worry: Israeli officials have already sworn up and down that “there’s no way we′re letting this thing go Terminator on us — no freakin′ way.”

[Via Danger Room]

 

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Original post by Evan Blass

russoc4 writes “Most people who play the United States Army’s freeware FPS sit through training simulations so that they may be able to get into the action and rack up some kills. The medic skills learned in the training allow you to heal teammates in the game, but it seems that they also apply in real life situations. According to Wired and the America’s Army forums, ‘a North Carolina man who saw an SUV flip and roll on a highway last November was able to provide medical aid to the victims with skills he learned from the America’s Army.’” See? We learn things from videogames! Feign Death works sometimes, too.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by Zonk

Filed under: CES, Laptops

You probably remember the SplashTop instant-on, Linux-based OS from past posts or perhaps developer DeviceVM’s demo at last October’s reader meetup in San Francisco. It’s well known that this embedded feature will ship standard on select ASUS motherboards, but as we were cruising around the PC manufacturer’s booth today, we happened to catch a rather unexpected application for SplashTop: running on the EeePC. Neither ASUS nor DeviceVM has made any announcements with regard to porting the software onto the popular ultra-portable laptop, but unless our eyes were deceiving us, this Eee was all ready to run Pidgin, Skype, or a browser without booting into the main OS. We’ll keep our eye on this one, as the merger of these two technologies would certainly create quite the compelling user experience.

 

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Original post by Evan Blass

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

It’s been nearly a full year since we first heard about the Ibiza Rhapsody, Haier’s Linux-based, WiFi-enabled PMP, and it looks like all that bake time paid off — Crave got their hands on the $330 30GB model and found it to be well-implemented and quite versatile. The 2.5-inch PMP supports MPEG4, WMV, M4V, AVI, and H.264, and offers wireless access to Rhapsody’s streaming Channels anywhere there’s WiFi — and allows users to save songs to the players’ drive with one click. A2DP support, a wireless podcast directory, and support for AOL Wireless video complete the package and make for much more effective and interesting uses of integrated WiFi and Bluetooth than in some other media devices we′ve seen. Too bad that squarish touchpad controller still brings the ugly with a vengeance. No word on when Haier will be shipping these out in bulk, but interested parties can hit up Amazon for pre-orders.

[Thanks, KC Kim]

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Nilay Patel