I just finished watching Microsoft's E3 live video stream. There was some pretty awesome stuff shown off there. Quick recap of what I saw:

• Lots of high profile games. I'm really looking forward to the long-rumored Forza Motorsport 3 in October, and with Metal Gear series coming to Xbox there may not be any reason to own a PS3 anymore.
• Xbox is now being integrated with Facebook and Twitter, which is sort of interesting yet pretty useless to me as a developer. I think we all knew it was inevitable though.
• Confirmation of a Music store, plus Last.fm radio. Instant on 1080p videos and shared viewing of them. All very neat.

So that's all well and good. Anything to cement the Xbox as the leading video game console in great.

The biggest announcment by far was of Natal, a video camera attachment that allows you to use your body to control the Xbox. This is almost assuredly the 3D video camera rumored early this year. They had live demos of a girl moving her avatar (using nothing but her body) around playing some kind of 3D breakout game, which is waaay cooler than it sounds. It has voice and facial regonition, all of which were demoed live. Nothing short of incredible. I sincerely hope we get access to this.

It was mentioned that dev kits for Natal "are being sent to our developers as we speak", but apparently that means their registered devs as I don't see any packages on my doorstep. ;-)

The ZuneHD is MIA as far as I can tell - what's up with that? That was supposed to be the main event, but it was overshadowed my Natal. If we get Natal instead of ZuneHD I think that's a good trade, but what happened to it?

So, what are the community's thoughts on E3 2009 for Microsoft, and what it means to us as developers?

[edit]: Duh, I guess this is what happens when I set FF's home page to the forum index: E3 Keynote. Maybe this will answer all our questions...

UberGeekGames:

Maybe this will answer all our questions...

It will certainly answer some: User Ratings

First Google Wave, now this! What an absolutely exhausting weekend \o/

So where is the announcement for downloading Game Studio 3.1?   I'm looking around and can't find it anywhere.  :)

After seeing Natal Project and its impressive set of technologies, I must say I want! Please XNA Team spend the time and make this happen for developers.

Wow. That's a bombshell - nothing I was expecting! That's awesome! It will be huge for Community Games, and I think it's more of an afterthought to put it in for everything else.  Cool!

Barkers Crest:

So where is the announcement for downloading Game Studio 3.1?   I'm looking around and can't find it anywhere.  :)

Strangely absent. I was thinking that was at least part of what the "announcement" was, but apparently not. Oh well, more time to finish my non-Avatar projects, since I know I won't be able to get anything done that doesn't involve Avatars once we have them. ;-)

UberGeekGames:

Strangely absent. I was thinking that was at least part of what the "announcement" was, but apparently not.

It's not really all that strange when you think about it:

1) We already know a lot (all?) of the features in 3.1 including the video stuff and avatar stuff. What else is there to announce besides a date?
2) 99% of the viewers don't care at all. E3 is a consumer show; most people just want to see what cool games are coming out. Wasting time to talk about dev tools like XNA GS is not a wise use of the briefing time.
3) E3 still has 3 or 4 more days.

I dont think there is going to be anything on XNA 3.1. It not really appealing to end consumers, but rather game developers/hobbiests. If anything involving Community Games pops up, it would be the actual games (I believe).

Zack Nelson:

I dont think there is going to be anything on XNA 3.1. It not really appealing to end consumers, but rather game developers/hobbiests. If anything involving Community Games pops up, it would be the actual games (I believe).

Yeah, E3 is traditionally a "Look at the games you will want to buy" kind of show, the place for developers is in the fringe, aka the people from the companies and industry insiders who have stuff to say but that doesn't fit into the general gist of the show.  Plus, announcing big things that aren't directly related to promoting something they can sell would have no place and be swallowed at a show like this.

So hopefully next week we see some news regarding 3.1 (or the new Zune, since I'm anxiously awaiting it too).

-E

I havent been home yet, so I havent watched any videos about the new controls system, but it does sound very cool.

Sounds like someone could possibly even write an app to do simple/quick Mocap using it?

I wonder if MS will use the new Zune as a chance to roll it out globally?
(The XNA platform means they have something ready to start the long road of catch up to the App store.)

They seem to have a lot of bits.

