!!!PS2!!!

Product: PlayStation2 Price: Japan gets it for a paltry 39,800 yen ($400). SCEA has yet to determine a price for the US, but the price will be much lower than Japan's. Available: Those lucky people in Japan can purchase one on March 4th, 2000. The US launch is currently stated for Fall release next year. Comes With: Dual Shock 2 Analog Controller, 8MB Memory Card, Demo Disc, AV Multi Cable, AC Power Cord. Dimensions: 12" x 7" x 3" Weight: 4lbs. 10 oz. CPU: 128-bit Emotion Engine 294,912 MHz 32MB Direct RDRAM Memory Comments: It's fast; really fast. Forget your PC, the PlayStation2 is the most powerful home gaming system ever created. You know how the Dreamcast is thinking? Well, the PlayStation2 already knows. PlayStation2's Dual Shock 2 Analog Controller Dimensions: Just About the size of your current PlayStation Dual Shock Controller. Weight: If it's gained some weight,you can't tell by looking. Features: All functions and buttons except for "start" and "select" are fully analog. Built-in "Shock" effect. Backwards compatiblewith original Dual Shock Analog Controller. Comments: Push the accelerator pedal in a car -- the harder you push, the faster you go. That's how analog control works. Every control interface on the pad now reacts to how musch pressure you appply to it. The Sony PlayStation 2 (www.playstation.com) hit the streets in Japan on March 4 and sold almost one million units in its first two days of availability. (It will arrive this fall in the U.S.) When the company started taking preorders online, they had to shut down the site temporarily because it got.....

flooded with close to half a million orders in the first few hours. With numbers like that, Sony is going to have to revise their estimates up a bit from their original guess of selling one million units in the first week. The company, the press, and the kids are all excited about the new PlayStation 2 for various reasons, and I would guess that, as a rabid 3D designer/developer/follower, you're a bit excited too. More PlayStations means more titles using 3D graphics, and that means more work for some of us. By now, you've probably heard that the new machine is supposed to be pretty hot stuff when it comes to the hardware, and you may have heard about (or are already working on) titles that are supposed to blow away the competition. The PlayStation 2 hardware is supposed to have real-time particle systems, multiple transparency layers, fog effects, smoke effects, reflections, highlights, a built-in, real-time scanline rendering engine, and just about every other effect short of radiosity (and I've even heard people claiming that the hardware supports a rudimentary version of that). All these graphic features are pretty cool, but you have to wonder how many game developers are going to take advantage of them. For years, game developers have been following one golden rule when it comes to special lighting or geometry: You can't rely on the hardware. In other words, you never know what kind of machine your title is going to end up on. Granted, game-console developers have the luxury of knowing down to the pixel what their target hardware was capable of doing, be it a Sega (www.sega.com), Sony, or Nintendo box (www.nintendo.com). But the prevailing thinking still holds that you'd have to be crazy to attempt real-time rendering or any kind of serious geometry processing on one of those machines. Most game developers have relied on good old prebuilt models and extensive texture mapping to get the effects (and speeds) they desired. If they wanted a cool effect, they would build it, render it, and then try and figure out how to get their engine to simulate it during game play (using as few CPU cycles as possible). If they wanted a truly realistic background, they would model it, render it, and then slap those textures on the background at play time. They took the same approach in creating moving characters: Build the model with a few thousand polys, render it to generate some texture maps, de-res the original model, then slap the textures on at game time. Sony, with the much-touted PlayStation Emotion Engine CPU and sundry graphics coprocessors, is now telling the game-developer community that their new box is fully capable of handling those tasks in real time. In fact, they want their developers to start using those features as quickly as possible. The trouble is that doing these things in real time is anathema to game developers. They don't even know where to begin building games that rely on real-time rendering, geometric manipulation, and so on. Certainly, a few games will be ready at launch time that use some of the hardware capabilities of the new machine, but for the most part, we'll probably see the majority of titles sticking to tried-and-true techniques. Eventually, game developers will take advantage of the hardware as Sony intends, but it will take time and a certain amount of learning to see how far they can push the hardware and what works best. About now, you might be wondering what's going to happen to traditional 3D artists when developers can generate textures, particles, and lighting effects in real time. Does that mean all you texture artists are going to be out of a job? I don't think so. If anything, it's going to mean that the successful title developers will be using their 3D artists even more. They might even start picking their brains a bit and giving them more respect. The first time pure programmers try to plug some raw geometry into a PlayStation 2 Emotion Engine and the results look like... well you can use your imagination... they're going to go back to the artists to ask what went wrong. At that point, the programmers will learn where the artist part of 3D artist comes into play. Postscript: Sony has recalled all the PlayStation 2 memory sticks. They hinder DVD playback and can even crash the unit entirely. How this will affect the new platform remains to be seen, and 3Dgate will keep you informed of details as they become available.