Gabe Newell: Xbox 360 Makes My Life Worse

Posted by: Newsfactory on: 08/29/2005 10:21 PM [ Print | 23 comment(s) ] · 1893 views

Valve Software?s head honcho believes that not being able to depend on a hard drive in the Xbox 360 makes his life as a developer tougher.

TeamXbox

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jago_ai Unregistered

#62160 Posted on: 08/29/2005 10:25 PM ...and he isn't the only developer who has the same feelings. The show "G4TV.com" on G4 had interviewed various developers who stated that not being able to count on the hard drive is going to be a problem b/c not everyone is going to shell out $100 for a 20GB hard drive.

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vacantmind Unregistered

#62162 Posted on: 08/29/2005 10:55 PM I'm sure they can manage to deal with it seeing how Xbox is the ONLY system that actually shipped with a HD at launch. I don't see the developers winnin this argument .

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jago_ai Unregistered

#62165 Posted on: 08/29/2005 11:03 PM By having the hard drive available they can unload data onto the hard drive. Hard drives are faster then optical drives @ reading and loading data and now they have to rely on the 512MB of RAM in the system. 512MB is alot for a game console yea, but when they can only rely on that there is going to eventually be a bottleneck.

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vacantmind Unregistered

#62169 Posted on: 08/30/2005 02:16 AM My whole computer runs on 512 MB of ram. I'm sure they can manage. Hopefully this will make them focus on content and story rather than graphics and all that other crap that doesn't make me interested. To this day the majority of my favorite games were from SNES. Of course I like some of the newer games too but there just aren't as many good games as there used to be.

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dlolos Unregistered

#62170 Posted on: 08/30/2005 02:33 AM Your computer has a Hard drive to swap file data between ram. Also you probably have a Video card with dedicated ram unlock the Xbox 360. It's a bad move. Xbox 360 seems more like a step back instead of a step forward compared to the original Xbox.

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jago_ai Unregistered

#62173 Posted on: 08/30/2005 02:44 AM God I hat e it when people bring in the whole "well my PC has XX amount of RAM"...blah...blah...blah...

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Cimlite Junior Member Posts: 6 Joined: 2005-11-12

#62174 Posted on: 08/30/2005 02:52 AM Not always having the HDD is a big misstake on Microsofts part. Games such as Morrowind, Chronicles of Riddick, Ninja Gaiden and a bunch of others would never have been possible without the harddrive. I doubt that the Xbox would have had the actually really graphically impressive games that it has without it. Besides, the only thing MS gains from this is being able to say that the Xbox 360 costs less than the PS3. Problem is just that everyone knows thats just a sales pitch.

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vacantmind Unregistered

#62176 Posted on: 08/30/2005 06:40 AM Even still using the HD for a swap file a game NEVER goes over 512 MB of ram. If it does, then the coders really need to clean up their code and make it run much easier, which is kind of hard with PC's. Why is it hard? Because there's so many different kinds of setups and hardware combinations available from intel CPUs to cyrix, from nvidia video cards to matrox etc. With the consoles the hardware is all uniform and there's NO REASON why they can't optimize code with the hardware they are given. They can also make it use the hard drive easily by throwing in an IF THEN statement in their code, which really isn't hard. PS2 never had a hard drive natively built in and it sure kicked the crap out of XBOX. So why not go with what works instead of trying to be a total revolutionary? If you want a hard drive go play with your PC. Both systems are going to be total rip offs anyway, I don't see anything in either system worth shelling out that much money. I'll probably end up doing what I did with the last systems, buying controllers and just playing with my friends systems'. SNES and dreamcast are still the best systems available.

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ODi Unregistered

#62177 Posted on: 08/30/2005 07:23 AM " If it does, then the coders really need to clean up their code and make it run much easier," Its the texture space you n00b that takes up all the memory and not the code. You got your decal map, then your normal map, toss in a spec map, lets say most will be 512x512 while others will be 1024x1024 in size. That is going to take up a LOT of texure space for a single level. Sure, you can stream textures from the HD for people who got them, but those who don't will complain about the massive slowdowns while the gfx card fetches the textures. Indeed, a horrible design flaw by microsoft. All xboxes should come w/ a hard drive, while the super duper pimp my xbox edition should come w/ bigger capacity.

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jago_ai Unregistered

#62179 Posted on: 08/30/2005 08:38 AM Wow you are an idiot...typical PC gamer. Having a hard drive would allow the developers to unload data that is being used alot so that temporary data is loaded onto the RAM.