Media playing device
Phone platform
Developer platform
Multi-platform Gaming API
Internet content delivery network

I wonder what other handheld devices they have coming in the pipeline....
 (Surely they are going to create an iphoneish thing, or a handheld gaming device)

J.

ps.. I can't wait to get home to see the video, it does sound like a genuine leap forward in ui tech.

Nick Gravelyn:

UberGeekGames:

Strangely absent. I was thinking that was at least part of what the "announcement" was, but apparently not.

It's not really all that strange when you think about it:

1) We already know a lot (all?) of the features in 3.1 including the video stuff and avatar stuff. What else is there to announce besides a date?
2) 99% of the viewers don't care at all. E3 is a consumer show; most people just want to see what cool games are coming out. Wasting time to talk about dev tools like XNA GS is not a wise use of the briefing time.
3) E3 still has 3 or 4 more days.

You misunderstood me. I meant it was strangely absent from the CCO site announcement - with the buildup I was sure that was what it was going to be, but user ratings instead is a completely unexpected (yet very welcome) surprise. I never expected it to be announced at the keynote speech - although at least some mention of CG would have been nice.

I had expected some mention of the ZuneHD - maybe it's being delayed? Or will Microsoft have more time for the rest of E3 week?

And I was just thinking about the possibility of using Natal as a cheap mocap device for us developers - how cool would that be? [edit]: I see the above poster has the same idea as well!

UberGeekGames:

And I was just thinking about the possibility of using Natal as a cheap mocap device for us developers - how cool would that be?

It would be very cool, but I doubt if they'll be exposing that capability.

Jim Perry:

It would be very cool, but I doubt if they'll be exposing that capability.

<crystal ball>
I think it's inevitable that we'll get it, but it will be after it's released for the general public. Otherwise, there would be a lot of extra logistics involved for Microsoft, since we would probably have to pay for our own Natal units, and they would have to process our orders and make sure we aren't doing anything un-legit with them (imagine what a prerelease version would go for on eBay!).

As CG gains in popularity, Microsoft will probably gradually open up more for us - I mean, who thought we'd ever in a million years have Avatars? Microsoft keeps proving that anything is possible. So while it's sad that we won't be seeing Natal soon, it makes sense for Microsoft since A) it's not finished/bug free yet and B) they don't want to tick off their registered developers - if I had ponied up $10k and had to go through rigorous testing for my game, I would be pretty angry that some CG dev with $100 can get almost everything I can.
</crystal ball>

UberGeekGames:

<crystal ball stuff>

I can hear Kathleen saying - "In ten years!"

Inside joke, sorry. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting though. :)

UberGeekGames:

• Xbox is now being integrated with Facebook and Twitter, which is sort of interesting yet pretty useless to me as a developer. I think we all knew it was inevitable though.

I wonder if that would useful for us hobbie designers to post updates to your projects...

Microsoft's E3 press kits site, lots of screenshots and factsheets.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/press/e309.htm

@Jim Perry: isn't that what was said about Avatars, and User Ratings? ;-)

@DarthCheesiest: Very cool, I'll go through all of those when I get a chance!

I just watched the video.... and  I have not been so excited at a tech demo for a long time.
If MS can pull that off so it works, this will be a hell of a lot of fun!

The real test will be if in normal game play, you don't have repeat actions, because it missed them.

Eye toy and the wii mote are great fun, and innovative game controllers, but you can often feel the limitations.
(samba del amigo on the wii.... oooh how I hate you, it could have been amazing, but neither me nor my wife could reliably get one of the actions to hit, which for a rhythm game is fairly key).

Anyhoo, that is amazing, it's almost cruel to show us so soon, now we have to wait! Reminds me of when I was young, waiting for my friends imported copy of street fighter 2 to arrive!

Nice one!

J.

ps..OMG!!!!! Milo.... that is so amazing... but it should have been called Damien.

I have a couple of Questions...  First, was my top level post on the other thread moderated?  If so why?  Even a "we don't want to talk about that yet" reply would enhance my understanding.

Second, I have broken out the Neural Net Comp Sci books to start writing a High level pattern recognizer for this particular dataset.  Am I waising my time?  A simple yes or no is the only answer I need...

