xbox next news

[AXmichigan]

MS chief reveals Xbox 2 development secrets
>> From pcpro.co.uk[reg. poss. req.]:

When asked (Allard) if, aside from the XNA demonstrations we've already seen, he had been privy to next-gen demonstrations, he said: 'There's some stuff that's just knocked my socks off.
'The thing we're looking at in the next generation is just an unbelievable amount of raw computing power - the architecture will be much more specialised,' he added.
'Right now you have your audio chip and your graphics chip and your CPU, and you're constantly trying to figure out the balances. In the next generation we're gonna have so much silicon, so much raw computing horsepower - developers are going to be able to use this in interesting and exciting ways.'
He went on to describe some of the demos being created behind the scenes: 'I've seen demos of terrain and worlds, with no textures in them whatsoever and no geometry - it's just a program that's creating a scene for you,' Allard said. Going on to describe the time- and money-saving techniques facilitated by next-generation tools and hardware.

'There's a lot of new techniques,' Allard continued. 'Like what shaders have done for 3D, there are a lot of new next-generation techniques for procedural synthesis that's really going to change how game construction is done, but also what the environment looks like so it feels a lot less "cookie cutter" [i.e. repetitive].' Rather the like the 'Library' level in Halo, we'd imagine, where it was very easy to become disorientated by the repeated environmental features.

Go read the full article on pcpro.co.uk[reg. poss. req.]
Thanks to Shadow_Mx for the news.