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thomas997 Junior Member Posts: 12 Joined: 2003-04-21

#62181 Posted on: 08/30/2005 08:52 AM Yeah this will have the extremely annoying and often load times consistant with consoles... Hard drive is so much better, even if its only 1 or 2 gigs being used as a swap... I guess its all about cutting costs, and the size of the console. Also with the xbox not moving to HD-DVD (AFAIK) theres eventually going to be a lot of compressed data, because games are already filling up dual layer disks..

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ODi Unregistered

#62187 Posted on: 08/30/2005 04:19 PM Sonds like you're just posting for the sake of posting and to have an excuse to call names. Slow nite for ya. Thought so. And to clerify my previous post, that's exactly what I said. DVD -> HD RAM. While el-cheep-o Xbox360 now has to fit ALL data onto RAM, so any streaming of content will be impossible off of a DVD. And yes, temporary data does go into the ram, DUH!

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ODi Unregistered

#62188 Posted on: 08/30/2005 04:20 PM That's supposed to say; DVD -> HD RAM

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ODi Unregistered

#62189 Posted on: 08/30/2005 04:22 PM W2S has issues w/ dashes and greater signs. One more time. Don't want mr. _ai to get all huff and puff about it again; DVD to HD to/from RAM

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jago_ai Unregistered

#62190 Posted on: 08/30/2005 05:51 PM ODi...I wasn't talking to you...I was talking to "vacantmind"." I agreed with what you were saying ODi...man this comment system on warp2search needs some major overhauling.

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ODi Unregistered

#62191 Posted on: 08/30/2005 07:30 PM Discard what I said man.

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jago_ai Unregistered

#62192 Posted on: 08/30/2005 08:05 PM np...and I still stand by my "typical PC gamer" remark. While not all PC gamers are the same, there are those who are so blind and ignorant about the difference between a console and PC it's annoying.

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vacantmind Unregistered

#62195 Posted on: 08/30/2005 11:06 PM I didn't say that the only reason why th PS2 was better was because it didn't have a HD. Having the hard drive in there is a big reason why MS was taking a loss on each console sold. You honestly have no idea what you're talking about do you? There is two different kinds of ram.. video and regular. Why would you even want a hard drive in there? It's slow as ***** compared to RAM and VRAM.

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Cimlite Junior Member Posts: 6 Joined: 2005-11-12

#62196 Posted on: 08/30/2005 11:12 PM You cannot judge the consoles as to how well they sold but how good the hardware was. The HDD on the Xbox allowed for games to run that never would have worked on the minimal 64mb of RAM that is has. The same situation will probably arise down the line with the Xbox360. Right now, at release... this thing already hurts the machine as it's harder for developers to do what they need to. Yes, it's not impossible of course... but it would be a selling point for developers to have it available.

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ChrisW Unregistered

#62198 Posted on: 08/31/2005 01:45 AM Once again, Vacantbrain, has show just what a complete moron, he really is. If it ain't the usual Creative bashing, thats now growing tired, and there's absolutely NO reason for it. And the fact that he just cannot put up an argument for his posts, other than it's shit. Dick. This whole original article, has gone completely over your head. People here, have tried, oh how they have tried, to explain to you just WHY this needs to be addressed. 1. Downloadable content. Where does it go if you have no HD ? Do developers cater for the hardcore that opted for the HD ? Or do they ignore them, and not bother with extra levels/music/add-ons ? 2. Custom made radio stations/tracks. Do developers write this feature into their games and target only the hardcore ? Or only target the casual buyers ? Or do they write 2 versions of their games, adding to development costs, and higher prices ? 3. It takes a few years to write games, so what target hardware do they aim for ? And what if the HD becomes standard, a year into it's life ? Do they spend more development time adding HD content, that could of been added from the start ? 4. The HD is a LOT faster than even the fastest optical drives. Streaming textures, levels, sound, music, etc.. gives developers soo much more freedom than having to use the slower optical drives. What do you think the Xbox's X,Y,Z partitions were used for ? 5. Xbox backwards compatibility, will NOT be available to the core system. A HD is required, Patches for Xbox compatibility emulation need to be stored, considering they may well extend to several megabytes each. This is a bad move for MS. A console needs to be a fixed platform to be successful. Looking at past mistakes like the 32x, and the MegaCD, and other add-ons, have shown that they don't work.