Took me a while to figure out what you're talking about but now I see your post in the Deleted posts. We already have a thread somewhere around here on Natal and there currently aren't any announcements about it in relation to the XNA framework. So there's nothing to talk about.

Neural networks are, in general, not considered the best way to build robust recognition software. First, once it's trained, it's hard to tell WHAT it's trained, and second, you can't take it apart to debug it, improve it, or figure out how it works. There are various spectral decomposition methods, recursive self-matching methods, mode analysis methods etc that work much better in practice.

Other nice E3 stuff: HALO 3++ looks good; MW2 looks good; Forza 3 now features tire deformation under friction (as if you'll be able to switch to a camera where you can actually see that...). The Rock Band / Guitar Hero franchies keep going strong with all kinds of new content -- like LEGO Rock Band. Who knew?

Mini Ninjas are cute -- but why didn't anyone already make that as a XBLCG game? :-)

Oh, and I'll be buying FFXIII when it comes out. But I guess that's no surprise, as I believe pretty much anyone on the planet will do that.

Couldn't find the Natal discussion (please add a link when you are splitting a discussion)

My analyze is that the technology is very complex and I think it will be harder to use than people might think. I've got some experience from using tracking cameras, it's a big difference from a button click and a vague body motion. Im also very excited about the Natal camera, but I think you hope for to much.

LEGO harry potter was my biggest surprise, they are really taking over with those blocks!

I can recommend Screwattack.com, they have very nice coverage of the E3

I've used NNs briefly, and I highly doubt they'd be useful for this type of thing. It will probably be easier to do as Jon said and construct your own recursive algorithms, which are much easier to tweak after they're built. Plus, when we get Natal (note my use of 'when' and not 'if' - positive thinking!), we'd probably get some new APIs to control it. Since from what I understand the processing is built into the unit itself, they would have to. Maybe we'll get a matrix of bones for the player, like they show in the demo video?

TG Viking:

Couldn't find the Natal discussion (please add a link when you are splitting a discussion)

There's a thread over here, and a deleted thread that linked to this very cool video speculating on the uses of Natal for that.

TG Viking:

My analyze is that the technology is very complex and I think it will be harder to use than people might think. I've got some experience from using tracking cameras, it's a big difference from a button click and a vague body motion. Im also very excited about the Natal camera, but I think you hope for to much.

Since AFAIK the processing is done inside the Natal unit itself, perhaps we'll get higher level APIs instead of raw camera data (or better yet, in addition to!). The Avatars were a little spazzy at times in the demo, but I'm sure they're not done with it yet, and I was completely blown away with what they've done so far. If they have another year or so before release then they'll probably have time to improve the quality.

TG Viking:

LEGO harry potter was my biggest surprise, they are really taking over with those blocks!

Where have you been for the past few years? ;-) LEGO has been using a form of "weasel creep", not unlike feature creep, to slowly but surely take over every genre and game released. <crystal ball mode> 2012: Lego Grand Theft Auto Released, Rated E for Everyone. </crystal ball mode> (actually, that would probably sell frillions to the casuals, and parents that buy every game with Lego on the cover - gives me a few new game ideas...) (sorry for going off topic!)

Nothing new about ZuneHD or CG as far as I can tell, but there's still a few days left for E3. With the announcement of Zune Music coming to the Xbox, it would be really cool to tie it in with a new handheld, but I would think if they were going to do that it would have been in the keynote address... Time will tell!

Nice to hear about the user rating that will come for the channel, to bad all the work that UberGeek (and some other guy with a similar project) spent on his game just got spoiled down into the toilet.

jwatte:

Oh, and I'll be buying FFXIII when it comes out. But I guess that's no surprise, as I believe pretty much anyone on the planet will do that.

Nope. Have never bought any FF game and I never will. Just not my cup of tea.  Crackdown 2 now, that's another story. I was thrilled to see it make an appearance!

I watched the Gamespot video on The Beatles Rock Band (Allie is pretty hot! :D ) and thought the three person vocals was cool. The only problem is, no one that I know wants to sing now, let alone finding three people. :( I need to get a mic stand so I can do drums and vocals at the same time.