Warp wrote:
>   Ok, this is a bit hard to confess, but I sold myself out, so to speak,
> kind of. I went and bought an Xbox 360.

Congrats!

What part is the sell-out? That it's a console, or that it's a Microsoft 
console?  Just curious.

The games look great in HD, too, btw.  Strongly recommended if you can 
manage it.

> that with the Xbox 360 it's just a relief that you can simply put the disc
> in and play without having to worry at all about crashes, graphics settings,
> latest drivers and whether your PC will be able to run it at all. 

Things do indeed "just work" much better.

> sound... (I don't really understand how they succeed in this, and why they
> don't use the same technique in the Windows ports of the games, when they
> exist.)

I think what's happening is there's a lot of background loading going on. 
The XBox doesn't have nearly enough CPU memory to load an entire large game 
at once, so the devs have to go out of their way to make that part work.

I'm not sure why the same techniques wouldn't work on a PC, unless the 
device drivers for the DVD on a PC are in some way too blocking or something.

Half Life 2 on the XBox has long loading screens.  Batman loads while you're 
crawling thru the pipes from one place to another, or during cinematic cut 
scenes that load while you're fighting, or something like that. I think it 
depends on whether it was written for a PC and then ported to consoles or 
vice versa.

> I'm assuming supporting USB mice is there or at least would be equally easy).

 From everything I've read, there's no mouse support on the xbox. Keyboard 
(discouraged), gamepad, chatpad (a keyboard that attaches to the gamepad), 
and camera.

On the other hand, there's clearly support for voice as well, but that's 
never listed in the "these are the input devices we support", so maybe I'm 
missing something.

Plus there's the IR remote for the media player, which I have to assume 
appears as a keyboard or something, but I'll be able to find out soon enough 
when I start running my own code on the xbox. :-)

> That means no FPS games for me. (Yes, I tried a few demos, and they were
> next to impossible to play.)

I've found it takes getting used to, and some games manage it better than 
others. I can't drive in GTA (which is kind of ironic), but shooting in most 
of the games seems OK to me once I play the game a bit, even tho I agree 
it's a lot harder than on the PC with a mouse.

> Well, it's both their and my loss, because I won't be buying
> FPS games (which is a shame really, because many of them *look* really great).

There's usually a lot of auto-aiming support for this reason. Did you 
explore the game options and see if auto-aim is turned on? It's a setting on 
the console.

Also note that if you buy a fast USB memory stick, you can copy the games 
from the DVD to the stick (which uncompresses some of the data as it goes, 
as they usually seem to wind up between 6 and 8 gig on the stick) and play 
from the stick, which can be faster.

I have an XBox HD, and saving a bioshock game went from about 20 seconds to 
about 3 when I switched to saving games on the HD.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Eiffel - The language that lets you specify exactly
    that the code does what you think it does, even if
    it doesn't do what you wanted.

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