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jago_ai Unregistered

#62200 Posted on: 08/31/2005 03:00 AM Wow your username fits you well... ...and I do know what I am talking about. You on the other hand seem to think that art assets (models, textures, etc.) don't take up alot of room. In order for games to fully take advantage of the X360, they will need room to store data that is constantly being accessed. You can have the fastest RAM in the world and it won't mean jack if that is the only place it can store temporary data. Somehow I don't buy the whole "the hard drive is expensive thing" b/c for one its only a 20GB hard drive and 2 the only custom thing about it is that it is a removable module (woop-dee-doo.) Correct me if I am wrong but wasn't the PS2 40GB hard drive $100 when it came out originally? $100 AND it had a game on the drive. For $100 for the X360 hard drive you get the drive and some patches to play Xbox games...yea that's a good deal X_X ...plus go read the post by ChrisW...and I doubt you will be able to come up with any real intelligent answers.

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vacantmind Unregistered

#62202 Posted on: 08/31/2005 08:11 AM Oh boy.. here we go again.. another know it all trying to tell me how it is. 1. Downloadable content: Screw it. It's not needed at all. The game should be on the CD and that's it. No patches or any of that other crap. It makes them test their games and make sure they include EVERYTHING they wanted. They shouldn't be lazy, they're putting out a product that people are going to spend money on and it should be the best possible right off the bat. All of the "extras" they put out are attempts to just get the game to sell better if it's not selling as it was expected. 2. Custom radio stations: Is this really needed? There's a very few games that actually use this. The only one I can honstly think of is GTA. They can use memory cards if they really want to. Custom radio stations would be better suited for the "media center" option rather than the gaming option anyway. 3. Both sets of hardware. It isn't very hard. Make 2 versions of the games and sell one for less, prices are already ridiculously high. 4. Wrong, hard drive is not faster. I don't see how going from drive to HD to RAM is faster than going right from drive to ram. 5. Don't need backwards compatibility. I'm sure you'll have your xbox laying around somewhere anyway. Do you really play PS1 games on your PS2 anymore? I doubt it. Not to mention that the xbox's aren't pieces of crap and break after X months like the ps1 and ps2's. You can flash the ROM that controls the emulation anyway, even if it's with a memory card. They could setup a Hd on their servers that store the needed files while it's being flashed, not that hard. PS3 isn't going to have a hard drive shipping either. Not having 2 official models hurts them much more than what MS is doing. Why? Because developers will simply drop the whole HD idea all together and there would be no point in buying the add-on. The reason they are doing this is to cut costs. THey showed with xbox1 you can't make a profit on the systems with a hard drive included so I'm guessing that the systems without the HD will make them some money. They obviously thought this through enough to determine that the hard drive didn't relaly add to much to the original xbox anyway. It only aided in piracy of their games as well. So get your head out of your ass and stop talking like you know everything.

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jago_ai Unregistered

#62203 Posted on: 08/31/2005 09:52 AM (1) Saying "make sure they include EVERYTHING they wanted" is just plain rediculous (that goes for both PC and console games.) If your moronic logic was actually taking place then Halo 2 wouldn't have come out until recently (recently meaning the date that the map pack came out.) You obviously have no idea what goes on at a development studio or how things work when a game is being made. There are things called "deadlines" and sometimes features have to be cut in order for a deadline to be met...plus now with the benefit of hard drives, those developers have the option to still release tho cut features at a later date. (2) Custom radio stations...while I've never really gotten around to playing the GTA series there are probably numerous reasons why they don't use memory cards for th music. The #1 reason is probably that the read speed of the memory cards isn't that fast (and it doesn't need to be.) (3) Make 2 versions of games??? Wow you really are stupid. Not only will that confuse the consumer (not everyone is a hardcore gamer btw) but it will be incredibly expensive to produce 2 copies of a game that are SLIGHTLY different. That doesn't make financial sense. (4)Ok...sense you are too dense and too stupid to realize this but the more powerful games get, the larger the asset files get (ESPECIALLY textures.) Yea a hard drive is slower RAM but a hard drive is ALOT faster then an optical drive. Being able to unload frequently used data (ESPECIALLY textures) onto the hard drive and use the RAM for other things makes better sense. Not only that but it gives the programmers and artist more space to work with. (5) Backwards compatibility: I still play my PS1 games...in fact I just bought Chrono Cross and FF9. I play them on my PS2 when I am at home and I play them on my mini PSONE w/ LCD screen if I am on a road trip or need something to keep my busy. Backwards compatibility was one of the strong selling points for the PS2 when it came out (an affordable DVD player was a stronger selling point however.) As far as modding the Xbox...the majority of poeple are not going to do that. Just b/c a bunch of tech nerds do it doesn't mean it is being done by the majority of the market. Yes the PS3 will not have a hard drive but it is still quite a way from being launched and things may change. Plus if they don't allow the hard drive to be used for games, they already said it would be used for other purposes. You are sounding like a PC/Xbox fanboy...and it wouldn't surprise me if you were.