Madden on PS3 Only 30 FPS “[pause] Well, I can only point to our own sports studio [doing a] 1080p, 60 frames-per-second basketball game, but I’m afraid I have no idea. We’re providing some tools and technologies from our worldwide studio’s core technology groups to 3rd parties now, as well. You may remember something from GDC, we announced this thing called EDGE and that’s now widely deployed within the 3rd party community, and that is clearly improving the developer’s ability to maximize what the CELL processor does. Hopefully, that will assist folks like EA. It would concern me if the platform was incapable of doing it, but we’ve proven the platform is capable of doing it, so it’s not a PlayStation 3 issue. I’m trying to be polite.”
How Home is Progressing
“We did have a small hiccup on getting the Home development kit out, but it actually went out on Tuesday [Harrison is referring to Tuesday, July 10th], so that’s already started out there. Some of the functionality that goes into Home is actually based on top of the PlayStation Network functionality and it has to be deployed there first before we can put the visual layer on top of it, so there’s a couple of different schedule issues in that, but, we’re on schedule for the Fall, as we said yesterday. Game launching, the ability to launch games directly from inside of Home, is in the next library update for developers, which will be in August.”
Will Home be Feature Complete this Fall?
“It’s hard to tell because we’re still in the beta program, so I can’t give you a definitive, but, also, it’s unlike building a disc-based game, where you have to get everything on the disc and then ship it. What we’re going is starting a service and a week later we can add a bit more functionality and a week after that we can add something else. There will be features that get added over time, it’s not going to be everything that we’ve ever talked about at the beginning of the service. I’m being very clear we never intended for that to be the case, either, but we have a clear road map of where and how and when we’re going to be adding functions and features.”
On Countering Wii’s Casual Draw
“We’ve had tremendous success with Singstar — it’s a $200 and something million dollar franchise for us, over 10 million units. I acknowledge the core of that audience is in Europe and it’s still yet to establish itself strongly in the US, but we have some big strong plans for it this year. I think it’s good that other companies are looking at that space, as well, because it will help grow the market. On a macroeconomic basis, if the industry is in good health because there are new consumers coming in, I’m not going to give you a format competitive response to that, because I think it’s positive.”
Wipeout HD a Stopgap?
“Let me be clear, Wipeout HD is a fully functioning game, full online multiplayer functionality. You’ll be able to download additional tracks over time, but the core game experience is a fully featured game experience.”
While the effect of adult films on the format war may be a heavily contested, the fact remains that there is a huge demand for this type of material. In Japan, the ability to release adult material on Blu-ray just got a whole lot easier. Assist Corp, who has handled most of the early adult Blu-ray content in Japan, has partnered with a company based in Taiwan to begin replication of adult titles. They are expected to begin production next month.
Sony has long mandated that, while they will not allow their own production facilities to replicate adult material, they will assist any company which wants to do so. With the addition of this new production facility (which purchased the manufacturing equipment directly from Sony), adult content producers now have an additional outlet to manufacturer their features in high definition.
A new suit filed against Sony Corp. of America says the PS3’s Cell processor infringes on an existing patent, and demands the “impounding and destruction†of all of Sony’s infringing processors.
On July 26, Newport Beach, Calif.-based Parallel Processing filed a complaint against Sony that alleges the infringement of patent no. 5,056,000, according to a filing obtained by Next-Gen.
The patent, “Synchronized Parallel Processing with Shared Memory†was issued in October 1991. It describes a high-speed computer that breaks down a program “into smaller concurrent processes running in different parallel processors†and resynchronizes the program for faster processing times.
Parallel Processing, the “exclusive licensee†of the patent, states in the suit, filed in the US District Court’s Eastern District of Texas Tyler Division: “On information and belief, Defendant Sony Corporation of America has infringed and continues to infringe on the ‘000 Patent by making, using, importing, offering for sale and/or selling products among other things, covered by one or more claims of the ‘000 Patent, including, but not limited to, Sony Playstation III [sic].â€
Parallel Processing said that Sony’s alleged actions have caused “irreparable harm and monetary damage†to the company.
The plaintiff seeks damages, reimbursement of legal fees, interest and “the impounding and destruction of all Defendant’s products that infringe the ‘000 Patent.â€
From a Bizarre Creations (developer of Microsoft’s Project Gotham Racing 4, a new 360 racing game due this fall) staff member at their official forums:
You won’t see different times of day per city because this involves recreating all the textures again (one for day and one for night). Whilst this wasn’t a problem for our dev team, it was a problem fitting all this data onto a single DVD. So we’ve worked around the problem by providing different lighting models per city. For example, Macau is always in the daytime, but if you play it during a storm everything looks darker and more foreboding. If you play during a blizzard then things are slightly tinged blue and everything seems more frozen. Of course, playing this track in sunshine will make everything appear bright and yellowy.
